Some humble Tips and Advice for beginners

[Taqwus]

An interesting bit with mercenaries is that while when first joining your service, they appear in the province you bid, when merely continuing their employment you can bid in a safer province e.g. your capital. They will not relocate, and unlike Dom I you can have multiple mercenary bands hired from one province. Another bit is that they're good for compensating for national weaknesses (lack of heavy cavalry, say) or jump-starting expansion -- e.g. you can hire Hector's Heavy Horsemen and get a bunch of knights for cheaper and faster than you can hire them yourself, esp if you have Sloth scales or otherwise low resources.

[CharonJr]

One minor general strategic hint (useful in all strategy games actually):

Try to take out the enemies ability to keep on fighting (i.e. recruit more troops) as fast as possible.

Here this means try to locate the enemies fortress and take the province it is located in as soon as possible (vs AIs this is the key to victory IMO since they only build 1 fortress).

You don't even have to take the fortress itself, just holding the province prevents the building of new troops (there) and usually nets you a very nicve additional income which you enemy will no longer get (getting stronger while weakening an enemy is always a good idea ).

CharonJr

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by CharonJr:
You don't even have to take the fortress itself, just holding the province prevents the building of new troops (there) and usually nets you a very nicve additional income which you enemy will no longer get (getting stronger while weakening an enemy is always a good idea ).

The holder of the fortress gets the income, while the holder of the province gets to set the tax rate.

[CharonJr]

Hmm, strange, I could have sworn that I have had fairly huge increases in income when I took a capital province even before taking the fortress, but this might have been coincidence then.

Thx for correcting me

CharonJr

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
The holder of the fortress gets the income, while the holder of the province gets to set the tax rate.

This is incorrect. The holder of the province gets both the lion's share of the income, and gets to set the tax rate. I have dozens of save games that can prove it.

[Kel]

Originally posted by Arryn:
The holder of the province gets both the lion's share of the income, and gets to set the tax rate. I have dozens of save games that can prove it.

Interesting. I assume they don't get the benefit of the administrative increase to the provinces income then ? (since they don't own the fortification).

Anyone have a more specific idea on what the "lion's share" might be, percentage wise ?

Just curious,
- Kel

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Kel:
Anyone have a more specific idea on what the "lion's share" might be, percentage wise?

The reason I used the phrase "lion's share" is because the defender does get an income also. But the defender's income is smaller than the besieger's, from what I've seen.

I think the attacker gets the province income, all of it, and the defender gets just the admin income. But this is just a guess. Some testing, or word from the devs, would help pin this down.