Provincial Barracks (ETW building)
| Provincial Barracks | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category: | Army | ||||
| Level: | 0 | ||||
| Turns to build: | 2 | ||||
| Building cost: | 750 | ||||
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| Enables | |||||
 Barracks | |||||
This complex of fortified buildings provides housing, stabling and training facilities for military units. The accommodation may be spartan, but it is usually clean.
The lower ranks are usually housed in dormitory blocks, sometimes with their wives to act as servants and scullions. A substantial number of servants or slaves will be present to do much of the day-to-day labour when wives are barred. Officers receive better quarters, sometimes even their own houses, on the barracks’ grounds.
The provincial barracks still have something of a prison air, however, as they are designed to keep unwilling troops in as much as unfriendly folk out. Impressment, even kidnapping, is not an uncommon way to get men into uniform.
Historically, barracks were symbols of central control as well as housing for troops, particularly within the Mughal and Ottoman empires. The presence of large contingents of heavily armed men backed up the civil authority or even replaced it. However, within the Ottoman Empire the increasing use of military (and particularly the janissaries) as the government brought its own problems: these men were extremely conservative in outlook, fond of their own privileges, and unable to react well to changing circumstances.