Determining costs

[Obadiah]

Sorry if this has been discussed already, but I couldn't find it:

The budget screen shows a lot of line items, but not individual costs by either province or by army stack. Its all too aggregated, and not useful to deciding which units to disband. I can go through and manually add up unit costs, or just use the general "knights cost more, militia cost less" finger-to-the-wind approach, but for a game with so much nuance, I think I must be missing something, especially since the game DOES show you good detail on province revenues. Ideas?

[grapedog]

Easiest way is to look at the upkeep costs before/as you build them. I'm flush with cash in my campaign, so it's not a big issue for me, but I have no qualms about disbanding a unit for a similar/better unit that costs less upkeep. If you look at the two units 10-12 turns from now(for high end units), the difference in upkeep has paid for itself.

Get rid of merc units...they usually have a ton of upkeep. I rarely use Merc units in the first place, but sometimes for Crusading they are nice to pick up on the quick to fill out any glaring weaknesses in my armies. But usually once I've done what I intend to do, I disband them or keep throwing them into armies doing some battle. Grabbing two or three spear units and crossbow units...then combining stacks until the last stack is half power or less and it gets disbanded.

Also, navies cost a lot...you really don't need a big navy. Depending on where you are on the map, you can have a single or double group for transportation to and from certain areas. I keep a single ship just for transporting my troops across the english channel. Then I keep a second navy of maybe 5-6 ships or so depending on what ships I'm using and what I'm going up against to secure the ports I now own from the Iberian Penninsula to Genoa in northern italy. They run off blockades mainly and complete the occasional blockade mission for me.

[ezoons]

Nice answer... to the wrong question.

[grapedog]

Nice answer... to the wrong question.

he wants to see the individual costs, which he can't do, so I gave him some general information on how to keep an eye on what his costs will be and how to reduce them if he is looking to do that.

If you have something to add, feel free, but just being a jackass is not very helpful.
------

Don't forget also to take advantage of city militia for free upkeep. Thats a LOT less troops you even have to worry about going against your upkeep each turn.

For my current campaign, I have about 33 provinces, and of those 6 or 7 are castles. All the rest are cities in various states of development, but the standing armies in those cities are pretty much all militia which means that when I look at my army upkeep costs, it's only my combat troops which are going against that number.

So in a way, it's different, but just as easy to see the costs of your actual standing army vs. garrison'd units.

[econ21]

I'm not getting the original poster's point - you can see the individual cost of units, just look at the upkeep on the unit card. If you want to save money by disbanding units, incrementally disband them starting with the most useless units and see how that changes your projected balance.

To address the issue of what to disband, the purchase cost relative to the upkeep may not be a bad indicator of how much value for money a unit is. Purchase cost is supposed to be balanced for MP, so should be a fair proxy for combat effectiveness. In the SP campaign, it is the upkeep that really matters for the cost - it will dwarf purchase price in the long run over the campaign. But upkeep is not set according to combat effectiveness. For example, unit types don't always increase in upkeep when they represent higher tech later versions. Knights have the same upkeep, whether they are the early mailed types or the better Chivalric ones etc. In this case, it is the older unit types that should go if you need to disband some.

[Carl]

@Econ21: He want to know if theirs a screen anywhere that he can look at that tells him the total upkeep of all units in the province/stack he currentlly has selcted.

The anwser is no, no such screen exists.

[Foz]

Is it at all necessary to have the army upkeep info broken down by region? What good would this do you? What happens when your standing armies move about and end up in different regions then, if your financial plan is determined regionally?

Honestly it does not matter at all if a province is "paying for itself." What matters is if the sum of your provinces is paying for their existence, which is what the financial report sheet currently already tells you. Any cutback decision you'd need to make should be on one of the following grounds:

1. The empire is in financial trouble or requires more capital in order to flourish/expand.
2. Something can be done more efficiently, or excess expenditures can be trimmed away.

If you instead tried to make economic decisions regionally, it could lead you to awful conclusions like "the army in this border town needs to be cut in half b/c the settlement is losing a lot of money." - when in fact the army may need to stay for security purposes, and another region forced to contribute to its maintenance too.

So what I'm saying is that you should determine first what strategies are necessary to your empire, and from there determine where unnecessary expenditures are happening and how you can optimize the economy inside the bounds of what must happen strategically. If you approach the problem like this, you will arrive at the best economy you can have w/o compromising your empire strategically, and you will never need any detailed info on a given region (except maybe its details scroll for smart economic planning) to do it.

In short, the removal of regional financial details actually promotes viewing the economics on a faction-wide level, which is a far more useful one for making decisions, and ultimately the only one that matters at all.

[ezoons]

In short, the removal of regional financial details actually promotes viewing the economics on a faction-wide level, which is a far more useful one for making decisions, and ultimately the only one that matters at all.

This is of course correct, but the old MTW system helped see how much an individual army cost you. Whereas now one would have to use a calculator instead. Or an abacus - to preserve the medieval feel :)

[Memnoch]

In short, the removal of regional financial details actually promotes viewing the economics on a faction-wide level, which is a far more useful one for making decisions, and ultimately the only one that matters at all.

I agree. One thing that would be useful though would be a unit cost breakdown of how much each knight/archer/dhow was costing you. I'd have worked out much earlier that my bloody navy was draining my coffers.

[Obadiah]

All true, thanks. I guess I'm just surprised that CA made so many improvements compared to the MTW (1), and left this one thing out (making game worse, unless I'm missing something).

In the old version you could easily balance a province's revenues vs the cost of army(s) in that province. This was very easy calculation of "is this province earning its keep". Which, would have to be adjusted for special circumstance, like it being a frontier province that is really providing security for several lightly defended provices behind it, etc.