Hi Sirrvs,

Your second point, about training more than one unit per province per year touches on something that has bothered me since STW. Now, I wouldn't mind so much if it was one unit per dojo (or MTW equivalent) per province per year. In other words, the ability to train 'in parallel'. If you have several training schools, then you should be able more than one unit at once.

I think the concept is like with modern military academies, where they turn out one 'class' every year. In the case of the Japanese dojos, it could have been that there was only one master archer or swordfighter etc. per establishment, hence it takes a year to teach 60 students. In the case of cavalry, it could take even longer as the horses require special training too!

In MTW, there's a subtle difference as, instead of training facilities, the buildings are just the weapon makers. Perhaps the implication is that your faction has just the one troop-training facility per province, so each year you have to choose what type of unit to train and it's your weapon-makers who determine your range of training options. With nothing but a fort, you just get peasants.

I was going to make a point about 3 years building time for a ship actually being quite sensible - for 18th century multi-cannoned things maybe! I've no idea how long it took in medieval times. Maybe the lower tech tools they had at the time meant that smaller sized warships took just as long, in their day. All the same, if the picture of it is anything to go by, the base level unit, the barque, should be at most a one-year build.

On the other hand, maybe the game is trying to represent the time taken to recruit and train the ships' crew, as much as the time taken to construct the thing?

Whilst it is frustrating that you can't train ships and troops in parallel and, needless to say, you will be building your first shipyards in your province which has the biggest castle upgrade to date - and thus probably is also responsible for the training of your best-equipped troop types - it's probably a good thing that the game is setup in this way. Otherwise the AI will probably make the most of its seemingly infinite money supply and out-build you in next to no time.

Not being able to construct more than one building at a time is probably the game-designers' idea of protection against players unintentionally overspending themselves into a position whereby a sudden need for fresh troops, say, can't be met due to excessive construction commitments made in a previous turn.

I'm playing my first ever campaign as the English and I think the bulk of my income is coming from sea trade. This could so easily fall apart at the seams if I get thoughroughly blockaded. I've had sporadic incidences of this so far but luckily I'd got my ships stretching from the Baltic to the coasts of Spain before other factions' ships began to appear. For some unknown reason, they move them about without seeming to attempt forming a complete trade route of their own. Call it exploring :) Anyone notice how ships allow you to look into neighbouring provinces and see castles, building lists and army stacks and troop movements, if not the stack contents? Ships as mobile watch towers? ~:D

At worst, a blockade in the English channel would cut my trade incomes in half but the routes either side of it still worked. If I was blockaded along the full length of my route, I might be in serious trouble just trying to maintain my troop numbers. On the off-chance of this happening later I'm making the most out of the current profits by building up farm income and upgrading some trading posts to merchants. In STW I was always hobbling along, nearly broke, only building up serious money once I was more or less in a winning position anyway. In MTW I have a piddly little collection of provinces and a long way to go but 16,000 in the bank and more rolling in by the year. That's much more than I'd ever seen in an STW game (give or take the building-things-for-the-heck-of-it I used to do in the closing stages of a campaign). I've read other players talk of having money upwards of a million but how they could do this without winning the game outright eludes me at the moment.