Towns And Expansion Questions

can anyone help me?

i tend to build 1-2 scouts rather early to (hopefully) find a few good spots for additional settlements. i play dense monsters, so i usually have to clear some lairs before i can settle another city or 2, but on normal settings, you should be able to find a few spots that aren't heavily guarded. 

i like to grow my capital to level 2 before i build pioneers (i start with conclave most of the time if my starting spot has at least 2 essences, but town or fortress starts can work out fine, too - just personal preference). once the cap is level 2, the next goal should be to get at least 2-3 more cities soon. aim for at least one conclave, one town and one fortress in total - preferably with appropriate terrain - conclaves are a lot better if they have essence slots, towns benefit greatly from an adjacent river, fortresses should have either lots of material and an adjacent forest, or several essences [for troop enhancing city enchantments].

fortresses are a lot better at training units, so if you don't really need units RIGHT NOW, build them in your fortress later. conclaves and towns have several great economic/research buildings that will occupy their build queue for most of the game, but fortresses only get the very basic money/research buildings. get the production boosting stuff and the unit improving buildings (forge/training yard and their higher tech upgrades) ASAP and afterwards your fortress can happily spam as many units as you want/need.

the important idea is that you should expand quickly early on, so you have several cities that contribute research and money and a dedicated specialized fortress for decent troops. 

it gets more tricky if you can't just go there and plop down new cities. if you actually need units to clear the area before you can safely settle, don't delay the units too long. getting better at the tactical combat system helps a lot in this situation. if you can clear those lairs with 2 spearman units and your heroes, you can settle the spots soon. if you need better weapons and more units before you can tackle them, your expansion is delayed, which can throw you back immensely.

the sooner you get some extra cities up and running, the better off you will be. early expansion is the key to a successful game. 

Well, everyone's style is different. I typically build a cleric and maybe the Tower first, then build either a Pioneer, if there's a good close spot for settling, or a couple of spearmen with the 3 Dodge traits to fill out my army. If I can build a claypit or a lumber mill I'll do that first. Restoration is my first tech, and as soon as Workshops are available I switch my build to that, then usually finish out the first column of each tech tree before starting the second tier of the Civ tree.

 

I build a second army as quickly as possible, and give it to my first or second hero for home defense.

 

After that it's clear and loot, and as I find a good new city spot, I repeat the process, until I have at least 5 settlements, usually a Fortress, a Conclave and 3 cities.
 Once that's accomplished, I focus on building them up, all while securing and connecting my kingdom.

 

Then I'll start worrying about the rest of the world.

 

 

It depends on the difficulty, but personally I'd say expand as fast as you can safely (i.e. so your cities won't fall to monsters). Beating the AI to good city spots is a big advantage. The unrest is not a big deal. As for buildings versus units, it sounds like you need to specialize your cities more. Fortresses don't need a lot of the non-military buildings, just food and unrest once in a while, they should be pumping out your armies. Towns are building money and food buildings to pay for your armies and grow your low food cities. Conclaves should focus on your research and mana buildings. 

I usually try to grab a minimum of 4/5 cities near my start location, focusing on settling the best tiles, but settling for less optimal tiles if it's close to my capital.

After that I'll try to grab tiles that're really good (like, 3+ essence, near lots of resources, highish numbers and along river and forest, able to block a chokepoint into your territory, etc) but mostly ignore the less great tiles.

I assume there's some point where the unrest penalty from a new city actually causes more problems than the new city can produce, but I'm not quite sure where that is, and if you build belltowers/clerics and so on you can probably stretch that point out even further.  Has anyone done any sort of analysis of this? (and/or how feasible is this)

ah i see i never really understood what made them all that different. i had every town build everything just randomly lol. wow that makes a lot more sense. So with the new town penalty in LE how many towns should i have like limit. I am also always unsure of tech tree like really what to go for. I like 4x games like this but never really sunk the time into them cuz they are so big and overwhelming. any more tips or advice would be very appreciated. 

I won't build a pioneer until my first city has gotten to level 2.  In the meantime, I put my taxes at None and focus my main city on pumping out a couple of cheap spear units to backup my sov and my first champ.  (Usually my first unit is a scout.) I wander around with the sov's stack and try to get as many loot drops as possible.

Once I have a couple fighting units trained, I queue up the Beacon which earns me my first champion.  I split my army to support both the sov and the champ and get them out scouring the map, looking for low-level mobs and loot drops.

At this point the capital city should be just about to level (or maybe it already has) and I hopefully already have a good idea of where to found my second city.  So I queue up a pioneer, clear out the mobs, and found the city.

At this point, I'm usually also finishing researching techs that will get me some decent defensive units (Defenders)  Depending on need, I may queue up a couple of those guys to tank for my champions.  In the second city my queue is focused on buildings.  In my main city I'm queuing a mix of +production and -unrest buildings (you should try to get unrest to 5-15% or so) and soldiers.  If I'm out of cash, I just try to do more questing and monster killing!  If I can't quest then I'll build a +gold building in your main city and set taxes to Low.  (Remember, if your taxes are none +Gold doesn't do anything!)

If I can see a nice third expansion point, I'll quickly build a second pioneer and go get it.  Again, my fledgling cities are focused on pumping out +production/-unrest buildings and nothing else.  Once they get to level 2, then I start to think about putting them to use making soldiers if I need them or +research or +gold.  This is also the point where I can start considering using pioneers to build outposts.

I also use the Mana spell on all my cities to ensure I have plenty of mana for buffing my champs.  I tend to cast tutelage for the XP boost.  Inspiration/Enchanted Hammers are my other go-to city spells (if I have them).

One great thing about LH is that you can play it a lot of different ways all pretty successfully.  Don't worry about doing anything perfectly, just do what seems right to you and see how it works out.  There's always CTRL+N if your experiments don't pan out.

I think it's +3% unrest per city?  But I'm not quite sure if that stays consistant or goes up faster as you get more cities.  If it stays mostly consistant, a rule of thumb would be just try to keep your unrest penalty down to the point that your basic anti-unrest structures can keep it under control.  (It looks like five cities could be offset by a belltower/cleric combo)

Ummmm other people probably have better understanding of how the details work out though.

All the advice above is quite solid. The differences are play style, etc. For me, I start with a fort, this gives me a production advantage used to more quickly make needed units. And the first tier money, research buildings go up fast. Also, after getting established, I may make border settlement into forts for the better defenses, walls, etc. Also, Forts don't kick out a +1 ZOC as do towns, so a border with lairs is safer to infiltrate this way. Its all play style, and knowing the implications of the choice of which of the three types of settlements each one will become.