Re: Garrisons?
You can use Province Defense in conjunction with mobile troops. They are not as good a mobile garrisons, since they can't move and are generally of weaker units (depends on nations, some are better than others), but they are free of upkeeps.
To raise PD in any owned province, click on Defense, or press 'd' and then use the arrow to increase the defense value. Note for each point increase in PD, you pay X gold, where X is the current value to be raised. I.e. going from 0 to 1 needs only 1 gold, but 1 to 2 needs 2 gold pieces, and so on.
Having PD also help somewhat in detecting stealth units if PD level > 10, your PD also gain an extra commander if PD level > 20 (i.e. make that total of 2 free commanders)
As you can see, PD takes little to get started, but to make it strong enough to defend against small-medium raids, it takes a lot of gold. Another use of PD v.s. AI, however, is to funnel enemy forces, as enemies tend to ignore provinces with high PD levels, when there are ones with lower PD to attack. I.e. you can adjust PD in threatened areas to set up ambushes.
Hope this helps.
-Gateway103
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