Good news: I tried starting a new VH/VH campaign with a slightly different strategy, and much more success right off the bat, which is encouraging.
The funny thing about my current VH/VH campaign is that I'm winning despite my frustration with it: the enemy has repeatedly failed to take my cities, all of the major barbarian hordes have been either destroyed or so heavily depleted that they are no longer a threat (the Franks are wandering around with 3 generals and a couple of units of spearmen: all that remains of their entire faction), and it's just a matter of time for me to expand. But there's the rub: time. It's taking so long to expand because of the financial and civil unrest factors that it just doesn't seem worth it to play the game out to its bitter end. I succeeded in holding 100% of the territory that I started with, defeating all of the hordes, fortifying my positions, and starting to move outward, but I'm staring at a long, slow city-hopping slog and it doesn't seem worth it. Maybe that's why I got fed up with it.
But just on a hunch, I tried a new VH/VH campaign with a much different strategy than my previous one, and so far it's actually working out fairly well. The first time, I pulled back from underdeveloped cities and used them as buffers against the barbarian hordes. I also got rid of all my fleets and most of my military forces because they were costing too much, and I tried to slowly, painstakingly build economic structures in my city with the tiny amount of money I had at hand.
This time, I changed strategies: I still dumped my whole fleet but I no longer eliminated most of the military: I only eliminated all of the concomitenses because their maintenance costs are so high (except for the 3 units that were with "The Gambler"'s field army). I kept other kinds of units intact, and then I went through all of the settlements with high civil unrest and used arena games (if available) to settle them down. This gave me only a small amount of money in the next turn, which I did not use to construct anything. Instead, I used all of it to build peasant units all over my territory (think about it: 2400 denarii is only good for a couple of structures, but you could buy 24 peasant units with it, and spread them all over your empire). In fact, I did this for several consecutive turns, making sure that I had at least two peasant units in every settlement. Then I switched to limitanei if the settlement needed them. During this procss I almost totally neglected construction, except when I had spare money left after setting my recruitment for the current turn.
I also took "The Gambler"'s field army and marched it on the very first turn toward the Allemani settlement with plans to lay siege to it until it fell (eventually, its weakened garrison tried and failed to dislodge my besiegers, and the city fell to my forces). Along the way, I reinforced it with a couple of units of limitanei from a nearby city.
The result was quite an improvement over my first VH/VH campaign: the peasant units are incredibly cheap to maintain (you can maintain 7 of them for one unit of limitanei) but they have a good effect on civil unrest. As levels of civil unrest dropped all across the empire, tax rates in all of my (auto-managed) settlements could increase without starting riots, and my income began to increase as well. It didn't take too long before I was pulling in 12,000 denarii per turn (along with the cash infusion from exterminating the allemani city), and I was able to start building things, as well as strengthening my garrisons (my "standard" garrison is two units of limitanei, two units of foederati spearmen, two units of peasants, and one unit apiece of archers and light cavalry, although I replace the foederati spearmen with peasants for "safe" settlements which are far from the fighting, and I add extra archers and perhaps even an extra cavalry unit for "hot" settlements which are often attacked). I also set the two frontier "large town" cities to "growth" auto-manage tax policies in order to quickly get them up to "minor city" status so I could build stone walls.
This strategy produced results that were vastly superior to my first campaign: I have not yet lost a single settlement, all of the wooden-walled settlements were upgraded to minor cities with stone walls before they could be attacked by any enemies, and my garrisons are actually capable of fighting rebels or holding off good-sized invasion armies. I've already boosted the "hot spot" frontier settlements above my "standard" garrison strength so that they can defeat quite large invading armies with careful tactical micromanagement, and as a result, I already have much stronger garrisons across my entire empire than I did even at the point where I left off the previous campaign.
So there's your tip: don't focus entirely on economic structures in order to build your WRE economy: strengthening your garrisons with low-cost units rather than the expensive concomitenses produces just as much (if not more) economic boost as economic structures do, it's much faster, its effects are spread more evenly across your empire, and it doesn't leave you as vulnerable to attack as an aggressive construction program will.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:So having a bog standard City Watch brigade at each settlement is enough rather than trying to build a professional army for each place?
Works fine for public order and such, especially pre-Marius. By the time you get your Marius reforms, though, you should be able to afford 3-4 units of auxilia easily, who are not only very hard troops with a grudge against cavalry, but also reasonably affordable and readily available even with a crap barracks.
To summarize, town watch are fine for interior garrisons, just don't expect them to hold the city if attacked.
Agitated asshole | (Ex)40K Nut | Metalhead The vision never dies; life's a never-ending wheel
1337 posts as of 16:34 GMT-7 June 2nd, 2003
"'He or she' is an agenderphobic microaggression, Sharon. You are a bigot." ― Randy Marsh
I would definitely not use high-end units to defend cities that may never be touched. I was playing the Greeks and my cashflow was seriously dropping like a stone so I sent my war units to battle where they are more useful and of course can take more cities and replaced them with Peasants. I never had a deficit in that game.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
In vanilla RTW, my standard city garrison was 4 units of town watch, 2 units of archers, and one unit of cavalry. You don't want to use expensive high-end units in city garrisons far from the front lines, but you also don't want city garrisons so feeble that that they must hide within the city walls from rebels roaming through your territory.
In BI, both ends of the equation become more critical. It's even more difficult to bear the financial burden of strong city garrisons, but it's also even more important to have city garrisons which can defend themselves because your cities are farther apart (hence little chance of combining units from two adjacent city garrisons to defeat rebels), and barbarian hordes can often range deep into your territory in search of a target. You don't want to have city garrisons so weak that it would take 4 turns to beef them up so they can defend themselves, because a barbarian horde might not give you that much time. You'd be surprised how often they simply bypass your frontier cities and head straight for one of your deeper territories. I once had a Vandal horde almost go all the way to Spain (still maintaining the pretense of neutrality) before it attacked one of my cities. And I didn't dare attack him in the field because they were travelling in a pack and I had no army that could possibly take on four full-stack Vandal hordes simultaneously without the defensive advantage of city fortifications.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
