I'm an RTW addict. Have been playing it pretty consistently since 2006. Ancient history and ancient warfare is an interest, so I'm sure that lends to my obsession. There are definitely some bugs in the game, especially with siege towers against large and epic stone walls. The soldiers will pile up sometimes at the entrance to the siege tower. I end up having to play a game of start-stop to get them to trickle into the siege tower a few troops at a time.

I used to love coming to the Guild site for RTW a few years ago when some of the serious experts were still playing and contributing comments. You can learn alot by going back and reading some of those old posts.

I wanted to 'ditto' ReluctantSamurai's comments about ZPG. When I first started playing RTW, public order issues were a constant 'worry' regardless of who I was playing with. And as I discovered over time, an unnecessary one. ZPG eventually slows the growth of your city to nothing. If the city isn't growing, neither is the squalor. And if the squalor isn't increasing, your public order becomes stable. In fact, one of my bigger worries was making sure that the city was growing at all or growing fast enough. some cities you simply have to 'goose' to get them to grow. (Which means building every farm and city building that aids growth in any way.) Otherwise, the city might not reach the next admin threshold, and then you can't build the military buildings that provide your best troops. If my city is growing at 2% or less, I figure it's time to build a farm or some water works project or a market.

I like Samurai's tax strategy with German cities. Have never really played that way myself, but it makes good sense. And the big problem with German cities, as with all the barbarian factions, is you want to get to those next higher admin thresholds fast so you can recruit your best troops, especially the archers. The sooner you get there, the sooner you can get at the Romans with good troops. You don't want the game to get so far down the road with the Romans still on the game board and have the Marius event pending. The basic barbarian units are large groups of spearmen. When you recruit one of them from a city, the city's population takes a hit, slowing its growth down, which in turn delays it's reaching that next admin level.

The two main Julii cities Ariminum and Arretium definitely need growth aids to keep them going. That means building farms early and building the Temple of Ceres series. Two cities that never seem to need growth enouragement are Alexandria and Carthage. When I play Greece, Sparta usually needs help. I occasionally have to recruit peasants in Corinth and disband them in sparta to get Sparta to the next city admin building so I can build the army barracks that allows me to recruit Spartans.