Various Strategy Questions

[shatner]

I have only been playing for a couple of weeks but I can infer from the tone of the strategy guides I've read here that I play very differently from the pros. Now, I am just playing single player at the moment so I am still successful despite my flawed play-style but I'm finding it hard to "break through" to the next level; I wonder if I could get a few of the pro-tips spelled out more plainly. As such, I have a few observations of how I play and/or questions regarding the efficacy of a given strategy and I am asking the good folks of this forum to wade in with their advice. By the way, the vast majority of my experience is from playing MA and mainly playing Tien Chi, Mariginon, Abyssia, Pangaea and Arco.


1) I tend to like to build my castles two provinces apart (maximize resource draw) and prefer to build the bigger, more expensive fortifications because they pay off better in the long run. I also tend to emphasize capturing the provinces adjacent to my capitol before I move out to conquer provinces two or more moves away from my cap and build my auxiliary fortifications. How do you guys balance maximizing your capitol vs. building additional forts quickly?


2) I read about the opening games wherein people are capturing two or three provinces a turn. Unless I'm playing a nation with elephants/hydras OR have an awake SC pretender then it takes me quite a while to muster a second, let alone third, indy-conquest force. How do you all build a conquest force quickly and on a budget when you're playing a nation without huge tramplers like elephants?


3) I tend to rush construction 4, evocation/enchantment/alteration to some level to allow my mages to contribute in combat (evocation if fire heavy, enchantment if death heavy, alteration if nature or astral, for example) and then I research Thaum 2 for the site finding spells (or conjuration/evocation for site finding, depending on nation). I rarely focus on one school up to the levels 6 without back-filling the others. How much or little do you all focus your research and are there any branches you feel are crucial early on (construction-2/4/6? thaum-2?, evocation-3?)?


4) I tend to manually site search briefly and then go full in with remote site searching. It takes a LOT of castings (OR a lot research and astral gems) to fully search one province but remote searching can be automated and allows lowly casters (like a death-1 revenant) to actually find the higher-tier sites. Manual site searching is much cheaper in terms of gems and potentially in mage-turns because one Imperial Alchemist (for example) is searching for 5 types of sites simultaneously. But you have the expense of moving the unit every other turn and having them away from labs in case you suddenly need them to do cast or forge something. Is it worth the mage turns manually site-searching vs. remote site searching? What's a good balance between the two? Is it worth having a priest site searching for the odd holy site?


5) Virtually all strategy guides emphasize that summoned units will largely supplant your national troops as the game goes on. I have the hardest time making this transition, in part because I can get away with it against the AI but also because spending 10+ gems on a single unit (or small squad... I'm looking at you Vine Men) seems hard to swallow; I could be tricking out my commanders with those gems! Therefore, unless I need to fill an niche (like amphibious troops to take the fight to R'lyeh or casters to diversify my magic) I tend to spend my gems outside of conjuration. What summons are good early and mid-game? How much emphasis should be put on forging vs summoning, especially in the early-to-mid game?


Thanks everyone for the info and keep writing those strategy guides; they're informative AND fun to read.

[KissBlade]

1) Forts are for strategic locations rather than actual troop generators. Their other main function is to build mages which requires very little resources. So build them on important sites or chokes.
2) Pretender, good troop forces lead by indie commanders or occasionally mages. Don't worry about hyper expansions, aim for 15 provinces by end f year 1 to stay competitive.
3) Completely depends on situation, nation, settings. Generally, good rule of thumb is focused research after you hit site searching spells.
4) First manual search, then swap to full remotes. Holy sites are more bonuses than something you should be actively searching for.
5) It is a slight exaggeration. Summons builds up faster than nationals as game progresses. Similarly most troops serve the same purpose for just sitting there and soaking damage or dealing pure damage but not great at soaking. The best choices are also the ones that allow some sort of discount or efficient mage time. here are some basics.

Nature: Vine Ogres + crown
Earth: Mechanical men, buried in sand, cave drakes with dragon master
Water: Naiad Warriors, Buried in Snow, frost drakes with dragon master
Blood: The four elemental demon types , devils, forces of darkness, etc (Blood has the best troop summons in the game)
Death: You rarely want to spend gems on troop summons for death, commanders are just so good. Banefire Archers and Longdead horsemen are occasionally seen.
Fire: Fire snakes, Summer Lions, drakes if you get a dragon master that can do fire ...
Air: call of wind for patrolling/sieging, corpsemen for emergency spam. Air gems are so good for other stuff ...
Astral: Better saved for other stuff.

[Sombre]

Call of the wind sucks at sieging. Good at defending sieges though.

[Illuminated One]

Well, these are not pro tips but...

1) Mostly castles are not worth it as money generators. I don't know the formula but 50% admin is not 50% income but something lowish. Pays of somewhen, but if you can put their extra costs into additional expanders/researchers this pays of better.

3) I don't think this can be easily answered. You should mostly try to research whatever is best in your situation. So for example if you are Marverni at evo-4 you can compare ench-4 with evo-5. Echantment gives you antimagic, poison ward and regeneration. You don't have thugs so don't need regeneration and if you are not at war with someone who uses poison or mr-spells you don't need the others. So why wait on Gifts from Heaven ten turns for spells you have no need for? Of course what you need and can do is largely dependent on the game.
People often rush down construction because all the level 8 items you can make are unique and some a really powerful.

[Fantomen]

The transitions between early, mid and late game i usually refer to as a nations "power curve". I think one of the most important things when building a strategy is to outline what kind of early, mid and lategame strategies you want to use and when and how the transitions will take place. You need to prepare for mid game during early game and for late game during mid game, while at the same time fielding competitive forces against your enemies. These preparations can involve getting the right boosters to build a path for casting that global at turn X, or remembering to research that specific summon that will work with your battlemages when you get evocation Y.

You need a plan for your research, your site searching, your expansion, your battle tactics and your gold/resource needs. The trick is to find a way to make all of them synergize with your nation as well as each other. The more you can make them synergize the sharper your power curve will be.

Fast expansion is generally a good thing but not everything. There are many nations for which a second fort and more research mages is worth more than a couple extra provinces.

I would advice you to start with following guides that describes the nations power curve in a linear and pedagogic way that is easy to follow. For example Baalz MA atlantis guide, Jim Morrisons Fomoria guide or my own Agartha guide. I'm not saying those are "better" than other guides, just that I myself found it easier to start with that kind of guide. Those three would also get you into three different concepts: Teleporting thugs(atlantis), Sacred troops(Fomoria), and big armies with buffs and summons(Agartha)

Then when you have a general Idea of what the stages of the games can look like move on to more complex things like blood nations, communions, dominion pushing, fatigue strategies and so on.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by shatner

I have only been playing for a couple of weeks but I can infer from the tone of the strategy guides I've read here that I play very differently from the pros. Now, I am just playing single player at the moment so I am still successful despite my flawed play-style but I'm finding it hard to "break through" to the next level; I wonder if I could get a few of the pro-tips spelled out more plainly. As such, I have a few observations of how I play and/or questions regarding the efficacy of a given strategy and I am asking the good folks of this forum to wade in with their advice. By the way, the vast majority of my experience is from playing MA and mainly playing Tien Chi, Mariginon, Abyssia, Pangaea and Arco.

Ok, the first thing I'll note is you've mainly played human nations, or nations with human-sized troops (Pangaea is the most divergent from this classification, MA Aby is sort of like playing humans that are on fire). This will effect your research priorities, and you should be aware of that.

You also aren't playing many bless nations, which is effecting how you perceive the early game. (Marignon is a bless nation).

1) I tend to like to build my castles two provinces apart (maximize resource draw) and prefer to build the bigger, more expensive fortifications because they pay off better in the long run. I also tend to emphasize capturing the provinces adjacent to my capitol before I move out to conquer provinces two or more moves away from my cap and build my auxiliary fortifications. How do you guys balance maximizing your capitol vs. building additional forts quickly?

Castles collect 100% resources (double-normal) from their province, and admin % from neighboring provinces. They will also collect admin/2 % additional gold. I believe this compounds the effect of scales, but cannot prove that.

Whether you need gold/resources or just forts quickly depends on which nation you're playing and what stage of the game it is. Some nation want as many cheap forts as they can get because they're only interested in the mage buy (for example, Jotunheim). Other nations care more about their national troops, and will at least eventually want to get the bigger forts.

All nations probably want cheap forts early because the extra fort faster and cheaper will dramatically increase your productivity (commanders and/or units) regardless of what its admin rating is.

2) I read about the opening games wherein people are capturing two or three provinces a turn. Unless I'm playing a nation with elephants/hydras OR have an awake SC pretender then it takes me quite a while to muster a second, let alone third, indy-conquest force. How do you all build a conquest force quickly and on a budget when you're playing a nation without huge tramplers like elephants?

To some degree, a lot of playtesting to figure out what you need to expand, possibly focusing expansion parties against particular types of indies. Awake SC pretenders help. Many bless nations can make an expanding party every turn or every other turn trivially.

Of the nations you've listed, with the right scales i can see TC putting out an expansion party every 2-3 turns. I have less experience with the others.

Marignon can easily build an expansion party every 2 turns with the right bless. You only need 4+ E9 Knights of the Chalice to expand against Indies with a blesser.

3) I tend to rush construction 4, evocation/enchantment/alteration to some level to allow my mages to contribute in combat (evocation if fire heavy, enchantment if death heavy, alteration if nature or astral, for example) and then I research Thaum 2 for the site finding spells (or conjuration/evocation for site finding, depending on nation). I rarely focus on one school up to the levels 6 without back-filling the others. How much or little do you all focus your research and are there any branches you feel are crucial early on (construction-2/4/6? thaum-2?, evocation-3?)?

It really depends on the nation you're playing and what your strategy is. For a non-bless human nation with E2+ access, I'd rush Alt 2-4 to survive a rush. But there's no one correct research strategy, it depends on what your plan is.

4) I tend to manually site search briefly and then go full in with remote site searching. It takes a LOT of castings (OR a lot research and astral gems) to fully search one province but remote searching can be automated and allows lowly casters (like a death-1 revenant) to actually find the higher-tier sites. Manual site searching is much cheaper in terms of gems and potentially in mage-turns because one Imperial Alchemist (for example) is searching for 5 types of sites simultaneously. But you have the expense of moving the unit every other turn and having them away from labs in case you suddenly need them to do cast or forge something. Is it worth the mage turns manually site-searching vs. remote site searching? What's a good balance between the two? Is it worth having a priest site searching for the odd holy site?

Holy sites aren't worth searching for.

Searching to 3 for a path is generally sufficient - the X4 sites are so rare as to be nonexistent. Every path (except maybe blood) has a common X3 site, but the rest of the X3 sites tend to be rare or unique or both, so even just searching to 2 can be generally sufficient.

How much priority you give searching manually will depend on what your expected early demand for gems is, what your starting gem income is, and how good your mages are for manual searching. I've done all my searching in death manually before because i needed death income quickly.

5) Virtually all strategy guides emphasize that summoned units will largely supplant your national troops as the game goes on. I have the hardest time making this transition, in part because I can get away with it against the AI but also because spending 10+ gems on a single unit (or small squad... I'm looking at you Vine Men) seems hard to swallow; I could be tricking out my commanders with those gems! Therefore, unless I need to fill an niche (like amphibious troops to take the fight to R'lyeh or casters to diversify my magic) I tend to spend my gems outside of conjuration. What summons are good early and mid-game? How much emphasis should be put on forging vs summoning, especially in the early-to-mid game?

That depends on whether you're playing CBM 1.6 or not. Without CBM 1.6, you fund massive summons with gem generators. Ie, fever fetishes, clams, and bloodstones, produced in large numbers, will eventually net you several hundred gem income *per turn*. This makes armies of summons trivial.

With CBM 1.6 national troops become more important and transitioning to purely summoned armies becomes harder.

Many of the strategy guides were written before CBM 1.6, so they assume gem generators.

[sector24]

#2: One of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome as a new player was being able to judge just how big an army I needed to take an opposing army without going over. It's very common to pile several turns worth of unit production into a giant unstoppable army and march around with just 1 or 2 of these armies against the AI. However, it's significantly more efficient to march around with 3-5 armies that are "just good enough" to defeat the independents without losses.

Choosing which independents to attack is also important. Ideally you want your starting army to take out the provinces that are "just weak enough" to defeat without losses. You want to leave the really weak provinces for an expansion army. You will probably have to combine your starting army with an expansion army to take the strongest provinces, so you want to make sure that the individual armies have done as much as they can do on their own first.

#4: I agree that most provinces only need level 2 or 3 site searching. Acashic Record is awesome because it provides "certainty" that you've found everything, but it's too expensive to be worthwhile in most cases. One thing that might help is knowing that certain terrain types like swamps have a greater chance of having magic sites while farmland has a lower chance. Another thing is if you find a province with unrest, or heat, or fortune and it doesn't appear to be related to your or someone else's dominion. That's a big clue that a site is there. Overall though, do the best you can but don't waste too much effort site searching unless you are desperate for a certain type of gems. You can always conquer the provinces that your opponents have site searched.

On the flip side though, some sites can win the entire game by themselves. These can be sites that allow you to recruit powerful mages in a path your nation doesn't have naturally, but are usually sites with something like "Blood Bonus: 20%". Basically it reduces the cost of all blood spells by 20%, meaning all your summons are cheaper than everyone elses. There are similar sites for Alteration, Construction, etc. If you find one of these sites, build a castle there, and defend it like it's your 2nd capital. So site searching can be a delicate balance.

[Sir_Dr_D]

For expansion learn how to use decoys. Put a few arrow resistant troops at the front, and tell them to guard a commander that is at the back. This usually results in the independent troops chasing after the decoys, and ignoring everyone else. Techniques like this make early expansion a lot easier.

[thejeff]

I've hesitated to use this extensively. Doesn't it result in archers (and maybe other troops) targeting your commander?

In expansion, the last thing I want to do is risk commanders. Even indy commanders are precious the first year or so and if I need priests to bless my sacreds...

Shield troops up on a front side on hold & attack I use regularly. Even they occasionally get mowed down fast enough that my main force is still engaged with another squad and the enemy cavalry rides my commander down in the backfield.

[Sir_Dr_D]

It works better then you'd think. Usually you don't lose either the commander or any of the decoy troops. Being that far back, it makes it hard for any archers to hit, and your other troops end up intercepting any melee troops that chase the decoys. The technique tends to draw archers forward within easy reach of your melee troops. Of course you don't want to use this trick with a high value commander like a mage.