What not to build in secondary cities

From The Evony Wiki ::The Free Forever Massive Multi Player Real Time Strategy Game

I remember there was a thread on this a while ago, but I can't find it.

Figured I'd make my own thread to let people know what I think, and to get people's ideas as well. We all eventually take over second and third and fourth cities, and we want to know the ideal way to build buildings on them. We don't want to waste spots on things we will never use. So here are my questions and opinions:

Inn and Feasting Hall: You will want one if these in every city in order to acquire and appoint heroes for each city (though you can build just one L10 Inn in your 'home' base and reinforce the Heroes from here to every other city).

Beacon Tower: Every city, you'll want to know if you have enemies coming.

Rally Point: Should be the first thing you build so you can send troops to and from the city.

Cottages: You will obviously want several of these in every city to allow for population growth.

Barracks: Again, you will need several of these if you intend on building an army.

Embassy: I believe you need an embassy to hold alliance troops, so if you are planning on being in need of aid from your alliance, build one of these in your city.

Workshop: This is necessary for a wall, so you need it in every city. (unecessary once walls reach level 10 and metal casting reaches level 10)

Academy: Every city shares research, but you need an academy of appropriate level to use the research in each city, so build one of these everywhere.

Warehouse: I'd suggest it in every city, you need to protect your resources.

Marketplace: I've been told to keep one in every city, not sure why though. Probably so trades become easier? Can anyone expand on this one?

Stable: You need to have a stable to have a relief station so see that entry.

Relief Station: Are necessary if your cities are widely dispersed as it cuts down transport times greatly. Also they are independantly levelled, so you need one in each city to gain the benefits and each has to be levelled up. If your cities are close together it is as important to have one unless you plan on transporting goods to allies a lot.

Forge: You need to have a forge to build a Workshop, so it is a necessary use of space. (unecessary once walls reach level 10, metal casting reaches level 10, and military science reaches level 10)

I think I covered it all, hope this guide sort of helps and I hope others can answer what I could not.

Things you can lose once you are done building

Once your walls are built to Lv9 or Lv10 you can get rid of the Workshop as it is no longer needed. Forges can also be destroyed. Stables are only need to level up the Relief Station, so once that is done get the Dynamite out and make room for other buildings.

Side Note: Make sure your technologies are at the maximum level (10) before destroying these buildings as you will have to rebuild them from scratch if you choose to build them again.

<Shaandras Writes>

REASON FOR MARKETS The reason you build a Market in every city is so you can temporarily put resources up for sale to reserve them for building walls etc. If you have noticed, walls often take more stone, for instance, than you have the capacity to store at lower levels. Just before stone gets to max, take a portion and put it up for sale at a really high rate, twice the going rate for example, and nobody will buy it. When you finally need it for contruction, cancel the transaction and it will appear in your inventory for use on the walls. You do incure a transaction fee everytime you post, but that is the cost of doing business. If you store, say, 3Mil Lumber, the fee is not that bad... a couple thousand gold is all.

GETTING RID OF FORGE & WORKSHOP I would not recommend it. You need forge for some research tasks, and to up your metal casting for sure. Same with Workshop

USING DYNAMITE Yeah, use it, rare as it is, if you want to destroy something fast, but you don't need to. You can destroy any building or resource field you built by clicking on the little red circle with the line thru it on the "build" display. It will give you a choice to dynamite, or take the building down one level. Select down level and it will give back some resource, not much, and it will take the time to go back one level that it took to build one level. But when you get to -0- it will disappear and you can rebuild whatever you want. I have found that in my higher cities, depending on who built them in the first place, many adjustments have to be made.

<Tanamakoa Writes>

REASON FOR MARKETS 2 A second reason for building a Marketplace in every city would be that you can use it as an extra warehouse in case you are under attack. The benefit of a marketplace over a warehouse is that a marketplace does NOT have an upper storage limit. To safeguard all your resources the marketplace will of course have to be at least lv 4.

In a reply to Shaandras' tip of using a marketplace to bypass the resource capacity limit, once again a lv 4 marketplace will do just fine. But if you do want to have a bigger resource buffer for material-wise costly improvements on other buildings, I would not go beyond a lv 8 marketplace.

{c.b. dillinger expounds} THE MOST OBVIOUS REASON FOR MARKETS I can't believe nobody thought to add this. Having a ton of markets is important for the same reason you level them up. More orders! The more orders and offers you can post, the more gold you can make by playing the market. Common sense. Also, it's nice to have a market in every city, whether you're using it as a warehouse or not, simply to be able to order supplies where they are needed, rather than having to ship them from place to place. Even more obviously, once you are generating tons of excess gold, your markets become your most powerful resource generators. Getting a nice fat shipment every half hour is always good, even when you're puling down 100k units of whatever per hour.

WHY TO KEEP YOUR STABLES... There is no reason to keep stables after you have sufficiently upgraded your horeseback riding skill and relief station. Despite what is said below, I have tested this out, and there is ZERO difference between production time of cavalry and cataphracts without a stable. I even tested each level of the stable as i destroyed it. It only matters to keep this to get your horseback skill and relief station leveled properly, afterwards, DESTROY IT! Just have a good attack hero equipped when you are recruiting in your barracks!

NO LONGER VALID---->Again, blatantly obvious. They reduce the training time of your mounted troops. Why slow things down? Replacing your stables with another barracks may seem tempting, another generator for split production is nice, but it is better to keep the stables overall, even though it only speeds up your mounted production. <---------NO LONGER VALID

...AND YOUR RELIEF STATION These are a must. Even if your sister cities are all within a reasonable distance of your capitol, keep in mind that you will not always be shipping things to yourself. I don't know what your alliance is like, but in mine we help each other out, and we give what we can spare to those who need it, as well as providing huge stockpiles of supplies to our noobs. Also, it must be noted that a vast deal of money can be made OUTSIDE the in-game market. Watch the world chat. Every idiot who hasn't figured the market out yet is more than willing to pay through the nose to get what he needs. Also, most players will pay a little more to buy thier supplies from someone nearby who can deliver within a few minutes, rather than waiting a half an hour to get them. Ever heard of extortion? I will personally attest to the fact that you can make more gold by getting someone to pay you NOT to raze their city to the ground than you can make by doing so. Now, while your having a releif station won't get their gold to you faster, keep in mind that you could end up at the wrong end of this arrangement yourself. I'm not the only one collecting 'protection' money on this game, and it's going to catch on at some point. Remember, there's always a bigger fish.

WAREHOUSES? If you are in doubt as to whether or not you should keep your warehouses, then it's because you've already made the mistake of building them in the first place. Use your market. Better yet, get your production to the point where it won't matter if you get raided. Even better, DON'T GET RAIDED. The time and resources spent on your warehouses would be better spend on building defenses that would negate the need for said warehouses. If the city in question happens to be in a real 'hot zone', then perhaps keeping a warehouse to hoard food could be justified. Maybe.

ADVICE! Whilst maxing out your cities' production and construction, and following every technology to lv10, and essentially building the best city possible is of course your first priority, the more you think of this game as a game, the more likely it is that someone like me with an eye for politics and business will come along and absolutely decimate you. LOOK BEYOND THE NUMBERS AND THE STATISTICS, BEYOND THE COMBAT MECHANICS. The human element is present here, and sadly, so many ignore it oompletely. This is why there are so many abandoned citys, so many quitters. Play this game as if it were a game, and you lose.