I haven't posted in this forum for quite a while because my own Kingmaker campaign is over. However, I've been running another campaign with higher level characters. In this campaign, the characters have come into control of a garrison from which they are supposed to clear some savage forest lands.
I thought it would be a good place to introduce the kingdom building rules, since these players saw some of my previous kingmaker campaign and seemed interested. So, experienced kingdom builders, if you were to make a kingdom from the ground up, what would you do in the first six months or so? How many hexes would you claim, and what would you build? Assume you have the same starting BP as in Kingmaker.
I am GMing a Kingmaker group, and I will tell you what they did. Whether or not it was the best route, I don't know, but it's worked out for them. Also, I gave them all of the information EXCEPT the specific effects of the buildings (though I did give them the buildings with descriptions). I did not want the Kingdom building thing to be a pure numbers game (at least to begin with - obviously, it will eventually become that, but I wanted them to pour over the possibilities and try to figure out what they needed).
They were conservative. They claimed about 4 hexes, immediately turned them into farmland to reduce their consumption to 0, then focused on getting buildings to boost their Stability and Economy. I made it pretty easy on them, I allowed them to pull leaders out of Restov, so their kingdom scores are boosted higher than they really ought to be, but I only have 2 (of 3) players interested in it at all, and I was worried that they would end up just struggling to keep their kingdom afloat and dislike the ruleset, so I gave them some benefits.
I told them that the AP kind of recommended spending a year or so building their kingdom, to get it running, so they agreed they would. Sort of a metagamey thing, but that's just kinda how my group rolls.
Unfortunately, then they decided they would spend another year working on it. And then halfway through, they stopped building, expanding, spending any BP, and the phases became entirely "You gain X BP." from making their Stability check with 0 Unrest, magic item sales, and making (high) economy checks. I was worried - they had boosted their BP by a ton. Then they went super expansive and spent the next half year claiming as many hexes as they could, converting them into farmlands with roads.