Regional organisation of an empire in M2:TW.

[TeutonicKnight]

At the start, when it's easy to remember stuff and I've only got a handful of provinces, I do everything manually, city by city.

When that gets complicated, I turn on auto-tax. I prefer that for larger empires since it will -usually- keep growth down a bit.

I will still scroll through every city every turn to make sure it's building something, when I have the cash. If I'm in a low cash flow situation, then I just target specific cities to keep them advancing, and build other non-essential stuff as needed.

One thing I've learned though. Even though cities are great cash, it's important to keep castles around. In my last English campaign, I kept only a single castle in each major border zone. When I lost that to the enemy, they were able to march all over my cities because I couldn't convert any of them back to castles and my other castle was too far away to do anything but provide moral support. I try to be a lot more careful now. :S

[Whacker]

When that gets complicated, I turn on auto-tax. I prefer that for larger empires since it will -usually- keep growth down a bit.

I start like you do, but at least in RTW I always kept the taxes at low, with the exception of the few first turns of the game when I need that extra cash boost to get me off the ground floor. I know low taxes contribute to growth, and I did that mainly in RTW because I always play on huge unit sizes. That's obviously not a problem anymore in M2TW.

I will still scroll through every city every turn to make sure it's building something, when I have the cash. If I'm in a low cash flow situation, then I just target specific cities to keep them advancing, and build other non-essential stuff as needed.

Same here. Works great.

One thing I've learned though. Even though cities are great cash, it's important to keep castles around. In my last English campaign, I kept only a single castle in each major border zone. When I lost that to the enemy, they were able to march all over my cities because I couldn't convert any of them back to castles and my other castle was too far away to do anything but provide moral support. I try to be a lot more careful now. :S

I always try to keep castles at my fronts, and convert everything else to cities for income. Honestly this is one of the reasons I do NOT like the new city/castle mechanics. It's a royal pain, esp. when you are moving or pushing quickly, to keep up with your building progress. The one thing I will say FOR this, is that an easy way to deal with a problematic loyalty city is to just convert the damn thing to a castle. Of course I have a self-made mod where you can convert any size city to a castle and vica versa, not just the small ones.

[Shahed]

Hi Whacker ! Could you please post that change you made for conversion. I've been thinking about that too. I think I won't change it as it makes me think about where to expand, but I'd like to know it just in case. I'll probably want to change that sometime in the future too.

[Whacker]

Hi Whacker ! Could you please post that change you made for conversion. I've been thinking about that too. I think I won't change it as it makes me think about where to expand, but I'd like to know it just in case. I'll probably want to change that sometime in the future too.

Certainly sir! It's actually incredibly easy to do, I will simply give you some info, and you can pick what you want to do depending on your taste. Plus I didn't save my files when I patched so I can't show you what I did exactly.

The only file you need to modify is your export_descr_buildings.txt. The two sections to pay attention to are the building core_building and building core_castle_building areas. If you scroll through there, you'll see the line convert_to #, with # being a value from 0 to I think a max of 4.

Basically each line for each entry corresponds to the level of the other type of building. You can load up the game and look at some cities and use some cheats to see what corresponds to what, and from there you can make a list of what you want to convert to what. I think I added convert_to 3 for the mid level (stone wall) city and convert_to 4 for the 2 largest city wall types. I did also tweak the castle conversions a bit because I felt those were off.

Experiment with that until you find something you want.

Also, I did a custom free-upkeep setup too for castles and military units. Foz has a link to something in his sig if you want something to start with, I just did my own from scratch. All it basically is, is editing your export_descr_units.txt file and adding the free_upkeep (I think that was the flag) line to the units you want to fall into this category. Again, it's personal preference.

Cheers!