Well previous versions has a turn counter, which i cant seem to find in the beta anymore, but it certainly took me couple of hours to reach that point.

No crashes till now actually which is quite suprising, only sometimes when i try to load a game when an oither one is already running in the background (eg go main menu, while playing an other game and press load, only in that instance till now).

Hope you like my sovereign and faction btw

Just load it and you will find your self at the point i saved last time.

Got i think 10+ lvl 5 cities, all teches and arcane, plus a full production and army build, but world is still unconquered.

All AIs are still there, same as quest.

You can test pretty much everything you want there by the times, full mana poll also and well i think you will never need more gold wheatever you build or train for some reason, just crazy production there.

Sovereign speed is at around 10 and can increase by continiously researching the agility thing for easier exploring.

Pretty much thats it, a wide open world to enjoy the full features of the late game the way you want. Would love a comment if possible btw, since i specialised all cities to my point of view and i think thats what you are more insterested to see, since you seem to grow slowly in your own games.

Lvl 5 city in 12 hours seems little too much for me, i think i got them all at lvl 5 by 6 hours or something 

P.S: Now i dont know if you can watch the strategy by the start of the game unless there is an option i didnt found till now in the game for it, which any game should have if there is one i guess.

nah not really. you only need 2 huts per city and research housing +10% 5 times. thats it all your cities will go lvl 5 this way ^^

After finally loading the game, it took me awhile to get over the initial excitement of seeing what you set up. I spent time just looking around. Right now, I can't decide if I want comment on it or go back and play. Impressive work--thank you for making me feel inadequate Seriously, I have a much different perspective of possible game play. So, you purposely kept all AI's alive, all quests and achieved that?? I love the sov & faction--especially the city keepers & beasts which reminds me you hadn't created any shrills, spiders, drath warriors or dragons. I had to use a buttload of books to beef my sov up to a 50+ attack. You haven't even used any books! Wow. I have so many questions...

• What is your initial technology focus? You say 2 huts per city/research housing +10% 5 times like it's nothing. I appreciate the city specialization; I do the same though apparently not soon enough. Obviously, quests are not a priority. Funny, I remember reading in the original manual not to fall behind in this category. Your game appears to illustrate that quests are not needed. I'm guessing you balance between tech & warfare in the beginning--specializing early as possible.
• How are you addressing initial defense? Start with peasants and as you progress you upgrade & delete? How often were you attacked by monsters in the beginning? I only played about 20 turns before I crashed. I didn't see any creatures. Spawn option on, correct?
• You have 11 cities all lvl 5. Did you establish all those yourself or did you acquire any from other factions? very nice---no city spamming for you. Was the map custom? Your kingdom has nearly perfect borders for what you seemed to have in mind.
• At any point did you whittle down any of the other factions or is what I saw a result of their own progression?
• All your cities are gildar positive & not all cities have gold mines. It looks like you have a specific caravan strategy to achieve this?
• Food doesn't seem to be an issue for you either--rarely for me as well but it seems like you have an efficient system in place. Blend caravans/resources/enhanced farming tech? One impression from your game is that I am NOT utilizing my caravans to max potential. I generally create caravans from outer cities and send to capital, sometimes to other factions. I am impressed that you have achieved such high production without having used significant expansion (i usually go to war when if resources are an issue). Is this correct? Actually, it looks like you're just been toying with the AI. I have done so myself but not with the flair that you have.
• Heroes, sov, and sov progeny all loaded with Elementium karrazans, armor & amulets...oh my! Sweet.
• I noticed that you didn't have teleport or return spells. Intentional? Granted with the huge monument bonus & apparent lack of armed conflict it isn't really necessary. However, you were creating some beasts in one of your cities and they had about 30+ seasons left. With teleport, you could go to that city, use the call to arms spell, and teleport back across the map..if you were so inclined--just an observation.
• I like how you got around the lack of organization talent. That sov army is badass.

Thanks for sharing. Now I have to decide if I want to play your saved game, go back to my current limp one by comparison, or try some of your tactics in a new game......

one more thing---for now anyway heheheh---what kind of spells, if any, were you using for offense? I find that I have not used spells much in the tactical sense--resist in pioneers and other lowly units is annoying. A battle ax/daring strike brings immense satisfactory compensation for a fizzled storm spell.

Ok one by one thats a long long post but i really appreciate the comments ^^

Since you asked for faction and sovereigns stats i guess they would have been included in the save, but it seems thats not the case so here are the link for them.

Game Save available here: Late Save Game
Just place it yo your Saves directory, usually found at: C:\My Documents\My Games\Elemental\Saves

Here you can download the faction Faction
and place the xml file at C:\My Documents\My Games\Elemental\Race

and also download Sovereign in use Sovereign
and place the xml file at C:\My Documents\My Games\Elemental\Units

Start out with civilization tech to get granaries fast, so it can halp you expand out till you find new food resources.

Switch to Diplomacy to get caravans so you boost your economy early on, this also allows you to get non-aggression packs if i remember correctly.

Then switch to warfare and get a quick armor technology, you wont be needing new weapons for a while, since they wont make much difference in attack power from what you initially have till much later on weaponary tech.

Then switch back to civilization to get the mill (dont exactly remember the name, its the structure that gives u +materials and can only be build once).

And by then you should switch back to adventure technology and research continiously as much as you can of the exploration sub-tree (not quests and heroes) so you can see the resources while you explore to new sides, before you switch back to some more warfare teches since montsers will start appearing and you would need those "city keepers" build before they start attacking you. Try to balance this based on your current needs on the map at the time, immediate need of "city keepers" vs immediate need of new resource expansion to cover more ground.

It is ialso mportant to get the Adventure's "Lost bounty" exploration pretty fast to find food at this part of the game.

Quests seemed more important in the stable version. beta version seems to be more strategic rather than going around killing monsters and finding magic crates to make your hero stronger and stronger. Yeah i agree that books make your hero stronger, but nothing really compares to a good builded company of troops, eg. the "beasts". in front of those any dragon or hero no matter what magic seems like a joke. if you tried them you will know what i mean, killing the master quest boss like he is nothing, that many people find him too hard ^^

And what if you had many heroes, sons grown up, spoose etc? you tend to make them as strong as you can since they can grow and grow in strength. only hard thing to find is a better sword than magical karazzan that also uses a shield. I only found one till now called the "doom hammer", you can find it equipped in one of my heroes if you havent saw it yet ^^

But till you get enough money to merge magical karazzan with legendary shield, then it is best to use lord hammer with no shield attached, gives boosted attack power.

As soon as you start the game go for 2-3 pioneers to build, so you can expand fast around you.

I then start every city with the same build, 2 huts, 1 workshop, 1 study and 1 arcane lab. That way i am not gonna need any hut again (explain later why) and i have a basic town industry.

Then wait till it gets to town lvl 2 pretty soon, thus expand borders twice to include any near by resource. acquire the resource and keep in mind which resources are also near by the city borders for their next several border expansions to come. Based on those you have the following options:

1. any food resource, you always add irrigation and granary, if not then you never build those to a town.

2. gold making building go to all cities whenever available. bazaar and mint should only be build in your highest income city or the one with the most gold mines around.

3. and 1 out of the 2 selections for each city, to either make it a research or an arcane based city. Usually decided if there is a lost temple or ancient library in city borders for that. If none of those resources is nearby, then i usually go for 2 research cities and 1  arcane, basically more of what you need at the moment also, but research has a much bigger role at this point of the game and even later on, since research can continue on offering something useful in late game, but arcane knowledge is only up to a certain lvl and point that gives something useful.

4. Also lastly we have workshops. Apart from the one workshop build per city at the very start, it seems not to be much of a need unless very early in the game which are in high demand. After that you seem to always have too much materials from them. If you feel you need anymore just add a quick circle addition of 1 of them per one of your cities to boost their production. I usually do this only once in mid game and once-twice more in very late game that are needed for very expensive troops production, but they always seem to cover cities individual needs no matter what 

Initial defence includes 2 peasants per town. By the time they are done and some turns have passed you will usually make your own "city keeper" unit version based on your early warfare research as explained above and have enough gold income to support their build by then. So start saving gold, which will start building quite fast probably by now.

So now everytime you have enough gold to build 2 "city keepers" do the following:

Select one town witch already has 2 peasants on it. Queue to build the 2 new "city keepers". Take the 2 peasants out of the city and place them next to your border. Then put them to Auto-explore. Thus the peasants will die soon from monsters, thus not taking anymore from your upkeep and they will become useful that way, since they will be able to detect for you any new resources or threats coming randomly, so you wont have to do it manually with 2-3 of your heroes like you did till the start of the game.

When an efficient number of those peasants have been released to auto-explore mode, then its time for you to call back your exploring heroes since you already would have an idea by then to where to place your last towns around and you will let the peasants to do the rest exploring till they die by a monster and get you in touch with new civilizations in the process ^^

Spawn option in the game is on dont worry ^^

Its just the way i play that you will rarely see any monster come near my towns, because i follow a common strategy.

Monsters usually spawn in places where no city influence exists and sometimes where there is fog of war. Still havent figuired the full mechanic of it, but thats seems to be the general idea.

I have only been attacked by monsters 3 times at the very early of the game, usually by the time my towns start getting to lvl 3 settlements. You should have your first "city keepers" build by then in order to defend your towns. Keep an eye out for them since you dont want to lose a city early on, which will be a big setback at this expansion point. Monsters tend to usually attack the same 2-3 cities, which are the nearest to fog of war, usually your faction borders, thus you may need to tranfer "city keepers" from other nearby cities to boost those border cities defences and build new "city keepers" for those helping towns at the same time. That is a fast and efficient way to get rid of an eminent monster threat.

Now there is a technique i follow to prevent monsters from appearing near you again as soon as you have the idea that your current cities for the moment are almost the ones that you will have for a while before expanding again, so in other words stable borders and expansion process coming to an end.

Preventing monster threats:

1. All your cities will eventually turn to lvl 5, explained afterwards to food and huts why and how. Thus their influence will expand and expand a lot, which will prevent monsters appearing anywhere near your city in the future.

2. Fog of war areas are usually appearing by high mountains and vast distance from your town where no unit is nearby within your area of influence. If you seem to have monster appearing whithin your town influence but because of fog of war (quite rare) then there is an easy way to fix it. Kill the monster and terafform anything near that foggy area into sea or mountain, thus perventing new monster to appear to this area you cant see. 3 mana is a cheap way to do so ^^

3. Also once you had your border towns taken some initial monsters attack, if you follow the suggested reinforce from near cities recommendation tactic explained above and build new units for the helper cities, this will leave your border city with more units by the end of the turn, since old city wont need the reinforcing troops back anymore. This will result if successfully defended from monsters, to prevent monsters from attacking it again since you have more initial defence power there rather than before, so no more monsters of that lvl appearing near by

P.S. if you want to see monsters in my save game, there are a lot to the right after the short passing of the 2 seas. I actually ventured there today and is like a monster heaven surrounding a poor ai. lol save them ^^

All cities were mine. All done by early expansion. Followed the tech path i explained to you above. 2-3 heroes exploration early on to see new resources path along the way and then the massive peasants exodus on auto-explore while they get replaced by city keepers.

First i expanded to the top and when i met an other faction i went to expand in the bottom. Basically i stopped expanding at that point as soon as my food production dropped to 0 and i could see no other resources useful enough and closeby to do an other expansion at the time.

So actually the red flag for stop expanding in early game is when food reach 0 for the first time in my first initial towns, AFTER of course i research and unitialise the "Lost Bounty" Adventure research for new food resources.

Thats an easy way to know when you are ready to enter the mid-game phase as early explaration came to an end.

Map is Large random ^^

I always like random maps since you never know what is coming to you

Now you will ask me why borders are nearly perfect and how that possible in every random map.

You have to follow some simple rules and you can achieve that too:

1. Never let an other faction build a city between your own cities, altought following the lvl 5 cities tactic, you will make your influence expand rapidly against the ai, you will still need time to get this right and is much easier if that annoying ai city wasnt there from the start:)

2. All cities will be lvl5 remember? Thus influence will expand and connect to any nearby cities and push enemy borders further always, thus also acquiring some of their own resources also at a certain point in mid-late game, if you dont conquer them first

3. Leave space between your cities, even if it means that your next town wont build next to the new resources you saw, but rather some tiles away (usually 2) and will have to wait for 2 influence expansions to include the resources to your bounty, unless of course this resource  is urgently needed, such as food resource. Althought 2 influense expansion spaces are usually happening when your city reaches lvl 2, thus not too slow to happen, but third one takes some time to happen. Ignore this distance rule when it has to do with a shard. Shards are best to be as near to city as possible when possible, in order to connect them effectively for higher mana regeneration.

4. Always build a city as a reason to acquire a nearby resource filed, not just empty space land. The only reason to build a city in barren land is if your cities are too far away for each other and you need an other one in the middle to connect them. Remember that it is to your best interest for all your cities to reach lvl 5, thus dont take lightly on building one such barren land city, since it will still consume you 3 food (1 for settlement and 2 for huts) to do so. An easy way to determine if 2 cities are really too far away is if they have a too huge fog of war between them when they are both at lvl 3, which will result in monsters spawning and killing you caravans alot since your influence will take ages to cover all that space and you dont want that. Only in that situation you build the barren land city.

5. Sometimes you build a city but even if you have lets say 40 more tiles to build for it, it tells you "unavailable space" or something like that. That means that your city can expand further but the terrain around the city doesnt allow it. Which means that your city is probably surrounded by forests, mountains and sea and there is no space to place a building there anymore. Chop the trees, lower the mountains and create beaches from sea (terafform) to the direction you want your city to expand. Then give it at least 1 turn for the city to realise the new terrain around it and allow you to build more. If still unavailable, then you probably need to wait for current building to finish in order to allow you build further on to new teraformed area or you should check out again if you teraformed the right way which the town allows you to build.

No interaction with enemy AI such as war was made. I wanted this game to be a test run for me, so i can experiment all game mechanics in it and in the late game(where the save is) to be able to get any kind of victory i want with having to take it all from the beginning since all AIs and quests are still there.

Challenging AI seem to be well easy to what i see till now. Devs should probably add them much more aggression for my tastes. Something like the faction "Thalan" in GalacticCivsII, thats the most badass AI faction i have seen in a game till now, even beats Civilization "emperor" difficulties

Ai seems to be entering wars with everyone by late game except with you. Easy way to keep AI in bay from the start and take the initiative whenever you fell like it are:

1. Keep always at top of factions strength ranking. Not difficult and upkeep of troops is not a problem, especially with the way you will be spamming gold from lvl 5 cities. You always have to build some more defence new type units or enhance your sovereign army with a new stronger edition troop or recruit a new hero and send him to sit in a city in the middle of nowhere because you dont need him etc ^^ All those add to your faction strength.

2. As soon as you research caravans you can also sign non aggression treaties at the very start. Unless you plan to do an early conquer of your enemy ai faction or if they ask too much gold difference for the non-aggression to establish such a deal, then sign it with everyone you like. This will keep you in their good charts and they will try to expand on others. Also peasants auto-explore phase will meet you with new factions very often at that point. Sign the non aggression pack as soon as you meet new factions at start of the game, thus allowing you to move from their teritorry thus spying them and been able to move forward by their terittory to meet the next faction up ahead with no monters meeting and difficulty in the middle.

3. And lastly when you research Diplomacy treaties, go and sign as much as you can with them. The cost of trade and research treaties is well worth it. As much more gold and research you are doing by your own towns, so much more benefit you will gain from those treaties. So dont wonder why when you have such a treaty, you tend to get so much more bonus while the ai usually seems to get much less profit for that deal. It is based on economy and research strength of each faction. So as much more as you have on your own, then so much more you will gain from the treaty you sign with the ai. Signing those will probably never make them think to attack you anyway possible and its really easy by following those 3 steps. Always worked for me and always said that elemental ai seem to be too much peace loving for my tastes

P.S #2: If you capture enemy cities, remember to destroy their extra huts if they have more than 2 (or 3 depends on the strategy you follow), since they are not needed and they consume uneccessary food. AI seems to be spamming huts for no reason to all their cities.

I will leave the caravans and gold making system for next Quote since its more related.

So lets talk about food and how to make efficient use of what you have and what you found. Food is the most important resource in early game. Metal is in middle game and crystals in late game. Now you will disagree and you will probably say that food is probably more important in middle game also, but i woud disagree if you follow my system.

Actually there are two way to make this system work. Lets start with my favourite one and the use of food resource.

1. All cities will be needing only 3 food no matter which point of the game. Thats 1 food for settlement apart your capital of course and 2 food for 2 huts which you build right away as first 2 buildings in your town. You wont be needing anymore of those thats it no more food requirement to this town.

2. How is that possible? Simple enough. 2 huts in a city are efficient to upgrade your city up to lvl 3 with no problem and no research upgrade needed.

3. Lvl 3 to lvl 4 settlement is the slowest transaction of your cities in mid game, even slower from lvl4 to lvl5. Thats the point in which you will finish your warfare and adventure balancing research as explained in the very first quote about first technologies and you will have to switch back to civilization tech tree.

4. You will be sacrificing a good 5-7 tech rounds to make this work, this is your slowest part of midgame and where everything base for your massive expansion in production, economy and everything else. You should enter this phase only once you fell there are no real threats around, that you will be missing that warfare research round in the middle of the process.

5, Focus on getting housing first and then focus on housing bonus. 3 times the +10% housing bonus is efficient to allow you to get all cities to lvl 4. And 5 times are efficient to get you all the way to lvl 5. So you can only make the 3 times if you thing you can research the 2 more times later on and emphasize in warfare or magic since we tend to have left this out till now or of course to which technology you think is most needed now, since this is the skeleton of what you will build.

6. Now since this is the slowest phase of the whole game from going from lvl 3 to lvl4 for cities, this is also the time which you will start spamming studies and arcane labs in all your cities as soon as they reach lvl 3. Studies for your technology specialised cities as explained above and arcane laboratories for the arcane based towns. Try to exphasize much more to tech at this stage thought, since it will get you out of this slow process much faster. Try to split studies build to all your tech cities, but better to ephasize mostly in 2-3 of them to gain much more bonus once you have school building too later on.

This is the prefered strategy i suggest for food and huts. There is an other one which includes building 3 huts and instead of 2 for each city.

This has one advantage and one disadvantage though. The advantage is that you have to research the housing bonus much less times to achieve this, thus less slow mid game time. If i am correct is 2 times for lvl 4 and 4 times for lvl 5 city. And the disadvantage is that you will need 4 food instead of 3 for each city. I recommend the 2 huts approach unless you think that you can do without this 1 food more per city (which in my view is too much to pay for 2 tech rounds cost) and want to process in the tech tree faster.

Never connect your caravans to an other faction unless you need a road, its not so profitable for you as it will to send them to your own towns.

Now caravans have 2 funtionalities. First one is to create a permanent road between the 2 cities they connect at the first time they do so. This road will remain and as long as the caravans run on them, then they will provide an economy +% for both the 2 connected cities.

Now the basic gold income in late game will basically come from your taxes and not from your gold mines. As much more population you have, thus so much more taxes you will receive. I think its 1 gold per 10 citizens if i am not mistaken to what i have seen.

So having lvl 5 cities is a must, gold income to its maximum for all cities since all of them will have the economic update buildings too, and the city with the most gold mines will also have the bazaar and mint build on it. Also i suggest when your cities reach lvl 4 to give a tech round or two to get some prestige boosting buildings, which will make them to lvl 5 like crazy ^^

Now about caravans strategy:

1. Caravans profit is not based on distance, but on how long they run on a specific road between 2 towns. As much more times they run between two cities, so much more this road will automatically getting updated and provide slowly a higher percentage profit on the two cities gold revenue.

2. This means that is better for caravans to have a short distance to cover as possible. This means that each city should make first their 2 "city keepers" and then 3 straight caravans build since 3 are allowed per city.

3. Send those 3 caravans to the closest cities from the city that created them. You may omit one if you want to create a road for a city you need desperately to connect a road to and you dont have, althought not recommended since the 3 closest cities to each city with caravans tend to cover all possible needed roads always, unless you somehow manage to create a crossroads of 4 ways (how would you manage that  , thus then you would need to spend the last caravan to the city with the non existant road. ^^

So as long as caravans run between 2 cities, so much more the profit  and the road is upgraded. After a point the road looks like solid rock and not an empty field. At around +25% and more percentage if i remember correctly is when it happens.

Hehe with such a high gold income i could buy elementium karazans for all my soldiers also if it was possible lol. But they need elementium ore for such upgrade and this is only found by quest chests and its quite too rare. Its one of the quests benefits, but its too rare and scarse to such point of the game, that you will probably have to search the full map just to make one set of this armor for one company of soldiers , so in my diea not worth the trouble.

Thats why you can wait long enough to research magic equipment since it will only be effective for your heroes and champions rather than researching warfare to better your troops which is a much better way to go forward. Amulets and stregthened hero armor can wait, since they can still wear the heavy soldier one meanwhile, which in the contrary soldiers wont be able to be build the magic one and even amulets will have a high crystal cost for them and you will only have to choose some as upgrades to your builds in order to minimize their crystal cost. More soldiers with slightly less hp are better than fewer soldiers with little more hp, always know that ^^

Magic equipment goes for your soldiers build based on how much you can effort to build and what you really need to have. Heroes and sov are excluded since they can buy from shop which is not a problem with so much gold around

Also as long as you dont neglect your army size and some basic warfare tech, even if you are tech expanding in other areas, no ai will be able to give you a problem, just stay one step ahead of them in all times. You have always the gold advantage, build troops if you think is necessary, you can always sacrifice them later if not needed .

Hey come on, its not such badass ^^ Just a 6k army power is not that much lol. It has 6 heroes in it, if you put 1 hero and rest "beasts" units it can easily touch 10k i think ^^ Making some battles also and gaining lvls for them, will increase their power exponentially which will probably give you 20k soon too lol.

Now actually the sov has the organization talent but its not needed. New beta made the organization ability useless, since sov cant increase their speed while lvling up anymore, thus only way to increase your speed is by warfare agility technology which can be continiously researched and will upgrade all your troops speed this way, thus no need for organization ability anymore, they trashed it royally as it was overpowering and gave players a viable option to have this ability by researching.

Now about teleport, thats the only mistake i made in this game, i was actually wondering where the spell was for the biggest part of the game. Then i realised that in the beta you get to choose which spellbooks your hero will have for a cost of 5 points per spellbook. I only selected 2 out of 4, because i was with the idea that you can research the rest of book ingame from magic research and they werent worth spending more points on them. It seems i was wrong. Maybe each spellbook doesnt give too many spells by the end of the day, but if you dont have the spellbook, you wont be able to have the spell no matter what in the game, such as teleport in combat spellbook and raise-lower land in terraform spellbook etc.

Will be giving it some more research on my next sovereign to evaluate which spellbooks give which spells and which of those spellbooks are worth their points for their spells. Teraform is a must at least for me as a spellbook. Now the enhachement stuff must be the other spellbook, which i dont find so useful, will have to give them a little more view before deciding which spellbooks to have on my nextsovereign.

Yeah i agree that no matter what you have, unless if you are majorly investing in your heroes intelligence to increase and have a bunch of shards in pocession, then magic battle attack apart of the distance advantage its minimal compared to a nice straight away blow of "beasts" units dealing 250 damage per hit compared to the spell 8 damage lol.

Now i dont know if the battle spellbook offers a better reliable battle spell option, but to my view spells especially late game are more used for startegic and advantage factor rather than actual battle advantage, in which the real hardened troops take their place.

Hope you enjoyed this long crazy reading i made, hope many people find help here.

Any further comments are always welcome on subject. Suggestions, comments, your own views on specific strategies etc

We all want to know the game mechanics, tactics and strategies as we go further

Thanks for reading,

Achilles__

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