Newbie Micromanagement Question

[Ironhawk]

I played Dominions 2 a while back and really enjoyed it, but as the game progressed I was turned off by the micromanagement. Ended up having like a whole set of cheap leaders whose entire purpose was to round up troops from my auxiliary provinces and shuttle them to muster points or to the front. Then when they were there I would transfer them to the real leaders who would take them into combat.

Am I missing some basic game mechanic with respect to raising troops and getting them where you want them to be? Cause it seems like way too much work.

[LintMan]

It sounds like you were building lots of independent troops (independent troops are not nation specific - any nation can build them, unlike your national troops, which can only be built at a castle).

A much better method is to build castles wherever you'll need troops, and concentrate on building troops almost entirely at the castles. Castles have the benefit that they transfer some of the resources from the surrounding provinces to the castle's province, so that it will have more resources to use to build troops there than any non-castle provinces do. So with castles your troops are more concentrated in certain spots (thus less shuttling them around), and you have more resources to work with (to build more troops there). Plus, castles increase your income, provide some defense, and increase supply to nearby provinces. And often, your race's troops are better than the independent ones that are available, so it's usually not a bad idea to build more of them than independents.

[Ironhawk]

Ah, just so. Yeah that would take a lot of the burden of having leaders wandering around the sticks collecting ragtag bunches of troops.

It is nice to be able to get some of these independent troops for thier unique properties. Whats the common way to do that? If you build a castle on the province which produces the interesting troop, arent they replaced by your own nations troops?

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Ironhawk:
If you build a castle on the province which produces the interesting troop, arent they replaced by your own nations troops?

No. You get both your national troops and any independent troops available in that province.