very hard to understand how the mechanisms work, give up
Give it time, if you have never played the stronghold game series before, it can be quite difficult.
Worth having a good read of the main forum and wiki guide, don't give up yet.
Just getting in to this now.
Currently maxing out Mathematics first of all with my research time, is that a good call?
You can actually be really effective with a very minimalist village. This approach is working for me as it is less time consuming and putting me in a position where I can increase my presence very quickly due to gold and honour reserves
The following is useful anyway for bare bones structure which ever approach you take. You really need two things to progress, honour and gold.
Max out arts (increases honour multiplier), decorative buildings (increases honour multiplier once built), scouts (find resources), horsemanship (increases scout speed) and foraging (increases carrying capacity of scouts). Foraging / scouting is a great way to get resources and quicker than producing. If you max out on speed and capacity you can beat others to the resource piles.
It is also worth producing two food types, apples and cheese so max out production research on those to 400% as they are the easiest to do this on. Once done, you will only need to build 2 of each to support a population of 16 at full quad rations and this gives you a +46 popularity bonus. This also produces extra to sell.
Get to level 2 mathematics so you can train merchant guilds. Max out merchant guilds so you can sell what you are producing as quickly as possible.
It is also worth researching 1 point in each of the banquet levels to get venison, metalware, furniture and tailoring so even if you don't produce the goods you can forage them and host the banquets.
The above will mean you can support a village with 16 peasants. The more peasants you have the more it costs to feed and bribe them. E.g. 50 ish costs ~ 2k+ for a full on bribe and 30k+ in food per day so your village rapidly becomes inefficient where you hare having to build more to support more but not necessarily gaining any gold, or honour production. You may even loose out until your are well developed and more self supporting which takes a lot more research points than available early on.
This gives you:
7 Stone Quarry’s
4 Woodcutter Huts
4 Food Buildings
2 Dove Cotes, 4 Flower Beds (or as many of these as you can build by the village hall to max honour gained)
So why only 16 peasants, well if you run on max bribe with taxes it only costs 480 gold per day giving +45 popularity bonus. You can make that back in 10 mins from selling over produced resources and from a quick foraging run.
You only get 5 merchants per market and to build a 2nd market you need to be researching stockpile capacity or reducing construction costs due to material costs.
The above combined with foraging gets me 5-6k honour per day and 4-5k gold. Very simple, very efficient and allows me to start to build up a small castle and plenty of gold reserves.
It keeps your points low and village size off the map so AI or other player attacks are minimal. Also gold and honour can move with you but your village, castle, army etc can be lost if attacked as I have found out.
Once you have accumulated a load of honour and gold, you can level up and upscale your operations noticeably. In terms of offensive and defensive capability, you want to be able to build stone walls and recruit archers and peasants so put a bit of research into those.
Just put resource buildings production on hold when recruting and at a high popularity you will get villagers to your village in mins not hours.
The only downside is your village looks like a starting hovel and points wont increase so fast but you can change that very quickly.