Research Diplomacy. Unlikely Friends, Monster Nests, Advanced Monster Nest, Mega Nasty Monster Nest, Dragon Monster Nest. Then Research in Civics to get a troop or squad. Now you have units (4-8 troops) with 160 Defense - 1000 Defense and even greater attack. Nothing can stop you now. Just make sure you get alot of wordly research resources and gold. Gold is the only resource you need to create these nests and to hire the monsters. Thats it. You don't have to do anything else. Here are some tips.
Don't research Adventuring or Warfare they are complete wastes of time.
Research Diplomacy, Civics, and Magic (if you have a mage or want to win quick, spell of mastery)
The other two trees are usless pretty much. I wasted all this time on adventuring (maxed out) and on warfare(15) to get good equipment and to get my Heroes better or so I thought. Waste of time totally.
As soon as I researched the Diplomacy which was the last thing I researched I noticed that MONSTER NESTS magically appeared in my towns sometimes right inside them so i had to look close. The Dragon's nest spawned right in the middle of my town. To hire the monsters all i need was gold since they have no equipment and they are ridiculously invincible. Example 2nd level monsters nest is shrills which are in a group of 4 blessed with 160hp over 100 attack and 100 defense. then their are the drath people who have 200 attack and even more defense, then I got the dragons who had 400 attack and 250 defense. So at the end of the game i figured out what was best. Diplomacy!
Adventuring USELESS!
Warfare USELESS!
Civics good
Diplomacy OWNS ALL!
Magic USELESS Unless you have i high Arcane research and want to beat the game by casting a spell which i think is weak. If its low you won't be able to learn but one spell every 30 or 40 turns. I'm 500 turns in and I have only 5 spells. You see if you want to get to level 2,you have to research level 2 like its a spell and it takes forever to research spells and levels. I have 5 spells besides the ones I got at start and they are classic. But they dont do ANY DAMAGE WHATSOEVER. WTH. Magic is a debacle and I have level 7 summoning spells and they are nothing compared to hiring 4 or 8 shrills or drath or dragons (Diplomacy, at little civics for units, and a bunch of gold) So now I'm completely OWNING everything and I made the mistake of making a large continent with 8 factions. There is a reason stardock only starts the large map with 5 (including you). Its because the game will freeze the more factions are in it. Unfortunately, at this point I'm stuck. The game won't even load my most recent saves. When I load 4 hours back and try to play i get about two hours in and then the game crashes. Stardock, why did you do this. I mean you had all the ingredients here to make a classic game and you pretty much let the fans down by rushing the release. If the game freezes before you can beat it how can we enjoy it or even get any replayability....? Right, we can't. But maybe someone who is playing this will research diplomacy and civics and beat the game before it kills itself by creating millions of NPC's wandering aimlessly in the wilds.
Case and point.
Heroes: Your sovereign cant die. I have full hero recruiting and the best hero i could recruit was level 4 with 20 hp. I'm fighting level 12 mobs with 200 hp 170 attack and 170 defense. Heroes are USELESS.
Spells: USELESS I cast spells on Monsters with a higher defense than my intelligence (WHICH is EVERY ONE! After level 5 Come on!) and it says i Missed. Are you kidding me? In your game Lightning bolt and Fireball are useless. Chain Lightning which you have set up like a fireball as far as radius does 0 damage to all creatures over level 5! SPELLS ARE USELESS!
Three categories are WORTHLESS are Warfare, Adventuring and unless you want to cheat and cast a spell to win...Magic
I can research Diplomacy for 100 turns and have monsters to hire that are 100 times stronger than any custom troop with magic armor and weapons will ever be. So why would i ever research anything else.
I researched adventuring fully and I couldn't get notable level 5. I could get quest level 5 but not notable level 5. Why?
Quests are Random so you can get a level 1 quest that will give you a dragon with 100 hp 200 attack and 50 defense that can breath fire, and you can get a level 5 quest that gives you a ring that increases your damage by +2 woohoo! There is no possibility that anyone who programmed this game played it after they coded it. Its like 5 separate teams coded all the different research branches separately and they didnt talk to each other one bit cuz none of them are balanced.
Lastly, I want to say this. If you work on this game for another year at least, you can fix it. So please fix this game and for gods sake do this genre justice. Us fans have been waiting years for a true game that you can start as a level 1 mage and rise to rule a kingdom and lead armies into battle. So please fix this game.
BTW I can only give you this much advice because im stuck and my game wont load any more and no its not my hardware. Your game cant handle the computations of 14 factions (6 of which are dead) and the tons of monsters. All those AI's that keep respawning every few turns. Your NPC factions won't kill the NPC monsters so you have a memory leak there. I walked to the other end of the continent and there were 20 wandering monsters level 1-13 all in a small space that wasnt part of anyones town yet (the wilds). The monsters keep spawning infinitely on every piece of land where there is no border or faction boundary. To be honest I don't really know why your game shut down on me but I noticed that the further I got into the game it started to lag between turns. I think the problem is you released it way too early and you should learn from this mistake. Don't release games early if they are not finished. Don't Nuke my article plz its a legit walkthrough and it will help you with balancing the game. Good luck.
