How to play tall in Imperator Rome 

Glad you found it helpful! It was your suggestion that got this made. Slave cities are the most productive way to make any resource, technically. Just very expensive to invest into.

@@KonglomeratYT I will do another playthrough. Focus my Capital on Nobles and a couple of cities as slaves. Since having population gets more levies, you can make a lot of client states, which could help against the bigger opponents.

I did it with tylos in MP RP, eventually formed Babylon, but I had like 11 gemstones produced in tylos and 200+ traderoutes in capital region. It’s very fun

But it is vanilla =P

Glad you have found these helpful!

I assume you are referring to Invictus. I haven't played it, but it makes some sense to do that. In this guide I recommended building slots for aqueducts > population capacity boosts specifically because adding aqueducts can result in far larger cities. I assume the modder attempted to nerf this.

I play vanilla, but sometimes I cannot help thinking that there's no way a city sustain so many people back in the days. I mean, even if you build more aqueducts, that doesnt mean more water sources. Now, if there was a technology that would provide you bring water from further places, like the Romans did, more expensive aqueducts, that would make sense, or even to import it as a trade resource.

Precious metals has a base value of 0.5. The least profitable trade goods have a value of 0.2. If you moved enough slaves to be sustainable you could make maybe (I will be unrealistically generous to your point) 3 more resources per area, maxed. Assuming the average good price, you would be increasing your average profit by 0.15 nine times. Meaning you'd make 1.35 more money monthly; base value. That doesn't even make Macedon's starting legion capacity affordable. And, the cost to get the values I've mentioned (in slave movement) would cost ~450 money, without modifiers. So, without modifiers, you'd spend 108 years paying that scheme off. I am not sure you understand what "totally broken" is, or perhaps you are playing with mods that change how trading and resources work.

@@KonglomeratYT I play plain vanilla, my first campaign ever, as Bizantium. Once I conquered some regions with wine, gold and I understood the slaves mechanics, I swam in gold. I could afford to maintain 3 mercenary armies at once, even at peace, and still keep a profit of +100 a month.

I did mention this. I just didn't dedicate a lot of time to it because, while important for growth, it is meant to boost growth over a vast empire. You can chase hundredth decimal bonuses for pop growth as a small nation, but i would not focus it; for the reasons that I discussed on how pop growth works.

That is more of a disadvantage. Crowding your capital with slaves is usually a bad thing since your capital is where you want to concentrate the highest % of nobles possible for research.

@KonglomeratYT Yeah bit easier to move from centralized areas.

​​​@@KonglomeratYTI only move to my capital already converted to my religion and culture slaves, and only there I let them to ascend to upper classes, since as you point out, that's where you want your nobles concentrated (building academies helps too). But I use the nearby provinces provinces as conversion hubs, as a constant source of converted slaves for my capital. That said, if your capital province (the whole province , not only the region) has some interesting resources for trading, it's also interesting having there lots of slaves, even if they are not of the same culture. Afaik, the capital province never revolts.