Caesar II Province Tips
Starting Off
Here are some tips that deal with development of a province at earlier stages of the game:
The recommended province to start any game with is Illyricum. This province is quite peaceful, has plenty of resources, offers much room for provincial development and has loyal people. My second choice would be Corsica and Sardinia: it too is easy to manage, but is very small compared to the others.
You will usually start off with building your city, and then proceeding with developing your province. This method will prove to be logical once you start building at a low budget (At harder levels of difficulty). When beginning to develop your province, I recommend that you do things in the following order:
- Connect your city to the nearest town(s)
- If a border town is near, connect your city to there as well.
- Beside the town, build a trading post, and as many warehouses as possible (Or as many as your budget permits you to build.)
- Build a port if possible. Make sure to build it so that it will be able to “Catch” ships that come in from other provinces or trading routes. If your budget permits, build a shipyard. Don’t forget to build warehouses to store trade goods.
- Build a cohort fort somewhere near your city
- If your province has very many tribes, than build a wall around your city, leaving out a space for a road to connect your city other towns and structures.
- Build some farms, mines or quarries if you wish (and if you can!).
Campaign games are harder than city-only games. Don’t try to fool yourself by thinking that you’ll be just as good playing at the “Normal” difficulty level in campaign games as in the “Normal” difficulty level in a city-only game.
Trade & Industry
- Usually you won’t need to build farms, mines or quarries. They are expensive to maintain because they must use large quantities of plebs to function properly. You can be quite profitable simply by building ports and trading posts.
- If you choose to or have to build farms, mines or quarries, than you just need to satisfy their pleb requirements by slightly more than two thirds. Production will be high enough to supply one or two industries at the city level.
- Refuse the “Build Warehouse?” offer when constructing industries. Build external warehouses instead. This method will get goods to your city faster.
- Build all industries far away from tribes. Attacking tribesmen try to destroy everything between them and your city. Later, when the tribes are conquered, you may safely develop the surrounding areas.
- Don’t Forget: A gate can cut off access between your city and provincial towns! I’ve seen this error made in city depository cities.
Province Defense
- Placing buildings in front of an army will not slow the attackers. Invading parties will just demolish them. Placing them as “bait” will not work either, as invaders go straight to cities.
- If a certain army is heading straight towards your capital city (No structures/other cities in the way), than consider letting the invader enter the city. This will lower your ratings for a while, but it’ll save your whole army for a more threatening attack. Once the invading party enters your city, they become as harmful as a rioter (Point: Easy to eliminate).
- Note in the picture above the problem that one can encounter. The attackers are going to destroy a building, and then head for the capital city. That’s bad. Since one of your buildings will be destroyed anyway, place your army between the city and the structure instead of waiting on the shore like this.
- When you have two armies attacking your province, you should attack the smaller army because it will cost you less men compared to the larger army and it will boost the morale rate to a higher level. You should let the larger army hut your city because the army is equal to a rioting force. –Anonymous
- If a strong invading army is heading for a provincial town, do not stop them. After the town has been captured, you will find that the invading army has turned into a much weaker local tribe. The town can easily be captured.
- Province Walls can be built unconnected to a Cohort fort if 2+ sections are created by dragging. -Robert Bognar
- On the provincial level first build a cohort and roads to your barbarian tribes. Then from the forum assign 60-200 plebians to army duty and 400 heavy infantry. When this cohort is all hired and trained, hire all your auxiliaries and wipe your tribes out. After your tribes are gone fire your auxiliaries and plebians -Anonymous
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on the contrary, building farms mines and such add to your rating score. the gains outweigh the losses.
Comment by Igor — July 15, 2008 @ 12:32 am
I never did raise a proffesional force of soldiers for army duty, as I’ve always thought it to be too expensive. When neccesary, I found it convenient to hike up the conscription rate to 20-25% and assign about 180 plebs to army duty. This irregular army of semi-trained conscripts always managed to get the job done. Remember, the larger your city is, the more light infantry you should get out of the conscriptions. Therefore, if you have a very large city, a concription rate of 20% should ensure a low-paid army of thousands!
Comment by Moses — July 26, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
Not sure anyone is still watching these boards, but I had a question. Sometimes my provincial roads are not registering properly, i.e. I have a port clearly connected to the city by roads but for some reason it registers as no road connection. If you have too many things connected to a road, can that lessen the road’s influence?
Comment by ShawnP — February 15, 2017 @ 8:06 pm
I build a Shipshard adjacent to the port and i cant produce ship, in did, in any port i have, no one produce ships. I dont understand this very much
Comment by Juan — January 18, 2018 @ 4:39 am
I have the same question as ShawnP. At some point provincial roads cease to work properly and certain industries will say that they need a road connection to function, despite having road connections. I have seen this happen even with Border towns, meaning that trade goods can no longer be imported, and industry suffers. There seems to be no way to fix this. Is there a limit on how many Towns and Industries can be connected to roads? It seems that maybe adding new industries makes other older industries lose their road connections. Does anybody know?
Comment by Matthew — June 23, 2019 @ 10:07 pm
When provincial roads stop working properly it means the pathfinding algorithm is confused by intersections. I was frustrated in Gallia Narbonensis by border towns and trading posts to the north and west dropping out. I had started with a long, straight road from the south edge of the western border town, past the city, and taking a 1 square jog to the north to touch both the easternmost mine/quarry and the eastern border town. How can that get confused?
When I had advanced to Aquitania I noticed that many of the towns and resources were lined up rather nicely, and thought it might be easy to daisy chain from one to the other. I had only 1 problem with dropout, and when I changed that road to connect only to the nearest neighbor location the problem went away.
I went back and fiddled with the old Gallia Narbonensis save. The southwest town had dropped out early in the scenario. I had tried at least twice to reconnect it without success. The western town and trading post and northwest vineyard dropped out. I completely changed the road connections and rebuilt the trading post and the farm. It worked but it was frustrating. The northern trade route had dropped out and I failed to get it working again.
On the reload I daisy chained things together and it worked like a charm.
[I would upload the save, but I don’t see how. Moderator can contact me.]
Comment by Meticulon — March 25, 2020 @ 9:18 pm