[das123]

Thank you all for the comments. It seem generally I should focus on expanding unless I have a good reason. I tend not to mess much with the scales when I set up my pretender.

Also, I usually set the starting indies at 7 or 8 difficulty so most games I play are difficult to expand every turn.

In the game mentioned I was playing as Vanheim against Ermor (EA) and it took me a while to build a strong army. I wasn't worried so much about the loss of income because when I got going my army would only lose about 10% compared to Ermor's.