Quote:
Originally Posted by arnob
Impressive !
Now, I know why I'm still a noob
Arnob
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There are quite several tricks that we all need to learn, it's much better if we share experiences here, that make the learning curve much faster.
For example, several new players ignore the fact that in your first turn, it's often the best play to put taxes at 150% in your capitol and put your commander to patrol to fight unrest, instead of becoming a prophet. That's true often for all non-blessed nations, the impulse you get from that extra half a turn in gold is better than the slight increase in combat efficiency that 1 smite per turn gives against indies. Of course, this might prove false depending on your nations, several nations *need* that divine blessing and/or the sermon of courage+smite spam.
Some other common first turn tricks is to attack blindly a province with a scout scripted to retreat. This way you see a perfectly accurate report from one of the province, which may help to decide what to attack in the first turn (your scout get experience and goes into the hall of fame as a side bonus :P)
Other thing that often is overlooked by newbies, is manual taxation. When you start to play, it's common to leave the taxes in "auto", so the game move the taxation acordingly to your unrest. That's suboptimal. First, you can tax 110% most of your provinces. Unless the unrest is 6+, there's no drawback. So you can set all your provinces with unrest 0-4 to 110% taxes, and leave it to 100% taxes when it goes unrest 4-5, without any drawback. Second, the AI overreact to unrest. You clean 1 unrest for each 2% taxes left. So if you have unrest 5, the AI will go tax 90%, to remove 5 unrest. However, with 6 unrest, the AI will go to 80% tax, to remove 10 unrest, That means the first 10% tax gives you 5 unrest removed, and the second 10% tax cut gives you 1 unrest removed, which is not efficient. Third: if you keep all your provinces with unrest 0, you are losing the benefit of several good events (those that lower unrest)
Another common mistake is to forget to raise Province Defense in every conquered province. An undefended province is vulnerable to even a scout attack. PD 1-2 cost next to nothing and avoid this. The best way to never forget this is combining it with the manual tax: go to Nation Overview (in the statistic section) and check every province has Def >0 and every province that has unrest <5 is set to 110% tax.
Then an often overlooked aspect of the game for new players is long term planning. Often we tend to do what is "needed" for the next turn, without looking what is needed 2-3 turns in advance. One good example of this is castle building. If you recruit every turn everything you can, you often can't build a castle in the first turns. That is a very big hindrance for middlegame, you HAVE to be building a castle before year 1 is over. Same goes with site searching: often we don't put mages on site searching becouse "we really need that extra 6 research *this turn*". This leads to midgames where you have research, but nothing to do with it becouse you have a lack of gems.