Mid Game - Newb in Need

[Arralen]

[quote]Originally posted by PDF:

[qb]
4. Castles - What is the best guidlines to use when setting up a network? What kind of situations should I look for in determining a site? What situations should I avoid? .. Is it wise to build a network of forts on the front line for defense and rely on my inner provences to recruit sodiers from?

Your castles should be located either :
* in a defensive position to deny easy conquest by enemy
* and/or in a resource rich province with rich neighbors you control : a castle allows for adding its Admin% of all the neighboring provinces resource.
That's surely why you get 200+resources in one case and only 60 in another- it was put on a poor province...

Not quite completely answered:

A province without a castle gives you only 1/2 ressource value. THAT's why you have very high ressource values in some provinces and not in others.

So basically a castle is a location where you'll levy most of your troops.

It's pretty obvious that there are 4 reasons to build a castle:

- to use a high ress.-Province (esp. with likely provinces adjacent) to build lots of ressource- heavy, nation-specific troops

- to boost the ressource-value of a province with some urgendly needed troop-type

- to protect temples/labs (e.g. at a special site that gives mages) from flying or stealthy raiding parties

- to block bottlenecks on the map

A.