A big part of it is knowing when/what you can fight with your sov in the early game, too. If you're spending a *lot* of time building up units to accompany your sov early on, that might be somewhat wasted time if you didn't actually need them just to kill a lone darkling, etc. Even flimsy sovs are capable of handling mites, darklings, wolves, and bandits in small numbers.
You should have 1-2 pioneers built within your first 4-8 construction projects, and have spots for new cities scouted out by the time they're done.
The early game is a bit slow paced, but you shouldn't often find yourself simply sitting on your hands. Some things you can do to speed it up:
Ctrl-N generates a new starting location. I wouldn't start with anything worse than 4/3/1, 3/4/1 or 3/3/2, or something similar but less awesome with immediate clay pit/grain access.
For your first city, materials are more important than grain. You can always fix the food problem later via research, buildings, and magic.
If you can build on a forest or river, it's probably easily worth giving up 1 material or essence to build on a forest instead of not, or 1 grain or essence to build on a river instead of not. Remember, Enchanted Hammers is just +1 materials, so for the early game a 3/3/2 and a 3/4/1 location are pretty much the same thing. The Mythical Perfect Start is a ~3/4/2 with forest & river access and a visible grain and/or clay pit. I've seen it maybe twice. The snaking mod is a huge help here. I personally feel they should never have removed this and really like the mod.
Your first city should either become a town or conclave.
The Tower of Dominion looks neat but takes forever to build early on. Don't make it your first 2-3 buildings.
Take Wealthy on a custom sov in order to rush build a lot in the early game.
The Armorer profession is handy if you start the game with Earth 2 for stoneskin, otherwise BeastLord is awesome to the point of being practically broken, for getting you some early game help.
Take Master Scouts for your faction so you can move through rough terrain without a movement penalty. This makes a huuuuge difference when your pioneers only burn 2 or 3 turns crossing a forest to get to a building site instead of 4-6 turns.
Never take Uneducated weakness unless you're using the point to buy the Scholars faction trait (which offsets the research penalty and nets you the first research tech essentially free)
Earth Apprentice for Enchanted Hammers.
Water Apprentice for Inspiration.
Meditation if you're just generally short on mana.
A custom sov who starts with a rusty short sword, might, and cruel begins the game with 12 atk, and can kill a lot of shit on their own, especially if they find a couple pieces of armor in lairs/goodie huts.
Unless you have a Cunning Plan™, always start with the rusty short sword. The counterattack is invaluable.
There's no reason to touch the warfare or magic trees until you have at least researched the entire 1st tier of the civ tree, and perhaps even a bunch of the 2nd tier.
DO NOT ignore those early game unrest improvements. Unrest takes bites out of your production time, research time, and tax income. It's absolutely worth building the improvements to get it knocked down ASAP.
If your location has 2 essence (or 1 and you can build scrying pools), the cleric is better to build than the bell tower. The cleric line of improvements ends up getting you mana income, while the bell tower line ends up bumping your ZoC and giving you guardian statues. I'll take the mana. You might need both improvement lines eventually, but if you have access to 2+ essence, build the cleric over the bell tower to start with.
As soon as you have enough research to make it take less than ~10-12 turns, rush the mounted combat tech. Your sov and champ exploring on horses makes things soooo much faster. Bonus points if you have access to horses/wargs for your units.
Thats all that's springing to mind off the top of my head. Once you start getting comfortable and doing well with stratagies that stack the deck in your favor, then you start playing weird combos and moving away from some of these strategies.
To add to that: focus on production in the beginning. Like, hard. Research that nets you production boosts, buildings that net you improvement boosts (and settle near a forest!). You need to produce quickly to get a leg up on the environment. Screw food and growth until you get your production settled. Don't autofight your starting battles, you can do better than the computer. Trust me. Don't be afraid to burn a militia in a hard fight if it gets you a neat quest reward. Google snaking, it's rather freaking handy once you get used to it.
Cog: that ctrl-N thing is new to me. Excellent advice :P
Oh yeah, always play with manual improvement placement on. The difference between snaking your city 3 tiles to claim a resource node instead of having to burn a pioneer to grab it with an outpost is 6-8 turns in the early game. Snake your cities and use those pioneers for stuff truly out of reach.
Plus with manual placement, you can snake your cities to natural boundries like mountains and oceans (I'm not sure the AI even knows how to use raise/lower land) and physically block the AI from passing your cities, instead of the "gentleman's block" of extending your ZoC. Which the AI ignores the shit out of at their leisure.
And to expand once more on the food issue: Food only controls your tax income and city level. While city level does dictate access to a few improvements, they're mostly mid-late game improvements. You can still get a city to level 2/3 and get some strong production/research out of it without selling out for food.
Well, there are some battles that the AI can win with auto-resolve that you could never win by actually fighting it out. Figuring out which is which is a big boost to how things go when fighting.
Cog: that ctrl-N thing is new to me. Excellent advice :P
I think after a certain number of turns it becomes disabled due to some memory guzzling issue, and you're locked into the game and have to bail to the menu and manually start a new one.
There was a fun bug in the late beta that I ran into a few times where Ctrl-N in a very late stage game would freak the game out and generate a world with a solid white background. If you bailed out to the main menu and manually started a new game, or even loaded a saved game, your sov would appear to be naked with no head or hands.
Well, there are some battles that the AI can win with auto-resolve that you could never win by actually fighting it out. Figuring out which is which is a big boost to how things go when fighting.
This is also true. More fun Beta bug stories - Originally Abeix was impossible to physically attack because of the gap between the squares you can stand on and the squares his chasm occupies. If you chose to battle him, you either had to magic or ranged him to death, and if you didn't have any/enough of either, you died. But if you auto-resolved, the game would somehome figure it out and your mans would melee him. You just had to hope your army was strong enough to melee Abeix to death.
But, quite often if I should for some reason run into a fight that gives me fits and I get stomped on, I usually load up a save and throw it at the auto-resolve once just to see if it pulls out a miracle. It does surprise you sometimes.
So I've gotten the early part of the game to a pretty comfortable level, albeit relying on stealth, master scouts, and wealth. I'm now having an issue with my cities getting eaten by marauding rock spiders. How do i split improvement production and garrison training?
So I've gotten the early part of the game to a pretty comfortable level, albeit relying on stealth, master scouts, and wealth. I'm now having an issue with my cities getting eaten by marauding rock spiders. How do i split improvement production and garrison training?
What other faction traits are you playing? Magic schools? Kingdom/Empire?
Thing about rock spiders is they have moderate armor for an early game enemy, so the best thing to counter them with is spears. They also don't hit obnoxiously hard, so you don't have to armor up too awful much. Spears + leather curiass is probably plenty for some garrison units to deal with them, and should keep the units cheap enough to produce quickly.
If you're having problems with a specific monster like this, rock spiders, the best bet is to put together a strike force to find and crush the lair. If you just mean "early game monsters, but rock spiders are the biggest pain in my ass" there's not a *lot* to be done for it but bite the bullet and set aside the time to make some garrison units, understanding your other production times will take the hit. Just concentrate on production and lowering unrest over food for the early stages.
If you have enough cities to spare one to specialize as a fortress, use it to make the garrison units for the rest of your cities.
If you have enough cities to spare one to specialize as a fortress, use it to make the garrison units for the rest of your cities.
Exact traits will wait til I get home to check, but I'm trying to figure out how big of a garrison force you want in your border cities.
Depends on too many things to easily answer -- World difficulty setting, AI difficulty setting, Pacing, faction traits, and monster density just for starters.
Total shot from the hip, if you NEED more than 3 units to supplement the default militia every city gets, you're doing something terribly, terribly wrong. Like, settling places where your ZoC nudges a lot of slag/drake/dragon lairs wrong.
I kinda would like to see that guy who does those lets plays and the newbie guide on the forums give his feedback as to how he would make the 8 default leaders so they don't suck but remain thematically appropriate.
I think the only pre-made leader/faction who is really at a marked disadvantage is Procipinee/Pariden. The rest are quite viable and I wouldn't go so far as to say any flat out suck. Relias/Altar is strictly the best, but everyone else is winnable on pretty much any difficulty. Sure, none are as good as custom faction/sov, but none are awful.
but i can't for the life of me figure out how to give my regular mage units spells.
is this a thing that's possible? I mean, is it? I train up mage units and then... they fire balls of light. but they can't heal?
I've only played through one game so far, and i'm only just learning the basics.
((Amhah is a fucking evil demon holy hell))
You can't
I made a suggestion to allow it during the Beta, but it never made it in. The best you can manage is making Henchmen, assuming your race is Men (Altarian).
If they ever do make unique units for every race, hopefully Pariden gets mages.
well actually, that makes me feel a bit better.
I was worried that I was missing something ridiculously obvious, and i was going to get laughed at for asking.
I shall try again! perhaps do a domination victory instead of spell of making. Which seemed oddly easy, but then I think of how many wounds my Champions had and... yeah. not that easy.
If something is seeming oddly easy, it's time to crank up the difficulty.
Playing Pariden with Procipinee (say that three times fast) is probably the only time where Meditation is up there with Inspiration and (if the first champion you find has it) Enchanted Hammers in importance for early game. That way you have a healthy supply of mana so you can drop arcane outposts to grab resources and deny choicy city spots from the AI as soon as you find them, as well as pay for the intial cost for any enchanments you cast on Procipinee (or rather, whoever is wearing her crown, which removes the upkeep costs on any enchaments that are active on that character.) Start with Evade to improve her survival rate and keep layering them on until you get a nigh-unkillable, fireball-throwing death machine.
Good tips again, thanks. I probably don't focus on production enough.
Also, never tried snaking.
Also I started Air/Water this time. Found an earth book from a rival. So far water has been lackluster, but I've been focusing on Air/Earth for buffs.
Water is good for 3 things - Slow, Inspiration, and getting Water 2 + Air 2 for Gentle Rain. Gentle Rain is the balls.
You forgot Freeze, the spell that makes your enemy archers have initiative in the single digits.
And Blizzard, which can one-shot an entire enemy army.
And Tidal Wave, the spell that means they're half-dead when the battle starts.
The problem with this is that you have to spend level choices on Water ranks 2 and 3 which, aside from freeze (must be cast in your territory, semi blah) and pandemonium (awfully random) is like throwing two levels in a hole and then shitting in the hole. Once you break through to Water 4, things do look up.
But seriously, you take water for Slow and Inspiration.
I kinda would like to see that guy who does those lets plays and the newbie guide on the forums give his feedback as to how he would make the 8 default leaders so they don't suck but remain thematically appropriate.
I think the only pre-made leader/faction who is really at a marked disadvantage is Procipinee/Pariden. The rest are quite viable and I wouldn't go so far as to say any flat out suck. Relias/Altar is strictly the best, but everyone else is winnable on pretty much any difficulty. Sure, none are as good as custom faction/sov, but none are awful.
but i can't for the life of me figure out how to give my regular mage units spells.
is this a thing that's possible? I mean, is it? I train up mage units and then... they fire balls of light. but they can't heal?
I've only played through one game so far, and i'm only just learning the basics.
((Amhah is a fucking evil demon holy hell))
You can't
I made a suggestion to allow it during the Beta, but it never made it in. The best you can manage is making Henchmen, assuming your race is Men (Altarian).
If they ever do make unique units for every race, hopefully Pariden gets mages.
well actually, that makes me feel a bit better.
I was worried that I was missing something ridiculously obvious, and i was going to get laughed at for asking.
I shall try again! perhaps do a domination victory instead of spell of making. Which seemed oddly easy, but then I think of how many wounds my Champions had and... yeah. not that easy.
If something is seeming oddly easy, it's time to crank up the difficulty.
Playing Pariden with Procipinee (say that three times fast) is probably the only time where Meditation is up there with Inspiration and (if the first champion you find has it) Enchanted Hammers in importance for early game. That way you have a healthy supply of mana so you can drop arcane outposts to grab resources and deny choicy city spots from the AI as soon as you find them, as well as pay for the intial cost for any enchanments you cast on Procipinee (or rather, whoever is wearing her crown, which removes the upkeep costs on any enchaments that are active on that character.) Start with Evade to improve her survival rate and keep layering them on until you get a nigh-unkillable, fireball-throwing death machine.
The thing I love about Pariden and Procipinee is that with Arcane Outpost, you can instantly lay claim to resource nodes and airable land anywhere with one click of the mouse, and you can also suddenly spawn territory for things like the afore mentioned freeze spell.
The thing I think is retarded about Procipinee is she pays 6 points for access to three rank 1 schools, none of which have any guaranteed damage dealing spells (Chaos, occasionally? Whoopie) and two of which she could get for like 160 gildar because her faction has the fucking Decalon. At least they replaced her godawful inefficient weakness, but my understanding is that when they let all cpu v cpu games run, Pariden loses a vast majority of them, cause her setup is just pants-on-head retarded, really.
If you want to play Pariden, make a custom sov and faction and start with Earth and Fire instead of Air, Water, and Life. Then just find a champion to Steal Spirit Life 1 from. Or better yet, make it a empire and take Earth/Death as your starting books, and buy Fire later through the Decalon. She literally has all the worst books to start a spellcasting/enchanting faction with. Vanilla Pariden is goosey.
Remove the Fog of War with Ctrl + U
Give yourself 1000 of all resources incluidng mana with Ctrl + M
Research all spells with Ctrl + Q & Ctrl + E
Raise some land out in the ocean
Move yourself to your private island with Ctrl + T
Toggle Auto Turns with Ctrl + Z
Eat popcorn.
Good tips again, thanks. I probably don't focus on production enough.
Also, never tried snaking.
Also I started Air/Water this time. Found an earth book from a rival. So far water has been lackluster, but I've been focusing on Air/Earth for buffs.
Water is good for 3 things - Slow, Inspiration, and getting Water 2 + Air 2 for Gentle Rain. Gentle Rain is the balls.
You forgot Freeze, the spell that makes your enemy archers have initiative in the single digits.
And Blizzard, which can one-shot an entire enemy army.
And Tidal Wave, the spell that means they're half-dead when the battle starts.
The problem with this is that you have to spend level choices on Water ranks 2 and 3 which, aside from freeze (must be cast in your territory, semi blah) and pandemonium (awfully random) is like throwing two levels in a hole and then shitting in the hole. Once you break through to Water 4, things do look up.
But seriously, you take water for Slow and Inspiration.
I kinda would like to see that guy who does those lets plays and the newbie guide on the forums give his feedback as to how he would make the 8 default leaders so they don't suck but remain thematically appropriate.
I think the only pre-made leader/faction who is really at a marked disadvantage is Procipinee/Pariden. The rest are quite viable and I wouldn't go so far as to say any flat out suck. Relias/Altar is strictly the best, but everyone else is winnable on pretty much any difficulty. Sure, none are as good as custom faction/sov, but none are awful.
but i can't for the life of me figure out how to give my regular mage units spells.
is this a thing that's possible? I mean, is it? I train up mage units and then... they fire balls of light. but they can't heal?
I've only played through one game so far, and i'm only just learning the basics.
((Amhah is a fucking evil demon holy hell))
You can't
I made a suggestion to allow it during the Beta, but it never made it in. The best you can manage is making Henchmen, assuming your race is Men (Altarian).
If they ever do make unique units for every race, hopefully Pariden gets mages.
well actually, that makes me feel a bit better.
I was worried that I was missing something ridiculously obvious, and i was going to get laughed at for asking.
I shall try again! perhaps do a domination victory instead of spell of making. Which seemed oddly easy, but then I think of how many wounds my Champions had and... yeah. not that easy.
If something is seeming oddly easy, it's time to crank up the difficulty.
Playing Pariden with Procipinee (say that three times fast) is probably the only time where Meditation is up there with Inspiration and (if the first champion you find has it) Enchanted Hammers in importance for early game. That way you have a healthy supply of mana so you can drop arcane outposts to grab resources and deny choicy city spots from the AI as soon as you find them, as well as pay for the intial cost for any enchanments you cast on Procipinee (or rather, whoever is wearing her crown, which removes the upkeep costs on any enchaments that are active on that character.) Start with Evade to improve her survival rate and keep layering them on until you get a nigh-unkillable, fireball-throwing death machine.
The thing I love about Pariden and Procipinee is that with Arcane Outpost, you can instantly lay claim to resource nodes and airable land anywhere with one click of the mouse, and you can also suddenly spawn territory for things like the afore mentioned freeze spell.
The thing I think is retarded about Procipinee is she pays 6 points for access to three rank 1 schools, none of which have any guaranteed damage dealing spells (Chaos, occasionally? Whoopie) and two of which she could get for like 160 gildar because her faction has the fucking Decalon. At least they replaced her godawful inefficient weakness, but my understanding is that when they let all cpu v cpu games run, Pariden loses a vast majority of them, cause her setup is just pants-on-head retarded, really.
If you want to play Pariden, make a custom sov and faction and start with Earth and Fire instead of Air, Water, and Life. Then just find a champion to Steal Spirit Life 1 from. Or better yet, make it a empire and take Earth/Death as your starting books, and buy Fire later through the Decalon. She literally has all the worst books to start a spellcasting/enchanting faction with. Vanilla Pariden is goosey.
In my experince, the reason CPU Pariden loses most of the time is as much because CPU Pariden isn't aware it can make outposts with mana. Every time they show up in my games, seems like none of thier outposts are arcane monoliths. Might have been the diffuclty though, only now just started playing vs. Challenging faction AI.
...Though I will admit, having apprentice in 3 schools that don't have a dependable (to a point...) damage spell until at least Mage level, especially for a faction that can grant any and as many schools of magic to a champion or sov you want, is a bit silly.
The AI is currently fuckawful at strategic casting (if they can even do it at all yet) so yes, I don't believe they can take advantage of arcane monolith. And, I get that Procipinee is supposed to be all about magery, and starting with lots of spell schools is her thing, it's just a screwball thing that she's paying 6 points for 3 schools of access when she leads a faction that could give her all the elemental schools for a bit of research and cash.
More than any other faction, Pariden goes as their starter champion goes. Get a combat beast or fire caster, you're probably in good shape. Get Lisbeth the Loser or a crap caster with repeat spell schools you already have, just fucking restart.
Result Cheat Code
+1,000 to all resources [Ctrl] + M
Level up party leaders [Ctrl] + P
Complete building projects [Ctrl] + B
Complete unit projects [Ctrl] + J
Research current tech [Ctrl] + R
Research spells (minor) [Ctrl] + Q
Research spells (major) [Ctrl] + E
Teleport selected character or unit to pointer [Ctrl] + T
Convert selected party (enemies) [Ctrl] + D
Copy selected party (leaders) [Ctrl] + C
Kill selected party [Ctrl] + K
Full map [Ctrl] + U
Toggle interface [Ctrl] + X
Toggle auto turn [Ctrl] + Z
Spouse and children [Ctrl] + F
Auto save [Ctrl] + S
An artifact from WoM. The code all still exists, nothing was ripped out when the game moved from War of Magic to Fallen Enchantress, things were just deactivated and unhooked. You can actually turn it on with a simple XML setting in the ElementalDefs.xml, though I have no idea what sort of UI support is in for it, or how badly it freaks out the AI.
In War of Magic, you could marry champions of the opposite sex, and have children, who would grow up and become champions in their own right. The higher level you and your spouse were when you procreated, the more powerful your offspring would be. There were traits (like ugly) that modified how many children you would have and such.
In olden times, before WoM was even released, there was talk that your Sov would be able to die perminently and your offspring would take over the kingdom, and there would be all manner of ancestry, family trees, diplomatic marriages to other factions, offspring between factions, etc, etc.
It never blossomed further than "get married, pump out free champions" but they left all the existing code in place and just unhooked from the XML, so they could revisit it if they chose to later, in an expansion for example.
I swapped out General for Beastlord on my sovereign and started a new game last night. I had some false starts such as starting in the middle of a desert with slags and drakes around any arable land or the same repeated on a maze of peninsulas but eventually got something with viable land near the start. Early strategy changes quite a bit when you can just charm the biggest wolf or spider in a monster pack instead of worrying about killing it and then use said critter to help clean up the rest of the pack. Corpse spiders are a lot stronger than the initial units you can build with no upkeep cost. Ravenous Harridans are even nastier. It got a ridiculous when I tamed the Hoarder Spider. I have two packs of champions that run around with spiders and used wolves to scout (5 movement). After the Hoarder Spider, I started cleaning out nearby drakes and slags before stopping for the night. The trait basically turns some monster packs into resources as long as you can swing the mana.
The no upkeep cost thing is gonna have to change, I would think. They'll either have to take some sort of steep gold cost, eat up a ton of food from your cities, or (easiest, simplest, and most sensible) suck up some mana upkeep. I could see them chopping up monsters into 'tiers' or some such, and having some upkeep tiers between 1-3 or 1-5 mana/turn.
Otherwise you can take Beastlord, attuned, and cast meditation a lot and just scour the map for free units.
The no upkeep cost thing is gonna have to change, I would think. They'll either have to take some sort of steep gold cost, eat up a ton of food from your cities, or (easiest, simplest, and most sensible) suck up some mana upkeep. I could see them chopping up monsters into 'tiers' or some such, and having some upkeep tiers between 1-3 or 1-5 mana/turn.
Otherwise you can take Beastlord, attuned, and cast meditation a lot and just scour the map for free units.
The mana cost is pretty hefty early on. That alone has forced me to emphasize mana production more than in previous games. Adding an upkeep would make it even more painful early on. If possible, I think having the cost scale based on how many tamed animals you have running around already would be ideal and have the starting cost be lower. It takes a good number of turns before you can first attempt to use it and later on the animals aren't going to compare to trained units so I'm wary of attaching upkeep.
The no upkeep cost thing is gonna have to change, I would think. They'll either have to take some sort of steep gold cost, eat up a ton of food from your cities, or (easiest, simplest, and most sensible) suck up some mana upkeep. I could see them chopping up monsters into 'tiers' or some such, and having some upkeep tiers between 1-3 or 1-5 mana/turn.
Otherwise you can take Beastlord, attuned, and cast meditation a lot and just scour the map for free units.
The mana cost is pretty hefty early on. That alone has forced me to emphasize mana production more than in previous games. Adding an upkeep would make it even more painful early on. If possible, I think having the cost scale based on how many tamed animals you have running around already would be ideal and have the starting cost be lower. It takes a good number of turns before you can first attempt to use it and later on the animals aren't going to compare to trained units so I'm wary of attaching upkeep.
I'd be fine with lowering the initial cost somewhat in exchange for continual upkeep. As it stands, if you're willing to horde mana for even a little while (which you can do fast with the starting mana, 4 mana per turn stacks up fast. Could even add attuned for bonus 40 starting) you can pile up a ton of mana in a hurry and then tame a shitload of things.
Upkeep puts a more reasonable limit on how much you can have tamed at any one time, which creeps up as you gain power. Go ahead and lower the inital cost to offset it.
The no upkeep cost thing is gonna have to change, I would think. They'll either have to take some sort of steep gold cost, eat up a ton of food from your cities, or (easiest, simplest, and most sensible) suck up some mana upkeep. I could see them chopping up monsters into 'tiers' or some such, and having some upkeep tiers between 1-3 or 1-5 mana/turn.
Otherwise you can take Beastlord, attuned, and cast meditation a lot and just scour the map for free units.
The mana cost is pretty hefty early on. That alone has forced me to emphasize mana production more than in previous games. Adding an upkeep would make it even more painful early on. If possible, I think having the cost scale based on how many tamed animals you have running around already would be ideal and have the starting cost be lower. It takes a good number of turns before you can first attempt to use it and later on the animals aren't going to compare to trained units so I'm wary of attaching upkeep.
I'd be fine with lowering the initial cost somewhat in exchange for continual upkeep. As it stands, if you're willing to horde mana for even a little while (which you can do fast with the starting mana, 4 mana per turn stacks up fast. Could even add attuned for bonus 40 starting) you can pile up a ton of mana in a hurry and then tame a shitload of things.
Upkeep puts a more reasonable limit on how much you can have tamed at any one time, which creeps up as you gain power. Go ahead and lower the inital cost to offset it.
One of my concerns is that it's an ability that becomes less useful as a game goes on. When you do well and are clearing away lairs and expanding your territory, opportunity to use it diminishes as stuff you can tame disappears from the map. Plus you're at the mercy of what gets randomly generated for you to tame. The Hoard Spider could have easily been an untameable slag, drake, or bone ogre. Hunter and Bandit Lord also have similar issues but strike me as much, much less useful even when you do have the chance to use them.
Ideally it would be an ability that's useful for more of the game but not such a power swing during the period you do benefit from it.
So, the Map pack is out. $5 for 5 new maps (one of which starts with 10 wildernesses by default, and another is the entire known game world and is twice as big as what you can get any other way), plus there is suppose to be more "stamps" for the random map generator for more random random maps.
The new stamps are actually a pretty big deal. Stamps are essentially like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They are bits of pre-configured terrain -- shore line, mountains, rivers, forests, etc. Each map size is made up of a certain number of stamps.
When you start a game, the engine grabs enough stamps to make a map from those pieces of the jigsaw, puts them together, assigns starting positions (each stamp has spots that have been manually designated as starting spots) to you and each opposing AI, and lays the modifiers you have selected over it (barren world, lush world, lots of resources, scarce resources, etc).
More stamps means random worlds become even more random.
Posts
You should have 1-2 pioneers built within your first 4-8 construction projects, and have spots for new cities scouted out by the time they're done.
The early game is a bit slow paced, but you shouldn't often find yourself simply sitting on your hands. Some things you can do to speed it up:
Thats all that's springing to mind off the top of my head. Once you start getting comfortable and doing well with stratagies that stack the deck in your favor, then you start playing weird combos and moving away from some of these strategies.
Cog: that ctrl-N thing is new to me. Excellent advice :P
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Plus with manual placement, you can snake your cities to natural boundries like mountains and oceans (I'm not sure the AI even knows how to use raise/lower land) and physically block the AI from passing your cities, instead of the "gentleman's block" of extending your ZoC. Which the AI ignores the shit out of at their leisure.
And to expand once more on the food issue: Food only controls your tax income and city level. While city level does dictate access to a few improvements, they're mostly mid-late game improvements. You can still get a city to level 2/3 and get some strong production/research out of it without selling out for food.
I think after a certain number of turns it becomes disabled due to some memory guzzling issue, and you're locked into the game and have to bail to the menu and manually start a new one.
There was a fun bug in the late beta that I ran into a few times where Ctrl-N in a very late stage game would freak the game out and generate a world with a solid white background. If you bailed out to the main menu and manually started a new game, or even loaded a saved game, your sov would appear to be naked with no head or hands.
This is also true. More fun Beta bug stories - Originally Abeix was impossible to physically attack because of the gap between the squares you can stand on and the squares his chasm occupies. If you chose to battle him, you either had to magic or ranged him to death, and if you didn't have any/enough of either, you died. But if you auto-resolved, the game would somehome figure it out and your mans would melee him. You just had to hope your army was strong enough to melee Abeix to death.
But, quite often if I should for some reason run into a fight that gives me fits and I get stomped on, I usually load up a save and throw it at the auto-resolve once just to see if it pulls out a miracle. It does surprise you sometimes.
Also, never tried snaking.
Also I started Air/Water this time. Found an earth book from a rival. So far water has been lackluster, but I've been focusing on Air/Earth for buffs.
Origin: Broncbuster
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Water is good for 3 things - Slow, Inspiration, and getting Water 2 + Air 2 for Gentle Rain. Gentle Rain is the balls.
What other faction traits are you playing? Magic schools? Kingdom/Empire?
Thing about rock spiders is they have moderate armor for an early game enemy, so the best thing to counter them with is spears. They also don't hit obnoxiously hard, so you don't have to armor up too awful much. Spears + leather curiass is probably plenty for some garrison units to deal with them, and should keep the units cheap enough to produce quickly.
If you're having problems with a specific monster like this, rock spiders, the best bet is to put together a strike force to find and crush the lair. If you just mean "early game monsters, but rock spiders are the biggest pain in my ass" there's not a *lot* to be done for it but bite the bullet and set aside the time to make some garrison units, understanding your other production times will take the hit. Just concentrate on production and lowering unrest over food for the early stages.
If you have enough cities to spare one to specialize as a fortress, use it to make the garrison units for the rest of your cities.
Exact traits will wait til I get home to check, but I'm trying to figure out how big of a garrison force you want in your border cities.
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Depends on too many things to easily answer -- World difficulty setting, AI difficulty setting, Pacing, faction traits, and monster density just for starters.
Total shot from the hip, if you NEED more than 3 units to supplement the default militia every city gets, you're doing something terribly, terribly wrong. Like, settling places where your ZoC nudges a lot of slag/drake/dragon lairs wrong.
You forgot Freeze, the spell that makes your enemy archers have initiative in the single digits.
And Blizzard, which can one-shot an entire enemy army.
And Tidal Wave, the spell that means they're half-dead when the battle starts.
I have obviously not even scratched the surface of this game yet.
You are all terrifying me.
I kinda like it.
Must get chores done so i can play more game.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
And I feel like i haven't even scratched it either.
Origin: Broncbuster
Playing Pariden with Procipinee (say that three times fast) is probably the only time where Meditation is up there with Inspiration and (if the first champion you find has it) Enchanted Hammers in importance for early game. That way you have a healthy supply of mana so you can drop arcane outposts to grab resources and deny choicy city spots from the AI as soon as you find them, as well as pay for the intial cost for any enchanments you cast on Procipinee (or rather, whoever is wearing her crown, which removes the upkeep costs on any enchaments that are active on that character.) Start with Evade to improve her survival rate and keep layering them on until you get a nigh-unkillable, fireball-throwing death machine.
The problem with this is that you have to spend level choices on Water ranks 2 and 3 which, aside from freeze (must be cast in your territory, semi blah) and pandemonium (awfully random) is like throwing two levels in a hole and then shitting in the hole. Once you break through to Water 4, things do look up.
But seriously, you take water for Slow and Inspiration.
Seeing Steam community tags for FE in sigs makes my pants fit funny... in the crotch area.
The thing I love about Pariden and Procipinee is that with Arcane Outpost, you can instantly lay claim to resource nodes and airable land anywhere with one click of the mouse, and you can also suddenly spawn territory for things like the afore mentioned freeze spell.
The thing I think is retarded about Procipinee is she pays 6 points for access to three rank 1 schools, none of which have any guaranteed damage dealing spells (Chaos, occasionally? Whoopie) and two of which she could get for like 160 gildar because her faction has the fucking Decalon. At least they replaced her godawful inefficient weakness, but my understanding is that when they let all cpu v cpu games run, Pariden loses a vast majority of them, cause her setup is just pants-on-head retarded, really.
If you want to play Pariden, make a custom sov and faction and start with Earth and Fire instead of Air, Water, and Life. Then just find a champion to Steal Spirit Life 1 from. Or better yet, make it a empire and take Earth/Death as your starting books, and buy Fire later through the Decalon. She literally has all the worst books to start a spellcasting/enchanting faction with. Vanilla Pariden is goosey.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Give yourself 1000 of all resources incluidng mana with Ctrl + M
Research all spells with Ctrl + Q & Ctrl + E
Raise some land out in the ocean
Move yourself to your private island with Ctrl + T
Toggle Auto Turns with Ctrl + Z
Eat popcorn.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
That's a nice change for the Torch Bearer. Now he actually makes sense!
I wonder if Heroic will be dropped to 40 influence as well.
In my experince, the reason CPU Pariden loses most of the time is as much because CPU Pariden isn't aware it can make outposts with mana. Every time they show up in my games, seems like none of thier outposts are arcane monoliths. Might have been the diffuclty though, only now just started playing vs. Challenging faction AI.
...Though I will admit, having apprentice in 3 schools that don't have a dependable (to a point...) damage spell until at least Mage level, especially for a faction that can grant any and as many schools of magic to a champion or sov you want, is a bit silly.
More than any other faction, Pariden goes as their starter champion goes. Get a combat beast or fire caster, you're probably in good shape. Get Lisbeth the Loser or a crap caster with repeat spell schools you already have, just fucking restart.
Origin: Broncbuster
Origin: Broncbuster
In War of Magic, you could marry champions of the opposite sex, and have children, who would grow up and become champions in their own right. The higher level you and your spouse were when you procreated, the more powerful your offspring would be. There were traits (like ugly) that modified how many children you would have and such.
In olden times, before WoM was even released, there was talk that your Sov would be able to die perminently and your offspring would take over the kingdom, and there would be all manner of ancestry, family trees, diplomatic marriages to other factions, offspring between factions, etc, etc.
It never blossomed further than "get married, pump out free champions" but they left all the existing code in place and just unhooked from the XML, so they could revisit it if they chose to later, in an expansion for example.
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Otherwise you can take Beastlord, attuned, and cast meditation a lot and just scour the map for free units.
The mana cost is pretty hefty early on. That alone has forced me to emphasize mana production more than in previous games. Adding an upkeep would make it even more painful early on. If possible, I think having the cost scale based on how many tamed animals you have running around already would be ideal and have the starting cost be lower. It takes a good number of turns before you can first attempt to use it and later on the animals aren't going to compare to trained units so I'm wary of attaching upkeep.
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I'd be fine with lowering the initial cost somewhat in exchange for continual upkeep. As it stands, if you're willing to horde mana for even a little while (which you can do fast with the starting mana, 4 mana per turn stacks up fast. Could even add attuned for bonus 40 starting) you can pile up a ton of mana in a hurry and then tame a shitload of things.
Upkeep puts a more reasonable limit on how much you can have tamed at any one time, which creeps up as you gain power. Go ahead and lower the inital cost to offset it.
One of my concerns is that it's an ability that becomes less useful as a game goes on. When you do well and are clearing away lairs and expanding your territory, opportunity to use it diminishes as stuff you can tame disappears from the map. Plus you're at the mercy of what gets randomly generated for you to tame. The Hoard Spider could have easily been an untameable slag, drake, or bone ogre. Hunter and Bandit Lord also have similar issues but strike me as much, much less useful even when you do have the chance to use them.
Ideally it would be an ability that's useful for more of the game but not such a power swing during the period you do benefit from it.
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This screenshot from this highly technical and excellent modding thread perfectly sums up what stamps are in a single picture.
When you start a game, the engine grabs enough stamps to make a map from those pieces of the jigsaw, puts them together, assigns starting positions (each stamp has spots that have been manually designated as starting spots) to you and each opposing AI, and lays the modifiers you have selected over it (barren world, lush world, lots of resources, scarce resources, etc).
More stamps means random worlds become even more random.
Also, the map pack has ships.