Now I go on with the carpenter, forester’s house and academy. I want to get about 10 levels on the carpenter and 4-5 levels of the other buildings before I go on reducing corruption more. I also always increase town hall as population is getting close to max. If you’re in a dangerous area, increase the hideout and wall level also at this point. I now alternate between reducing corruption and increasing the other buildings levels. When corruption is only 20% or less I fill up the rest of the city with useful buildings.

For your whole empire you only need one workshop. You want this to be in a city on a crystal island and you also want to build an optician in this city. You will use this city for both unit upgrades and buying research. I like to have 2 barracks and 2 trading posts in my whole empire, maybe 3 if you’re really spread out and have many villages. The rest of your villages should have these buildings in order of importance:

• Town hall.
• Palace/residence.
• City wall.
• Tavern.
• Hideout.
• Academy.
• Trading port.
• Carpenter.
• Forrester’s house.
• Wine press.
• Museum.
• Alchemist’s tower/glassblower/stonemason/winery.
• Shipyard.
• Architect’s office.
• Extra warehouse.

Second reason is too keep population growth high, a happy population grows more quickly, and during times of war when you need to recruit troops quickly it’s very important to be able to get a high population growth rate. Another thing when it comes to wine and war is that it’s much much harder to beat down a player with lots of wine cities, it’s almost impossible. Even if he loses all his troops he’ll be able to recover real quick since he’ll still have max population in his cities, he’ll be producing and consuming wine even if you plunder his other resources after all. A non wine city will have a much harder time keeping it’s population if it’s being plundered often since it depends on getting its wine sent from other cities.

If you’re in a peaceful neighborhood, being a peaceful player that and just sticking to yourself I guess having a mix of all kind of resources is ok, but for an active plundering player that risks being attacked back during night, wine is definitely the superior resource. If you worry about raids during night just set wine production to the same as you consume, stop producing all other resources, and you’ll wake up in the morning with lots of  gold and no losses. I’ll write more on this in my wine and plunder article.