How do you get gold in Stronghold Crusader 2?

Last update: Wednesday, May 11, 2016

The tax system in the game.

The gold is without a doubt the most important resource in the game. With it you can buy everything - food, building materials or weapons, not to mention that it's used in army recruitment. It also comes in handy in critical situations - if you are left without food and don't have enough candles / ale, you can give your peasants a bribe. It will cost you some gold, but your peasants will still come to the kingdom, enabling you to stabilize your economy faster.

Gold is a factor which has the greatest influence on the popularity. You can do so by managing the level of taxation in your kingdom - your peasants can be charged with taxes, which will decrease the popularity but is one of the most important sources of gold inflow, or you can decide to give a bribe, which will cost you gold but significantly increases your popularity. The table of influences is as follows:

• Generous bribe: +45 to popularity
• Large bribe: +25 to popularity
• Small bribe: +10 to popularity
• No taxes: +5 to popularity
• Low taxes: no influence on the popularity
• Normal taxes: - 10 to popularity
• High taxes: - 22 to popularity
• Very high taxes: -36 to popularity
• Extreme taxes: - 52 to popularity
• Cruel taxes: -70 to popularity
• Diabolical taxes: - 90 to popularity

It's obvious, that you won't be using 'Generous bribe' at all, because despite the huge bonus to popularity, it will cost you immense amounts of gold. The same problem is with the 'diabolical taxes' - they offer insane amounts of gold, but the negative impact on your popularity is so large that you won't be able to keep it on such a high level for extended periods of time. You would have to set your food rations to maximum, not to mention similarly high levels of ale / religion to be able to generate new peasants - the problem is, that it would be cheaper to just set the taxes, food, ale and religion on lower levels and sell the surplus of resources on the market and you would probably still get more gold out of it.

There are two ways of gold acquisition: taxation, which was described above, and selling resources on the market. The second option comes in handy in 'late game', when you have a well-functioning economy and an excess of resources which can be sold on the market for some gold.