Opening Gambit

[Mightypeon]

Indeed.
Also, concering the AI, put 10 PD into every province as soon as you conquer it. It really makes them more peacefull. The beeline making happenes when an AI scout sees a Human province with less then 10 PD. The AI thinks "Yay free province" and beelines for it.

[rdonj]

With regards to hiring mages early, the contribution of a single mage over the long term is fairly irrelevant as a consideration. What you need to be worried about are your immediate goals. One mage won't make a huge relative difference between you and other nations. What will make a difference is your early fighting strength. If you can hire non-mage commanders that will significantly increase your early fighting strength, then it can still be a valid purchase. On the other hand, you don't want to purchase non-mage commanders if they'll interfere with your ability to research critical early spells. Basically, do the math first.

[triqui]

Originally Posted by rdonj

With regards to hiring mages early, the contribution of a single mage over the long term is fairly irrelevant as a consideration. What you need to be worried about are your immediate goals. One mage won't make a huge relative difference between you and other nations. What will make a difference is your early fighting strength. If you can hire non-mage commanders that will significantly increase your early fighting strength, then it can still be a valid purchase. On the other hand, you don't want to purchase non-mage commanders if they'll interfere with your ability to research critical early spells. Basically, do the math first.

1 mage in the long turn means 80 points of research (which are two level 1 paths, or 1 path from level 1 to level 2) in the first year, or 160 in the second year. If that's relevant or not, that's up to you to decide.

However, I was not advocating against expanding, I was advocating against buying scouts. Early expansion makes up for any research lost, becouse it allows you to get a bigger country, that it's the same that having extra castles, and extra castles mean extra research. There are a lot of situations where you wouldn't buy a researcher in the first turn. For example, with Ermor MA, you are almost bound to use your first mages as commanders, as you need mages to carry undeads. Several nations with heavy bless strategy need to buy a priest in the first turns as well, and some nations expand using SC chasis (like Nieflheim with jarls).

Early expansion is the single most important thing in the first turns, bar none. However, a lot of nations (most of them), need not to wast any castle turns on that. You can expand to your first province with your initial army, then recruit an indy commander there, and go back to get your second army when it's ready in turn 3. In the meanwhile, you should be buying a mage+troops each turn, if you can afford, or just troops, if you can't. That bassically depends on how cheap are your researchers.

[Starbelly Geek]

Originally Posted by Mightypeon

Indeed.
Also, concering the AI, put 10 PD into every province as soon as you conquer it. It really makes them more peacefull. The beeline making happenes when an AI scout sees a Human province with less then 10 PD. The AI thinks "Yay free province" and beelines for it.

Someone (I forget who) determined that the AI's thresholds for deciding how strong your PD is are 6, 11, 16, 21, not the multiples of 5 or 10. If that is true, the AI does not see a difference between a 6 and a 10 province defense.