Looking for tips from the pros

[Endoperez]

It's good if you're going to fight a lot in that province, and keep on winning. Human players probably won't assault it many times with forces that aren't good enough to beat you. If it's a chokepoint, go for it. If it's not, he'll go around it. If he goes around it, or you take a few provinces and the front of the war moves, you can't move the PD elsewhere.

For some nations, it's worth the money, but it's always situational.

[sector24]

Two very good suggestions already made:

1) The computer will only attack you when it perceives the gain of at least 1 province. If you pump the PD on your borders and/or leave small armies in those provinces, it goes a long way towards keeping the peace.

2) I think you went into blood research too early. I noticed you have 0 conjuration which generally means no thugs. If you are going to have a smaller army graph by recruiting higher quality troops, then you need to quickly move to thugs and SCs. If not, then it's in your best interest to get lots of slaves and 10/4 archers and other cheap units to pump up your graph.

For what it's worth, I have lost lots of promising games in the same way you did. The trick is to either change the map options (harder independants, higher mountain %, different map dimensions like a tower map) or quickly advance your magic because you can't beat their massive chaff armies unless you build equally large chaff armies yourself, which you typically don't want to do.

I think the people on the forums that say that AI is a joke change the map options in the player's favor, like lots of magic sites or only having 4 opponents. It's very easy to divide and conquer when there are so few nations. I play small maps with 20 opponents and usually default settings, and this type of thing happens all the time because everyone gets crunched up against each other quickly, and you always have the smallest army graph. These types of situations are winnable, but you have to have the thugs/SCs summoned and equipped before the 3rd nation declares war on you or you typically can't recover.

[Folket]

sector24 said:
Two very good suggestions already made:

1) The computer will only attack you when it perceives the gain of at least 1 province. If you pump the PD on your borders and/or leave small armies in those provinces, it goes a long way towards keeping the peace.

2) I think you went into blood research too early. I noticed you have 0 conjuration which generally means no thugs. If you are going to have a smaller army graph by recruiting higher quality troops, then you need to quickly move to thugs and SCs. If not, then it's in your best interest to get lots of slaves and 10/4 archers and other cheap units to pump up your graph.

For what it's worth, I have lost lots of promising games in the same way you did. The trick is to either change the map options (harder independants, higher mountain %, different map dimensions like a tower map) or quickly advance your magic because you can't beat their massive chaff armies unless you build equally large chaff armies yourself, which you typically don't want to do.

I think the people on the forums that say that AI is a joke change the map options in the player's favor, like lots of magic sites or only having 4 opponents. It's very easy to divide and conquer when there are so few nations. I play small maps with 20 opponents and usually default settings, and this type of thing happens all the time because everyone gets crunched up against each other quickly, and you always have the smallest army graph. These types of situations are winnable, but you have to have the thugs/SCs summoned and equipped before the 3rd nation declares war on you or you typically can't recover.

I have won four front wars aaginst impossible AIs without using bless strategies and I allways play default settings. But I would say that blood magic is a little to slow for that.

Long time since I played the AI I should do that some time.

[Baalz]

Yeah, the thing is suggestions for SP games basically break down into two categories.

1) General strategy. You seem to have this down and suggestions you get are going to be along the lines of tweaks, not overhauls. You've laid out a very viable EA Mictlan early game strategy. Unfortunately, playing against the harder AIs means you're not playing on a level field, you can't just be better you need to be much better so you can kill off many times what you lose just to push even. This unfortunately means playing a good game is often not enough to win, particularly if you get placed in a bad position.

2) Tricks to exploit the AI - use a lot of PD for no purpose other than to fool it, create thugs that the AI can't cope with, etc.

Unfortunately category 2 is really what you usually need to do to fight against multiple harder AI's - by the time they team up on you they just field too many troops to "fight fairly". This is unfortunate because once you learn a few tricks that the AI just can't deal with it does become way too easy.