Lugdunum Walkthrough

by Cherub Marty Party

Career level: Procurator (salary 20 Dn)

Starting City Funds: 5000 Dn

Highest housing level: Grand Villa

Overview

This is the 4th peaceful mission, and your job is to learn how to fit lots of people into a small amount of high-level housing, which is one of the key ingredients to prosperity. The other key ingredient is that of managing your money. Although you’ve been doing a lot of trading on previous levels, you will be introduced to a lot of stops and starts on your trade routes here, which will pressure your financial control.

Targets

Trade Partners

Mediolanum (land route)

• sells 15 fruit [per year]
• sells 25 timber
• buys 15 weapons

Massilia (land route)

• sells 15 vines
• sells 25 oil
• buys 15 marble
• buys 25 pottery

Important Events

Note: there are no barbarian invasions

Disasters

Occasional landslides will stop land traders from reaching your city for a few months. Be prepared for these cuts in your main source of income, by keeping city funds at 1000 to 2000 Dn. Don’t spend every cent as soon as you earn it. Otherwise you’ll go into debt, Caesar will be mad, and you’ll be forced to deal with a lot more troubles than is strictly necessary.

Hints & Tips

The main problem that most players have with Lugdunum, is food distribution and lack of workers. Here are a few ideas to overcome these problems:

1. Pause the game at the beginning and build aqeducts around the 2 packs of wolves (they work just as well as walls, for wolf control, and cost less). Build a javelin unit later on, and move them near the wolves. They can shoot over the aqueducts to kill the wolves, and can do it quickly enough to stop any wolves from being reborn. Once the javelin unit has been built, demolish the barracks to reclaim some workers.
2. Build low bridges to connect the islands. There are no ships on this level so don’t waste money building ship bridges.
3. Demolish the natives’ roads and rebuild them in such a way that you can cover all of the native’s houses with only 2 or 3 missionary posts
4. Don’t build prefectures, hospitals or the hippodrome. You don’t need them on this level. Keep your people happy by managing unemployment and throwing a festival once in a while so that you have no problems with riots.
5. Try to fit 99% of your population in the natives’ area, between the two farmlands. If you can’t manage this, the next best thing is to build on the large farming hill. Try not to build anything but houses and the bare necessity services in this population center. This way, you’ll have less trouble letting people live near the food supplies, and also it may encourage you to keep away from building more services than you need, and that will help alleviate pressure on workforce shortages.
6. Don’t build academies or colosseums in the population center. Build them elsewhere if you think you need them for the culture rating or “overall” entertainment level.
7. Build a few tents, but not too many, to support your workers for the export industries which you’ll want to build somewhere away from your main population center.
8. Build only enough (small) temples to provide religion “coverage” for the populace. Have at least 1 to each god, and the same number for each, except maybe build one extra to Neptune or Venus (not both), to keep him/her permanently exalted. After the small temples, build only oracles, and build them away from your population centers.
9. Don’t import fruit.
10. Don’t import vines to make wine. You can achieve the prosperity rating without building any villas. If you do build villas that will only make matters worse because of the workforce shortage problem. You can, and will want to, achieve the prosperity by having almost all of your houses at insulae level. By not importing vines, you also reduce pressure on your purse string, via lesser imports and increased trader turnaround time, ie. traders can get out of the city quicker, allowing the next group of traders to arrive sooner. You also save on warehouse and workshop workers by not making wine.
11. Build only one pig farm. Build a nearby warehouse set to accept only meat, and tell your trade advisor to stockpile meat. Use this only to satisfy Caesar’s requests. All the rest should be wheat farms. Feed your people nothing but wheat.
12. Try not to make the same mistake I did, of building the export industry too far away from the domestic industry. You’ll have fewer hassles with the traders if you build them closer.
13. Don’t get your population too high too early. Take some time to get the food production & storage well and truly rolling along, before you build any markets. 5 to 10 full granaries would be my suggested minimum before building any markets. If you like, you can segregate your housing into sectors using gatehouses. This way, you can build markets for one sector before the others, and gradually phase in the initial food grab. After the initial grab for food, empty out and then demolish any granaries that are just taking up space. 4 half-full granaries are not as good as 2 full ones. You also save on workers.
14. Build more markets than you usually would, but don’t go mad with them. One market for every 500 people should be sufficient. More markets equals more stable housing, but the people won’t consume more just because there are more markets! You especially don’t want your houses to constantly evolve/devolve on this level because it takes so long for new immigrants to get to the houses and replace those you lost during the devolution.
15. Right click on your granaries and warehouses, and use the special orders screen to set some of them to “get” certain types of food & goods. The granaries furthest from farms (and coincidentally, should be nearest to houses) should get the food from other granaries. This saves your market ladies some legwork, so that they can spend more time making subsequent trips to either get more food, or to get other types of goods.
16. Don’t build barbers until you’re nearly finished. In the meantime, fill up one warehouse full of oil, and stop. Leave the advisor on “importing” oil, but don’t let any other warehouses accept it. This will help you spend less on imports, while improving turn-around time for the traders from Massilia, who buy marble and pottery. When the end is within sight, build the barbers, and watch as your medium insulaes evolve to large insulae (fingers crossed), to give you that final push for prosperity, if you needed it.
17. When your prosperity rating is taken care of, use areas away from the population center, for building the schools, libraries, theaters and academies you need to achieve the culture rating.