Commandery Building Basic Principles

Here are some basic principles for commandery building. This guide might contain other unrelated tips that I thought of at the time of writing.
This is a work in progress.

Introduction

This guide will focus on the basic principles of commandery building, which is more in depth than it first appears. Many guides were created during an early version of the game when population only buffed peasantry income. But a patch was released later that changed this to 'All Income'. This changed the campaign strategy to one where your main focus is to capture and develop the high income, high population centres.

But you'll also need high food income to complement these income commanderies. Prior to this change the main strategy was to match building colour types. For example: Industry and/or commerce focused commanderies were buffed with other purple and blue support buildings. Growing the population wasn't important.

Now it works better to build all base income buildings in the tier 1 high population centres and maximise food production elsewhere to support these.
Many of the popular guides haven't been updated, or the creators haven't realised the significance of this change.

Income

Lets start at the beginning with Base Income, which is the key.
There are three main types of income in this game:

Peasantry (Green and Yellow)
Commerce (Blue)
Industry (Purple)




The base income from these buildings above seems pathetically low at first, but it gets a percentage bonus from buildings, technology, population, assignments, characters, and ancillaries.



There are also two other income types: Silk and Spice. But these are not important enough to include in a basic principles guide. Leave a comment if you want more info about this.
Most players start out learning that they should match the building chain colours, like for example, if a commandery has industry income from a minor settlement, then they think they should build all of the purple chain buildings in the main settlement for synergy.

This is a trap and will lead to poor results and frustration. There is some benefit to matching colours, like for example: food (green) is best maximised by building the city based food building in a commandery with food production minor settlements, and then the one support building to increase food production by a percentage. But this is really as far as it goes in many cases.

Most of the time you don't want to build the grain storage so forget about matching all the colours.
There are three tiers of commandery. Tier 1 are commerce and industry focused with high income potential. These are extremely valuable to hold. They have two or three special commerce and/or industry forms of income, either from a minor settlement or a city based port.

These are where you place an administrator. In most campaigns you will only have two or three of these and it depends on what part of the map you conquer or where you start.
These are the commandaries that you want to invest in and encourage high population. Note: my basic principles don't work well with a low population, low public order strategy like rebel farming. Leave a comment if you want to know more about what this means.

Tier 2 commandaries have commerce or industry minor settlements but maybe only one, or one peasantry income settlement and one commerce or industry. These are average for income and you can place an administrator here if you have a spare slot, but I don't recommend building these any further than a city. This will save on food maintenance cost.

Tier 3 commandaries are valuable for food production but poor for income. You want to maximise food production here to cover the food cost of your tier 1 high population centres.
You don't want to build these commadaries beyond a city either because it's not efficient on food. I prefer to build all of these to a city level and use the 4th building slot for a non income building like military or school chain.

Alternatively, you can leave these as a small city, which is only three building slots and costs little food as maintenance.
Now here's where things differ from other guides: You want all three main income types in your tier 1 and 2 commandaries! There are three to four key base income buildings that provide peasantry, industry and commerce. They are not hard to find in the building browser.

Just look for base income in their description, and there's usually one core building for each colour as mentioned above, just not red.
Fill the first three to four building slots in the main settlement with these base income buildings and make sure your population is rising at all times.

This is really important because it's 'All income' that gets buffed as your population increases and as you unlock more technology.
In the early game when money is tight, population is low, tech level is low, and you need to maximise your capital, there is a case to be made for construction based on just one or two income types with the support buildings.

This works ok for a short part of the game but is sub optimum for tier 1 commandaries that you are investing in for the longer term. Tier 2 commandares can be built all commerce and/or industry and used as a stepping stone until your tier 1 high population centres are established.
I'm going to give you one example of my favourite commandery in the game built using this all income high population approach.

The secret is the Food Trader building chain to add peasantry income to a high commerce/industry commandery. This can even be taken a step further in the late game by using the palace (Han buildings), of which you can only build one, and provides more peasantry income.

In the screen shots below I didn't get the tech needed for a palace in that campaign. I also didn't even need level 5 base income buildings to get this commandery booming. So there's more potential here if you get the tech needed. However, in my experience you don't actually need level 5 building tech for economic success. So you can save this research time for non income related things like military or espionage.




If you want to look up the tier 1 commandaries on the campaign map, here are my favorties:

Danyang
Taiyuan
Badong
Jianning
Poyang
Changsha
Hedong

Corruption

I base my whole campaign strategy around reducing corruption because it's that important to success! This is probably the single biggest challenge in the game for most players. Corruption reduces your income, before expenses, so if you fail to control it, and over expand, you'll find yourself with negative income.

It's really important to prepare for corruption reduction well before you need it!

- The characters I place in key office positions like Prime Minister or heir need the 'Honest' or 'Outsider' trait for corruption reduction. There are some legendary characters that provide this as well.

-The commadery administrators reduce corruption.

- The technology choices I make for most of the early game and into the mid game are intended to lower corruption.

- The buildings I place in every commandery, except for tier 1, are the Coin Makers which reduce corruption in adjacent provinces, which then stacks. Tier 1 commanderies get the main purple building for base income rather than the alternative Coin Maker.

- There are assignments that can be activated on a per commandery basis for -50% corruption.

I can't emphasise enough how important it is to work on reducing corruption.
I haven't found a use for the yellow corruption reduction buildings with my play style because the purple ones, in combination with the other things mentioned above, work so well. I can get -100% corruption in most commanderies, which frees up the tier 1 commanderies for a base income focus.

Food

Food production commanderies seem boring at first because there's often little potential for good income generation. But these commaderies are crucial for supporting your high population, high income tier 1 commadariers. Without maximising food income where possible the rest of my strategy fails.

These comandaries are also the place I build military buildings. As an interesting bonus, the green buildings also provide a Wu Xing construction discount to red military buildings. More on the Wu Xing principles later.
Below are screen shots of typical food production commanderies with a purple corruption reduction building.

The 4th building slot in these commaderies is optional. In one of the screen shots you'll see that a commerce building fits in quite well to round out the three income types. But if you really want to min max, then leave these commaderies at small city for 3 building slots and less food maintenance cost.





In that image above you'll see that commerce has a 218% bonus that only gets utilised or unlocked if you build a commerce base income building, which means another 668 income per turn in this example.
Lastly, the grain storage building is the most useless in the game. I really wish CA had adjusted how reserves and army supplies work.



There are several mods that improve on this if you're interested, however they come with other gameplay changes which you may or may not like.
In vanilla, the food storage building is designed to give your main settlement more siege hold out time by increasing the amount of reserves it can hold.

The system works, but it's not that useful or impactful to gameplay. I've never found that I needed longer siege hold out time because I usually have enough income to build more armies and have most of my boarders patrolled. I guess if you have a different play style to me you might like the insurance.

Or you might not want to keep armies on patrol on a particular boarder and think they should be on the front line. Here's a secret: The AI can tell if you are weak militarily and even your neighbours with positive relations have a chance to declare war on you if you appear weak.
Actually most Total War games work this way in my experience.

Test it out yourself by disbanding your armies on a boarder and see how long it takes for the AI to attack. On the higher difficulties the AI will dog pile on you if you're not careful.
Anyway, this is all the more reason to have a strong income to pay for more armies to cover your territory.

[Lateralus]

@BBO Silk & Spice didn't belong in a basic principles guide. Once you've learn't how base income works, Silk & Spice isn't hard to understand.

[BBO]

So ignore silk & spice?

[Lateralus]

Thanks Gabri

[Gabri Kenpachi]

Really useful, thank you man!