Early Expansion Question

[Velusion]

Ubercat said:
How do players maintain an expansion rate of 2+ provinces per turn early in the game? With the initial limitations of resources and gold, I typically don't have what I consider a reasonable beginning army until turn 3 or so. Plus, I often recruit a leader suitable for prophethood on turn one, raise him on turn two, and then he's ready to go with my first army on turn three. At that point you have no other troops and it will take another 3-5 turns to get a second force big enough to attack indies.

Bottom line, I don't see how you can have 12+ provinces on turn 12 without an awake SC pretender, or elephants.

Here's a related question. How would MA Shinumaya have the most provinces, about 7 turns into a giant MP game? Aren't their basic goblin troops just fast dying chaff? Isn't that too early to have their good summoned troops going?

See I usually base most of my pretneder/design around surviving and thriving in the early game. So if my nation doesn't have great troops like elephants or I'm not going the strong bless route I'll usually take an awake pretender. Another plan is to take advantage of any good mercs out there. One way or another I'll be able to expand fast .

In exchange for this I usually have below average scales (but never really horrible ones). And sometimes due to bad events or just bad luck I can't expand as quickly as I wanted to.

I'm sure not everyone agrees with my hyper-expansion ways though...