[rdonj]

Every player here will tell you to always take order, unless maybe you're playing with pangaea. There are times when productivity can really shine though, especially if you can afford to take it on top of order. I would argue that MA ulm is one nation where it makes at least a moderate amount of sense to take productivity, as they have the amazing sacred-killing guardians, which are cap only and take quite a few resources. Productivity is also very useful for kicking off your starting expansion if you don't have a good bless strategy or early recruitable thugs.

People will tell you that resources become useless when you have a certain number of forts and to an extent that is true, because once you are hiring 4+ mages a turn you probably will not have lots of spare money. But early in the game, the resources and the GOLD that you get by not taking sloth can really help sometimes. And if you're planning to mass a cap-only recruitable... well, more castles are really not going to help. You should still almost always take order first though.

For the record, I hate playing under turmoil. If you're not very lucky with gold events you will be much poorer than you would be with order. However, if you can find the points, I have found order-0 luck-3 to be tolerable to play under.