Quote Originally Posted by PTucket View Post
Honestly....once you start farming NPC's taxes are pretty worthless...so I'd build like 8-9 cottages...you'll have plenty of population for res gathering. Keep in mind in order to build large number of troops at a time you need a large population, since the excess number of workers (The green number to the right of your cities population) is the max pop of the troops you can build. i.e. 2,000 extra pop allows you to que 2,000 warriors since 1 warrior = 1 pop.
this exactly, i have 9 level 9 cottages in all my cities(except the lvl10 barb city i took over) + the essential buildings and all the rest are barracks