Quote Originally Posted by econ21
But again, as Foz said, is it necessary to know how much a stack costs? Rather than just try to make the required savings globally?

Thinking about it, there may be cases when province or army level summary information on upkeep might be handy. Specifically, where you have peripheral province or area that you wonder if it is worth holding given the cost of the required garrison. The Holy Land for Catholics is the obvious in game example. The Falklands for the UK is the obvious real life example for Brits.
Yes I can certainly see the merit of that. We already have city-level net income shown on the campaign map, so from there the only thing missing to figure this out would be a quick summary of garrison upkeep. I'd actually prefer this to be done as a stack-level summary of army upkeeps instead of having it attached to each city's stats. One reason is that it lets you track the cost of any given army, which as Carl suggested would be useful information. Another is that it gives you a way to do this calculation quickly if need be for an isolated piece of turf, while not including it in any neat user-visible way. It's not that I'm against making things easy, but rather that if the user can easily see a sheet that determines the net profit or loss of each settlement each turn, then it becomes far too easy to think of your empire as disjoint provinces instead of one large economy... and that leads to a plethora of potential management pitfalls.

So while I agree that it'd be nice to have a better way to determine a city's profitability at a glance, I think it would have to be carefully constructed to avoid the tendency to think of ANY region in the empire as an individual piece of property w/ respect to management decisions.

Come to think of it, a really cool implementation of this would be for the campaign map to allow regions to be grouped by the user into theaters of operation (with hotkeys like unit groups in battles). Each could have a separate UI tab or scroll, which would center on it, and give you the vital stats about that clump of regions. Default behavior could be to set contiguous regions as groups, since this seems to be the most natural way to manage things: in my head, England's holdings on the mainland are immediately separated from its island ones when I play, and then any holy land territory becomes a third group. To me it seems that a feature like that would give the regional glance that we are looking for, while still preserving the larger strategic and management aspects that we typically apply to huge tracts of land under our control. We'd still have the overall faction screen as the main one, it's just that I think players could get an awful lot of mileage out of a system to subdivide their holdings into theaters to be focused on more easily and thus organized separately, at least when convenient.