Quote Originally Posted by Spidey
1. I've played RTW for several weeks now and it seems the game is much more random that MTW (which I played for years). In MTW, you could pretty much expect the same AI reaction to whatever you did. In RTW, I've noticed I can play a faction once and it's quite easy; the next time it's like going to the dentist it's so hard. Anyone have the same experience?
Hmm, I've only played a couple campaigns as the Julli, so I haven't noticed any wide variations. My last two Julli campaigns seemed to be turning out about the same though in one Germania had gave me a bit of trouble, while in the current they have been a bit slow off the start. Gaul was fairly easy to deal with in the first but have had stronger numbers in this one. I played one previous to these two (mostly to learn how the game works), and the Brittons were the tough faction to deal with.

So, I suppose each campaign can vary, which is a good thing, though I've heard that MTW seemed to have more randomness.

2. Squalor. I know from reading the above guides that we just don't know a lot about it. I know that, as my population increases, so does my squalor. At about 5000-7000 population, I'm usually running about 20 to 25% squalor. Question: Is that high? Should I try to fix (and thereby increase my population rate) or just make little collars for the rats and call them pets?
I wouldn't say that that is very high, but your population is likewise not that high. One of the patches caps squalor at 100%. Unpatched, squalor can really cause some problems as it will keep rising. You get to 100% squalor at or around 24K population. I did some calculations, and you need to max out as many happiness buildings as you can. You can't really reduce the level of squalor in a settlement without setting you back in teching up, all you can do is build the happiness buildings to try to offset the penalties. As the population rises, you need more and more garrison troops to babysit the population. Unlike in MTW, the troops need to actually be sitting inside the city to contribute to the garrison troops. You could have 10K of troops camping outside the city gates and it won't matter.

A question I have is what is the most cost efficient unit to use as a garrison in a city? Meaning which gives the best boost to garrison for the least cost. I've used Town Watch but for 20 units of useless town watch it's 2K per turn and above 30K population I was only getting 30% boost.

The only way to reduce the squalor is to reduce the population. Ideally this is done after you've done your final government building upgrade, as the buildings you can construct are based on your palace level, rather than population. Some ideas:

- Let the settlement get captured, and then retake it. Once taken, Exterminate the population.
- Try to encourage the plague to come to your city. If necessary get some spies roaming if a plague comes up and try to get him infected. Get back to the city and hope he infects the city. I had a city of 18K drop down to 11K when the plague randomly hit one of my original cities

3. Negative income streams. Okay, I know that some cities pay more for troops than others, so they end up running a negative income stream. Still, some of my cities get to be around -700 or -1200 (particular if I'm playing the Romans). At the same time, I'm bringing in 5000 or 6000 in gold. Question: should I worry that my cities are losing TOO MUCH money? Should I try to fix it? Is this a common experience or am I missing some key element to the game.

Spidey
From what I have heard, just ignore the numbers that the city gives. From what I have heard, it divides your expenses by the number of cities to determine each city's share of the expenses. So, if your army upkeep is 10,000 and you have 10 cities, each city's share is 1,000. If one of your newly conquered cities is only producing say 500 from Farms and taxes, the game will report that city's income as -500.