Pathfinder Kingmaker Kingdom optimization guide?

[akalsaris]

Hey all,

A long while back I remember seeing a guide/handbook to creating a kingdom in the Kingmaker AP, but I haven't been able to pull it up on google. Can anybody provide a link to it or give their own experiences?

Also, I would appreciate any advice for running the Kingmaker AP. I just started it yesterday and my PCs are quite unoptimized (fighter, rogue, gunslinger..), so I'm looking forward to it.

[Halinn]

Get the kingdom to produce as many magic items as you can possibly sell.
The most important check is Economy, but if possible, keep the others around your kingdom DC.
For optimizing, get as few cities as possible.

[Slaughterhouserock]

I don't know about a guide, but I made some stuff that might help ya out.  To help with finding what cuts the cost of other buildings, I made a little bubble map of the breakdown by cost reduction.  I then made a second one to include the cost and numerical benefits of each building.

Simple map:

(click to show/hide)

Expanded map(warning, it's big):

(click to show/hide)

One bit of advice I can give from when I played it.  Take the hex map and just cut and paste the hexes onto the blank sheet when the players explore a hex.  Unless you've got people who're really into drawing it out, this will save time and frustration.  I know it made the game a hell of a lot easier on us to have a decent map to look at after exploring all over.  Also, at some point the books say you're supposed to spend a year building your kingdom before moving on to adventuring again, but our DM said fuck that and just had us do it every other game session(usually from thirty minutes to an hour) until a years time had passed.  This kept the city building from getting too tedious and kept the plot going.

[Halinn]

Oh, and for your 50 starting BP, you can do a lot worse than the Caster's Tower. It's a quite efficient source of income early on.

[akalsaris]

Thanks for your help everyone! I'll pass Slaughterhouserock's charts on to my PCs after they get the hang of the basics.