Raiddinn

I was just playing a game (expert) myself and I was doing the worst because I got a really bad start. Ythril was hurting me pretty bad and razed one of my 3 cities. I beat one of their main armies, but they had another right by me. I had to take my units into a city to heal. Well, I had tamed a hoarder spider and that was really helping me defend against them, except when my units went into the city it poofed into non-existence. I don't know if it is su

I played only one game on ridiculous and I didn't do anything unusual compared to what I do in lower difficulties. I just played smart and did the best I could. Yithril was a big pain in my area that game, they even conquered one of my cities early on. I managed to take my city back and eventually take a few of their cities as well. Mostly what I was doing was setting my units to defend and I had a henchman with Air magic go around hasting my sovereign an

If the forest is at a diagonal from the starting city, you can build a lumber mill in that city. Same for river, as the other poster mentioned. AFAIK, the snaking mod just changes the rule so that you need to start within 2 squares of a forest/river instead of just within 1 square of it. I don't use this mod or any other mod, so someone else might know better. Even if you only use Air + Life, having 2 enchantments on your first city means you can use +initiativ

I can already check that I am done before I end the turn with auto-turn on. I just have to make my unit actions occur last on my turns. The only really big differences that I have experienced are: 1) All your units are all in cities and you try to take one stack out of a city. Sometimes the unit you kick out will idiotically just walk right back into the city it just came out of. That will pass the turn if no units are outside of cities with turns remaining A

I guess I value elegance pretty highly. I would rather there not be a difference if the difference isn't one that is going to markedly change play. I think I would still do everything pretty much the same if I could make a pioneer for 5 production and 30 population, because the most important cost remains intact. I would rather not waste the UI space in that case. The 5/5 outpost only pioneer would dramatically change the way I play, though, and it would theref

I don't think I would make any pioneers that build outposts only if they still make me lose 30 population, even if they cost less production. Now if they only costed 5 production and 5 population, I would definitely make those.

Good effort trying to make a playthrough that can help ease people into the game. Some other considerations for beginners reading the comments that they might want to consider for their own games: 1) If you move the militia 2 spaces and the spearman 1 space (or vice versa) before moving the hero, the hero can make a city anywhere at a distance of 2 on turn 1, because one of your units still has movement left and that will prevent auto-turn from engaging. Then you can use

I would take Air by itself over both Fire and Death. Also wouldn't need Death Worship anymore if you have Air, can trade that for a more powerful choice as well.

Death and Fire magics don't really do a lot to mitigate unlucky starts, that's true. Why not just play with Life and Earth or some other combination that has a lot less downside potential?

Commanders are just really good. One of the things about commanders is that they counter a lot of the split. You can give the group +40% exp for a 4 level investment. They also counter enemies trying to do any crazy assassin tricks. They also pretty much guarantee that you play first, and whatever unit you want can take extra turns. Potentially your whole army can take extra turns when they are high level. Maybe if you setup an assassin right it can tak

I just wanted to say that I have found a lot of instances where the additional growth was worth the consulate upgrade. A lot of times on border cities I will hide an outpost behind my city and give it upgrades that affect combat to make it harder for the enemy to conquer it. The production border fortresses have is less valuable than the production pretty much any place else, so finding time for Consulates isn't the hardest thing to do. With those sorts of cit

[quote who="BuzuBuzu" reply="8" id="3421351"] Any of you guys know how the AI chooses which units to build? But how does it choose between units within those very broad categories? Does it always try and build the most powerful units if there's enough resources available? Does it always build from one design or try and get a mix of units with different traits? Does it always ignore the generic unit designs if there are any custom ones?[/quote] As

They are more likely to accept if you get your main stack near their last city. Not sure how close yours was. It also helps to have a score much greater than theirs, which is normal if you took a lot of their cities so they just have 1 left. I never played on anything less than challenging and they still surrendered plenty of times to me with just 1 city left. Sometimes it takes an extra turn or 2 to get them to agree to it, but they pretty much always cave when

Rabe, do you have manual building placement turned on? "Snaking" your cities, manually placing buildings to take maximum advantage of the environment/rules, is a huge benefit. When you extend your cities into a long straight line, it can shave a lot of turns of travel time off in the course of the average game. Also, being able to put the iron/shards/horses/etc inside your city walls is a very good advantage. The only way to do this without manual is just to pray

I would take the 2/3/4, the 3/3/3, and the 4/3/2 in that order of preference. I would make it a Fortress regardless of which of those I ended up getting. It is really rare that I choose anything other than Fortress for my first city, because it takes the longest to get up to speed. If you choose Town or Conclave for your first city it might take a really long time before you can get your Fortress up to speed whenever you get around to making it. Having a high mat

What I meant is that it is advantageous anyway for me to wait until turn 200 to attack. For that matter my victory is a tiny bit surer if I do it on turn 201 instead of turn 200 and a great deal surer if I do it on turn 220 instead of turn 200. Waiting is a benefit to me rather than a benefit to the AI. Instead, the worst time for me to go to war with them would logically (and in reality) be turn 1. If I survived the rush I would likely be so far behind as to get

If their production varies inversely according to the map size then the best way to help the AI is to play the smallest possible maps. Indeed, the smallest possible maps give the player the greatest likelihood to get a bad start. That by itself gives the AI plenty of win %.

I find that the best way for me to win is for me to not engage the opponents until really late in the game. AIs would have no chance if they didn't declare war on me until turn 200. I don't know if I have ever lost a game where I survived past turn 100. I think it can only penalize the AIs to drag the game out. Generally speaking if their power graphs are linear and cap early vs my graphs that are quadratic and have no cap, every turn I delay helps to e

We obviously play on different maps. I never see stuff taking 50 turns for the AI to make, but it's hard for the AI to get more than 4 or 5 cities on the tiny maps that I play on. With me they keep reasonable production speeds and still never go anywhere in terms of power.

I posted a few times about a game I had where the AI went absolutely nuts in the power ranks. It recently came up again in another thread and I was thinking about the differences between that game and all the other games I have played where they generally perform terribly. The notable things about that game that I can think of were: 1) The AI had half the map uncontested 2) They were playing a race I designed 3) When I played that race, in the game I desi

The thing that throws me off is that the AIs seem to be completing things at a reasonable speed when I look at their cities. If they were grinding their economy to a complete halt by not building production buildings and not building unrest buildings then it would seem like they would get to the point where they couldn't complete anything in any reasonable amount of time. To support the viewpoint that AIs play by the same rules, I can say that the few times the AIs do real

The thing about research is that more of it is only really useful if you are being bottlenecked by research. I just don't think that research is going to be the bottleneck very often. My production always seems to be behind my research regardless if I add to research or not. That being said, I am the kind of person that likes to produce buildings as they become available. For instance, if I want my main fortress to always produce buildings that increase pro

I am actually interested in the economics of workshops for the AI. Is it really that beneficial for them to even make workshops? A faction has to obviously spend time to build the things and it adds to a base of production and pays itself back over time. Does it really impact the AI? Are we sure that the AI is producing things according to the same rules the players are? It sure seems to me like the AI produces a whole lot more than I do at the baseline.<

Little Willie may have some serious personality issues, but he is at least in the ballpark on one thing as much as I hate to say it. There are a couple different game plans that stand out as clearly better than the rest. The game is just designed to reward players that play according to those plans. For instance, having a lot of cities is really good in this game. The AI picks on people that are the lowest on score first and the buildings inside cities add greatly

I play exclusively on tiny maps with 3 AIs and I use lots of henchmen. It can be kinda cool to make lots of commanders and turn them into mini cities with max gold and some research each. If I didn't run out of fame I would put 9 of those in every city. Seriously, though. I just got done playing a game where I was using 1x mage, 1x defender, 3x commanders, 3x horse melees, and 1x horse archer in my main stack. All of the heroes were about lvl 30 becau