Regional organisation of an empire in M2:TW.

Greetings fellow emperors, kings, sultans, and others !

I'd like to know how everyone manages their empires in terms of regions. I find it difficult to keep track of building, recruitment ques so here's what I do.

For example as the English, I organise the empire inot regions such as: Normandy, Bourgogne, Flanders, England, Scotland, Ireland etc.

This way I can actually remember what guild I'm targetting, what I'm supposed to be building etc. Of course I never play on auto manage anything. I do everything myself including taxation.

Another method I employ is to group settlements by type, then region. So for example, as ENglish, All castles in FRANCE would get upgraded simultaneously.

This has the added benefit that once you have very large settlements your ques don't stall as often since you can space your construction to make sure that no more than a limited number of settlements START building in the same turn.

If anyone has any other or better methods fire away !

I also don't use auto taxations/building and do everything myself.
However, I just give orders as I see them. Scroll around the (hugely laggy) campaign map and scout for settlements missing the construction icon and let them do something.
Before ending my turn, I do a quick check on the cities tab whether I missed any settlement or not.
That way you also don't lose turns waiting for other settlements to finish their building and you won't have every place identical.

I do that sometimes but the problem is it takes a huge deal of time. If you groupd by settlement type for example:

Normandy = Rennes (Large City) + Caen (Large City)

Then you go into the que at end of turn and add a FULL que to both the settlements. Now you no longer have to look at those cities for many, many turns provided you have enough cash.

Then you hit end turn.

Next turn you select England region = London, Nottingham, Caernavoron (sorry I don't know how to spell it).

Now you add in a FULL que.

... and so on.

Now you allow ALL the ques to finish then you restart the procedure.

This way you have a system of management which allows you to coast through the game rather than having to check ques constantly. It also helps your cash flow a lot since you space by at least one turn building ques per region. That means that all cities etc don't have to be building at the same time.

I prefer this way, as I feel it's more organised.

Edit: forgot something, naturally to do this you need settlements at ideally the same population level. I achieve this through controlling the taxes and also (thanks to PureFixer) through governors.

just check the cities list and see if there are any not building. Incidentally, I also do this for my agents.

I break my Empire down into "districts". English, French, Spanish...etc.
I then build them to be self supporting in terms of recruiting and finance. I probably lose a little money this way, but eventually I can raise an army just about anywhere.

I think I'm the anomoly here then. I go through all settlements as the last thing I do each turn and make sure I've got what I want set for each. This is mostly to verify I'm squeezing every possible florin out of the populace, but it also helps make sure I don't forget to build something or forget about an agent or army.

Once you get in the habit it takes only a few seconds per province, so its not that big of a drain on time. It also helps me spot rebels and heritics I'd otherwise miss.

I just go settlement by settlement. Now, I do make ad-hoc regional groupings for defensive purposes, where I'll keep a field army in a region to deal with hostile neighbors and rebels who appear, but aside from that I do settlement by settlement.

If I can't remember what I'm doing in each settlement (not usually a problem until about 12-15 provinces), I check them each every turn. It's slow, but I like micromanaging so I don't mind too much. It's only usually an issue when I'm low on cash. When I'm flush, I simply make sure each settlement is building something and then only make decisions about the ones that just completed construction on something. If there's a really important building that I'm afraid I might forget, I put it in the queue.

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Originally Posted by Quillan

I just go settlement by settlement. Now, I do make ad-hoc regional groupings for defensive purposes, where I'll keep a field army in a region to deal with hostile neighbors and rebels who appear, but aside from that I do settlement by settlement.

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I do this too. Pick a "region" of provinces, make a good stack to defend it. Organize your plan into fronts, try to keep a few stabilized and fight/push on the others. Make peace on the ones you want stabilized, or failing that conquer the buffering provinces, turn them into cities, and then let them rebel into full stacks. I also turn all of my own "buffer" provinces into castles for defensive measure and military troop production. There's rarely ever a good reason to keep a stack in your backcountry, just keep a few diplomats running around to bribe rebels as they crop up. I tend to knock the brigand and pirate spawn values way up so they rarely appear, I find them to be annoying and distracting from the core goals of the game.

This is one of the reasons I like playing as England, because you start in a corner and can work your way out.

:balloon2:

I like playing England as well. LOVE the longbows.. pwnage ! The whole unit roster is really cool, and the pre battle speeches are incredible.

You know what joy is ?

It's watching 5 units of LBs shooting from the walls of Caen castle onto 12 French units and utterly decimating then into retreat.

But do English get anything better than Levy Spearmen for spears in campaign ?

Hey I used the no pirate/no brigand mod (with PureFixer 1.13) to kill rebels all together. They never posed any real threat and were just plain annoying. I wil mod that mod to make them appear somewhat infrequently. Currently with that mod the only rebels are ones which hold a city, or national armies that rebel from factions.

The game is much more enjoyable. Mid game and late game it's tedious to keep running after 2-5 unit stacks of rebels. I enjoyed it as the Turks since you just make 6 HA and their fast, cheap enough etc... stil tedious after a while.

Sinan,

As the Turks, I've found I LOVE having rebel stacks. Put together a HA army and you can have some great fun killing them at range while keeping your forces intact. Its a great way to work a couple units up to silver to use as replacements in your front line army.

I did the same as Turks but then I only ever played the Turks, before this month I think.

I agree though that there should be some rebels.

Also the Middle Eastern rebels are sometimes "exotic" camels, javelin cavalry etc. They are fun to fight but with but these peasants and militia that dominate Western Europe's (vanilla) rebel armies I found very unentertaining. They are good to skill up LBs to silver chevrons too though.

I'm gonna try and get a balance in between vanilla and no rebels.

At the start, when it's easy to remember stuff and I've only got a handful of provinces, I do everything manually, city by city.

When that gets complicated, I turn on auto-tax. I prefer that for larger empires since it will -usually- keep growth down a bit.

I will still scroll through every city every turn to make sure it's building something, when I have the cash. If I'm in a low cash flow situation, then I just target specific cities to keep them advancing, and build other non-essential stuff as needed.

One thing I've learned though. Even though cities are great cash, it's important to keep castles around. In my last English campaign, I kept only a single castle in each major border zone. When I lost that to the enemy, they were able to march all over my cities because I couldn't convert any of them back to castles and my other castle was too far away to do anything but provide moral support. I try to be a lot more careful now. :S

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Originally Posted by TeutonicKnight

When that gets complicated, I turn on auto-tax. I prefer that for larger empires since it will -usually- keep growth down a bit.

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I start like you do, but at least in RTW I always kept the taxes at low, with the exception of the few first turns of the game when I need that extra cash boost to get me off the ground floor. I know low taxes contribute to growth, and I did that mainly in RTW because I always play on huge unit sizes. That's obviously not a problem anymore in M2TW.

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I will still scroll through every city every turn to make sure it's building something, when I have the cash. If I'm in a low cash flow situation, then I just target specific cities to keep them advancing, and build other non-essential stuff as needed.

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Same here. Works great.

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One thing I've learned though. Even though cities are great cash, it's important to keep castles around. In my last English campaign, I kept only a single castle in each major border zone. When I lost that to the enemy, they were able to march all over my cities because I couldn't convert any of them back to castles and my other castle was too far away to do anything but provide moral support. I try to be a lot more careful now. :S

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I always try to keep castles at my fronts, and convert everything else to cities for income. Honestly this is one of the reasons I do NOT like the new city/castle mechanics. It's a royal pain, esp. when you are moving or pushing quickly, to keep up with your building progress. The one thing I will say FOR this, is that an easy way to deal with a problematic loyalty city is to just convert the damn thing to a castle. Of course I have a self-made mod where you can convert any size city to a castle and vica versa, not just the small ones.

:balloon2:

Hi Whacker ! Could you please post that change you made for conversion. I've been thinking about that too. I think I won't change it as it makes me think about where to expand, but I'd like to know it just in case. I'll probably want to change that sometime in the future too.

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Originally Posted by Sinan

Hi Whacker ! Could you please post that change you made for conversion. I've been thinking about that too. I think I won't change it as it makes me think about where to expand, but I'd like to know it just in case. I'll probably want to change that sometime in the future too.

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Certainly sir! It's actually incredibly easy to do, I will simply give you some info, and you can pick what you want to do depending on your taste. Plus I didn't save my files when I patched so I can't show you what I did exactly. :embarassed:

The only file you need to modify is your export_descr_buildings.txt. The two sections to pay attention to are the building core_building and building core_castle_building areas. If you scroll through there, you'll see the line convert_to #, with # being a value from 0 to I think a max of 4.

Basically each line for each entry corresponds to the level of the other type of building. You can load up the game and look at some cities and use some cheats to see what corresponds to what, and from there you can make a list of what you want to convert to what. I think I added convert_to 3 for the mid level (stone wall) city and convert_to 4 for the 2 largest city wall types. I did also tweak the castle conversions a bit because I felt those were off.

Experiment with that until you find something you want.

Also, I did a custom free-upkeep setup too for castles and military units. Foz has a link to something in his sig if you want something to start with, I just did my own from scratch. All it basically is, is editing your export_descr_units.txt file and adding the free_upkeep (I think that was the flag) line to the units you want to fall into this category. Again, it's personal preference.

Cheers!

:balloon2:

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Originally Posted by Matty

just check the cities list and see if there are any not building. Incidentally, I also do this for my agents.

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I don't think I've ever seen this. Where is it?

I tend to keep 1 Castle centralized in an area. for example, British isles is all citys apart from nottingham, france will be all citys apart from 1 castle.
Although nearer my frontlines i tend to have 2 or 3 castles depending on how large my frontline is.

I then like to have a small patrolling force or 2 around the areas to deal with rebels and can build better troops incase of a larger attack.

I am always too cautious over guilds though, i hate wasting them and i think i read that your faction can have only 1 master guild of a specific type built, so i tend to wait too long on them. Is that right ?
So im always second guessing myself, do i build such a guild here, or wait till i have this region and try to get it here?

How do you deal with guilds?

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Originally Posted by Whacker

Certainly sir! It's actually incredibly easy to do, I will simply give you some info, and you can pick what you want to do depending on your taste. Plus I didn't save my files when I patched so I can't show you what I did exactly. :embarassed:

The only file you need to modify is your export_descr_buildings.txt. The two sections to pay attention to are the building core_building and building core_castle_building areas. If you scroll through there, you'll see the line convert_to #, with # being a value from 0 to I think a max of 4.

Basically each line for each entry corresponds to the level of the other type of building. You can load up the game and look at some cities and use some cheats to see what corresponds to what, and from there you can make a list of what you want to convert to what. I think I added convert_to 3 for the mid level (stone wall) city and convert_to 4 for the 2 largest city wall types. I did also tweak the castle conversions a bit because I felt those were off.

Experiment with that until you find something you want.

Also, I did a custom free-upkeep setup too for castles and military units. Foz has a link to something in his sig if you want something to start with, I just did my own from scratch. All it basically is, is editing your export_descr_units.txt file and adding the free_upkeep (I think that was the flag) line to the units you want to fall into this category. Again, it's personal preference.

Cheers!

:balloon2:

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Thanks !

I've done the free upkeep thing as well using Foz's upkeep .exe
Here's what I did:

Jousting Field = no free upkeep unit
Jousting Lists = 1 free upkeep unit
Wooden Castle = 1 free upkeep unit
Castle = 2 free upkeep units
Fortress = 3 free upkeep units, 4 recruitment slots.
Citadel = 4 free upkeep units, 5 recruitment slots.

I'm sure you know this but just in case someone who does'nt know is reading... If you want more recruitment slots you simply change the integer in the "recruitment slots" ine to the number you wish to have.

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Originally Posted by TeutonicKnight

I don't think I've ever seen this. Where is it?

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You can find this by clicking the faction shield on campagin map, then there are a few buttons next to college of cardinals. One of them is the lists scroll, click this one it looks like a page with writing on it. Then once it's opened click the settlements tab on top.

It's VERY useful.

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Originally Posted by Siven

I am always too cautious over guilds though, i hate wasting them and i think i read that your faction can have only 1 master guild of a specific type built, so i tend to wait too long on them. Is that right ?
So im always second guessing myself, do i build such a guild here, or wait till i have this region and try to get it here?

How do you deal with guilds?

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I deal with guilds as follows. I will give an EXAMPLE as England:

1. Before I start playing the campaign I scroll across the camp map and determine what my empire is going to look like.
2. I determine which settlements will be cities and which will be castles.
3. I determine which guilds I want in which settlement. e.g:

York -> Horse Breeder's Guild
Caernaveron -> Mason's Guild
Antwerp + Brugge -> Merchants Guild
Rennes -> Theologians Guild
Angers -> Woodsmens Guild

And so on... again this is NOT the best way to run England, it's just an example.

This way I always stay on track to get the guilds I want and where I want them. Mason's are a real beotch though, takes forever.

Off to mod that now. But it is a really excellent guild if you ever get it to HQ, huge contruction discounts NATIONWIDE.

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Originally Posted by Sinan

Hey I used the no pirate/no brigand mod (with PureFixer 1.13) to kill rebels all together. They never posed any real threat and were just plain annoying. I wil mod that mod to make them appear somewhat infrequently. Currently with that mod the only rebels are ones which hold a city, or national armies that rebel from factions.

The game is much more enjoyable. Mid game and late game it's tedious to keep running after 2-5 unit stacks of rebels. I enjoyed it as the Turks since you just make 6 HA and their fast, cheap enough etc... stil tedious after a while.

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In leaked 1.2, rebels are actually really useful - they're easy training targets for spies and (I assume) assassins. Spies have tougher mission success percentages after the patch, but rebel stacks remain very high success targets, and so are great to keep around to train those first few points onto a new agent, until he can hit better targets.

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Originally Posted by Sinan

Thanks !

I've done the free upkeep thing as well using Foz's upkeep .exe
Here's what I did:

Jousting Field = no free upkeep unit
Jousting Lists = 1 free upkeep unit
Wooden Castle = 1 free upkeep unit
Castle = 2 free upkeep units
Fortress = 3 free upkeep units, 4 recruitment slots.
Citadel = 4 free upkeep units, 5 recruitment slots.

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Yeah that's exactly how mine look. It's worked well for me so far, esp the extra castle recruitment slots. Good for retraining, especially when upgrades come through.

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Originally Posted by TeutonicKnight

I don't think I've ever seen this. Where is it? (referring to unit roster)

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Originally Posted by Sinan

You can find this by clicking the faction shield on campagin map, then there are a few buttons next to college of cardinals. One of them is the lists scroll, click this one it looks like a page with writing on it. Then once it's opened click the settlements tab on top.

It's VERY useful.

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I agree, quite useful. I wanted to note, though, that an even simpler way to access it is to simply right-click the UI button for the list you want to see - City/Castle button opens the settlement list, and so forth for the other buttons like army and agents.

For settlements, though, I find simply looking at each in turn is better for me than trying to get info from the settlement list. The bracket keys are a hotkey for cycling to the previous or next settlement in order, so I simply hit H then B to select my capital, and get its building screen. I check that it's building something, then ] to the next settlement. Any settlement not building something, I make a building choice, then move on, until I'm back to the capital. I do the same for recruitment, though there it's more necessary to pay attention to whether you want to recruit troops in a given place. I find this faster than trying to use the settlement scroll, as I find it easier to see whether something is in each queue than to look at the settlement list. Looking at those tiny building/recruitment icons was giving me headaches, not to mention I was sometimes just not seeing that a settlement was idle. It might've been easier to tell if each icon was a different color, or in some way more distinct from the others.

As for tips on how to remember what you plan to do with cities... rename them with useful info. I commonly append guild types I'm aiming for, units I plan to specialize a place toward, and other such info to the names of settlements. It's been amazingly useful for me since it displays right on the campaign map, and in every settlement scroll. Failing that, you can always play the game with a pad of paper handy and make notes detailing your plans. Either way, having reminders will save you A LOT of time and aggravation.