Rise to power: How I learned to stop worrying and love Realm Divide

[Leptomeninges]

Regarding profit from land consolidation, I don't think the added "fixed wealth" is relevant. The relevant part is the added food, which gives you growth equal to number of provinces.

This might not be interesting at 5 provinces, but at 15+ it starts to make a lot of difference - especially since you have to grow your tax pool for the low to no trade period after the divide.

Hmm... Still not convinced. As I recall land consolidation upgrades farms by around 100/turn wealth to a barren province versus around 250/turn in a very fertile province. If you are talking about building 15+ I can only assume you're plunking down that 3744 gold price tag everywhere -- not just very fertile soils. Thats around 56,000 you're spending on this investment (assuming only 15 provinces) at a time that I'm trying to get my armies up as fast as possible to push past realm divide. Even assuming this will pay off within the life of your game (haven't done the math but there is obviously a break even point) you're minimally pushing off your future expansion by a ton in building these expensive and marginal yield farms instead of armies. And while you're building these farms, the AI is spending whatever this 56k investment would correspond to as a fraction of their economies on armies, multiplied by the number of opposing AI clans in the game.

Bottom Line: You're trading a ton of wealth now for possible wealth later which I think is probably better used in conquest now.