Parish Management(help)

[Endless7]

Im looking for any help and advice i can get in parish management. Im new to it and i want to do it right.
I have ownership at the moment of a new parish on a new world and i do not want to let my parish mates down, i have plenty of experience managing my many villages but not much in the ways of Steward, im not looking for a build order or anything like that, mainly general advice and knowledge that i can use to think over and adjust my strategy too, any and all advice would be highly appreciated, thank you in advance.

[Gaius22]

Well my suggestions are:

- Keep building stuff so there is always some guild to donate to;
- I think the parish members would welcome if you keep them post on what you're doing, like what is the next guild you're building;
- When you cover the basic buildings (stone, wood, architect, apples, cheese, etc), ask for suggestions on what guild should be built next, this makes them feel that they're part of building process and a community (Note: weight your opinion with theirs, dont do everything they ask for, make a balanced judgement ) ;
- If you have already some guilds fully upgraded, delete them and post them on the parish forum (for example), so that you and parish members keep note on what has already been built and to narrow suggestions (point above);
- Use the parish army to help deal with enemy AI, as the steward you have the obligation (my point of view) to have the initiative, the new players count on you to help them grow faster and protect them and mid-players to facilitate their lives, though encourage all to help destroy enemy AI;
- Send warnings through the parish "twitter" (or whatever) about donations, make sure that the parish members donate, specially producers of more "scarce" resources, they have rights BUT ALSO duties, they are part of a community, so...
- If the parish reaches a great amount of gold, decrease taxes a bit, the others will welcome it.

You didnt ask for a building order so I guess I cover the essential, I cant think of more but surely someone will

[whitesatin]

I have a new parish with NO troops in it and only two new villages availoable. How can I get any troops? Someone keeps pinching the flag- what effect has this on development?

[Baldwin Bernd]

-Build and max out all your production guilds first(food, weapons, stockpile resources) that way you will be able to upgrade everything else much faster as you will produce much more goods to donate. Don't bother building your fourth barrack before you have apple and wood\stone guilds there. That way people in parish will benefit more from guild than from a supply depot or barrack and they will be able to donate the excess as well.
-Don't stack guilds without upgrading them it's a sign for bad stewardship skills - tons of unupgraded low-lvl buildings in parish. ALWAYS have free space in your parish, if you are running out of space max something out and delete it. Try to maximize your space as well, work on buildings setup to find optimal placement.
-Get your army to 300-350 size at least to be able to kill AI in your parish, build catapult guild and work on upgrading it. You have to understand that as steward you will be doing 99% of donations to the parish most likely so if you are not ready to devote time and resources to that give the parish to someone else. Parish is not a toy but a responsibility. You may want to sell some of your goods to buy goods to donate to parish. If you are not fighting you should have a lot of gold to spare anyway and it's good idea to invest it in your parish. Typical army you will need to kill ai is about 40-60 catapults depending on the castle, you can kill snake with 20 catapults and rat with no catas at all.
- Always try to kill AI castles in your parish(you can kill wolf camps and bandit camps if you are peaceful and have nothing else to do anyway but those will spawn again after hour or so, so it's really optional, it helps but you cannot be sitting 24\7 killing those things. AI castles however are nuisance and they will ransack people and lower your popularity so get rid of those). Also try to heal disease in parish and maybe give it blessings when the weather is bad, if you are neutral you have nowhere to spend your faith anyway.
- Ask people if they need some guild and if they do build it for them and help to upgrade it(most of people don't even care). When building banqueting guilds depending on the priority look how many people in parish can use those, if it's only you then you will be the only donating to it. Make sure you can max it out as soon as possible to save space.
- Keep taxes reasonably low when it's possible, don't stack hundreds of thousands of gold for no reason. Keep enough gold in your parish to build few armies and then lower your taxes to x3-x6. You may also want to donate(reinforce) catapults and buy archers and pikemen from parish(100 archers cost as much as 10 catapults). You don't need many catapults anyway, you can just buy those from market if you don't produce them.

Basically if you will be good steward people will like it and will support you and you will keep people in parish happy as well. Some people will not support you and try to take the parish even though their stewardship skills are horrible and they will turn the parish into scrapyard but luckily in general there are more reasonable people.
So good luck with your parish!

[whitesatin]

Because W5 has entered the second age- I missed the earlier posts which covered start-up situations- at present although I have two barracks and wood & stone, I cannot even get a wall around the Parish keep- what have I missed? Now the flags are being stolen when I am off-line so it is a vicious circle- no wall, no flags!
PS I notice the link to the Wiki page still refers to deleting guilds- surely this needs to be amended to warn those who are in 2nd age (some may start in one of those worlds)
Thanks for the advice so far, it all helps, but how to start???