Questions regarding various buildings

mizaralcor wrote: JimJams wrote: - you don't need a trader to see local markets, every city enable you to see the nearby hubs Moving a trader from a city to another can be handy and I would be happy to see the option made available, but I fear it is unlikely. Personally I would love to be able to move also troops and diplomats, and commanders.... not reinforcing, but move the ownership from a city to another. By that I meant that only the city where the Traders are hired from can see and directly compare listed prices of items located in hubs and located in local markets, side-by-side. The other cities without Traders can only see their own local markets and can not compare those local prices with hub prices side-by-side. Therefore, if the player changes his mind in the future and wants to have, say, his city B to have access to direct comparison between hub prices vs local prices, instead of his city A (his original city where the Traders were hired from), he will have to move his Traders. I can understand the reasoning for the devs not providing a means to re-assign (instead of merely reinforcing) military and diplo units from one city to another, i.e. preventing a player from stacking his troops in one place, but that is for another discussion. My point however, is that this reasoning doesn't really apply for non-offensive units like Traders, and therefore it shouldn't be a problem for the devs to provide a way for players to transfer "assignment" of their Traders from one Merchant Guild to another located within a different city. Also, as previously mentioned, once you have multiple Traders, the cost of re-hiring them can get astronomically high, higher than even few army divisions due to wine requirement.

mizaralcor wrote: True, with Reinforcement stratagem, a player can reinforce his attack-oriented cities with defensive army types when under threat of being attacked/sieged. However, how do players with specific-army cities deal with situations such as : - When a player wants to attack from a city focusing on defensive armies (spearman cities or non-trueshot archer cities)? Reinforcement stratagem won't help in this situation. - When one wants to break sieging armies outside of his city that is focusing only on defensive army types? Yes, one can stack reinforcements and use "sally forth", but sallying forth has its own drawbacks such as 6hrs interval, can only be done after bombardment is started, not much help when there are multiple sieging armies, etc.

 

1. if your cities aren't spread around too much you can reinforce each other

What is sometimes referred to as the "big 5",  library + market place + mage tower + consulate + barracks, is present in all my towns.  Presumably a military town still wants diplomatic contingents, thieves, assasins (incl. T2), and a decent visibility radius.  For a minimal cluster of three towns you'd want a geomancers' retreat in one town, protective blights in another town, and another protective blight in a third town, because the second town cannot blight itself.   For these spells you need mage towers at level 20, otherwise the spells would be too weak.  

Fellow Illy players,

I have various questions pertaining to functions of certain buildings and town specializations :

1. For military towns, it seems like specializing each town into only one type of army is encouraged. I understand the advantages of doing so, such as maximizing the benefit of upkeep reduction buildings and army production sov bonuses.
However, my question is, how does a player manage his army that way if all 4 troop types are scattered on different towns? A town that is attack-oriented (cavalry town for example) will surely need defenders from time to time when they are being attacked, and cavalries don't really make the best defenders? On the other hand, a town that is defense-oriented (spearman or archer towns for example) will want to send out armies to attack other players or NPCs occasionally, and they aren't exactly efficient attackers?

2. I also read that the mage tower and the consulate aren't always needed in every single town owned by a player. They will be built only on magic-focused and diplo-focused towns, for example. However, for towns with neither the mage tower (i.e. no runes) nor the consulate building, how do they defend against diplo attacks? Surely they will be extremely vulnerable against any diplo attacks, even the smaller ones?

3. When a player already hired a Trader unit and placed him in a trade hub, and then deconstructs the Merchant Guild (the building where the Trader is hired from), what would happen with the Trader unit? Will it disappear/be disbanded automatically?

4. When one town hires a Trader unit, the unit will be "assigned" or "attached" to the town hiring the unit. As such, only that specific town will get access (after necessary research is completed of course) to trader-only features, such as ability to post buy or sell orders in a hub, access to advanced market graphs, ability to redirect caravans sitting in a hub, etc. My question is, is there a way to "re-assign" this Trader unit to a different town, i.e. not the town from which the Trader was originally hired from?

I apologize for the lengthy questions. Thank you beforehand.