OK OK
, I'll try to recall what I've done .. er .. <recalling...>
As I've said before, it really depends on the circumstances, the year and the country you're playing as. When I was playing Russia, most of my finances went for building armies, I basically had no cash whatsoever to upgrade fortresses / increase my per annum income, all at the same time as historically Russia was rather a poor country at the time, and you had to do either one or the other. If you wanted to fight a war, you had to build craploads of troops, but spend <20% of your cash on defences, which could and would create problems for you if the war was going bad. An example of this is in a game I'm playing at the moment as Hansa. Sweden was at war with Russia, Russia maxed out its troops, and had forces all over their country, but could not take any fortresses, they were just too weak, Sweden moved its forces onto Moscow and captured it. This was early in the game too, about 1520.
A relatively strong country like Poland, France or Spain can carry on a war whilst spending alot of cash on upgrading its fortresses, promoting Bailiffs and other things increasing its per annum cash.
Cash can also be spent on various technology upgrades, such as land technology, e.g. Muskets, .. or naval technology, or stability, infastructure, .. You can regulate how much cash is spent on this technology in the finance screen (i can't quite recall what its called, but there's a few pix of it at
www.sidgames.com/eu, go to the screenshots section, was able to get a few custom screens of my games and post 'em up onto our EU page, thanks to Johan..
Anyways, it really depends on your strategy. If you have a weak country, are in a strong alliance, aren't being harrassed by anyone else, you can spend most of the cash on increasing your internal strength, promoting economic growth through trade (placing traders in trading posts, so if you're luck you can earn a monopoly = big cash bonus..), whilst keeping only a token force of an army around your border areas ...
How's that?
Sapura
