Musings on getting the most out of the early game

[thejeff]

quantum_mechani said:
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I usually (unless, say, I'm surrounded by heavy cavalry provinces) move out my starting army plus whatever I built on the first turn to start conquering on turn two.

What strength indies do you usually play with?

I usually play high (8 or 9) and it takes awhile to build up an army tough enough to take even the weaker provinces.

As for prophets, while Smite is nice, I usually find that getting the full army blessing and moral spells at Holy 4 is at least as important. So I won't usually prophetize a starting commander unless the nation only has Holy 2 priests. Getting divine blessing is especially important if you're playing a bless strategy, obviously.

[Boron]

Forgot one thing regarding sitesearching:

Unless you play a <40% site frequency game Pythium should sitesearch via accashic. This way they save valuable magetime.
Arco can also consider using Accashic.

[WraithLord]

Boron said:
Forgot one thing regarding sitesearching:

Unless you play a <40% site frequency game Pythium should sitesearch via accashic. This way they save valuable magetime.
Arco can also consider using Accashic.

I'm not so sure about that. Astral gems can be put to so many good uses, especially by Pythium and Arco. They can be used for teleportation, spying, mind hunting, wishing and so forth. IMO With so many good uses for astral it's better to waste the other gem for remote site searching.

[thejeff]

The main advantage of Akashic is in mage time. So that's a trade off. Time/gems. I usually don't use it.

The other advantage is that it can find sites of paths you don't have mages or enough gems to remote search for. Some of those sites might provide mages capable of searching that path, or at least the gems to fund searching.

[shovah]

best to use it when you cant afford to send out your mages/need a type you cant find

[quantum_mechani]

thejeff said:

What strength indies do you usually play with?

I usually play high (8 or 9) and it takes awhile to build up an army tough enough to take even the weaker provinces.

As for prophets, while Smite is nice, I usually find that getting the full army blessing and moral spells at Holy 4 is at least as important. So I won't usually prophetize a starting commander unless the nation only has Holy 2 priests. Getting divine blessing is especially important if you're playing a bless strategy, obviously.

Most often I play at indies 6, but usually even at indies 8-9 you can find some easy indies to pick off while you build up force.

Taking the most extreme case of turn one patrolling (Caelum or Mackaka on 200%), I worked out some numbers. With all neutral scales they would gain 160-170 extra income that turn, in exchange for 15 gold per turn income. I can certainly see why someone would be unwilling to take that step, it adds up to a lot over the course of the game. On the other hand, by the time the lost income really starts to add up, it is a drop in the bucket anyway, while on turn two it is a huge windfall, likely to snowball simply from gaining the 'turn advantage' over other players.