Building strategies

[therother]

At the behest of Silver Rusher, I'm opening this thread for:

"researching popular (and effective) building strategies, and also popular opinions on what should/shouldn't be built etc."

SR: Is this dealing with the order of construction in cities, or strategies like building a few basics in some provinces and teching out others, or all of it together?

[sapi]

Unlike in MTW, in Rome it is not always to your advantage to place lots of buildings in the que, as the cost is deducted immediately.

Regarding the farm buildings, it depends on what you want to use the city for. In a military city, upgrade fast, as this makes the city grow more. The troops you recruit can keep the population down, reducing squalor. In an economic city, you have to be carful not to let the population out of control.

[Octavius Julius]

On temples:

Destroy enemy temples on conquest. You might have to lower taxes but the culture penalty goes away.

Then, immediately build a shrine to what ever god you like.

Then as soon as you can, upgrade the shrine to a temple dedicated to that god.

This way, you can create priests dedicated to that god that will join your general's retinue.

Roman priests are very effective at boosting your general's stats. For example, a Priest of Jupiter gives your general +1 command, management and influence.

Shrines won't allow priests to join your retinue.

So, my advice on the build order should be:

1. Shrine

2. Temple (however, the city must be a level 2 city with the relevant government buildings)

Temples produce priests very often (about every 5-6 tunrs I think) so get your generals to move around adding them to their retinues so new ones can be produced.

Build all three types of temples available, therefore some of your generals can have three priests in their retinue. This makes them very efficient characters both in the city and on the field.

After building temples, I recommend build roads. Roads not only boost trade, but they increase troop movement. This is the key to winning. Moving legions around quickly is what made the Roman Empire so great (historical, not RTW).

[Silver Rusher]

Thanks for the info! It shall all be used in my settlement management guide (under construction)

@therother: I want to know both really. Anything to do with building in settlements is fine in here.

[Quillan]

There is no maintenance cost for buildings, so if you can afford it, there is no reason to not eventually have every possible structure in every city (aside from stuff that adds pop growth for squalor control reasons). Given the time needed to build the buildings, it's best in the early going to specialize in military cities. Build infantry structures in one city, cavalry in another, and missile structures in a third

[Tamur]

Settlements with more (or more expensive) buildings appear to be more expensive to bribe. Couple an agressive building programme with a live-in high-influence diplomat, and you can make your cities far less likely to fall to bribes.

[dulsin]

I like keeping a few of the temples intact for a time. Milk them for any useful bonuses before you trash them. If you keep them up a few turns it is possible to pick up ancilaries unavailable to your factions.


My next game as Bruti has a goal to capture an intact Parthanon of Neptune so I can crank out the good ships.

[Germanvs]

I definately keep any foreign temple when I can. I really like the temples of Abnoba when playing the Julii, as it can give me +3 missile troops very early on.

Apart from retinue, temples can also give your governors some nice traits if they stay long enough.

Otherwise, the building queue is very different every game, as so many factors are involved.
Roads are good if they allow for quick transport to the front. Towards backwaters I don't care so much.
Ports are definately the best buildings at hand, simply for the cash they generate.
Clusters of cities will provide for the training of units: each city its own specialty. Often only one has an armourer.
With captured cities I seldom raze any building: whatever militairy buildings they have will determine what to build next.

Since I beleive that slavery does not add to your population growth, I have started to build more farms etc.

[andrewt]

This is something I did extensively as Parthia since the cities near the Med I conquered are relatively close to each other. If you have the denarii to spare, move a governor with construction costs discount retinues or traits around then queue up everything you can and want to in the city he's currently in.

Also, a quick way of building population is building population temples and replacing them later on with other temples.

[dulsin]

if you move that builder govener out will they still build in the reduced time and cost? Wow that would be handy for making a traveling Architect.

[MikeV]

I usually end up specializing a few troop production centers, and focus on economic upgrades everywhere else. A typical build sequence for a given city tends to look like this:

1. Religious temples, to quell the unrest when initially conquered
2. Income: port, market, academy (to reduce corruption), farm (even poor harvests produce revenue, and larger populations mean more tax revenue), then sewers/aqueducts/etc (as the population increases)
3. Happiness/Order buildings, since this lets me set higher tax rates (a happy populace is a profitable one)
4. Garrison: basic infantry training buildings, especially in the largest cities (recruiting can help hold down the population growth/unrest, and they often need a larger garrison anyway)