Basic Multiplayer tips wanted

[jutetrea]

Is there an existing thread? Something less nation specific and more general? I know pretty much everything is situation dependent and diplomacy throws a huge twist on things but there must be some general advice from the veterans.

Assume medium map 15 prov/player (or give an example for small, med, large)

For example?

High prot units worth the resource cost in early expansion to have more leftover troops?

Secure a small/medium border, bulk up and hit with an unbeatable army? Or Keep poking/raiding and then overtax/pillage?

Send mages out early for xp and reduced losses or keep everyone at home for research early?

Mercenaries? worth it with the chance of a wasted bid? Obviously they're worth it short term but is the wasted bid worrisome?

sit tight and bulk or expand quickly and paint yourself as a target?

research site searching spells asap or wait till after either evoc 2-3 or const 2-4?

Play nice early or pick an early target?

Try to form a survivor type alliance or go for the largest alliance you can? Based on geographic or strength? Kill the strongest first or ally with em?

Yup, pretty much all situational... but is there anything that maybe steps outside of nation/age/pretender/dom? Maybe "never do xyz in multiplayer"?

[Micah]

What units you recruit, diplomatic options, and an early game rush are all going to depend on your nation.

Raiding is more important than hitting things with huge armies most of the time, taking castles is generally the only time when you'll want to have a large amount of troops in one place.

Early on mages aren't going to help you do much of anything since nothing is researched, so they should be searching or researching. Bless nations will have ot recruit priests for blessing though.

Mercs are great, but never put yourself in a spot where losing the bid will set you back a turn of expansion.

Early expansion is critical, and being too big means you have a stick to beat people with, which discourages alliances against you, being too small means you're just lunch for one (or more) of your neighbors.

I'm a fan of manual searching, but I'm about the only one I know that likes it, so I don't bother researching the search spells.

And having a good ally helps out a lot, grab one if you can, but I'd avoid a large coalition, since then they can all gang up on you if you get too large. Having just one ally provides a really good reason for them NOT to betray and gang up on you, since I know I'd devote all my energy to making sure my former ally didn't profit from his betrayal once it became clear that I was overmatched by an alliance agaisnt me.

[jutetrea]

Interesting, since I haven't got to the end game of an MP game yet most of my strats are based of SP which, well...just won't work

In regards to raiding, is it generally considered "worth" it to be an annoyance? Taking a province, not defending it, jacking the tax rate, and moving on? Or is it "better" to take it, pillage the heck out of it and then move on if you do not have full scout intelligence of what the enemy will hit you with?

From the above, it seems that early expansion is worth it if you can get big enough to be scary. How about if you can only reach middling status, but in doing so you may provoke attacks?

Stupid, subjective question: how often do you find that people are betrayed by their own coalition? I would think the coalition would work to keep everyone relatively equal and take everyone else out before "resetting" the alliances? Not so?

[quantum_mechani]

jutetrea said:

High prot units worth the resource cost in early expansion to have more leftover troops?

Depends if you have an expander pretender to pick up the slack in early expanding (it will be slower with high rec units).

Secure a small/medium border, bulk up and hit with an unbeatable army? Or Keep poking/raiding and then overtax/pillage?

You always want to maintain raiding if at all possible.

Send mages out early for xp and reduced losses or keep everyone at home for research early?

Keep anything that will keep mages away from research to a minimum.

Mercenaries? worth it with the chance of a wasted bid? Obviously they're worth it short term but is the wasted bid worrisome?

It's usually very worthwhile to big on mercs, but keep in mind your bid must be higher on average if there are a lot of players.

sit tight and bulk or expand quickly and paint yourself as a target?

As long as you don't get a long ways ahead of _everyone_ else in provinces you should generally expand at max speed.

research site searching spells asap or wait till after either evoc 2-3 or const 2-4?

It's generally pretty safe to go for the site search spells right away. Of course, if you see signs of an early war brewing be sure and take note.

Play nice early or pick an early target?

Play nice - it's very hard for an early rush to pay off unless you are much more skilled than your opponent.

Try to form a survivor type alliance or go for the largest alliance you can? Based on geographic or strength? Kill the strongest first or ally with em?

Ally with whoever you can unless you plan to attack them soon or doing so will more or less gauarantee their eventual victory.

Some misc tips:

*Use indy scouts and troop leaders wherever possible, saves fort slots for mages.

*Don't use most low level summons unless you are already in a desperate war.

*Don't try a recruitable assassin strategy, a couple is a great distraction, many is a waste of money.

*Don't use a human rainbow mage, they are quite weak base and difficult to make good use of besides.

*Use decoys - 1 unit far in front and to the side of your main force, to draw arrows and enemies.

*Don't put all your mages in a big clump on the battlefield, spread them around so something unexpected can't kill them all at once.

*Don't try to equip recruitable commanders with stuff to fight in melee unless you are playing a couple very specific nations.

*Pretenders are mostly for fighting in melee, there are very few cases where having them cast spells from the back is useful enough to warrant bringing them.

*Generally, don't use cavalry or low armor (prot 1-10) infantry.

[Velusion]

I'm not a super expert like QM is but...

jutetrea said:
In regards to raiding, is it generally considered "worth" it to be an annoyance? Taking a province, not defending it, jacking the tax rate, and moving on? Or is it "better" to take it, pillage the heck out of it and then move on if you do not have full scout intelligence of what the enemy will hit you with?

Pillage it only if you don't plan on keeping it anytime soon... Usually I just up the tax rate and move on to raid more. Raiding is always useful because it puts them on the defensive and ties up troops they have. Often times you'll find that areas you thought they should just take right back they can't/won't.

jutetrea said:
From the above, it seems that early expansion is worth it if you can get big enough to be scary. How about if you can only reach middling status, but in doing so you may provoke attacks?

Early expansion is extremely important in MP. More areas = more gold = more troops = stronger military = bigger stick. You should always be taking at LEAST one indy province a turn in the early game. Many nations will be taking 2/3 per turn. To answer your question: Middling status is always better than smallish status... you never want to have the smallest empire... it's just a target on your forehead because they know you don't have the gold output to match them troop for troop.

jutetrea said:
Stupid, subjective question: how often do you find that people are betrayed by their own coalition? I would think the coalition would work to keep everyone relatively equal and take everyone else out before "resetting" the alliances? Not so?

Totally depends on the group dynamic and personalities. The larger the coalition the harder it is for it to work. In my experience... once the immediate threat of "super-empire" is gone the coalition falls apart.

[quantum_mechani]

Velusion said:

Pillage it only if you don't plan on keeping it anytime soon...

I would even extend that to not using the pillage command under almost any cicimstances. If you have a military force in enemy territory, it is almost always more productive to simply take another province rather than hang around. 200% taxes works plenty well for disrupting the enemy and gaining a quick cash boost.

[jutetrea]

agree on the pillage, never once used it in SP (or my limited MP)

Good tips.. couple questions on the miscellaneous tips:

Don't use cav or low prot infrantry - beyond the obvious chaff that you expect to die, could you elaborate? Even high prot cav with a lance/hoof?

regarding infantry I always thought spear/repel was good, recently there was a series of posts where they actually did the math and it looks like crap. What is generally regarded as better, glaive, broadsword, morningstar (few) or what? Is having a shield always better than not unless you have a 8+ or 9+ 2H?

Does the comment regarding human rainbows include lich/master?

regarding decoys...is more better? 1-5 clumps of 1-5 units to draw fire/melee?

Thanks for the tips folks, keep em coming... diplomacy bits are great too. Obviously everyone is different and group dynamics will rule, but general tips are still good.

[TwoBits]

quantum_mechani said:

*Use decoys - 1 unit far in front and to the side of your main force, to draw arrows and enemies.

Does this generally work? I like using decoy units myself, by I often find the battle AI ignores groups of less than five (meaning, they don't seem to shoot at that lone infantryman out in front, but at the big group further back).

Any opinions on the optimum use of decoys?

[Sir_Dr_D]

Qm, about your comments on rainbow pretenders, I disagree.Isn't the following tru about rainbow pretenders

1) It will give you a big gem income at the beginng of the game, in all paths of magic, not just the ones your nation specializes in. Even if you have no use for gems in some of the paths, you can likely trade them for the ones that you need.
2) Even if you just had one of every path, that would still be enough to cast some battle changing spells such as wind guide, and fire arrows. These can be handy if your nation can not normally cast them.
3) Two of every path will allow you to build a number of path boosting items, to raise your pretender to 3 or 4 in the paths. And since you are also likely collecting gems that your nation can not noramlly use, it is easy to empower. Now you are at 5 or 6 in a number of path and your pretender has a lot of options in what it can do.
4) Isn't bringing a size 6 pretender into battle, painting a big target on it that says 'zap me with spells'. With a human size pretender you don't have to worry about being cursed, horror marked, soul slayed, or decayed, as long as you have some troops in front of you.


I find both rainbow's and large pretenders have their uses.For variety I try to have a different type of pretender each game.

[MaxWilson]

TwoBits said:

Does this generally work? I like using decoy units myself, by I often find the battle AI ignores groups of less than five (meaning, they don't seem to shoot at that lone infantryman out in front, but at the big group further back).

Any opinions on the optimum use of decoys?

Well, it's worth knowing that according to the manual pg. 61, target orders (Fire Archers, Attack Cavalry, etc.) except for Closest pick a random enemy and its squad. This means that a large squad will be picked most of the time, so one little archer decoy is almost never going to be selected by a "Target Archers" order. This has two implications:

1.) You can, if you wish, split a targetted group up instead of decoying. 1 decoy and 39 archers won't work, but 5 groups of 8 mean that if there's just one huge squad of enemy archers they'll keep firing at their chosen group until all 8 are dead, thus keeping your casualties down to 20% at most. I haven't tried this and I don't have time to test it right now, but it follows from the mechanics.

2.) Decoys work against "Attack/Fire Closest" because it is the closest squad which is attacked, not some random close unit and its squad. They might potentially work against Attack Rearmost except that the rearmost unit isn't reliably detected anyway (by design) so your decoy can get overlooked.

Against indies I have found that a single decoy five squares ahead of my main force often diverts fire. Seems like it's always worth at least trying a decoy if you know there will be missile troops, in case they *are* set to "Fire Closest."

-Max