Kobavelli's The Prince : a guide to breeding the perfect statesman.
The question pops up fairly often on all TW boards : "how do I make more cash FFS ?!". Us grizzled veterans almost always answer "well, build roads, ports, farms, mines, and send merchants to Timbuktu". But there is another, or rather, an additionnal way to make teh $$$ : governors. Good, honest governors. They alone can almost double your cities' income, if well trained, fed and groomed.
We all know that dumping a governor inside a settlement boosts its income somehow. Some are better than others at this game, and with so many traits and factors to take into account, it's not always easy to find out who to use where. Some use the empirical method : get him out of his city, then back in, and check the difference, and most of us don't know, or don't really care, what makes a general better at governing a given city, nor how to make him even better.
Because yes, just as base iron becomes sword or ploughshare, verily I tell thee, there's a way to train and breed the perfect statesman.
EDIT : there's obviously also a way to train and breed the meanest, most savage fighting machine this side of the Terminator. And you can find how in this thread
But first things first, some basic considerations :
A] Who to train ?, a.k.a. Suffer little children to come unto me.
Don't use the few starting generals you're saddled with at the beginning of a campaign for this, no matter how good they might be. Use those only to boost your early income, but do not train them actively.
Considering the time needed to train them, the costs involved and the simple fact that you'll want to profit from their skills to the fullest in their appointed region, you will want a 16 year old boy for your budding governor, and nothing else. Untill your faction has a few of these young bucks, don't build anything except military buildings and armorers. No churches, no farms, no roads, no mines, no town halls and for the love of god no priests nor merchants. Get your early cash through missions, selling trade rights/alliances and sacking.
Yes, that means a slow start. Consider it a good thing : the AI will be that more challenging.
Also, generals who are born with interesting traits should definitely be set aside for training.
Fighters are a dime a dozen, but good governors are rare. Traits to look for are : Smart/Intelligent, Good Trader, Servant of Heaven, Energetic, Mathematician, Rabblerouser, Austere, Sober, Honest, Miserly, Rational, Cheapskate, Stoic and Prim, the bolded ones being especially good.
If you are lucky enough to get a princess with the "Intelligent" trait, be sure to flog her to a governor as well, as it will give him the Wife is Wise trait which is a great boost. Otherwise, read Durallan's guide to pruning your family tree, he's written a very good article on the use and care of princesses.
B] Chivalry or Dread ?, a.k.a. Killing them with kindness
All other things being equal, it doesn't really matter wether your governors are saints or bastards. Chivalrous governors usually get traits giving them more population loyalty, but Dreafull ones often get bonuses to law, and with militia slots public order isn't usually a problem, except in regions far away from your capital or with religious issues.
That being said, piety is important for governors, and chivalrous traits often give piety as well and vice versa. Meaning chivalry is probably the way to go except for Muslim factions and Byzantium (see ancillary section to get why)
C] Where to govern ?, a.k.a. The right tool for the job
Hammers are for nails, screwdrivers for screws. To get the very best out of a given governor, and considering that you'll be hard pressed to train them to be good at every single aspect of getting you more dough, you need to know your provinces, in both their good and their bad points, and to specialize their governors accordingly.
A province's income comes from four things :
- Taxes. That's only related to population, and not an important factor in the decision, as it's easy to get generals good at taxing, and population sorts itself out in time.
- Trade. While every town and castle generates a modicum of trade through imports and exports both by sea and land, some provinces are clearly at an advantage in this field. Provinces with a coast, provinces bordering another faction, provinces with multiple ressources, provinces with rare and expensive ressources, all of these factors make a good trade region. Considering how hard and expensive to get are good tradesmen, you need to identify the very best trade regions in your empire. Antioch, Vienna, Venice, Naples, Constantinople and Cairo are good examples. The New World too, obviously.
Note that you can make these regions even more profitable by building a Merchant or Explorer's Guild there as well.
- Mining. As of 1.2, quite a lot of provinces have now access to mines, but only a few of them are really worth it. It's somewhat easy to get a good mining governor, but the cost is steep, and you'll only want one if the mining ressources are worth it in the long run. Vienna, Timbuktu, Zagreb, Stockholm are good examples of mining cash cows.
- Farming. Easily overlooked, and harder to train than mining or taxing, some provinces can make twice more money through farming than through taxes. Plus of course developping farms means getting more taxable peons, a win-win situation. Good farming regions are those which have a high base_farming value in the descr_regions.txt file. The good farming regions are : Cairo, Paris, Cholula, Tenochtitlan, Budapest, Constantinople, Milan, Venice, Marseilles, Naples, Baghdad, Antioch, Nicosia and Alexandria ; and while building farms is always a good investment in and of itself, you'll want governors good at farming in those specific places. Incidentally, those regions will also grow faster, hence yielding you that more in taxes.
Also note that while early on you can pretty much build every building available and are only hindered by population (i.e. wall) levels, as your cities grow and buildings become more expensive and take longer to build you will definitely have to specialize them. Guilds only compound the issue. So identify your key cash provinces, those with good growth, good farms, good trade or good mines, build cash buildings and academias there and have them governed by pros at all times. The rest can be devoted to spying, improved militia training, armories, military academies, priest training, assassination, fleet building, canons and siege engines or whatever, and governed by lesser governors, i.e. ones who only need Good Taxman and are not utter loons.
D]What to train ?, a.k.a. Eugenics 101
The first and most obvious (and easy) thing to look for is piety. In M2TW, piety is the equivalent of the Acumen stat from RTW, each additionnal Piety "halo" giving a bonus to the city's global income.
Then there are specific, learned traits boosting each aspect of a province income, that is Taxes, Farms, Mines and Trade, each by 10 to 30%
Academic skills can be learned that also boost Taxes and Trade, but not mining nor farming
Some genetic/family traits which can not be learned in any obvious or safe way give slight boosts
Finally, you'll want traits which counteract or stave off the umpteen bad traits that can turn a brilliant administrator into a drunken gambling wretch with expensive tastes, and which more often than not come from the same sources which make you truely wealthy.
E]How to train ?, a.k.a. Finally, he's getting to the frickin' point.
The meat and potatoes of this thread, let's review the traits and attributes that make a good governor, and how to get them.
Note that throughout the text, when I say "build something" it means the general has to be in town on the LAST TURN of the building process. That is to say if you want your general to profit from the building of a small farm which takes 2 turns to build you can put it in the queue without the governor being in town, then bring him next turn. This is an important mechanism, as you can optimize a governor's training process by having him cycle between 2-3 close towns and synchronize building completions so that he can hop in, get credit, then ride off to the next town etc... Especially important later in the campaign when buildings take longer to get built.
E.1] Piety, a.k.a. "We'll need priests. Lots of them."
Piety is fairly easy to come by. First of all, any and all generals start with 3/10 piety barring any bad trait like Superstitious, Feck or Public Atheism, and there are five main ways you can get more : crusading, ReligiousActivity, PublicFaith, ForcedReligious and TouchedByTheGods.
Crusading is fairly straightforward : answer the call, ship off to whatever den of cursed heretics has earned the wrath of the man in the funny hat and hopefully conquer it will get you the Grand Crusader trait, for a whopping 3 Piety and assorted Chivalry. Muslim factions have an equivalent trait for successful Jihad leaders.
PublicFaith has 4 levels, each giving one point in Piety. It can be gained by sitting around in a town that has a religious building (15% chance for 1 point every turn), by having a father with the trait (20% for 1 point) , by being born with a cathedral or better (or jama or better) anywhere in your empire, and lastly simply by being born (4% flat, with increased chances if you're playing as HRE, Spain, Milan or Poland, and always one point for all Muslims). This cannot really be trained, you'll have to rely on that 15% chance each turn. Expect 2 or 3 points from that over a governor's lifespan.
ReligiousActivity also has 4 levels, and is gained through building all kinds of churches as well as training priests, one point for each. Note that you'll also get chivalry by building churches. The max level is reached with 12 points, meaning you can get there by building 4 small chapels, training the 4 priests, then upgrading all 4 to small church. You can also build a small chapel, destroy it then rebuild it on next turn but beware if you're playing a catholic faction, as the pope is not too keen on destroyed churches.
ForcedReligious you get by getting tried for heresy and surviving. A general can also get it randomly by surviving a disaster, and a bug in the game somehow makes generals check that trigger each and every turn, albeit it's a very low chance (5% of 4% IIRC). Sadly, the same trigger can also make them Superstitious, which is bad, and can pass down to their offsprings, which is why you want the Rational trait. All in all, this trait cannot really be trained, but welcome the sight of an inquisitor in your region : in 1.2 they very, very rarely succeed their trials, so if one gets close to your governor, you can gamble on it and evict every other possible target for the inqui and hope for the best.
Lastly, you can only get TouchedByTheGods at birth, but not only is it a very good trait (giving +2 to +4 Piety), it's also self propagating, meaning it gets better all by itself over time. The bad news is that having it means you can get neither Rational nor Sane, and you could very well wind up with a Superstitious or even mad governor.
EDIT : pete101 has found out that the King's piety influences the income of EVERY city/castle you own. Send him on a crusade already !
E.2] Taxes, a.k.a. The second certain thing in life.
At least early in the campaign, this is the main way by which you get cash. It is also the skill that all governors should try and devellop no matter which province you want them to eventually rule. Thankfully, it is also very easy to get the main trait which helps with them, GoodTaxman. Other good traits are Austere, Intelligent and MathematicSkill, Cheapskate and Miselry, while Sobriety, Prim, Austere and Upright will ward your governor against negative tax traits like gambling, drinking, embezzling, expensive tastes etc... Let's see what we can do about that.
You have 75% chances to get one point in Good Taxman every time you complete a building in a settlement that also has taxes set to Very High and disillusioned loyalty (the little blue face), and you only need three points in it to get to the last level which gives 30% bonus to taxes. It's a huge bonus. Get it ASAP by sending the militia out when you complete something and keeping a modicum of religious unrest in your regions.
If the governor has a Wise wife, that's 5 to 15% bonus to taxes as well.
Intelligence and MathematicSkill are very hard to come by early in the campaign as you'll have to rely on pure luck at birth (with a bonus there if you're Danish or Muslim), but can be gotten easily by having academic buildings later on. Not only do they increase a general's chances of being intelligent at birth, but staying in a settlement that has them has good chances of giving them both traits, as do completing the buildings themselves. They also give good ancillaries, so make sure your would-be governors spend a few turns in an academic town or castle if they have no better stuff to do.
The bad news is that unless your empire reaches a population level that allows you to build City Halls or academias, all your generals will have a chance to become Ignorant each and every turn - but a Cruelly Exacting Taxman who's also Blissfully Ignorant still provides a 20% tax bonus, so it's not too bad.
Prim and Upright both come mainly from staying in a town or castle that has a religious building in it, and since you're already doing that to get more Piety, your governors shouldn't become corrupt arsemonkeys too easily, though you'll also need Austere and Sobriety to be totally safe from the worst of traits.
Tough luck on Austere: you can only get it at birth, from the father, or by sitting in enemy lands. Your governor has better things to do with his time, which is why I marked it down as a trait to watch for earlier.
Sobriety is so-so : you'll likely have it if your father is a drunkard, but the only other way save being born with it is to get married of have children while already having a drinking problem. But since Drink is probably the easiest bad trait you can wind up with, and one of the worst with Gambling and ExpensiveTastes, count yourself very lucky if you get a Sober, Austere general at birth. You might even consider training and adopted or married general if he's not too old and he comes with theses traits.
E.3] Mining, a.k.a. Things that go *clink* in the night
This one will be short, as there's only one trait which gives a bonus to it (GoodMiner), and no trait whatsoever that comes with a negative.
GoodMiner has three levels, and you'll need 5 points in it to reach the third level. You get 1 point every time you complete either a basic mine or a mining complex. That's it, it's that simple.
Obviously, there are two ways to get the points : travel around like a door-to-door mine salesman, or building a mine, destroying it, and re-building it.
The first solution has no downside : your general will get his points, and all mines more than buy themselves in the long run, no matter how meagre their income might be.
For the second solution you have to compute wether a governor with 30% bonus on a given mine will offset the cost of building/destroying a basic mine during his lifetime.
A basic mine costs 2000 florins. IIRC, destroying a building gives you back 1/3 its building cost, 650ish florins in this case. You'll need to build 3 basic mines, destroy them, then build one more and finally the mining complex.
Easy math : Good Miner costs 4*2000 + 3500 - 3*650 = 9500ish florins.
A governor getting Good Miner at age 20 and dying at 60 will give you 80 turns' worth of that 30% mining bonus. Say you park him in Vienna, the mining complex of which yields a bit more than 1100 florins per turn. 30% of that is 330 florins. 330*80 = 26.400 florins. Definitely worth it.
The same Good Miner governing an average mining province (350 for a mining complex) gives us 110 florins per turn, or 8800 florins. Not worth it, better to just let him get the basic 10% bonus he'll get for building the mine complex.
Please feel free to redo my math if I'm wrong about the 1/3 refund thing.
! IMPORTANT EDIT !
All of this is completely correct, and a testimony to my intellectual brilliance, except for one thing I forgot to check : you can't destroy mines once you've built them.
And considering how relatively rare they are, and they only have 2 levels (compared to farms, which have 4) makes this trait at least on par with GoodFarmer on the difficulty scale, and once again once your first generation keels over, it will be extra hard to train another.
Which leaves us with only two options : the door-to-door pick salesman thing, or modding mines to be destroyable somehow (I just checked the export_buildlings.txt file, and there's no toggle for it there, so I'm stumped for now).
E.4] Farming, a.k.a. The fat of the land
Another easy one, but a bitch to train. Only one trait helps with this (GoodFarmer), and you'll need 12 points in it to reach the last level. You get 2 points for building any farm level, plus whatever points you're born with (Egypt has a bonus to GoodFarmer at birth). So build any 6 farms and you're set.
The trick is that unlike churches, mines or ports, you cannot destroy farms by any means whatsoever, and as farm levels go by each level gets increasingly longer and more expensive to build.
Thankfully the AI doesn't seem to invest much in farms, so conquest can be a way to get more farmland to improve, although obviously not always in convenient regions that are close to your governor's final target.
All of that means that while it's a very easy trait to come by early on when you only have to build slash-and-burn then communal in three cities, when your first generation of GoodFarmers die off, you'll have a tough time breeding another. So make sure you build only what farms you REALLY NEED, and make sure there's a strapping young lad in town when you do.
As a sidenote, sitting in a town that has farms+3 or farms+4 has a good chance of giving the Overseer ancillary, which also helps with farming and mining.
E.5] Commerce, a.k.a. Outright Theft
That's one's the real pain. The main trait, Good Trader, has insane thresholds. GoodAdministrator is very chancy. The other good trait (Epicurean) comes from buildings which also give you a slew of bad ones.
Then again Trade is probably the cheesiest path to wealth, it gets so huge.
Let's deal with the bad traits first, since they're the same that get in the way of taxation : once again you'll want a Prim, Upright and hopefully Sober and Austere kid for the job to avoid Corruption, Gambling, Drinking, Expensive Tastes etc...
Good Trader, like I said, is insane, and quite possibly a trait overlooked in the 1.2 overhaul.
Like the other Good Such-and-such it has three levels, but you'll need no less than 48 POINTS in it to reach the third, and 12 for the frickin' first. You get 2 points per merchant trained, 2 points per market-type building, 3 for ports, 1 for roads, 3 for merchant banks, 3 for caravan stops and 1 for merchant docks (80% of the time only). Oh, and you'll lose one point for each turn you spend in a town that hasn't at least a corn exchange, to make things interesting.
Now let's review that. Imagine you have a clear Huge Town at your disposal, unlikely as it is, with only a corn market in place so that your governor doesn't get Bad Trader before he's even gained one point.
- Stone roads, that's 2 points in 3 turns
- Merchant's quarter, that's 10 points in 22 turns
- Naval drydock, that's 12 points in 16 turns
- Merchant Vault, that's 6 points in 10 turns
- Docklands : 2,4 points in 14 turns
- caravanersary : 6 points in 6 turns
Total : 38 points in a whopping 71 turns, and that's only if you're playing the Moors as they are the only faction with caravans. Meaning you'll also need to train at least 5 merchants to finally reach the last level of the trait. But then you'll only get to reap its benefits for approx. 10 turns, before the governor dies.
On the upside, if you get the trait at birth, you'll start with 12 points in it, meaning you only need 30 more (12 for the second level). A few factions have more chances of getting good traders at birth, namely the Venitians, Milanese and Portuguese.
The fastest way to accrue points in this trait is to build the basic port and destroy it, over and over again. It'll take you 16 docks and 32 turns to get there, plus 8.800 florins, and that's without factoring in the loss of trade you incur by not having a basic port in a coastal province.
Forget about doing that with the corn exchange, as every turn without it will give your governor one point of Bad Trader.
Frankly, I'd say don't bother. Building markets, ports and banks as you're wont to do and training a bunch of merchants will give you the first rank (10% bonus), and that's probably as good as you're going to get unless your governor was born with said 12 points. If he was, you might want to have him do the port thing a couple of times in a castle to speed him up on his way to level 2 (20% bonus), but that's about it.
Good Administrator will net you a 10% bonus when you have 12 points in it, but the only way to get points is to crank your taxes to Very High : 3% chance every time a unit is trained, 7% every time a building is built, 7% each turn if loyalty is in the green and your governor has spent at least 3 turns in town (preventing your from training him over several towns), 5% if loyalty is in the blue. So you see, it's very hit-or-miss, and you'll be very lucky to get those 12 points. Get your taxes to Very High, now, and keep an enforcer around for when the brigands spawn.
Intelligent, Wife is Wise and MathematicSkill we already covered.
Epicurean will give you 10% with 8 points in it, but also reduce your bribe resistance by 30%. Beware those roving diplomats.
You'll eventually get points in it by sitting in a town that has Public Baths, Artist Studio, Theatre or a Pleasure Palace (5% chance each turn) or by letting your treasury get over 50.000 florins, and once you have it it'll also get better over time.
The downside is that all those buildings can give you such lovely traits as Aesthetic (ruins command and increases squalor, countered by Austere), ExpensiveTastes (a whopping -30% in taxes and trade when full blown, countered by Austere), Girls (ruins Chivalry and popularity, countered by Prim or Upright), Gambling (-20% trading, no counter) and Drinking (-10% taxes, countered by Sober). The worst offender in the list is the pleasure palace, so keep your spying off your trading. Once your governor has that first point in Epicurean, feel free to destroy those buildings if you don't need them.
As you can see, getting bonuses to trade is quite hard, and you'll probably have only one or two trading governors at any given time, if that, so you have to identify your best trading regions fairly often (trade is fickle, it changes with your own trade buildings as well as those of other factions, trade agreements and wars, disasters etc...) and ship them there ASAP.
F] Ancilliaries, a.k.a. Can I bring my friend ?
Finally, let us deal with notable ancillaries. I won't detail every single one because there's a LOT of them, and most only give a marginal bonus. Here are the easiest and best ones :
Academic Advisor gives 5% to trade and taxes, and you have 33% chance to get him when completing any academic building, so make sure whenever you finish one, a good governor is around.
Mathematician gives 5% to trade and taxes, and you have 10% chances to pick him up each turn you spend in a town/castle with any academic building, but the northern european factions can't (France, England, Scotland, Danes, HRE).
Money_Counter gives 10% to tax and 5% to trade, and you have 8% chance to get him each turn if in a city with a fairground or better, but middle eastern factions can't.
Treasurer gives 5% to tax and trade, you have 10% chance to get him each turn in a city with a merchant quarter, but northern european factions can't.
Overseer gives +1 farming and +1 mining, and you have 10% chance to get him in a town/castle with farms+2 or better
Scribe gives 10% to trade, and you have 10% chance to get him if in a town with both an alchemist lab or better and a town hall or better
Muslims and the Byzantines also get a 20% chance to get the awesome Slaver (+15% trade) for each building completed but only if the governor has 4+ Dread.
F] Short Version, a.k.a. What should have been on top of this thread
- check your good provinces to determine what their main source of income is.
- select a newborn general and train him extensively in Good Taxman plus whatever Good fits said province
- dump him there and have him build churches and train priests. Lots of them.
- roll in the dough.
And that's all you have to know to GET $RICH$ QUICK !!1$!1
On to part deux : Kob Tsu's Art of War : the guide to breeding the perfect warmonger.
Originally Posted by FactionHeir
. But I'd say the problem solves itself overtime : to get piety you need churches and priests, and they in turn boost OwnReligion. No heathens, no problem.
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