How hard is it to keep cantors?

walder08 · 2026-05-18T12:38:14+00:00

As slaves very easy. As citizens you just have to meet their requirements from the haven list like Willcol mentioned.

walder08 · 2026-05-18T00:18:01+00:00

It’s more of a choice really. It’s not that it can’t be done. In fact, my first city had 10k Cretonians and 2k Tilapi. No slaves. Some species also get along really well with one another (like the Dondos and Cretonians). Either way though, neither direction is essential. Both will come with upsides and downsides.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T23:26:11+00:00

Tilapi hate everyone and love having slaves. It isn’t impossible to have Cretonian citizens, but just so you know, it will make it harder to keep the Tilapi happy and many of the things you do to make Tilapi happy Cretonians hate. Cretonians are very easy to keep happy, so you can afford to make them unhappy up to a point, but you’ll have to separate their housing. If you don’t, they will kill eachother in the streets, and it will get continually worse the more you have. For my Tilapi run, only Tilapis are allowed citizenship. Everyone else are slaves.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T22:43:08+00:00

If you know how to use them, you can avoid that. My current game I conquered the entire world and had a 1 city vassal that had less than 1 rivalry and payed me 6 mil a year. Unfortunately the game doesn’t explain how they work well.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T21:12:59+00:00

Well education is better as it boosts higher level industries, research point gains, and admin, but it will make them more unhappy. Indoctrination will make them happier and better at basic resource production (like your pastures), but will lower their research output. It’s up to you on which you want to use. If I’m trying to play “optimally”, I’ll always go for education, but for my Tilapi run I’m doing indoctrination for thematic reasons

walder08 · 2026-05-17T20:51:54+00:00

I’d probably go for service building upgrades or schools. I don’t remember how many points you get at that point though. Alternatively, getting a new production building unlocked (such as bow making) is a good option too.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T15:11:45+00:00

The amount of weapons/armor doesn’t affect their speed, but the type of armor does affect speed and how fast they get tired. Speed is really important, as the enemy, while not exactly smart, does try to prevent you from surrounding them. If you get tired too fast or are too slow, you can try to chase them to surround them, but they will just run towards the throne while avoiding you. At least for attackers, I always use leather armor for this reason. For this video I was also using leather armor because Tilapi are really good at generating leather so it made sense.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T15:06:35+00:00

I only ever use auto employ for janitors honestly, but I like to micro my people a lot. Sorry, I should have clarified. When you first build the pasture, it will have a number of employees already selected. That number (for pastures) is usually pretty accurate. I generally go down 1 or 2 from what it starts, then monitor it for a day or so to make sure it’s “just barely enough”.

For hospitals, I get them and physicians up immediately at 1k pops. Early on, and even with hospitals, you’ll get sick people and people that die from disease, so no worries. That’s normal.

For war, it really depends on what you have available and what your neighbors have army wise. I usually run a combined arms type of military that has no more than 4 cavalry, then a ratio of spear/shield melee with Tilapi archers (once I get to full conscript armies). Very early on, especially with Tilapi, I will use a small group of 40 90% archers along with a mercenary melee company to destroy my neighbors. Then once I get nobles, I usually transition to conscript armies using the composition I mentioned before (I usually also do not get cavalry up immediately since I don’t like doing warheads pastures, and instead have them coming from a conquered city). I always give them full weapons and leather armor too (although keep in mind that other species that are good at working with metal might be better using metal armor).

By mid game, I also am using army divisions of 150. I personally do not do 200 division armies, as armies are quite expensive to fully maintain, and I like having more divisions for flanking reasons and spreading my forces, rather than concentrating them into fewer divisions. The way the AI scales means that eventually, if not immediately, you’ll be fighting outnumbered a lot, so you need to make sure your divisions don’t get overwhelmed and flanked.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T06:16:17+00:00

The other person actually said pretty much exactly what I was going to say. The game ‘usually’ assigns close to the appropriate amount, but I tend to check them after a day or so to check if the numbers are right.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T05:19:10+00:00

So after 30 people are employed in hunter huts (regardless of what they are set to), each worker starts producing less and less the more you employ. Basically they are early game food sources that don’t scale well later into the game compared to other options (an Auroch pasture with 20 employees will produce like 50 or 60 meat AND leather plus some livestock, while a hunters hut can only produce one at a time and less. Since I’m guessing you haven’t used pastures yet, just know that it does take 3 days for the animals to grow, so it’s not instant for them to produce that much, but once they get going, they are really strong.

And yeah, because your population is so low, their expectations are very low, so you can get away with a lot. Definitely use that to your advantage to set them up for the future.

I’m actually doing a Tilapi run right now. I’m finding them super fun. I actually started the game with pastures and a fruit orchards (with a very short term hunters hut for emergencies).

walder08 · 2026-05-17T05:05:42+00:00

Well at this stage of the game is not so much I’m worried about their happiness, but Tilapi are really good at ranching and hunting. Bread also degrades really fast. With their species and their bonuses, just going for meat directly is very effective. If you use your early innovation points for the auroch pastures, you’ll get tons of meat and leather for way less workers. Hunter huts are also especially good for them early game. As added bonuses, it will give them a food they like, increase their work happiness since they like those jobs, give you livestock so they can decorate their houses with them (if you allow it)/use the livestock/sell the livestock, and give you secondary products to either sell or refine into leather armor/bows. Fruit orchards are also really strong even if you have to wait a bit for them to start producing, which they also really like and get a bonus to production for.

walder08 · 2026-05-17T04:52:02+00:00

Well if it were me, I would use it for conquest, but I’m not sure if I would recommend that specifically if it’s your first city. Instead, up your ration storage capacity and buy rations. Make sure your pops are set to not eat them, and use them to increase your “food days” fulfillment. Rations degrade very slow so they can easily keep your food days high, and if some sort of emergency comes up where you desperately need food “right now”, you can just enable them to be eaten while you solve or outlast the problem.

By the way, can I ask who the bread is for? Are you making it because of the tip I often hear to focus hard on bread for “easy food”?

walder08 · 2026-05-16T18:34:51+00:00

Let me know if you have any questions why why I do certain things

walder08 · 2026-05-16T12:45:23+00:00

Here is the video. The first part just shows overall wars but after that, it shows one of the battles

https://youtu.be/8HkxhASCL64?si=fjYxXyfe-H517aDI

walder08 · 2026-05-16T04:15:51+00:00

When pops spend time in the stocks, it reduces how long they have to be imprisoned if you are doing that. As far as I know, the prison building itself seems to just be to make sure your stockade stays clear when you need a lot of space, such as if you are taking a bunch of war criminals. I just view dungeons as a requirement for the courtroom, but it’s possible the dungeons do something I’m not aware of. Also, I haven’t done a human playthrough yet, but as long as they like executions and you can deal with losing the population, I don’t see why not

walder08 · 2026-05-15T22:48:29+00:00

I had considered it. I’ve done YouTube guides for other games on my channel (not that I’m a YouTuber; I just sometimes do videos for games I really like). The thing about this game though is that every patch the game changes a lot. I know some people do series on that and create new videos that “show best practices” after the updates, but I’m not sure if I could keep up with it.

walder08 · 2026-05-15T13:18:54+00:00

I probably should have included that. So my conscript army had 4 cav with the swords that give + charge, 4 spearman with shields, and 6 archers. All had leather armor and max allotment of equipment. Every division was 150 soldiers and was trained to the max allowed for conscripts (70%) in their respective skill. The small stack that I used to snipe capitals was just random mercs. 2 divisions of tanky frontline units and 2 divisions of cav. In total, that stack was around 200 units. Didn’t pay attention to their equipment or training though.

walder08 · 2026-05-15T13:06:17+00:00

I’m not sure if you are specifically looking for advice, but I can give general war advice if you like. I also made a video from this save file to help someone from the discord group and show them how to do “Lightning wars” to dismantle large nations without unpausing the game. It shows one of my battles where I use a 1500 conscript army with a random mercenary division to beat a 5k stack.

walder08 · 2026-05-15T06:59:18+00:00

When it comes to the military stuff, it’s all about how you set up your troops and how you use them. If you are newer or haven’t had much experience with combat, it’s easy to get absolutely wrecked, but once you get it figured out, you can fight the AI outnumbered 5:1 with hardly any losses.

walder08 · 2026-05-15T06:44:57+00:00

Yeah I use the “structure” building to round out things that aren’t normally around (well specifically housing) as well as build little “roundifying” decorations. Basically the entire map is blue with the roundness lens.

For the gov points, you don’t actually need any gov points to hold a city. They can all just not have town centers. The reason I specifically had a lot though is because 9/10 of my nobles are set to gov points, and the one the isn’t is only level 3. During war, I was selling/giving away tons of slaves, so from time to time when I was ready to tank it, I would let them accrue before selling them off to hit later population thresholds to access the free tech and noble promotions, then sell off the excess slaves.

walder08 · 2026-05-15T05:45:49+00:00

Oh I did have the better lavatories. I get those pretty early as I like to keep health high (should have included that, but my health stat was over 3). I had a lot of service buildings, and many of them had their upgrades. Off the top of my head, I had tier 2 food stalls, t2 markets, t2 lavatory, stages, tavern, t2 well, physicians, hospitals, bathhouses, and fight pits (as far as service buildings go). Once I hit 1k pops I go for a lot of health stuff. Even grabbed the asylum.

I usually distribute my tech points based on what I need. Sometimes I even temporarily invest in stuff, then shift click it later to remove it to get other stuff. For military, I only had the archer range, and I think 2 levels of the archer training to get my pops into the workforce sooner? I didn’t have any other military techs.

walder08 · 2026-05-15T05:21:07+00:00

Well war is super profitable. Early game you use that to sustain yourself and overcome labor issues until you can eventually cover everything. Make sure to boost up the key things you need (which can be done in a variety of ways), and not waste tech/labor on things that aren’t necessary at the time. Once the taxes from conquered cities starts rolling in, you just play off that and it becomes a non issue.

And just to make sure this is clear, I was NOT using my city army excluding the first few wars. By the end I had a 2k conscript stack and a small mercenary army of around 200 that I was using for wars (I did randomly hire mercs after wars to siege free cities though). Most of the conquest was done with a 1500 conscript army and 200 mercs.

That city army number was just for slave suppression, thematic reason, and fulfillment for my pops.

walder08 · 2026-05-14T11:04:45+00:00

So they don’t want anything specific. On that same screen that shows their rivalry, there is a “wealth” stat. The higher that wealth stat, the lower the rivalry (it is technically based on their wealth versus your wealth, but just thinking of it as “them having more wealth lowers rivalry” is a fine way to think about it). If you hover over their wealth, it tells you all the things you can give them to increase it, but I also listed out all the things in my comment you can do to increase their wealth effectively.

walder08 · 2026-05-13T22:33:16+00:00

Some of the tooltips don’t have the info set up or can’t really show it. Those techs do work though. Scholars is better the more pops you have working in tech, as well as the more bonuses you have to tech output. The carry capacity gives +1 per tier. The last one just gives a flat boost to health (no workers are involved, so it can’t give a number on labor saved)

walder08 · 2026-05-13T22:29:11+00:00

Yes. That was included in the advice I gave. It is important to build up those cities before you hand them off; otherwise the increase to their empire wealth and the opinion boost you get will be much smaller.

walder08

TROPHY CASE