Slitherine

I've mostly played using the province population/building automation tools, so this game I decided to manage buildings and population assignments manually. It adds a lot of interest to the game, so I heartily recommend it, with the proviso that it is more micro.

On sort-of-poor regions I've concentrated on agriculture/health to get the population up, but poor really poor regions will take forever to get to where they can actually build anything in a reasonable amount of time. Honestly, I think this is historical and probably accurate.

My question is, what to do with "poor" regions where building anything takes 40, 50, 60+ turns. Is it best to just leave them on nothing, pick something and hope it appears in 50 turns, or what?

I set 1 or 2 to build, usually agriculture, leave the others empty so they share their infra. Builds up slowly over time

Don't forget to move population around to focus on infrastructure. I usually move almost all pops to infrastructure upon conquest to allow to build up. If a region is 6-7-8 population for example, but only has 1-2 buildings, you don't really need to produce any more food than just the bare minimum to sustain the population. And obviously you don't put anyone on culture/gold line as well.

Also, don't underestimate the effect of loyalty on your productivity, so try to take those buildings when no good infrastructure buildings are available. Lastly, consider that a food production building is also a sort of infrastructure boost in that it allows you to move more pops from the food line to the infrastructure one.

My advice would be to control the province and focus on one region at at time. Have enough pops in each region on food to avoid starvation, and then put everyone else on infrastructure. Then only build one building in one region at a time. Something for food or infrastructure. Owning the whole province pools the infrastructure, so it's possible (and better) to focus down the building process. Why spend 60 turns building a farm in each and every region when you can spend 10 turns focusing on building a farm in one region, then 8 turns building one in the next, then 6 in the next, etc etc.

The thread poster has some useful ideas. I didn't know until I read the manual that Food and Infrastructure are distributed through a province.

5.2.3. Advantages of Provinces

A province allows you to pool resources and production across the regions of the province, as well as allowing the option of automating population and building management.

In addition to items that are fully pooled across the region (such as military equipment), resources such as food are partially pooled and moved between regions if one is short of food. If a region has a surplus of food or infrastructure points, it will share up to 50% of current production and 15% of anything that is stockpiled.

worth noting the manual is wrong and it shares 100% of new infrastructure (not stockpiled)

food is still 50% (or w/e it is)