Macromanagement refers to actions taken by the player that build buildings, units, gather resources, etc. It basically contains all of the generalized actions that make your army larger and more powerful. An example of a game with an extremely heavy macromanagement focus is Age of Empires II.
An example of an Imperial Age Teuton player's military.
In this game, the player has to spend a significant amount of resources to advance their age through four ages, from the Dark Age to the eventual Imperial Age. Each time a player upgrades their age they gain access to many new units, buildings, and upgrades. There are also four resources in the game where most RTS games have one or two at the most. This means that players have to make a lot more resource gathering workers than is typical and also choose where to deploy them to fit the needs of their military. For instance, if a player wishes to build large numbers of knights they will need to focus on gathering food and gold. The primary focus of combat in the game is focused principally on building larger numbers of better upgraded soldiers than an opponent. This makes the game a macromanagement oriented player's dream-whoever does the best at gathering resources and building the largest army usually proves victorious.
Macromanagement in Total War
All of the macromanagement actions in the Total War series are performed during the turn-based portion of the game. To some extent, this makes it less stressful than in other RTS games, as you don't have to figure out which workers to send to gather resources while also managing all of your military units. You have time to think about the best choices to make.
So where does the challenge of macromanagement come into play in Total War? There are four main strategic areas a player must consider: income, costs, construction time, and troop deployment.
Income
Resource gathering works a bit differently than in many strategy games. In Medieval II Total War the currency in use is called florins, and it is used to purchase everything from buildings to mercenaries to regular units. The major difference is that instead of workers you control producing income, settlements produce almost all of a player's income. This wealth is produced through taxation of the population, farming incomes, mining incomes, and trade. Players can choose to upgrade the buildings in a settlement to produce more income from each of these revenue streams.
For instance, adding mines to Genoa adds 200 florins a turn in revenue to the city.
The main difficulty is that the player must balance producing, maintaining, and moving armies around the world with building revenue enhancing structures, improving military producing structures, taking new settlements, and maintaining good public order in existing settlements. This can be quite a challenge because players can't just build more workers to produce gold, the only major way to improve income is to take new cities. Unfortunately this requires sending out armies to claim them, which costs money in itself.
Plus Milan isn't happy when the reason you attacked their capitol is that "you needed the cash."
One of the additional changes in Medieval II Total War is that settlements may be castles or towns. Towns produce much higher trade incomes than castles so they tend to yield a great deal more money than castles. Castles, on the other hand, are harder for an enemy to take in combat and build stronger military units. A player may choose to change a castle to a town or vice versa until they reach the highest level of upgrade.
The screen to switch settlement types.
This leads to one strategy to maximize income-convert castles in well protected areas of your empire to towns so that you get more money out of them. It doesn't make sense to have a fortress in the middle of Ireland where there aren't any enemies around.
There are also two smaller ways to produce income in the game. One new unit added to Medieval II Total War is the merchant. There are numerous small resources scattered about the world map in the game, ranging from slaves to gold to amber. A player can place a merchant on these resources to trade in them, which generates a sum of gold based to some degree on the rarity of the resource, the merchant's skill level, (which rises with time spent trading and also by taking out rival merchants), and how far the resource is from the player's base of power. For instance, an English player's merchant gathering lumber right next to London would probably generate about 7 florins a turn, which is about enough to buy five spears for a single spearmen unit. If that merchant was instead gathering ivory in the Sahara desert, that would produce 200-300 florins a turn, a much better option.
A Moorish merchant trading in France.
However, I do not personally think merchants are worth the time and effort to manage. The main issue is that merchants can be "attacked" by other faction's merchants and taken off the field of play if the other merchant has a higher finance skill. This is calculated somewhat randomly so if you aren't the type of player who likes to reload the game a lot you will not have merchants for very long. One of the few things the computer does well is to build lots of merchants and use them to attack rival player's merchants. Additionally, the wealth generated by merchants is quite small compared with settlement revenue. Even if you have four merchants generating 300 or more florins a turn, an exceptional occurrence, that still only generates as much money as a typical small town.
The final small income boost is generated by stationing a general or family member in a town or castle. This allows them to be the governor of the settlement, adding his own personal bonuses to the town's incomes. For example, if a general with mining knowledge is in a settlement with extensive mines, that mining revenue is boosted by 10%. Generals can also improve public order, allowing more military units to be pulled from the town to fight elsewhere, lowering upkeep costs.
Unfortunately, most generals get traits like "Sadly Ignorant" which reduces a town's trade and tax income by 5%...
That sums up the discussion of income, so what does all that money get used to buy?
Costs in Total War
The largest costs in the game are incurred when upgrading and adding structures that allow new military units to be produced. The best units in the game require humongous investments of resources to field-sometimes going up to 30,000 florins or more. When a basic infantry unit costs about 300 florins, that's basically the price of a small army. Even mid-range units like armored swordsmen in the image below cost a good 10,000 florins to be able to produce.
Although they look awesome enough to be worth the price.
Even worse-each of the types of units-cavalry, archers, infantry, etc. is built through a different building upgrade tree. So if you want to build a force of the best infantry and archer units for your faction you have to upgrade two different structures to the maximum level. This is quite an expensive task. So why is it important to do this? It seems like it would be more cost effective to just build a bunch of the cheap spearmen units instead.
The main issue is that the less expensive units just don't stand up in a fight later in the game. A force of knights will carve up a group of peasants with pitchforks without losing more than a couple men at the most. Additionally, every unit in the game has an upkeep cost that has to be paid every turn. The upkeep costs for cheap units aren't much lower than the more expensive ones, meaning that you aren't saving much money in the long run.
It's also a bit embarrassing when your entire army consists of these guys.
This leads to another concern when upgrading your military unit producing structures-building time.
Time
Most structures take multiple turns to construct with more advanced military and economic structures taking half a dozen of more turns. This means that a player has to consider their goals carefully when deciding what to build. It is foolish to try and upgrade every city and castle to produce the best available units. That takes far too much time for each settlement and also is a waste of hundreds of thousands of florins that could be put to better use building more soldiers. A better idea is to coordinate building upgrades among the settlements in a region. For instance, in a section of the map with three castles, a player could upgrade one to produce heavy cavalry, one to produce heavy infantry, and the last to produce archers.
For an example of how much money and time that coordination saves, let's assume that it costs 5,000 florins to build each building for each unit type and that they each take five turns to construct. The price for upgrading every castle for all three units versus one unit type in each is as follows:
5,000 x 3 castles x 3 unit types = 45,000 florins
Build time- 5 turns x 3 structures= 15 fifteen turns
Compare that with only upgrading one in each castle:
5,000 x 3 castles x 1 unit type each= 15,000 florins
Build time- 5 turns x 1 structure= 5 turns
A 66% discount is a pretty good deal, no?
An additional consideration is that revenue producing structures like mines, docks, and farms also take multiple turns to complete. It's important to consider where to place them in the construction docket so that you have more income later.
That brings us to the last main macromanagement area of Medieval II Total War, troop deployment.
Military Deployment
One common military maxim is that one soldier on hand is worth more than ten available at some unknown point in the future. This is extremely important throughout any Total War game as armies are spread out over a continent-spanning world map. It doesn't matter how many soldiers you have in Africa if the battle is in Europe.
This maxim even applies to individual armies. It's better to have all of your soldiers consolidated in one army if possible. This is because reinforcement military units don't deploy alongside your army on the real-time battle map. They will enter the field from a different direction-possibly one that is a long hike from the main army. This can allow an enemy army to destroy your main army in detail and then turn to crush the reinforcing army as well.
As in this example, where the total numbers of all three Scottish armies were roughly equivalent to the English force, but the English force charged forward and destroyed each individual Scottish force with ease in the actual field battle.
This has a great deal of relevance to strategic decisions throughout the empire as well. It makes no sense to leave large forces to garrison cities and castles that are not near enemy factions. They are most unlikely to be attacked, send those soldiers forward to towns and castles that are on the front lines of whatever wars you current face.
Conclusion
Although the macromanagement of Medieval II Total War is done in a turn-based setting, taking away the urgency of decision-making, it still takes a good deal of thought to do well. A player who does not make good choices will end up bankrupt and with inferior forces to their opponents. Also consider that a Total War game takes a lot longer than most other games so short-sighted economic and military decisions to win a current war may come back to haunt you later in the game!
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