Resources less important than Income?

[JonBrave]

[I play SP vanilla, against Impossible AIs.] In this game, I find most strategies/advantages/disadvantages balance out nicely. But I'm being driven to a conclusion that income is vital and resources irrelevant, which I'd rather not be the case!

I have played a variety of nations, scales & strategies. I always find I have insufficient money compared to resources. The only time I have enough money is later if I'm winning handsomely, and by then it doesn't really matter about my resource level.

I assume the intention is that you want resources as a strategy choice so that you can buy (fewer but) better quality units per dollar spent. But my bottleneck is always total income. This is especially true since mages & specials cost loads of money for only a couple of resources. I can't begin to afford constant mages every turn, and whatever I do I'll need more money for them.

So..... please convince me that I'm wrong! Because if you don't then --- unless the nation is "unusual" --- I shall go for 3-Order in exchange for 3-Sloth every game from now on, which would be a shame...

[rdonj]

You're not wrong, in vanilla sloth is pretty much a no brainer. The drawbacks just aren't a big deal. That's one of those things CBM didn't like much, and recent CBM has done a lot to make high production relevant. The only argument I can really give you is that some nations have such high resource costs for their expansion units that taking sloth 3 could potentially hinder your expansion speed excessively. If you can get 15+ provinces in the first year with MA Ulm or LA Jomon with sloth 3 though, then you don't have much to worry about.

[JonBrave]

Thanks rdonj. Though I wouldn't rate my chances of getting 15 provinces in year 1 as any nation!

WRT CBM, then, I have asked this before, and might even start another thread. I may be about to give up on my present game and start a new one. Should I do a CBM, which I have never done before? I'm afraid I have no prospect of ever playing MP, so SP is all that concerns me. I think I've gathered that the AI will play neither any better nor any worse, so presumably it's only me that's affected. One thing which puts me off is that the tables etc. in the manual which I use a lot are superceded, it's a pain having to download & learn different ones. Also, I think the in-game descriptions text didn't get changed(?), doesn't that mean I won't readily know things have been altered?

[rdonj]

Okay, well, I guess I shouldn't put it that way for SP only. Maybe more like, if you can survive early wars against the highest level AIs you play against with those nations :P Because yeah, it's mostly the first year/year and a half where production is relevant in vanilla no matter what scales you take.

I'm not going to tell you whether you *should* use CBM for playing in SP. Personally that is my preference, and I could make arguments like "cbm makes the summons the AI uses better, thereby making the AI better", but that's about it. CBM isn't going to make vanilla any worse though, and I think it's definitely worth at least trying out to see if you like it. If not, no harm done. It should at least shake up your usual gameplay a bit. You will have to relearn some things... but IIRC it's only a handful of spells that have been moved around, mostly spell changes have been changed in other ways. And descriptions have in fact been changed where appropriate. Anything that has new abilities should have descriptive text saying so if the abilities aren't obvious, and spells basically update their own descriptions so that part shouldn't be a problem. It is true that there is some re-learning to be done, but there's not really the feel for me like the entire world has been changed Basically anything that you could do before with spells you can still do now. It will just sometimes work better.

The biggest changes to wrap your mind around IMO are the changes to magic items, because CBM has made pretty heavy adjustments in that area to make underused things more viable, and especially in response to the loss of hammers as a massable item. Luckily there is a handy CBM forging guide you can refer to when trying to figure out path requirements.