Need advice - MA Nation, Strategy and Pretender

[Rytek]

You really should have Astral or Air on your pretender. You will really regret it mid-game. And if you go with Astral you need a minimum of 6 because of mind duel.
Counter his tiger blesseds with your regular calvary and archers. lances should put a hurting on F9 tigers due to no defense, although your losses will be big in return, you should be able to out produce him.

[Rytek]

You should be able to grab any early turn mercs as well. On turn 1 you can crank your tax to 150%+ (no unrest at 150) and patrol with your starting army while making your starting consort your prophet. recruit a minister of magic and as many composite bows as you can. On turn 2 you have a choice of another minister and more bows and having around 800 gold left over for mercs, or you can take an imperial alchemist and take the 10 or so composite bows to reinforce your army on turn 3 and still have a good chunk of change leftover for mercs. Then use the imperial alchemist to sight search.

[Zeldor]

IT is good to learn to play without mercs Though surely TC can use it in the beginning.

IF you are not going for SC I think it is really worth making pretender dormant. You could really use that points. Either earth or nature [or even both] at level 3-4 to cast some globals can really help [you could surely make use of GoH with TC and it is really hard to get it with national mages]. 1-2 levels in fire and death could also help for magic sites and items, but it really depends what you want

[Rytek]

Well, mercs are part of the game. And vfb will have to decide on buying 100g tigers or mercs. If he is going with the F9 bless then he cant afford the mercs. And if he buys the mercs to prevent TC from getting them then he is not using his early F9 strat..

[FedSlayer]

vfb is very crafty. I don't know how he is going to handle those negative tiles and raise an army over the long run. Monkeys are cheap, yes? He should have gold but not so many resources with those tiles. And bad luck!

I'm playing a SP test game on the 6 lands map with an aggessive and better than standard AI for the Monkeys. 4 Standard random AI players and myeslf as TC. TC is doing real well, but half the AIs daclaired war on TC in the first 6-8 turns. Found a special (lab and good recruitable mages) in the first province I searched (turn 4).

vfb has, in the games we've played, gone for SCs/strong thugs of one sort or another. He likes construction.

[FedSlayer]

Yes can't get it to work, I've tried 2 downloadables MS Vistual Machine & mIRC, the Java at gamesurge and ircatwork.

Vista is such a wonderful product!!!

vfb tried to help but he is not a windows user. Uses some freeware OS from Sweden or maybe Rumania.

[Zeldor]

AI is extremely pathetic when playing monkey nations. You need to set it to impossible and even then it tends to make really stupid things. You can help a bit by making pretender and then switching it to AI. You should easily kill all mighty or even impossible AIs with TC.

[Sombre]

Fed: Why do you give up on irc? Can't get it working?