I dont think this is actually "the" Meta, however it it definitely my prefered choice.
- Fians are great
- The culture bonus is the best
- The area is very concentrated and quite central; so good for both farming enemy lords (and, in my experience Battanians are easy pray Fians or no), recruiting troops and later getting some towns (same as those you suggest)
If you really want to Meta then you would probably go Battania for the culture bonus but still recruit KGs.
Edit: One more thing perhaps (if talking about metas). Ananda_The_Destroyer once said something that made alot sense to me, which suggest that the best strategy might actually be to hold only one town. I havnt tried it though I always go with 3 towns, force of habit.
The meta's holding up to 4 or 5 towns no castles - but you need to have adequate governors for each + battanian culture
Fians are meta on player's hands, you don't even need to move in a map, just spam fians and hold position - nothing can win, absolutely nothing. If you are against vland just create 2 or 3 formations and make their cav ping-pong between them...
Fians on sieges sum to let them erase all troops on the walls than just telling them to charge when there are only a handful left.
Khan's Guards are the strongest unit but the player doesn't benefit from them as much, the reason being that AI isn't good at moving & shooting - they'll miss most shots which means longer battles where many will be forced into melee... They work great for the AI because the AI doesn't know how to properly set up formations or make tactical decisions. I doubt using Khan's Guards differently from Fians because when stationary their DPS is dozens of times higher. Now - meta is meta and it's never about purist builds, I said battania's the meta because it is, 2 4 village towns, easy access to fians with proper perks, the 2 most powerful cultural feats on player's hands: +1 militia; forest movement. Now, if you doing meta power-gaming, it's obvious that you'll pick up khan's, not doing it is silly considering they'll also add ++ on auto-resolve and ++ on party speed. Than we may or may not chose to pick-up canon fodder for infantry - but that's entirely optional.
Following this meta (fians mostly) you can even single handendly win melee on sieges while you let fians clean up anyone who shows at walls - you can even find videos on this.
So the meta of the game are 2 troop units (Fian Champions and KG) - 4 towns (Jaculan, Marunath, Seonon, Sanala) - 5 low level companions (Healer / Surgeon / Willowbark / Knowing / Scholar [empire culture]) for either governors or party leaders - a handful of decent captains (companions again) - and a handful of useful wives (female nobles) that can either lead parties or be governors.
Than there's the debate between bat and emp as PC culture - but all the negative effects of having Bat can be easily cancelled by proper kingdom policies, which makes emp not that great - It only had something going it's way before they've nerfed negative wages with 1.9 (where it was possible to make garrisons pay you if you were Imperial)
So Battanians gain easy access to higher slots for Fian recruitment - 2 of the meta towns within it's territory & culture - the starter background choices are the best for the player (allowing for both 2h Bow & Medicine) - the most useful cultural feats for the player & it's territory's packed which makes defending it piece of cake for both AI and player.
Now, back to the "single town meta" - that'd be a fallacy but not entirely, it is a sound strategy IF you don't want to train governors - considering we only really need 4 to keep all of the best towns - it's not something hard, and you can actually pick-up temporary comps like Spicevendor if you were lucky on the RNG to fill the shoes of yet leveling govs (though she works best at Sanala - obvsly). - The management of the towns' simple, though - Sanala's the best to house your entire army without starving and it'll shoot above 11k prosperity on it's own, you don't even need to do anything... Marunath, apparently, can hold the most profitable workshops (although to pull that off is a very lengthy effort that I consider waste of time). So the trick is to keep a small garrison in Jaculan for emergency fill-ups by companion parties and a massive one at Sanala which basically works as your reserves and your "never besieged town" because AI never tries to take on massive strong garrisons. Meanwhile, you cash in on militia spawn rate for both Marunath and Seonon and keep the garrisons EMPTY (you won't lose loyalty, and with the proper gov perks it won't lose much security neither) This means you're getting double town income without any expenses - while if you made a good gov for Sanala (wage reduction + taxes) you'll also profit from it - that's 30k +- daily. Even if you flip the best gov possible having a single town, you'll only make up to 10k daily - expenses, not a smart move.
Changing subject: any 2 village towns are complete garbage for the PC - it automatically makes the prosperity cap much lower meaning less taxes, less recruitment slots for replenishing, and less food to actually place a decent garrison in them. 3 Village ones can work but will 100% of the time be lesser choices compared to the 4 village ones. In the list of the best in this category that would be Bhaltakand, Ortysia, Epicrotea and Rhotae - among those Rhotae's garbage compared to the other 3 because it has a neighboring massive bandit spawn which will fk up your villager parties overtime if you aren't patrolling there constantly, the good part of Rhot's that it has better food income due to having 2 wheat villages.
Ortysia and Epicrotea end up being the most profitable of the 4 because both receive a constant spam of caravans (raising tariffs and increasing goods variety) a whooping 8 trade bound villages after conquering the entire regions, all while also having massive potential of workshop productions, both support Smithy + Silversmith - though you must conquer Gersegos castle for your faction before investing on the silver for Epi.
Balthakand will cash in on Wool production, but only if you keep all sheep villages within your faction (bound to castles) - If I'm not mistaken you can trade bind 4 sheep villages total for it which can skyrocket the wool weavery up to 800+ daily on average.
Meanwhile, none of the Sturgian Towns are good - you can make it work IF you manage to keep either Varcheg or Omor at a time - never conquer both, if you do that you'll inevitably bind all villages to one or the other which makes their prosperity skyrocket - yet if you move on to take both later, the town that was awesome will eventually starve and drop back into disgusting prosp again. Simir and Varnovapol are useless - both own 3 villages, but both have ZERO trade bound villages - meaning they will always produce less than the 2 village towns and gain only 18 extra food. Yet, if you MUST GO STURGIA for RP reasons, the only reasonable choice is Tyal, but you can't let your faction take Balthakand in that case - this way you'll move all trade bound villages from Balt to Tyal - yet Tyal will never reach the same levels of prosp due to having 2 villages only (-18 food than Balt; -36 from a 4 village town)
With RBM I've noticed a massive increase on horse village income - but I'm not sure if with vanilla it's the same - in that case Askar's the most profitable town above all others as long as you keep it's nearby castle. Arguably you should keep that caslte for yourself (in that specific case it's worth it because each horse village can make up to 8k daily)
There's a reason why I'm always mad at not being able to skip into mid-game (even made a thread about it), I test everything really thoroughly and extract the game's meta eveyr single time. Currently this is the meta, though Battania has sort of been it since the start of EA, and I hate it - I dislike their fashion & their architecture & their naming, and I don't particularly like their map region geographically. Can't deny they are objectively the best for results.
Aserai's disgustingly handicapped with a ludicrous debuff (increased wages) while it's positive effect's only useful if you're activelly trading - Sturgia does well for early and mid game with it's army buffs, but at late game their feats are insignificant; Khuzaits are decent for combat and campaign map traveling, but suck at total income potential; and empire's good for building and not worrying with kingdom policies (almost 1/3 of the map is their culture) but they destroy village growth which makes prosperity increase much more painful to manage.
Now, if you wanna understand deeper how the entire prosperity game works - it's all about increasing it directly through buffs while increasing village hearts, otherwise the town / castle will starve defining a cap - each village has 3 tiers - +6 food +12 food and +18 food - and towns and casltes are limited to their natural bound villages for these buffs - this means that 4 village towns get whooping +72 food just from their villages existing once they reach 600 hearts each + whatever they sell to the town - while 2 villages only give +36 - that directly translates into prosperity caps because once the town reaches certain prosperity, it'll inevitably start consuming more food than is produced, which will lower the prosperity. It's a hard to see soft cap, but ultimately affects everything in it (tax income - item prices - workshop income - tariffs - troop quality - troop spawn rate) - I've not yet managed to find Sanala's cap, though, seen it go above 12k prosp without taking food hits - but I've seen other towns like Marunath and Seonon struggle once they reach 11k.
