Couple question: Economy, religion...war

[Ratwar]

Building thing:

Really managing Settlements of all types in the game is just a matter of prioritizing. Basically you start out with several goals in each city. For example:

Marseille's Goals:
1. Make Money: Port city, can make plenty of cash
a. Get a Merchant's Guild to improve trade and produce Merchants that are worth buying.
2. Grow Fast: As your only starting Port city and potentially your most profitable settlement you want this place to grow fast.
3. Happy Populus: Essential for making money via taxes and needed to keep a large city in line.
4. Decent Defense: As a city on the border of Milan, it may come under attack at some point.
5. Safe to Governor: As a major piece of my future economic plan, I want Marseille to be able to have a governor without him becoming Prince Lou-Man of the Clap.

Then you build based on these goals. In Marseille's case, I'd follow the basic build order of any City-Level Upgrades, then any trade buildings. Following this up with a basic amount of farming followed with. The next three are pretty easy to combine as a lot of buildings are duel purpose (Barracks provide good troops and a order boost, building the townhall line and churches boost popularity and give govenors good traits). Finally it also means that I'm going to avoid building any brothels, since they have a bad tendency to attract bad Governor traits.

In General terms, I want all of my Towns/Cities to make money. After that usually I choose a Guild for them to work towards (Usually the inland cities are the unique Guilds while the coast just gets merchant ones to increase trade).

A sample Castle's priorties for Angers:
1. Cavalry Troop Specialization: Inland, roughly central to France as a region, if not as a Nation yet. Calvary are fast moving and can thus reach borders quicker, so creating a single major cavalry depot in the Center of your Empire has advantages.
2. Fast Growing: The fast it grows, the fast you'll get access to more powerful cavalry.

In the early going, Merchants are useless, but once you've got a Merchant's guild, they can become very fun.

As for your single player strategy, that is simply good tactics.