Money Problems

[Slon]

I read some of the tutorials on this site and found them helpful, especially in regard to city management. I am currently playing a Scipii campaign (long) on Medium/Medium because I read that Easy makes the battles unfair. I followed the advice of building farms/roads/aqueducts early and was alright for the first part of the game. I started to run into money problems upon capturing all of northwestern Africa (Carthaginians and Numidians destroyed, took a few spanish provinces). The reason why this happened is because of really low public order. In Carthage (Huge City), for example, I had to keep a huge garrison (that barely fit in the city), run monthly races and games, and set taxes to low just to avoid rebellions. I have completely upgraded farms and aqueducts there. The settlement has about 40000 population (just as most others do) and I have large fleets (blockading all egyptian, spanish and gallic ports). What pushed my income into the negative is a plague in Syracuse (captal, huge city). Much of my income comes from Rhodes and Crete, since Macedon (allies) took complete of Greece and Pontus (allies) are nearby. I have no other allies (other than romans) since the Senate made my blockade everyone and they no longer accept ceasefires. The odd thing is, the enemies that were around me were weakened to the point where they had virtually no navy (yes, Egypt actually had no ships) and completely stopped besieging my settlements. I had one huge army as my main attacking force (8 units of Praetorian Infantry, 3 praetorian cavalry, 2 repeating balistas, 2 catapults, 3 archers auxilia, 4-star faction heir as leader) and garrisons with auxilia and peasants. I was also working on a group of Urban Cohorts, but those never got finished. The plague in Syracuse hit my income so hard that I just left the newly-conquered Spanish province, gave it to Rome as a gift, and set boarded a ship that was blockading the port to go to Egypt in a last effort to just take the whole nation for cash.

I've been enslaving all conquered provinces. Is this the problem, should I have extermianted them? And yes, I demolished all the previous shrines and built my own.

Does anyone have any specific advice on city management? What kind of buildings should I build and in what order? What am I doing wrong? I heard that lots of people beat the game as roman factions on very hard/very hard with no trouble at all. Should I just play Egypt (better units?)?

[Alphidius]

From what you'd said, I think you're taking towns too fast & the plague is wearing the empire down. Capture one town at a time, build up then move on. For plague cities, isolate them. No unit goes in or out. IIRC there's a retinue of Doctors or something, it might speed things up alittle. Other then that, halt expansion and improve infrastructure & trade.

[Slon]

The cities that usually get the plague are the huge ones with fully-upgraded aqueducts, roads and trade buildings. I usually skip out on building army buildings, except in the huge cities that I plan to use to mass-produce good troops (such as Carthage). I find that if I just sit there and build up cities before moving on, I just spend a ton of years on that one city, with cash flowing in slowely, if at all. I only move my main army out of a city once it has a governor (if I have family members that aren't already doing something) and a garrison of about 4 units of auxilia (and some peasants too if the city needs a huge garrison to get to 80% garrison bonus). Also, what does fast expansion have to do with plagues? The only unit I move out of plagued cities (and keep him adjacent to it) is the governor if he hasn't caught the plague yet (I don't want to have disease family members). The major problem with my cities is squalor. It seems the more population I get, the more health buildings I build, the worse it gets. Also, other towns had problems with distance to capital (I kind of improved it by moving capital to Syracuse) and cultural difference (even after i made my own shrines). Is exterminate populace better in the long run than enslave populace? Also, some towns have "unrest", how do I fix it?

[YAKOBU]

Hi Slon

I've now managed to complete a campaign as Scipii on Medium/Medium and have now moved up to Hard/Hard. The 2 areas I see as the root of your problem are your current population levels and your enslaving policy when you take over towns. Once you reach the 24,000 population level that gives you your final level buildings you really don't want your population to go much further than that. I would move a large army near a city with 40,000 population, move the garrison out, and set taxes to the highest level. This should cause a revolt and you should then retake the city and exterminate the population. This will reduce the population to a manageable level and give you revenue from the extermination. Once retaken the lower level population will be much happier and you can manage to set the taxes at a higher level.

When taking new settlements enslaving is only adding to your population in your already over-crowded cities. Once you have reduced the populations in the problem cities you may be ok. Alternatively you could just exterminate or occupy when taking new settlements.

As a side note you may want to check that your generals with the highest influence and management skills are in your biggest cities.

Hope this helps

[Bhruic]

Ok, you are mainly doing two things "wrong", if you want to use that word. First off, building the farming improvements is generally a bad idea. While they will help your city grow faster, they also will make it grow larger. Large cities are rebellious cities, so it's best to avoid that as much as possible. I no longer build any of the farming improvements, they just aren't worth the hassle.

The other issue is enslavement. That's a double whammy. First you move population into cities that might not need it anymore. And second, you miss out on the extra denarii that extermination brings in. Early in the game, enslavement isn't a bad choice. But in mid-late stages, extermination is the way to go.

The other issue you need to keep track of is your military costs. You'll likely end up with a lot of 'backwater' cities that are in no real danger of getting attacked. Stationing a lot of expensive troops there is a waste. Move them to the front, and garrison the city with peasants. They are the biggest stack size you can get, and they have the cheapest upkeep for their size.

Bh

[Slon]

So should I only upgrade farms to crop rotation or comunal farming in my miscellaneous cities and upgrade it all the way in my troop production cities? Then, when my troop production city reaches full potential, just destroy the farms? Also, I like the rebellion idea. I actually thought of that once, but didn't know if it would really work. Also, once I exterminate the town, should I keep exterminating them only down to 24k or should I go lower? The town doesn't lose it's Huge City buildings if I go below 24k right? It's just that I'm training Urban Cohorts and I can only train so many of them and really don't require huge populations to do it.

If it's a Huge City and the population gets below 24,000, will the city still allow me to train new units/retrain old ones? Or will that option be disabled until the town reaches something over 24,000 (or whatever the current city needs) before I can draft civilians into the army?