How to Planning: Balance Sanitation, Public Order, and Wealth

[AdmiralPrice]

So my last tutorial video, how to taxes, demystified the numbers behind the economy.

This time, I'm taking on planning and building for the future in "how to planning." I hope it helps you in planning your settlements and doing your thing.

[Seyavash]

Nice video. However, how do you manage the food issues with decreasing fertility as the game progresses? Since they are multipliers based on fertility level the additional food and agricultural wealth will decrease as fertility falls.

[AdmiralPrice]

Honestly, it's to not build too many food intensive buildings. Even in Rome, my first turn is usually demoloshing the level 3 settlemetn to make it a level 2. Avoid most buildings that take food.

[easytarget]

An interesting game design that forces the player not to select part of the choices you present them.

[Seyavash]

Honestly, it's to not build too many food intensive buildings. Even in Rome, my first turn is usually demoloshing the level 3 settlemetn to make it a level 2. Avoid most buildings that take food.

I do the same in Rome. Very nice video, going to take another look at my provinces in my current playthrough to see if I can optimize them a bit better.

[Bramborough]

An interesting game design that forces the player not to select part of the choices you present them.

I don't see it that way. Rather, they present a wide range of choices which won't really work well if we just fill slots haphazardly, but offer tremendous reward if carefully synergized. Which I think is the fundamental point of OP's video. LIke Seyavash, I too am going to go back to my campaign and see what I can do to improve Belgica.

[Oleander Ardens]

I find this video gives some good pointers and shows some useful techniques how to handle the economy with some of it's key elements. However there are a couple of points:

1) The Maxi approach helps to understand a region and it's building but in this case the ROI and time value get completely neglected. For example in this case one has especially limited funds and destroying the salt structure and building another takes precious money, time and gives zero earnings.

2) In this specific case in Italia salt is, enough trade permitting and a WRE corruption of 70% the better choice for top income even without money and time constraints. It is strange that the wrong conclusion gets drawn in the video despite the correct steps are taken into account. In fact the 1280 trade + say 270 corruption-adjusted income is higher then the more impressive looking modified sheep built which is mca* at most not much higher then 1000...

3) The fertility drop gets not taken into account, of which the first will likely hit before the built gets maxed out.

Overall it holds true what I wrote in the economy thread. Small factions with low corruption should focus on flat building wealth with some attention to modifiers. Trade ressources seem to make trade agreements easier which help alot in the diplomatic aspect apart from giving almost flat extra earning through trade tarifs and long-term relationships...

Maybe I will write a short checklist for the economy.

*mca= modified and corruption-adjusted

[Slaists]

It seems you're aggregating squalor on province level. Actually, it is region specific. So, you do not need to cover the aggregate squalor across province but rather squalor in each region separately.

Sanitation buildings on the other hand can have region specific and province-wide effects.

I think you hit on the latter in mid-part of the video. At least, for the barbarians, the minor region sanitation building (wells/canals) has both, a local and a province wide sanitation effect. The province wide one provides a +x to sanitation in all the regions in the province.

There are also global sanitation (and PO) effects from tech research.

p.s. Also, there is more to trade than the fixed tariffs you mention. Hover your mouse over the good icons in the trade summary page. You'll see how much you gain from each unit of goods exported (in addition to the tariffs). You need to be manufacturing the goods, of course.

[AdmiralPrice]

All good critiques, Slaists. I realized my mistake in production, and I thought of re-doing the entire vid. Then I got lazy and didn't. Probably should have!

The thing with trade is that if you don't have enough agreements, you won't even sell all your goods! In my Legendary WRE LP on Youtube, I'm producing 140 wine but only exporting 28% of that. Very frustrating.

[Paradigmatic]

Also, when taking into account fertility drop, consider that by the end-game, fertility is nil about everywhere. With that in mind, Wheat Fields are the worst kind of food production. They make less money and also produce the least food in a barren province. When trying to max out a province with 0 fertility, food is always the restricting measure - at least for the WRE.

For the WRE Food = Public Order and Public Order = Income. The 2 best buildings for PO, at max level, eat up 100 food each. That is 200 food for 38 PO. On Hard difficulty, you can already remove 15 of that PO from immigration (9), taxes (mid-level 4) and difficulty (2; 4 VH, 8 Legendary). Ergo, 200 food gives you 19 PO to spend on commercial and industrial buildings, assuming none of it is going to your food producing buildings of course (apart from special resources, Food Emporiums and Fishing Ports are more worthwhile, Food to PO then Cattle Farms and Sheep Barns).

Provinces that can produce Wine or Olives have the possibility of having a 170 food producing building which is a must-have. They incidentally become the highest grossing provinces by end-game.

The food cap is also what renders Roman Paganism completely useless as a religion. All it's buildings are food-based. And it's sanitation bonus is negligible if you take into account the usefulness of Thermae and Aqueduct Networks.

The building options are excessively restricted because of the diminishing fertility events. Central provinces for the WRE will all have a Circus, a Governor's Palace and an Aqueduct Network, nearly always a Thermae, and, depending on their food/special resource situation, a Food Emporium or a Wine Emporium. The Slave Emporium and industry in general, is very, very secondary.

[Bramborough]

Yep, diplomacy in Attila is frustrating to me, but trade in particular. I'm finding it quite difficult to get green-relationship friendly factions to accept trade agreements without disproportionately huge payments. Even when the trade proposal is mutually beneficial or in their favor, from both an economic and a strategic-resource perspective.

And that's just on Normal difficulty.

The inexorably-increasing Great Power attitude nerf is already hard enough to deal with...I think it ought to be a bit easier to cultivate and maintain the few friends we do manage to get.

[Paradigmatic]

The fact that they removed the old internal trade as it was in Medieval 2/Rome 1 is a big mistake. Especially for the classical era. The Roman Empire had more internal than external trade. At its height, when it controlled the Mediterranean basin, there was little external trade at all except along the Silk Road.

Rome 2 and Attila base trade entirely on external trade. You could always argue that the "commerce" income is in fact the internal trade. But it is entirely unsatisfactory because it doesn't take into account resources. If I produce a ton a gems and I own half the known world, I should be able to find buyers within my own borders, no try to peddle them to some far off barbarian tribe.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I agree - in fact internal trade should eat up most of your resources and you should be trying to balance that to have goods left over to trade.

Mind you, I'm increasingly feeling that CA have made quite few questionable design choices with regards to this game, not that it isn't good, but it's quite flawed.

Let's hope in the fullness of time we get something like the "Emperor Edition" for Rome II.

[Paradigmatic]

Let's hope in the fullness of time we get something like the "Emperor Edition" for Rome II.

That would be awesome. This game already starts with much more potential than Rome II ever had.