[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by Reverend Zombie:
What are minimum goals that I should be trying for in order to survive to mid-game in terms of:

[snip]

In the early turns, maximizing your income should be your primary goal - with gold you can buy mages to research and/or locate magic sites, you can buy troops to expand faster and thus gather even more gold, and you can raise buildings to strengthen your emerging empire.

There are a few cases where you need to push reasonably fast for a specific research target - typically for a SC pretender to be able to buff him/her/itself before a battle.

So basically it's (5) first - which typically means (1) since these 2 points are strongly correlated, and sometimes (2) at the same time - which may require (3) if you aren't good at research, but OFC (3) requires (5). When you're good at (5), the rest should be easy to get.