Managing your cities and city types.

As requested, I'm going to post my ideas on how I manage my cities and sort the cities that I own into different categories with their pros and cons.
Take note: These cities are only meant for expansions, and is not suggested to be used as your main and first city. You need a stable capitol before trying these cities. As for building a stable capitol, it's not included in this guide. You can easily find that information elsewhere.

Type 1: Farmer's Paradise (Farms & Cottages)
Pros:
1) Generate great amounts of food and gold.
2) A great city to keep troops.

Cons:
1) Unable to produce troops.
2) Unused population proven a waste.
3) Requires resources from other cities to develop.


Rural view:

As you can see, I only have 1 of each for lumber, stone and iron resource tiles just to keep the capacity up, to avoid disasters from happening when you transport too much resources. The rest are all farms.

Town view:

Only 1 barrack, which will be dismantled later on, just a pre-requisite for beacon tower.

Type 2: Stronghold (Farms with 12 barracks)
Pros:
1) Generate great amounts of food.
2) Will be your main bases to keep most of your army, massing them up in numbers makes them stronger.
3) Becoming one of the bases to keep your army and be able to produce them as well, amazing troop production rate with 12 barracks.
4) Makes use of the available population.

Cons:
1) Requires resources from other cities.
2) Low gold production rate due to lack of population generated from cottages and most of the population are used to produce troops.

Rural view:

The same as farmer's paradise.

Town view:

12 barracks enable optimum production of troops, at the cost of lower population.

Type 3: Lumberjack's Retreat (Resource City)
Pros:
1) Generates the most resources other than food.
2) Able to support other cities and the city itself in development.
3) Plays an important role in late game when producing siege weapons with reasonable number of barracks and sufficient resources.
4) Reasonable number on both cottages and barracks.

Cons:
1) Unable to keep alot of troops, making it's defence fairly weak.
2) Requires food from other cities.

Rural view:


Town view:
Not available yet. Will upload it ASAP.
We're looking at around 6-9 barracks for the Resource City.

----- Overview.
I personally suggest that your first expansion, your 2nd city should be a resource city aka "Lumberjack's Retreat". Build up on your resources first and start producing some troops that your cities can hold. After that, move on and create a "Stronghold", with the amount of food produced, you can control and keep more troops and produce troops at the same time, with the resources from your resource city. These cities should be built as close as possible to able to support each another. With each city focusing on only one thing, you get a stronger city which all of your troops are stationed at, making them stronger instead of splitting them up. You get another city that has optimum production of resources, with less defence but located next to your stronghold, so you're fine.

I won't suggest building "Farmer's Paradise" anymore as the lack of barracks has proven to be a waste of population. But of course, the pros are generating great amount of food and gold, useful in it's own way.

The above sample cities are merely suggestions, you can work around it and plan out your own strategy that works best for you. Some of the buildings for instance armory, can be dismantled later on when you reach your choice of level on walls etc, making more slots available. You can then use the slots to maybe build more warehouses, to protect your resources, especially for your resource cities.

Outposts and taverns in cities are not compulsory as well. If your cities are close enough, you don't need outposts imo. And as for taverns, I build them just to increase my chance of finding better heroes, if you don't feel the need for these buildings, you can go for maybe more warehouses, cottages or barracks.

I hope this helps, feel free to comment on it. Cheers.
PS: forgive me for the crappy city type names.

Thanks for sharing your view Jason, very nice of you =)

My 2 cents of thoughts:

At this point of the game, we should be preparing to gear towards conquering a NPC county. Why? We could only get to Major (Military rank) and High Knight (Noble rank) using normal construction (construction blueprint). To get promoted after that, you need to own a county. As High Knight, you can own up to maximum 6 cities -> what it means is that you either build up to 6, and abandon 1 of them when you are close to conquering a county, or focus on 5. Hence the advance city planning as written by Jason.

So what does it take to conquer a county? A lot of troops, and be prepared to lose troops. Thus you need barracks in every cities to rebuild what you lost. Bear in mind, having sufficient troops makes a big difference in total annihilation (of course you get back in the hospital, but only a faction and cost gold) of your conquering army, or a victory, you can't retreat in this game to save the majority of your forces if you realize that you might lose the battle when you are already into it.

Hence you probably need at least 2-3 farm cities with barracks to host your troops, and resource cities to make sure you have the resources to build up. Having farm cities too early (a mistake I made actually) results in a constant lack of resources to build up hence my suggestion is that don't start your farm until you are ready (eg your 3rd or 4th cities).

If you intend to have 4 farm cities, then a pure resource city with a only 2-3 farms may be essential. Otherwise, a hybrid with more focus on lumber, stone and iron may do.

So a lot is base on personal preference and playing style, but advance planning is important.

another thing that i'd like to mention is that:

it is good to have each of your cities specializing in one of the resources.

PRO:
making max profit out of wilderness boosts. imagine you have
1) a hybrid type city, e.g. 25% of food/lumber/stone/iron
2) while another city with pure type resource fields (90-100%)

for (1) each wilderness will only boost 25%, while in case (2) each wilderness will boost up 90-100% of your resources fields.

CON: (minor)
a) you'll have to do a lot of transferring between cities, so you'll have to build them close to one another. (which i think can be easily solved with cavalries/rickshaws.)
b) you'll have to be an active player :p

again its just as north says, its up to personal preferences ^_^



* Note behind: hybrid is good in the sense that the city itself can self sustain in terms of resources. Even now my cities are only about 70-75% specialised. but I think eventually I'd dismantle the extras and make them 90% anyway.
* Note 2: aslan agrees with me LOL as you can see with how he named his cities (food2/lumber1 etc.). I hate him just as much as anyone in our league, but i'll have to agree that he knows how to play =/