MA T'ien Ch'i - a little of this, a little of that and BAM!

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

Thank you for the elaborate and convincing response

I could be argumentative and say things like - "put more magic on your pretender", "get a minor bless", "take an awake SC with great scales apart from sloth", "Crank up many castles so sloth wouldn't prevent you from mass recruiting". Instead of saying any such things I think I'll take your excellent advise and just setup two SP games - one that will follow your advise to the letter and a 2nd that would dump those sloth points on something else (I'll try to come up with something good). I suspect it is very likely that the first game will look up much better - Regardless, this is the first nation that I ever consider taking prod-3 a valid choice. Up until now I have never taken anything other than sloth 3, be it SP or MP. I thank you for helping me see the good side of the production scale.

Cool, let us know how it goes. A couple suggestions:

As much as possible you should match your troops vs enemy troops even during initial indie expansion. Send composite bows vs barbarians, lizards, tribal archers, light infantry, etc. Send Imperial Horsemen or mixed infantry (glaives & tower shields) against heavier infantry and against strong indies (heavy cav farmlands, etc.) send critical mass of Imperial Cavalry (with some tower shield chaff to catch lances for the real big indie masses). You can really have a pretty good expansion, but you'll have a hard time doing it efficiently with homogeneous expansion groups.

Once you've got 3-4 good expansion parties (depending on how many indie territories you expect to be able to take) stop recruiting anything other than ministers of magic for a few turns. The gold will pile up incredibly fast allowing you to plop up around a fort per turn.

If you're comparing my suggested dormant master lich, once he wakes up send him out site searching, specifically to the territories you've put up castles. This is a great way to get at least a minimal dominion to push your production scales without building many temples.

Speaking of which, make sure you push your fabulous order 3/production 3 scales to every province you own, temples pay for themselves pretty fast if they're keeping your territories in dominion.