Depressed - advice welcome

[Freddybear]

Try putting a higher priority on building up your home-base economy in the early game. Build *all* the economic buildings that you can build in each of your towns. Ports, markets and mines and their upgrades should all be high on your list.

And specialize your castles on just one line of military units each, at least at first. For example as England, build the archery series (longbows!) in Nottingham and the drill field series (billmen, etc) in Caen. Each time your castle expands, the upgrade for its military building should be the first thing you build there.

And don't overdo the size of your armies before you've completed your economic buildup. Nothing can stall out your economy like too many Mailed Knights.

By the time you get the whole of the british isles in your hands, you should be raking in several thousand florins profit per turn, and then you can afford to go crazy on your enemies.

[Quintus.JC]

England is a rather easy choice, here's my advice for your opening moves (not a step by step guide, just a basic outline)

Firstly you have 2 choices regarding to the expansion of your kingdom:
Option 1: Expand within the British isles and be rid of your castle in the mainland, this is less profitable but more secure, and you'll only be likely to be at war with Rebles and Scotland.
Option 2: Expand both ways, this is much more lucrative but risks war against France, Denmark and HRE, but if you can handle it then it's obviously fine.

Okay, England starts in a very promising position, within castles both across the channel, they have plenty of rebel lands to take before getting involved in a war with another major power.

Dipolmacy:
Secure an alliance with at least one of the Iberian factions, 2 if you can. Alliance with the Pope and Poland would be a massive help, the benifit from former is obvious while the latter tend to grow into an awesome Eastern powerhouse, also for some reason I found Poland to always keep their words.

Expansion:
British isles: Leave William in London, he's old and all the fighting should be done with Rufus. York is your ideal first target (you should however aviod sieging it on turn 1. On turn 2 the council of Nobles should ask you to take York with a big rewards), it's very weakly garrisoned and shouldn't put up much of a fight. The next target is less clear; you can either go for Canneveron (spell?) or Dublin, both have pros and cons. Canneveron is well garrisoned, with plenty of Welsh Longbowmen that will make siege extremly difficult, it's best to starve them out, but that takes valuable time. The alternative is you take Dublin, the city has formidable garrison in the form of Galloglaich, but they shouldn't last long against cavalry and a few mail knights should be able to take care of them easily, also the settlement has no walls. I often finds taking Dublin to be more benifical because you are able to recurit Galloglaich mercernary in Ireland, very handy troops. After that you can think about eliminating the Scots, try to do it as quick as possible to aviod angering the Pope, send a spy in Edingborough and take it in a single go. After eliminating the Scots the rest should be elementary.

Mainland Europe: Use Robert, get some mail knights from Cane and recurit some Spearmen Mercenaries, don't bother about Crossbowmen. Take Renne and get the trade going nicely. Renne has a tough garrison and should be dealt with accordingly, starve them out if you find assult too hard. Afterwards Bruges is the clear target, it has some fearsome rebels (I think they have Flemish Pikemen + Crossbowmen), the best way is to starve them out if you want to aviod high casulties. Bruges makes plenty of money and boost your trades significantly. After taking these three mainland settlements + uniting the British isles you should of estalished yourself and the rest is your choice.

Further Expansion:
Most people finds Atwerp a tempting target, my advice is don't be tempted. Atwerp is a cannon-foder that would get you a war with either Denmark or HRE or both (even if you don't take Atwerp then you still will probably at war with one of them, Denmark most of the time). After taking all of rebels and eliminating Scotland you should concentrate on France, it will be tough, but at the end. You will succed.

What to build?
In cities trade is your priority, roads and other economical structures is a must. In castles you should be building missile ranges and infantry barracks. England have top-notch missile infantry plus excellent selection of heavy infantry (pity there lacks good spears). There cavalry also leaves much to be desired.

Extra tip: Try to limit the numbers of castles in your provinces. As far as I'm concerned you only need two. Nottingham and Caen. Caen is in a good position to reinforce all of your mainland provinces while Nottingham will play and intrustmental role in your effort to unit the Bristish isles. Keeping the number of castles to a minimum should make sure your treasurys always stays at a health amound.

[cassu]

and remember not to overbuild, if money is tight then dont build unnecessary stuff (except the front line there you should have atleast something building)i.e stables, barracks, brothels... When you check what to build and wonder how profitable it will be you can check it from the button in the lower left corner (when you opened the building browser) and you should see some grayd out carts when you have a trade building in cue. hovering the mouse over those gray carts shows you how much they will start to earn, building many of the same type like ports will of course add more to those carts. last thing would be that merchants are usually not worth it if you arent close to a good resource or if there is enemy merchants close by because you earn 500 florins from successfully taking over if i remember correctly

[Eikon the Magistrate]

As others have stated, there are some factions that are far easier than others to build
up financially. These are the English/Scots,Denmark and to a lesser extent Egypt. They are
easier than others because of the lack of enemies at the start,the trade goods available
to them and also their geographic locations make them easy to defend.

The Polish and the Moors have historical enemies right at their doorstep at the beginning
of the game, making it more difficult to expand.

Try to make certain cities *trade cities* and build all the economic buildings there, other
cities that are in provinces of little value can be upgraded later. Example as the English
you should concentrate only on London initially for buildings,then as you take out the scots,
convert the castles in the british isles to cities.Keep 1 castle in every region only,theres no need
to have 2 or more castles in Britain for example.

In Mtw1 for example, most of the time it was wise to simply keep a city at a keep or castle level
and not upgrade further, the same thing generally applies in mtw2 for most areas that you are
simply conquering and not intending to invest for growth.

Keep only your militia in your cities as defense. A fully upgraded socio-economic city
in your factions heartland will in the end only require the free militia as a garrison.

If you are turtling, keep only 1 field army eq. for defense, esp at the game start theres no reason
to have multiple armies using your resources.

Your treasury (barring mass amounts of $)wont build all buildings simultaneously.
But it will give preference to the buildings being created. If you have 10
cities and not alot of money remove all ques except on the important cities that need to grow 1st.

If you are playing as the Scots,Danes or Brits, theres no reason to go for any military
building right away, at game start the AI can be wiped out easily with a combo of
spearmen,peasant archers and w/e officers you have hanging around for your cavalry.

(a note on cavalry... as opposed to mtw1, in mtw2 your officers recharge their bodygaurd units
after the battles, so in the early game you can consider the officers you have as free cavalry,
and so long as they do not die in battle, they will recharge and possibly grow in size after the battle.
as such often my first armies have 2 or more officers supplying the cav component.)

Plunder everything,take a province over and sack then sell everything thats there.
The only time you should exterminate instead and not sell off the buildings is if you
want to keep the province later. Example *a fully upgraded citadel close to your conflict areas.*

Re: Merchants, Id suggest in the beginning to keep them close to your cities and let them
gather what they can.When you see an AI merchant coming, put your merch back into
your city til he moves on unless you have a favorable chance of defeating him. In the
late game you can afford to expand your upgraded merchs around abit. You should
use merchants primarily in regions that have cities in them, and try to monopolize
the trade goods of that area. For the 4 factions I listed above, this is quite simple.

As the Danes or English, once their respective *islands* have been conquered,
you are able to turtle in them, grow your cities and have 1 stack of units as defense.
You also make a small amount of florins per turn as profit.


Some of this may help. Welcome to the ORG.

[Ramses II CP]

Do you use auto-calc a lot rather than fight your own battles? If so what you need to do is pick a single unit of heavy infantry, with swords if the faction allows to get the Swordsmith guild, and train only those. If you aren't fighting battles heavy infantry will give you the best auto-calc results by far. Your economy is also simplified by only following a single build chain in your castles.

England's Armored Swordsmen are excellent for auto-calc, but some of the hands down best are Poland's 'spearmen' and dismounted Polish nobles. They also have low upkeep and easy to upgrade armor. The Danes have a variety of excellent heavy infantry as well, and the Sicilians do well with dismounted Norman knights.

[ArtistofWarfare]

Try putting a higher priority on building up your home-base economy in the early game. Build *all* the economic buildings that you can build in each of your towns. Ports, markets and mines and their upgrades should all be high on your list.

And specialize your castles on just one line of military units each, at least at first. For example as England, build the archery series (longbows!) in Nottingham and the drill field series (billmen, etc) in Caen. Each time your castle expands, the upgrade for its military building should be the first thing you build there.

And don't overdo the size of your armies before you've completed your economic buildup. Nothing can stall out your economy like too many Mailed Knights.

By the time you get the whole of the british isles in your hands, you should be raking in several thousand florins profit per turn, and then you can afford to go crazy on your enemies.

Back in the old days of 2003 when I started playing Total War games I had similar issues as the OP. Any large scale conflict would drain my resources rapidly and put me in a situation where I just ran out of steam early.

My problem was that I was clueless really - but in all seriousness- I always put an emphasis on recruiting and organizing a large army for an early offensive. However, my goal was never to blitz. Obviously, this caused a conflict. I would wind up with tons of low quality troops sitting all over the place, eating up my finances. Further, I wouldn't have enough money in the bank to change direction and start building the kingdom from within, and the troops weren't of a high enough quality to be effective in an actual offensive into enemy lands. The result was almost always the following: Build large army, start going towards the red (finances), try to reverse this by building- run out of money before either the economics or anything else fall in line with expansion. In the end, I would be totally vulnerable to invasion myself and due to the large army I would always have, I would wind up being invaded by a neighboring faction - and totally unable to wage a war against them. Just sit back, try to defend what's mine, and lose more and more money.

Eventually, I started to grow more interest in the financial aspects of empire building and placed more of an emphasis on an early "power base". That's why I'm quoting the above post. It's not necessarily "turtling" but for the first few turns, you want to lay the tracks for your kingdom to have consistent and reliable income. You want a guaranteed form of income that will support any hypothetical war that is possible. Further, you want enough income that you can not only support a war but continue to build your economy and technology (military and non military) during large scale recruiting before or during a war.

Most of this will be covered in detail by other posters...but I just wanted to add my 2 pennies to the discussion. Believe me, 4 major economic upgrades in your starting provinces will bring you MUCH more power and influence than capturing rebel provinces early. Expansion is often costly in itself initially (and long term if not planned properly). You want to be literally swimming in cash before you commit huge expensive armies to campaigns.

As long as you have wealth- you will have numerous options during any major war. When you run out of money, you have NO options. The greatest single "unit" you can have in your stack is a nation behind that army that has attained and can maintain wealth. This is the driving force behind all military action. Also- Do not engage in a war because you need money- this is a common mistake. You don't engage in war to raise a red bottom line back to the black. You go to war to expand and increase power/influence - and the time to do that is when you're MOST economically stable, not least.