Troop Building: Maximize Amounts and Speed

This procedure maximizes the population available in the selected city for building troops as fast as possible in Age II. It does this by temporarily reducing your production to zero and thus freeing all of the city's population for troop building.

Step 1: Make Your Empire's Highest Attack Hero The City's Mayor

Notes: Your City's mayor at the time you set the build of troops determines how fast you can
build them. The difference of a few seconds per troop adds up to a large amount of time saved
over thousands of troops. To take maximum advantage of this, always move your highest
attack level hero into the city using a scout and Reinforce, then make them Mayor.
 

Step 2: Maximize The Population Available To Build Troops With 

Click on the Town Hall, the Overview screen pops up.
Click on the production tab and set production to 0
Click on the tax rate tab, then click on OK.
Your idle population should now equal your max population.

Notes: There should be almost NO idle population in any city. Idle population means you are NOT making the most of your city's assets. So if your resource fields need 20K population then ideally you only need a total of 20K population in the city. Justhave enough cottages to take care of the resource fields, the rest should be required buildings and barracks. Depending on your resource field's labor needs, you should be able to have 14 to 18 barracks per city once you've removed no longer required buildings.

Step 3: Build Your Troops

Step 4: Make Your City's Highest Politics Hero The City's Mayor

Notes: Your city's Mayor during the time you are NOT building troops determines how fast you can build other items such as walls, buildings, resource fields, etc. To take maximum advantage of this, always make your city's highest Political rated Hero the Mayor. Failing to reset your Mayor will leave your city building using the Pol ratings of the Hero you used to build your troops. This can be a very costly mistake.

Step 5: Restore Your City's Production And Population

Click on the Town Hall, the Overview screen pops up.
Click on the production tab and set production to 100
Click on the tax rate tab, then click on OK.
Your idle population should now reflect any population shortage in red and your population
trend should be UPWARD indicating you are building new laborers.
Click on comforting tab, use population raising to get population up quick

Note: You can use comforting/population raising every 15 minutes to restore your population (and production) more quickly. Failing to restore your city's production and population is an all too common error when doing fast troop building.