III. General Guide
1. General tips and tricks
i.Build a successful economy
During the early game (meaning up until the second Punic War probably) this is not too much of a concern. Your cities are too small to make a lot of money and consequently, the only early economic building, the mercatus, will not help significantly. However, there are still some things to do to avoid getting bankrupt. First of all, don't build many units in the same cities. As you will find out, most units have a pop cost ranging from 1 to 3. If you build 2 or even 3 Legios in the same city, it will likely fall to 1 pop and stall the rest of the production. It does not mean you have to refrain from building units, but you must do it wisely. For example, a city without an aquaeductus or access to a river cannot grow beyond pop 5. In order to maximize your pop growth, try to crank out a velites or a Legio every time it is about to reach that number. At the same time, try to keep some big cities. Rome and Capua are prime early example as their production is so high it is best to keep their pop up in order to build units without pop costs and wonders which will come sooner or later. Plus, the surrounding area is easily roaded early on and these cities can support units built by the rest of the empire.
On buildings, try to keep this rule : check out how much money a given city is putting in your treasury. If the upkeep costs for improvements are higher, stop building improvements or units, road the area, wait for the population to grow and try to build the free improvements. However, you should probably build the basic infrastructure in most cities, meaning delubrum, fabrica, portus, domus discendi, mercatus (this can wait though), templum (it can wait too but try to get 8 fast because it gives the ability to build a happiness wonder) in that order (that's my way, you can find your own). Also, in newly conquered cities, as their population is either resisting or not really productive (like 2-3 shields per turn), try to rush a Legio or a Faber before any roman population appears. Why? Because if you build these units with foreign nationals, they will be free of support (they are considered slaves or something)! The problem is that as soon as even 1 roman pop goes in the unit, it is considered roman and requires support.
So, the early game consists of building improvements and units intelligently to avoid depleting the city or having too much upkeep from infrastructure. Use slaves to road around to raise extra money, farm and then build mines evenly for Italia. Most of all, build all the wonders as fast as you can, but pay special attention to the PRAETORIUM, which reduces corruption in all cities. The Praetor should not be made too early, you must consider the 20 support cost! In general, do not build that until I have an ‘empire’!
For the republican era (from the second Punic War up to the beginning of the empire, things are different. Not only the aquaeductus (that you should have started to build in important cities) will increase the general population of the empire, but you get the second economic building, the latifundia. Combined with a good road network, this additional pop and money bonus will make your good cities thriving commercial centres. The idea now becomes to specialize your different parts of the empire. Everything around Roma (meaning cities not too far away that do not suffer crippling corruption/waste problems) should be money making cities. The mercatus, templum, catasta (makes slaves that you will very much need to improve an ever growing empire) and latifundia are a must there. The outer cities, while waiting to get more production from mines or more pop, should be building more units than buildings. Thus, you get a rich core that can build units from time to time (when their pop reaches 10 most of the time) and outlying villages that form the backbone of your military strength. As you expend, the cores get bigger, richer and supports even more units to conquer even more land. The must have wonder there is the Lex Agraria. Try to take as many cities before building that wonder. It enables the construction of civitas (reduces corruption, resistant to propaganda, reduces war weariness) in your cities for a short period of time.
Input is needed for the imperial era
ii.Micromanaging cities?
A deciding factor on how hard your game is how FAST you do your turns.
Do you micromanage your cities or do you leave them to the governor? Some players micromanage a lot, even at 100+ cities (even, one has to admit, it takes too much time, some having spent 500 hours on 1 game only).
Why do we speakabout micromanaging? Well for starters, many good units cost 1 or several pop to build. So it is important that you synchronize pop growth with production. I don’t know if the governor can handle this. You don’t wanna build a pop costing unit with an ALMOST full granary, since the granary will be emptied when the city decrease in size due to the pop costing unit being built. Exception; units like ballista, catapults and ships (I seldom build ships, save cumba) which have no pop costs. If you build pop costing units several turns in a row in the same city you are slowly and gradually decreasing the city production, which can be hurtful in the long run. Pay attention to cities with both large farming/fishing potential and good shield production, those cities will be the main sites to recruit legions.
Also taxmen play a more important role, increasing gold to treasury with 4/taxmen you promote. You have workers who give you food or production that would be waste? Promote them to taxmen instead. Some turns you can harvest 200-300 gold from taxmen only....
It is also important how you change between building military units and city improvements.
Don’t make the mistake of building lots of infrastructure like the production, science and money buildings and temples in 5-10 pop cities for at the end we will not able support these AND an army and lagged behind.
The aqueduct costs a lot too, so it should be recommended to ONLY building them where there's tons of food and even then, if people aren't happy (war weariness), they won't eat and you have -3 maintenance you can't get rid of!
Regarding the portus commerci; dont forget it has other advantages besides the commerce, justifying its heavy maintainance cost: Usually the extra commerce is just about enough to pay for its own upkeep. The function of the portus commerci as granary will prove even more important after the age of Commodus. And the ability to connect trade and reallocate troops is important too.
One city improvement that is generally a good idea to build no matter how small the city is the mercator (marketplace) as it require only 1 gold upkeep to get 50% more gold to treasury from that city. Only if the corruption is skyhigh should you refuse to build it. Although, at the beginning at least, your cities have almost no road, no pop and are in small numbers so the mercatus will only add like 1 or 2 gold which is barely worth what it costs in upkeep, considering the time spent building it. Certainly, as soon as you get aquaeductus and the Italian cities are almost all above 6 pop with many roads around them, it becomes an essential improvement. You might consider building the domus discendi before the mercatus in all your cities, since these will help you to save money through more effective ‘research’.
The same goes with defensive infrastructure; You will for example notice that it just costs way too much to have a Portus and Arx Litoralis in every city in Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia... To the point you should sometime consider paying for extra troops rather than supporting the buildings building.
All these factors make players very hesitant regarding leaving city handling to the governor.....
But... warning
Sure, you should probably micromanage especially at the beginning when it is doable, but some fun is lost since you spend all those hours making sure you maximize production, growth and commerce. However, at least do try to finish a unit when the city reaches max pop and in between, build improvements. Not everybody need to micromanage thw whole Empire in order to win, for it can simply kills the fun.
iii.Balance your military with your economy
Just always keep in mind that you must always balance your military and economy in RFRE: if you concentrate too much on either, your Empire will surely suffer.
As a faction, Rome has several rules distinction with other civilizations. First, it can only support a limited number of units, whatever the size of its empire. Currently, the maximum free support is 40 units. Units maintained in excess must be paid for, by the Roman treasure. The cost per unit in excess depends of the Roman government. Republic and Christian Principate are highest with 6 gold per turn and per unit, while Absolute Principate is lowest with only 4 gold per turn. Triumvirate Republic and Principate are intermediate at 5 gold per turn. Meanwhile, Rome has access to plenty of units which never require support. These are typically foot auxiliaries consisting of barbarians or local levies. Late in game, Rome will also increase its reliance on mercenaries, due to internal troubles.
iv.Expand rapidly and constantly
Be aggressive! If you sit around and waste time Empire-building while there’s still nations out there to conquer, then you’re bound to fall behind and have trouble keeping up with the game.
Avoid wars that you are not prepared for. If you go off wasting units on pointless wars, you may be set back for years! As a general rule, especially in the early game, waging two wars (or more!) at the same time is a very bad idea.
However, don’t feel rushed to conquer all territories around you. Try to follow that the Romans did by a certain time period but remember that you have until around 200 AD (and even some time after, once you are done with the Crisis of the Third Century) to conquer all of “real” Rome’s territories and to build up your borders before you’re going to run into any major barbarian invasions.
v.Read the Civilopedia
Thoroughly read the Civilopedia descriptions for units, improvements, and wonders. Sometimes it may contain information that is vital for your understanding of the purpose of that unit, improvement, or wonder. This guide can in no way cover all that is included in the pedia!
vi.On the importance of slavery UPDATED
Slavery is central to the development of your land. They will be the key to farming, and greatly help in mining, road building or cutting down forests. The small number of servi and your sole faber should all, at the beginning, build roads, not mines. You need the trade bonuses much more than the production increase in order to field a balanced economy in the first 50 turns. Legions can build fortifications and roads, but will not farm your lands! Try to use Slaves in groups of 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32. In these numbers, you waste the least amount of worker turns while improving terrain. You can supplement the slaves and legions with engineers, who will greatly boost the speed of public and military works. They are however expensive and need to be supported. To be sure you get enough of these slow working slaves, you will need to be aggressive and wage wars. Legions and regular cavalry can quickly capture many slaves. Slaves market, once built, also will create slaves regularly for you to use. Also, remember that these are the same slaves you can use in great games to be held in cities, especially if these have an amphitheatre! This can help to strengthen the patriotism of newly conquered cities and avoid culture flip. You will find that developing a serious network of roads as Rome expands will be crucial to the success of future wars. Make sure your legions are busy in period of peace.
vii.Use diplomacy with tact
Be careful in your diplomatic negotiations. Do your best to never break an agreement and ruin your reputation and never declare war on a nation before cancelling your Right of Passage agreement with them.
Take note of all the nations that you can make military alliances with. Use these alliances to your advantage: turn the Greek nations against each other to weaken them before you invade, use Syria to weaken the Asian nations (and themselves) before you invade them, etc. Be careful not too weaken a civilization too much if you are not ready to invade it though, as it will be an easy prey to its powerful neighbours. A Parthian Empire covering the whole Seleucid area is pretty lethal.
viii.Understand and use your troops wisely
Use your high-HP Legion Armies to cover up your lower-HP Legions and other troops as you invade roaded countries so as to cut down on the losses when conquering other nations. Be careful when you do this, however; as some nations have equally strong army-like units that can defeat your Legion Armies. Use a cover of range firing troops to weaken strong enemies before attacking. Velites or ballistas are early examples of troops able to do so.
When attacking cities and units, try to eliminate all defensive bonuses that the enemy has: attack from hills if they are defending on hills, destroy their walls, never attack across rivers, etc. This will help you to avoid unnecessary casualties during wartime.
ix.Prepare strong lines of defence
When invading nations such as Carthaginian Spain, try and hold off your invasion for a while after declaring war so that you can destroy all of their strong army-like units (e.g. Hannibal’s armies) before you invade. The AI will generally send these troops in to invade your territory and will often place them at a disadvantage so that you can defeat them easily. Take advantage of the AI’s lack of tactics to defeat them! If you don’t, then you will probably suffer high casualties during your conquests.
Later on, you will have to develop a huge defence system at your borders, and these borders should be coherent and exploiting natural defence, such as hills and rivers (especially combined). It might not look like you will need it during the Golden Age, but believe me, the Great Invasions are difficult to apprehend in their scope!
x.Use dirty tricks when desperate
First, although not a dirty trick proper, make sure you save often and that you keep a save at each keep point of your game. A bad luck in major battle, a tricky attack in the back from a neighbour while already in the midst of a major Germanic invasion, many occasions can ruin your game and make it non-winnable at the end. Considering the time you need to invest to finish a RFRE game, it might be good to be able to restart from a sound basis a few decades ago if things really goes grim, rather than from the start.
Use your ability to sign Rights of Passage with other nations to gouge gold from the AI. Even from your 2nd turn in the game, you should be more powerful than some of the nations across the Med. and they will gladly pay up to be able to enter your territory (though likely never will!). Try to avoid signing RoP’s with nations that can build Hidden Nationality units (Pirates, Raiders, revolting tribes), though: that will cause you an awful lot of trouble!
Further with RoP agreements: use your ability to enter their territory to set up an attack that can take multiple cities in one turn. Just make sure to wait until the turn that you can cancel the RoP and cancel the RoP before declaring war. Though this tactic is considered cheating by many Civers, I consider it a perfectly viable military option when I need to deal a crippling blow to a nation and quickly conquer it.
More tricks and tips?
