I have some questions about overall campaign play.

First, whenever I see a territory withing mining capability, I always go after them first, seeing them as good addition profit. The question is: Is this an effective strategy.

Second, I after playing the game for almost 3 quarters of a year now, I still have trouble with money vs. troops equation. In an early campaign, I quickly learned that if you try to draft a big army before you economy is ready for that burden, it will send you into the negative amounts. The problem I have is that many times when I see one of my cities going negative which means to me not that they are losing money, but the city's expenses or more than its income, and thus the remainder is being drained from my treasury. Therefore, whenever I see the income from one of my cities getting low or even seeing that one of my cities is draining my treasury, I feel very hesitant to recruit more troops.

The following scenario happened to me many times. This time, I was playing the Julii, and had Segeste, Arretium, Arrinium and Selona (which I took for its mining capability.) I left a small army in Selona in case the Macedonian's or the Dacians came knocking and brought the rest of my army back to Italy to join the army I was drafting in preparation for a two-pronged attack on Po River Gauls. However, after defeating a band of rebels in my territories, I noticed that Arrinium's income was getting low, and if I didn't do anyhting about, Arrinium would start draining funds from my treasury. So I stopped all military unit production except for those already being recruited. In the meantime I recruited just peasants from my two larger towns to bolster the populations in Segeste and Selona in order to get them to the Large Town level. All available projects in those towns had been completed, so they were just waiting to expand. My hope was that they expansion of these towns would help relieve some of the expense burden being placed on Arrinium and brings it's income back up. This took several turns to happen, and eventually it seemed as if I was able to at least recruit a few military units if any. This whole time my main army was sitting in a fort just outside the Gallic border in the pass between the Italian heartland and the Po river. However, at this time I discovered the worse has happened.

Gaul had already declared war on me, a report that I must have missed. Two medium size Gallic armies was already marching towards Arrinium. While I marched out my fortified army to intercept them, I had my spy (which was at the Po River to begin with to keep any eye Gallic movements) explore those Gallic lands to see if there where any weaknesses. I expected that the two Gallic armies near me was all there was in the Po River valley, and that other Gallic armies were too far away to help. I expected that once my army finished off the attacking armies, they could easily take both cities without much reinforcements from other Gallic cities for a while. I was sorely mistaken.

My spy discovered three similar sized armies patrolling about the valley on the north side of the river. At the same time, two more armies were marching through the passes to the west and northwest. With only one moderate sized army and no economic capacity to recruit more armies, I felt defeated, and quit the game. It seems to me that this whole incident occurred because I was spent all my focus worrying about the stability of my treasury, and I was not prepared for war when it showed up on my doorstep. This has happened too many times. The fact is, I worry every single moment about my treasury going under and not being able to recover from it.


So the question is tri-fold: First, what is the true dividing line between having enough money to afford the armies you want or not having enough money, and what information that the game provides can tell me this. Second, Do I have to fear going under that much. If my treasury going into the negative, can I recover. Finally, is there a possiblity that I can train an army that puts my treasury into the negative just to recover when I've taken new territories.

This is all very confusing and it has been a constant contention point for me.