the trade buildings are absolutely terrible economic investments. at around 10% boost, it'll take you decades to earn back your investment even in your best trade provinces.

Build them for the blacksmith line, or for the arena (which is a great way to control order in high pop provinces), or academy. But not for the money.

Quote Originally Posted by Murmandamus
I probably had the same problem as you. I went out hard. I'd wiped out the Gauls, Spaniards, Cartheginians, Dacians and 1/2 the british by 220AD. Every round I spent everything I had and my balance rarely went above 10k. I hit a wall though because I couldn't build the higher level buildings.

What I did was go through all my provinces and see just how much garrison they needed by taking the armies out and putting them back in 1 by one until they were happy again. I found that most of my provinces needed only a few units get full the garrison order bonus, whereas most had 10 or more. Once I had gotten rid of those excess units (or moved them to the front for cannon fodder, rebel suppression) I went around and made sure I did the trade upgrades.

It only took about 5 years to go from a 5000 denari profit per turn to > 10k. 5 years after that I had 40k in the bank and increasing. It's not that difficult. You just need some self control and spend a little time on management.

Getting that right is 1/2 the game. If you just cheat your only robbing yourself of the satisfaction of acheivement since you didn't win, the cheat did.