I usually go with Town, Conclave if it has 2 or more essence. Cities whose zone of control do not join up with your capital cities zone of control have an unrest penalty. I find the extra zone of control distance that a Town provides is useful in this case.
I play mostly Medium with some Large maps. Medium games for me is neither too short or too long and have a decent number of opponents. Large tends to take too long for my taste but I like having more special areas to explore.
End game Magic weapons and armor used to require a lot of Warfare research (beta 2?) but they removed that. Under the old system, you where forced to research almost the entire warfare tree to research end game magic items. This removed the choice of going either warfare or magic. Magic gear is more powerful but it also cost a lot more. Equipping champions and units with Long Swords is a lot cheaper than Boreal Blades. For this reason, I sometimes skip end game magical weapon research
Isn't Crushing Blow unique to Path of The Warrior too?
In Some of my recent games I've been tempted to choose Path of the Governor so that I could get Merchant trait. When you have a lot of heroes their upkeep can kill your economy. Not so much when they are merchants.
I think they usually do a weekly report on Thursdays.
I got lucky with 2 random goody huts providing me with the sand golems. I've found that they really nerfed the gold and equipment drops from combat so even though my single stack defeated many opponents, I did not get much gold that way in the early game. I have not played with taxes in 0.914. I have in previous betas but usually to lower it to near zero to increase production.
I finished a Pariden game last night on small land mass and normal difficulty. I started out on a small continent with a single land bridge to the main continent. My first champion was a fire mage. The most dangerous monster den near my main city was an umberdroth but fortunately there was enough space to not trigger it till I killed it much later. Initially, I only managed to found a single city on this continent but later reloads revealed that I could have fit two more cities.
There is a quest that nets you an Umberdroth but the Umberdroth you get is rather weak.
I've found that normal can be tough for some sovereigns and starting locations. Both 0.913 and 0.914 force me to adapt my play style but I agree that the game got noticeably tougher. At times it is frustratingly so. Now I only build 1 pioneer then I build a workshop to help boost production before building a second pioneer. Depending on the starting location it may be better to start by building militia. The first thing I do when I found a city is cast the inspiration spel
The game only checks the unit that is leading a stack for quest turn ins and loot. Sometimes when you merge armies it doesn't put the person you want in the first slot which causes the problem. You may have to un group the army and re group them in the right order to get it to work.
My first game with Lady Irane crashed like that. I haven't had a crash since though.
The game has gotten a lot better. The current beta was more challenging. Felt more like playing Nethack to me than MoM. In MoM the heroes could get a lot more powerful. The champions of the early betas were more like MoM heroes in my opinion.
I think the current pacing is geared toward the hardcore player and really should not be the default setting. Casual players will want a faster pace game where their champions feel powerful. The current pacing works when you have a good understanding of how the game works. One thing I like about the current pacing is that the game does not drag out unnecessarily. While the game did take longer to play, I did not have to spend half the night mopping up stray cities which I've found to be a
I may have found a related bug. When moving over greyed out areas, if the path taken crosses over units from another faction, the game will get stuck. I once managed to recover by cancelling the move order. Another time, it hung for a long time then prompted for a battle. There is probably an issue with the path finding algorithm.
After many failed attempts, I finally managed to win with Gilden on Normal. I usually restart when a champion dies or a lose a city to monsters. This time I only had one champion death due to a bad auto resolve but it was only a chipped tooth and I had a potion of restoration if I really wanted to clear that. I've found Gilden to be a lot harder to play in the early game than Altar, Tarth or Pariden. -4 initiative weapons and double tactical spell cost really slows things down whe
I'm hoping that the Monster avoiding AIs think is a bug because it is totally ridiculous for the AI to plant a city right next to Medium or Strong monster lairs without fear.
Pioneers should remain cheap or else Arcane Monolith will be way overpowered. Arcane Monolith is already a huge advantage. Playing Pariden I only build pioneers to build cities and steal all the AIs Shards with Arcane Monolith.
I think Storm should take a little longer to cast than Fire Bolt but not a full 2 turns. This might already be the case though and the display might not be giving enough information. Perhaps spells should list exactly how much initiative is required to cast. Alternatively, maybe Storm should strike adjacent squares for half damage. This would make it more in line with Fireball. With the current leveling curve for champions, it's quite difficult to get 3 ranks in a branch of magic
I prefer using Air over Fire unless I can guarantee a first turn Fireball. Stinking mud is also a great spell. The realm of magic I use the least is Life.
Spell Mastery Skill counters magic resistance. Curse and Mass Curse are also harder to resist and reduce magic resistance. You may want to inspect some enemies because they have special abilities that reduce elemental damage by 25, 50 or 100%.
Here are my 10 movement spearmen in tactical combat vs Earth Shrills. Only one unit took damage and I am about to clear the encounter. Notice that the spearmen can move clear across the field.
Why nerf Champions movements when you can create high mobility units like this? Turn 65. 6 Spearmen with 10 movement and 135 damage total. My Hero Stack of 3 is only 2 movemennt, 47 attack 10 defense and 132 hp.
The way I see it is that you teach the AI every dirty trick in the book. Customize some AIs to prefer certain tactics, and add a little random magic. Then you can scale back the list of tricks based on the AI difficulty. Level 1 militia is there to stop random weak encounters from defeating your city. Adding a single well designed garrison unit and/or city improvements can help a lot in defense without having to station a champion or sovereign. Spearmen are particularly effective. I m
AI should automatically declare war on players of opposing faction. It's what I would do. :P AI should know which monster spawners to leave along and farm when they get strong and which to kill right away. For example, farm butchermen in the hopes of a maul weapon dropping. AI should purposefully trigger strong monsters near enemy territory and run away or suicide (preferably with expendable units). Really evil AIs will powerlevel strong monters near enemy territor