Roman: Scipii

[Quillan]

I missed the skull icon. The term in english is "plague". I don't know if there are any other differences between the different language versions, but in my North American version, most of those would have reached "Huge City" sizes, because of the city appearance I can tell an Imperial Palace has been built there. However, the maintenance costs are distributed in proportion to the current population. Assuming there aren't any other differences like Athens being the only one of your cities to have a dockyard or the market levels varying a lot between all these towns, the reason Athens is making so much more than the others would be because it has a lower population. Any city with plague has money problems, as pretty much all trade stops as long as the plague is active. I once had plague break out in 3 cities at once; it was a severe economic hit.

As to your other question, the eastern med is pretty good (Antioch, Tarsus, Salamis, Sidon, Jerusalem and Alexandria), as is the area right around Italy (Tarentum, Croton, Messana, Syracuse, Lilybaeum, Caralis, Carthage and Thapsus).