[alexti]

Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:
What advice can vets offer for newer players such as myself to defend against early more powerful neighbors who choose to be agressive, without crippling the crucial starting expansion?

I don't know what vets can offer, but the most straightforward protection is to make sure that your neighbours aren't more powerful. I can see several ways to get yourself into a trouble early on:

- start with non-combat pretender and concentrate on magic. If you plan on doing research rush, take a combat-capable pretender to have some protection, if you need specialized pretender for your strategy, then you have to postpone your intense research and build some regular force first.

- hire mercenaries and expand quickly. Few turns later mercenaries leave, got killed or flee and after spending money on them you have no regular army and newly conquered lands didn't bring enough income yet to compensate for the mercenaries cost. Now your neighbour can enjoy a helping of undefended lands

- suffer too much losses attacking indies. It causes the same problem as scenario with mercenaries.

If, for whatever reason you still got yourself into a trouble, there's still a diplomacy to find a way out. You can pay to your neighbour to stay in peace, so that he will prefer to collect gold/gems from you while fighting someone else. Or you can bribe another nation to ally with you. Another popular method is to say that you're dedicating all your forces to the war with Ermor, nobody likes them. If you are really desperate, you may have neither Ermor near you nor forces to dedicate to the war with Ermor, but still try your luck by claiming the same. Early on, your neighbour may not be aware of who is where yet