Hi at all, the game is really good, I had to force myself to stop playing ;)

I have a question concerning the mood of provinces. Is there any way to actively affect province mood? I know that later I can build some structures enhancing mood, but are there other ways? I have the feeling that the mood rises when I conquer adjacent provinces... but I'm not sure about this. Any hints? Thanks!

Thanks for clarifying. So I guess the mood changed due to some of my decisions while conquering new provinces and not simply because of conquering them.

Actually, taking a province by force tends to make its inhabitants quite unhappy. So for provinces whose defenders aren't outright hostile or detrimental (such as brigands who damage pop mood when retained as guards), peaceful annexation is always preferable.

That makes sense, but it's pretty impractical as the price point to have a province switch side is pretty high, at least in my experimentation.

A fun experiment : I had once an Ogre contract as guards- the pop was constantly upset, but the ogres thrashed any rebellions !!

Yeah, but by using a scout and choosing right abilities you can get this down by a lot (scout has options which decrease cost by 50% from the start! No investment needed)

That penalty is temporary for human populations. So you should always conquer them by force for the XP.

The ability you mean is Diplomacy which you can get on the Scout/Ranger guy.
This is a good option when the defenders are just a bit to tough to take on so early as ideally you could buy the Ranger Hero turn 1 and get the diplomacy on him and take over a neighboring "Free Province" that has say a 10-20 income because that province will probably be beyond your conquering ability for a while.

TIP Buying your starting hero can be a bit tricky as the one you want may not have the ability you want (I hate this part not being viewable before you buy :( ), so the best way to get the "right" hero is first do your first day build, I usually build tavern, then hit end turn. The game at this point autosaves for you so the first thing you do the next turn is go try to buy the hero you want, if it does not have the starting skill you want then click the bottom right menu button and choose "into the past" to reload. Now Day 2 will always give you the same hero it did before so this time you build again and try the same thing on day 3. You can keep this up until you get the hero you want with the ability you want. The price is usually 360 Gold I believe for "Free Provinces". With the Ranger's Diplomacy ability it opens the option to pay the company leader half that right to him so only costs 180 then or so.

If the province is one of those that generates close to or over 10 gold per turn this will be quickly returned and then will just be bonus cash.

The best way I find to effect morale of conqured provinces is by the use of a Pub built in each with a Theater in your main as this increases their mood right away by +2.

The build order for them are: Tavern, Granary and Inn (Hotel) This lets you build the Taverns which improve mood by +1 in each area they are build as well as generating +1 gold. To increase the mood by another +1 you build Library, Show Booth and the Theater.

This way any new area you take all you have todo is build the Pub and boom your morale is quite good.

This also lets me take advantage of the "Empty Coffer" ritual to get myself extra gold quite often as well as taking advantage of certain random events like when their is food shortage and I over charge them for food, even after all this the people are still usually content. lol

Yeah, I discovered that effect myself in the meantime. The pubs really work very well :-)

1. Almost all abilities for each class are immediately useful.
2. By the end of its career you will have near maxed out all the the abilities you wanted anyways.
3. You lose a massive amount of points by save scumming (each "into the past" or load from a crash result in +1 to reversion count which give massive penalties to glory acquisition.) Only do that to get a strategic resource otherwise you lose out on the XP from them.