[Edratman]

The nation choices above are all good choices. You can pick many others, but I do recommend you stay away from blod nations. That's a complication that you can learn later on. One great way to start is to look though the nation guide sticky and pick a nation with a guide and follow the guide.

I would choose one of the prepackaged maps and set number of opponents so that there are about 30 provinces per player. That will allow you to expand through indies for a while and get some feel for the game.

The settings I recommend are AI- normal. Gold, resources and supplies at 300 and research to easy. This allows you, and the AI maximum build capabilities.

You need to learn how to distribute your commander purchases in castles. Trial and error is as good a method as any. This is not Civilization, you cannot do everything at once. You have to learn how to balance your army and commander builds. Castles generate only one commander per turn and you have to choose among battle mage, research mage, priest and military commander. Don't waste a castle turn buying a scout or assassin. The game is based on distributing limited resources and you need to learn how to choose well.

Another mistake I made was buying every indy troop I could. There is a factor called upkeep, look at it as tax, for troops and you will find that wanton purchase of cheap indy troops will erode available gold as the game progresses. The upkeep for sacred troops is less than that of regular troops, so in the long run they are the most efficient purchases. You will be better off just buying the best troops from your castles and filling in with indies for needs. Indy mages are almost always a wise purchase.

Do not fortify provinces away from your border with troops. Use province defense (PD), because PD does not have an associated upkeep. A PD of 10 is a good value.

As for magic use, the forum is the best source for optimal spell useage. The chaps playing MP games continually astonish me with the cleverness of spell useage, so look for these kind of threads.

Pretender creation is in itself a game within the game. Read the guides and follow them to start. Adjust as you learn. Just remember, many of the pretender build guide descriptions are geared to MP, which is an entirely different game with a emphasis on mandatory early expansion that is not necessarily applicable to SP.

Many players say the AI is weak. That is not true. Until you learn to play the game you can expect to lose a lot (I lost every game for 3 weeks). The AI is predictable and exploitable, but not if you play the game like CIV and think you can just amass the largest armies and hammer the opponents.