Determining costs

Sorry if this has been discussed already, but I couldn't find it:

The budget screen shows a lot of line items, but not individual costs by either province or by army stack. Its all too aggregated, and not useful to deciding which units to disband. I can go through and manually add up unit costs, or just use the general "knights cost more, militia cost less" finger-to-the-wind approach, but for a game with so much nuance, I think I must be missing something, especially since the game DOES show you good detail on province revenues. Ideas?

Easiest way is to look at the upkeep costs before/as you build them. I'm flush with cash in my campaign, so it's not a big issue for me, but I have no qualms about disbanding a unit for a similar/better unit that costs less upkeep. If you look at the two units 10-12 turns from now(for high end units), the difference in upkeep has paid for itself.

Get rid of merc units...they usually have a ton of upkeep. I rarely use Merc units in the first place, but sometimes for Crusading they are nice to pick up on the quick to fill out any glaring weaknesses in my armies. But usually once I've done what I intend to do, I disband them or keep throwing them into armies doing some battle. Grabbing two or three spear units and crossbow units...then combining stacks until the last stack is half power or less and it gets disbanded.

Also, navies cost a lot...you really don't need a big navy. Depending on where you are on the map, you can have a single or double group for transportation to and from certain areas. I keep a single ship just for transporting my troops across the english channel. Then I keep a second navy of maybe 5-6 ships or so depending on what ships I'm using and what I'm going up against to secure the ports I now own from the Iberian Penninsula to Genoa in northern italy. They run off blockades mainly and complete the occasional blockade mission for me.

Nice answer... to the wrong question.

All true, thanks. I guess I'm just surprised that CA made so many improvements compared to the MTW (1), and left this one thing out (making game worse, unless I'm missing something).

In the old version you could easily balance a province's revenues vs the cost of army(s) in that province. This was very easy calculation of "is this province earning its keep". Which, would have to be adjusted for special circumstance, like it being a frontier province that is really providing security for several lightly defended provices behind it, etc.

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Originally Posted by ezoons

Nice answer... to the wrong question.

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he wants to see the individual costs, which he can't do, so I gave him some general information on how to keep an eye on what his costs will be and how to reduce them if he is looking to do that.

If you have something to add, feel free, but just being a jackass is not very helpful.
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Don't forget also to take advantage of city militia for free upkeep. Thats a LOT less troops you even have to worry about going against your upkeep each turn.

For my current campaign, I have about 33 provinces, and of those 6 or 7 are castles. All the rest are cities in various states of development, but the standing armies in those cities are pretty much all militia which means that when I look at my army upkeep costs, it's only my combat troops which are going against that number.

So in a way, it's different, but just as easy to see the costs of your actual standing army vs. garrison'd units.

I'm not getting the original poster's point - you can see the individual cost of units, just look at the upkeep on the unit card. If you want to save money by disbanding units, incrementally disband them starting with the most useless units and see how that changes your projected balance.

To address the issue of what to disband, the purchase cost relative to the upkeep may not be a bad indicator of how much value for money a unit is. Purchase cost is supposed to be balanced for MP, so should be a fair proxy for combat effectiveness. In the SP campaign, it is the upkeep that really matters for the cost - it will dwarf purchase price in the long run over the campaign. But upkeep is not set according to combat effectiveness. For example, unit types don't always increase in upkeep when they represent higher tech later versions. Knights have the same upkeep, whether they are the early mailed types or the better Chivalric ones etc. In this case, it is the older unit types that should go if you need to disband some.

@Econ21: He want to know if theirs a screen anywhere that he can look at that tells him the total upkeep of all units in the province/stack he currentlly has selcted.

The anwser is no, no such screen exists.

Is it at all necessary to have the army upkeep info broken down by region? What good would this do you? What happens when your standing armies move about and end up in different regions then, if your financial plan is determined regionally?

Honestly it does not matter at all if a province is "paying for itself." What matters is if the sum of your provinces is paying for their existence, which is what the financial report sheet currently already tells you. Any cutback decision you'd need to make should be on one of the following grounds:

1. The empire is in financial trouble or requires more capital in order to flourish/expand.
2. Something can be done more efficiently, or excess expenditures can be trimmed away.

If you instead tried to make economic decisions regionally, it could lead you to awful conclusions like "the army in this border town needs to be cut in half b/c the settlement is losing a lot of money." - when in fact the army may need to stay for security purposes, and another region forced to contribute to its maintenance too.

So what I'm saying is that you should determine first what strategies are necessary to your empire, and from there determine where unnecessary expenditures are happening and how you can optimize the economy inside the bounds of what must happen strategically. If you approach the problem like this, you will arrive at the best economy you can have w/o compromising your empire strategically, and you will never need any detailed info on a given region (except maybe its details scroll for smart economic planning) to do it.

In short, the removal of regional financial details actually promotes viewing the economics on a faction-wide level, which is a far more useful one for making decisions, and ultimately the only one that matters at all.

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Originally Posted by Foz

In short, the removal of regional financial details actually promotes viewing the economics on a faction-wide level, which is a far more useful one for making decisions, and ultimately the only one that matters at all.

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This is of course correct, but the old MTW system helped see how much an individual army cost you. Whereas now one would have to use a calculator instead. Or an abacus - to preserve the medieval feel :)

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Originally Posted by ezoons

This is of course correct, but the old MTW system helped see how much an individual army cost you.

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But again, as Foz said, is it necessary to know how much a stack costs? Rather than just try to make the required savings globally?

Thinking about it, there may be cases when province or army level summary information on upkeep might be handy. Specifically, where you have peripheral province or area that you wonder if it is worth holding given the cost of the required garrison. The Holy Land for Catholics is the obvious in game example. The Falklands for the UK is the obvious real life example for Brits.

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Thinking about it, there may be cases when province or army level summary information on upkeep might be handy. Specifically, where you have peripheral province or area that you wonder if it is worth holding given the cost of the required garrison. The Holy Land for Catholics is the obvious in game example. The Falklands for the UK is the obvious real life example for Brits.

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Yeah, thinking about it your right. Likewise, somtimes it would be nice to know how much a stack that is out counquring is costing me each turn, that way i can work out just how much more Income I need before I can affiord another army of a similar compostion.

Yep, I miss the old RTW display of city revenues where you get the net income of each province. When I first got M2TW and played as Spain, I noticed that all of my cities were making more than 1000 which was quite alot compared to RTW so i though i was good for a long time economically. Only after a few turns when I was broke did i realize the change. I wonder if any modders can mod it back like RTW

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Originally Posted by econ21

But again, as Foz said, is it necessary to know how much a stack costs? Rather than just try to make the required savings globally?

Thinking about it, there may be cases when province or army level summary information on upkeep might be handy. Specifically, where you have peripheral province or area that you wonder if it is worth holding given the cost of the required garrison. The Holy Land for Catholics is the obvious in game example. The Falklands for the UK is the obvious real life example for Brits.

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Yes I can certainly see the merit of that. We already have city-level net income shown on the campaign map, so from there the only thing missing to figure this out would be a quick summary of garrison upkeep. I'd actually prefer this to be done as a stack-level summary of army upkeeps instead of having it attached to each city's stats. One reason is that it lets you track the cost of any given army, which as Carl suggested would be useful information. Another is that it gives you a way to do this calculation quickly if need be for an isolated piece of turf, while not including it in any neat user-visible way. It's not that I'm against making things easy, but rather that if the user can easily see a sheet that determines the net profit or loss of each settlement each turn, then it becomes far too easy to think of your empire as disjoint provinces instead of one large economy... and that leads to a plethora of potential management pitfalls.

So while I agree that it'd be nice to have a better way to determine a city's profitability at a glance, I think it would have to be carefully constructed to avoid the tendency to think of ANY region in the empire as an individual piece of property w/ respect to management decisions.

Come to think of it, a really cool implementation of this would be for the campaign map to allow regions to be grouped by the user into theaters of operation (with hotkeys like unit groups in battles). Each could have a separate UI tab or scroll, which would center on it, and give you the vital stats about that clump of regions. Default behavior could be to set contiguous regions as groups, since this seems to be the most natural way to manage things: in my head, England's holdings on the mainland are immediately separated from its island ones when I play, and then any holy land territory becomes a third group. To me it seems that a feature like that would give the regional glance that we are looking for, while still preserving the larger strategic and management aspects that we typically apply to huge tracts of land under our control. We'd still have the overall faction screen as the main one, it's just that I think players could get an awful lot of mileage out of a system to subdivide their holdings into theaters to be focused on more easily and thus organized separately, at least when convenient.

I appreciate the commentary from everyone. I guess I should clarify the background behind my original question, as it evidently wasn't clear. First, I played MTW (1), but never got RTW, so can't comment on how it treated costs. Secondly, while I really love this game, I don't get to play it very much (wife, job). I really like reading the threads on unit values, whether armor is calc'ing correctly, etc., but I just don't have the time or brain space at the end of the day to execute my campaigns/battles based on having memorized this level of detail. Nor do I want to have to refer back to unit cards every time I have a battle. Talk about amazing levels of game data details!!!! I rely on the general cost/quality heirarchy, as well as my own experience with specific units, and try to buy as high up the ladder as I can afford.

So I'm still in my first campaign (english), and have, predictably, run into a budget crunch. I'm good enough to understand I need to reduce troops, and can generally see where that ought to occur strategically, but troops can be shuffled between locations/stacks, creating a lot of options. I don't want to have to do the math going through each of several (admittedly small) stacks and pricing out the cost of each unit type. This just seems silly and un-necessary.

I don't mean to suggest that the old province net profit approach was perfect, but it helped. And, frankly, as still pretty new to this "II" version, I am probably missing some of the usefullness of the budget screen.

I'm afraid this has become a bit of a bigger issue than I'd intended. The basic answer to my question is, "No, there is no way to assess individual costs, the old MTW(1) screen doesn't exist." I just thought maybe I was missing a new key screen somewhee.

That said, I really like the last poster's (how do I get to look back at prior posts once I'm already "responding" to quote specifically?) comments about being able to group provinces and look at their economics regionally. Great idea!!!!

Well, when making a new stack to go conquering something, the total cost of the stack is very important. From the current financial view, you can see how much you can spend on your new stack. Then you can make your stack, making cuts where you have to.

But anyways, there really isn't a way to do this without using the good old brainulator...Only thing I can think of is an ingame calculator, and that's, well...rather silly.

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Originally Posted by Foz

In short, the removal of regional financial details actually promotes viewing the economics on a faction-wide level, which is a far more useful one for making decisions, and ultimately the only one that matters at all.

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I agree. One thing that would be useful though would be a unit cost breakdown of how much each knight/archer/dhow was costing you. I'd have worked out much earlier that my bloody navy was draining my coffers. :wall:

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Originally Posted by Obadiah

I don't want to have to do the math going through each of several (admittedly small) stacks and pricing out the cost of each unit type. This just seems silly and un-necessary.

I don't mean to suggest that the old province net profit approach was perfect, but it helped. And, frankly, as still pretty new to this "II" version, I am probably missing some of the usefullness of the budget screen.

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I don't think most of us find it valuable to think of cost at this level of detail.

I generally make the best offensive troops available without regard to cost, and when I have a big enough stack go attack something.

Internal cities should have minimal garrisons, prefereably with free militia. Border cities need bigger garrisons.

The flaw in calculating a net by region is that one must allocate costs to a specifc province that are more of afunciton of the empire as a whole. The reason I can get by with a minimial garrison in Interior City A is because of that big expensive stack of troops sitting 3 regions away in City B. I need the combination of A and B to generate enough cash surplus if I'm going to afford a stack to take City C.

In my english campaign I recruited as much as I needed for my initial push into the north of england, without regard to how much it will actually cost. When I realized my expenses were going to outpace my income, I halted unit recruitment, and used what I had to expand. It took a while before I started recruitment again, but eventually as my military needs took priority, I started recruitment again. Usually this meant I recruited more than I needed at the time, but that just meant that I had the available forces to look to expanding once again.

If you're concerned that you're losing money on a stack of units, they are obviously not fighting enough. Send them out, and if they don't sack something, they don't come home :laugh4:


That occured on my crusade army to Jerusalem. It took forever to get through the Alps, and by the time the crusade target was taken, my troops only made it to Venice. Already weakened by huge losses due to desertion, Venice (held by rebels) looked to be a mighty fine target. Well, even after taking Venice, and then being threatened by a much larger Sicilian army, whereby I made the decision to completly sack the city and give it to Sicily, they still didn't return home. The stack was in time and position to head to Marseille as I was driving back Milan, and then later he personally lead the attack on Ajuccio and Cagliari, all with his original troops some hired mercenaries, and some minimal reinforcements. I think he was regarded as one of my greatest generals.