Quote Originally Posted by Polemists View Post
Only going to take econmic side here one step at a time.



Castle v Village


Depending on who you talk to there are a plethroa of strategies on this, two of the most common are the Frontier strategy and the scattered.

Frontier
Frontier is where you build castles all along your borders with enemies and let your "safe" zones turn into cities. This lets you get troops and defenses to your front, and earn income.

This is useful for facitons like SPain, denmark and others, where you can really create a wall between the rest of your cities and the enemy by only turning a handful of cities into castles.

Scattered
If your France or Germany or Byzantines or another large empire, then you can't really create the so called border, it may prove to costly and time consuming. In this instance you are just gonig to scatter based on what you need.


A important thing to remeber is while castle troops and defenses will own the first 200 years of the game, the last 200 city defenses will surpass them, do to cannon towers and the like. Plus city troops will get better as time goes on.
Good to know.
I am trying out France right now and so far, have managed to take back what is Modern day France.
But I have a pretty good idea of what you are saying. I will continue to test things out.

Quote Originally Posted by Polemists View Post

Merchants:

This is purely a choice, I always use them, some people don't. You have to use them though to get anything out of them, just having them sit on resources will get them taken quickly.

Merchants after a turn or two on a resource go up to 2-3 finance, and then you need to send them out to take other merchants. Try taking ones with lower amounts, but if you can't it dosn't matter try taking them, even if you lose your merchants.

Every time your merchant tries to aqquire another pushes you towards the merchant guild. Once you get the guild your merchants will really start to improve. Just keep them active. They truly can generate thousands of florins a turn if used right.
I can really see where Merchants are powerful. I tried doing some things by getting trade rights with another faction and having my Merchant sit on some resource. However, my merchants always seem to get "taken" out by another merchant, yet I cant do it back to them.

I recently was able to setup the Merchant's Guild in Paris. I am still learning this, but what does the purpose of the new unit (Merchant Unit of some sort)...help with? I wasn't sure on how to use this unit.

Thanks for your help.

TCG