Hi,

i just wanted to know how people play and what are their strategies. Here are mine:

1)

Make a melee Sovereign this is important because you will need be able to kill monsters early on without much pause. If you make a caster you will have mana regeneration issues.

2)

settle near the fertile land, if there is not a single gold mine near you might want to restart the game. in the first or second turn your should buy a weapon for your sovereign.

build a material producing building, wait for 2 materials and immediately build a pioneer. Do not build your cities up yet (unless you can afford it, for example you are lucky and find materials) just spam cities all over the map.

3)

if you made a good min/max melee hero you can go out with him and kill everything on the map without problems. you should do so because every combat gives you money to still spam more cities.

4)

the first technology should be diplomacy to get darklings/spiders. they are good troops and only need very little research in comparison with regular troops who need more research done to become equally strong and they cost materials/iron/crystals while the darklings/spiders only cost gold.

after that make sure to research magic a bit to get better equipment for your sovereign. he is your main source of income* for most of the game. you can very easily get access to incredible good weapons and armor by researching magic weapons/armor (much faster then researching warfare). you can have a very overpowered sovereign very quickly**.

5)

after the initial phase you can build up most of your cities. i usually research civics (the kingdom research is much better in this regard especially the palace is a great building, the empire faction suffer greatly from having only one weak prestige boosting building) to get my economy rolling, your darklings/spiders will make good troops for quite a while.

6)

from here on you are free to play as you want, i usually research more diplomacy to get better troops (up to demons/dragons) and than warfare to put them in groups and train them. the gain quite a lot of hp by training them.

7) how to develop your cities:

-food producing cities you should only get them to lvl 2 to build food improving buildings

-gold producing cities should always aim to go for lvl 5 and maximize the gold income (choose this option on every city lvl up)

-tech producing cities should go to lvl 2 or 3 to get schools and the like

-material/iron/crystal/diplomatic capital producing cities should stay at lvl 1, you only have a limited amount of food and lvl 5 cities need a lot of it.

-always build caravans, especially from food producing cities to get more food

i am curious on how you guys play, please share your experience

*even with full developed cities and some gold mines you will only make ~40 gold per turn while your sovereign can have mutlitple battles per turn each giving you ~100 gold

** don't forget that he can use multiple rings/amulets making him unbeatable