Quote:
Originally Posted by thejeff
My comment was about Squirreloid's approach.
Thus the 6-8 provinces by the end of the first year. For that to even begin to viable, you have to be unopposed in the seas.
Sure, you do whatever it takes to take the seas, but it's much better to take most of them from indies, not wait and take them from opposition.
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Well, that was also with a total lack of resources devoted to early expansion as well. One turn of buying units for expansion. You can do much better and still stick pretty much to what I was advocating by buying regular units for 3-4 turns. I basically decided to sit down and play a game where i bought just mages all game. You'll note I said the MA/LA guide was an ok place to start for early expansion, I just wanted to see how a pure mage set-up fared, for theoretical purposes.
(1) Crazy amount of research in year 1 without the pretender doing most of it.
(2) Plenty of gem income, even with few provinces.
(3) Had a clam forger (W3 empowered to N1) and an earth forger (empowered to E3) mage by the end of year 2. (Almost didn't have the second one. Odds of getting an E2 are actually ~1/15 because of the 10% chance at an extra +1 WESD, but that still means you could look at a lot of mages before getting one).
(4) About 6k gold from Lucky 3 over the course of the first year alone. Now, that includes a 3k event, which you don't expect to see, but i'm guessing your first year expectation with lucky is >4k gold from events even with a half-dozen territories. That's rather... substantial.
Basically, my LA R'lyeh build could afford not to expand very fast. While I haven't tried this in MP, I imagine this is useful if people are going to get disturbed should you make a push for land provinces. (You want to secure water faster than that, but you probably don't want to snag ~20ish provinces advocated for indie expansion rate since that will necessitate a large land holding that might provoke a war before you're really ready for one).
Edit
And to my advantage, I already had the research and the mages for combat support by the middle of year 2. (3 W1E1S3D1 mages with crystal shields). Evoc 5 by the middle of year 2 for Gift of the Heavens was both rather early and quite devastating for my move to land. So a 'pure' mage build is looking at being slow out of the gates, but rapidly catching up when its mages come online early. Since you'll also have ramped up the freespawn production by then with increasing dominion in many of your territories, its also far easier to find the chaffe to field for those mages.
More Edit
Ok, maybe i'll try a remote site searching version of the same to see how my gem totals compare at year 1 and year 2 end, and how my research compares. Also, how my dominion spread compares, since a mobile pretender will spread dominion more widely (which helps with generating those freespawn).