Using FMs as gorvernors or as army?

Hi everyone! Whenever I play as Sweboz, I tend to leave my towns abandoned and take the FMs as units in my army. I do that for 2 reasons:
1. They are cheap and kick buttocks, so I dont have to spend money for other troops.
2. I got the feeling that governing towns is much less important for swe than for other factions.

What du you think about this espicially nr. 2?

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Maybe you will notice that I posted a lot of new threads today. I dont want to spam, I recently collected all the questions I have about EB, and which I always forget when I am in the EB forum.

Then you should have odds of FM in your campaign. They are really good like usual solders, but if a FM dies, his guard disbands, and that's a pity. Also they die from from assassins, floods, quakes, old age, so the army based on FM is not reliable one.

As for Sweboz - they are barbarians, the savage ones. Of cause managing cites is not their specialization. According to ancient historians (even G J Caesar) they didn't have cities.

But if you have Sweboz governor who is "languors" and the academy in the settlement, he will make extra Profit.

I had to same concern in my Roman campaign. While there are oodles of FM's available as the game progresses, going to war on a large scale typically dwindles down FM's quickly than anticipated, leaving towns abandoned.

I rely heavily on client rulers to ensure that newly conquered settlements are properly stable and managed. While expensive, having FM's in towns usually had great bonuses and stability in new settlements, and more importantly, free's my FM up to continue his battles instead of being bogged down in a newly conquered settlement.

Sometimes you need guys with a lot of influence (FMs) to keep the more rebellious cities in line, especially when you've expanded so far that you get the '-80 to public order' in some of your cities because of that 'distance from capital' stuff.

While it is true that governors matter for civilized factions (they're a matter of life and death, mostly), sometimes it helps as barbarians. Like having a governor with the Miner trait (or is it Good Miner?) in a settlement with mines, obviously, it helps your income tremendously. I'm not even talking about the large empires, where they're extremely useful against unrest.
Sometimes though, even with civilized factions, there's an excess of young ********, so I get them together and give 'em some factional troops, some mercs, and ship to another random coast of the Mediterranean to raep and slaughter their way through coastal cities. Last time I think it was the Roman Rave 200(BC) in the Levant... I'm pretty sure I had 9 young dumbasses in that army. Roleplay, I guess...

:laugh4:

I actually tend to use the less capable FMs as governors, freeing my more gifted FMs to lead battles. In both of my Getai campaigns, I have grouped five to six FMs together in a stack (the other slots being occupied by horse-archers). Though this can lead to some rather impressive victories, it has also resulted in half of a generation being wiped out in a single battle (attacking one of those Eleutheroi supersettlements - destroyed one full-stack with very few casualties, was attacked by another, which I wiped out after a retreat, and then found myself facing a third superstack that appeared out of nowhere with no movement points left... manage to kill half of that stack, but six FMs were lost).

I've only play a little as the Sweboz, but what I do is hire a unit of archers to keep the public order and use the FM as soldiers.

When I play Sweboz. I usually keep a good FM in each settlement and send the useless FM's to war. Works wonders on the economy and it doesn't matter so much if your Generals are crappy, because you're the one calling the shots.

most Sweboz FMs are better suited for war than for sitting around but I usually get 2~3 FMs who get Management capabilities out of thin air(at the point where the sweboz hold the germanic core regions) who I keep in the less happy settments or (for miners - good miners) in settlements with mentionable mines.

For all factions, I use FMs with high management and traits or ancillaries that increase income in some of my core settlements which are highly developed with mines, harbours, largest markets, temples with trade bonus to generate income or to control newly conquered settlements. My conquering armies are usually followed by a manager lead archer armies.
Those poor D/U/L guys with loads of negative traits and ancillaries (I usually move some of these to them from better ones) serve as "captains of cavalry" (when bodyguards are a cavalry unit) - that's how I RP them, they serve under command of better FM. They are used only as superior unit. I don't mind losing them, so they are used in attacks where I would be afraid to lose more precious one. But they tend to have very large kill ratio.

I rotate between the two ideas.

All my FMs are sent on campaign, except for the few that were already in a settlement for a long period of time. I generally stick two FMs together, give them an army and a campaign to fight in.

As you can imagine, as Makedonia, that gives all major armies an extremely capable cavalry wing.
As Rome, it seems to work as well.

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Originally Posted by IrishHitman

As you can imagine, as Makedonia, that gives all major armies an extremely capable cavalry wing.
As Rome, it seems to work as well.

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And as Baktria/Pahlava/Saka/Hayasdan it gives you unstoppable crushing power. :2thumbsup:

Yeah, Baktria... :sweatdrop:

Actually once your faction is large enough, you can sort of see two groups of elite "commanders" and "managers". Proper placement of those makes a huge difference (especially with "managers"). Because of EB's awesome hereditary trait system ("takes after" etc.) I usually have dynasties of excellent governors. Yeah, sometimes nature (or should I say, chance) plays nasty tricks, but overall it doesn't happen that often.

Edit: whoops at my other post, didn't realize it was so strict here. Sorry.