[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Boron:
4th : you most likely get your first +500 or +1000 gold event in the first 5 turns .

I don't think so. As Zen may recall, I used to think that Disorder 3 / Luck 3 was a good idea quite some time ago. I still rarely saw a really great income event in the first ten turns; maybe in the first 20. But I _did_ see temples and labs burning to the ground, and I did watch 40% of my capital's population wiped out on turn 2 or 3. IMO, you're not going to get your income that way.

In addition - with death 3, Disorder 3, you're going to have a good amount of events killing population, plus a steady decrease of population. Guess what? When you run out of population in your capital, it's going to be hard to recruit there. Okay - you think to only recruit CMs there, 1 resource point, and even with 0 population you seem to still have 2 resource points.

Still - it's going to be hard to have the income for it, especially as you have to rebuild temples and labs.

with a vq + really few archers + 1 or 2 celestial masters using fire flies and the like you still can expand 2 provinces / turn .

Have you been playing with the default settings? Independent strength 3, some archers and fire flies may be able to take some of the provinces, but you get up to indie 6 (seemingly the most common MP setting), archers and fire flies are going to get butchered. Also, your VQ isn't going to expand so well either until you get a fair amount of research done - alteration 3, maybe some enchantment.

If you manage to get those 10+ provinces you talk about, thus allowing you to recruit some researchers and get a gem income going, you might do okay, but that's a big if.