Winning strategys?

[Vynd]

I think that castling can work, but only for some nations and only if you make it a major part of your strategy from the start. You need to plan for the fact that, at least temporarily, you'll be short of gold for building troops and commanders. That'll slow down your research and leave you vulnerable to attack by someone who is spending his money on troops. But you can mitigate this by taking a good combat Pretender and concentrating your early research on getting you research enhancing items. (Or by taking a good research Pretender and concentrating your early research on summoning spells.)

In any event, you shouldn't even think about this sort of strategy if you want to build large numbers of national troops or (to a lesser extent) commanders. Also, as Tuidjy pointed out, it only approaches being practical if you take a cheap castle. And while they will keep your temples from getting burned down, Watchtowers and Mausoleums aren't really much good at stopping determined attacks. Once the fighting kicks into gear you're going to need some sort of method to save your beseiged castles fast, before they fall. Fliers, teleporters, cloud trapezers... something. So your nation needs to be capable of that sort of thing.

In sum, madcastling with Ulm is probably a bad idea, but it could work with, say, Caelum, or Mictlan.

[Boron]

Vynd said:
In sum, madcastling with Ulm is probably a bad idea, but it could work with, say, Caelum, or Mictlan.

uhm with ulm the watchtower is imho a good idea :
you can build spies quickly or 2-3 mastersmith / turn early on .
this only works with a 300 gold castle .


i would say chosing the watchtower is with most nations a good choice because it costs 0 designpoints and you can build lots of .
the extragoldincome from admin 40 compared to admin 10 is lousy : +20% instead +5% for watchtower .
thats not so impressive because you soon build additional watchtowers and with a castle you would not have your second + third castle as quick which results in 2 / 3 mages soon / turn if they are cheap or 2 mages + e.g. one spy

so while not real strategies :
-watchtower is with most nations a good choice because of the above mentioned reasons
-clamhoarding is very profitable + lategame combined with wish very good .
-raiding + taxes to 200% in war in enemy territory is almost always good
-caelum: read the why no love for caelum thread , i agree there with stormbinder/cohen that caelum is probably overpowered a bit

gandalf put it very wise : you have to find the combination of nation/theme , pretender , research and scales what fits your playstyle best .

but my above mentioned 3 "ministragegies" can be used with almost every nation and help every nation that can use them.

[Vynd]

I held up Ulm as an example of a bad nation to try and castle with because I am assuming that anyone who takes Ulm wants to be able to build Ulmish troops. That's pretty much all base Ulm has going for it, IMHO (but that's a totally different thread).

Anyway, here is what I was trying to get across, without the nation-specific example: Don't plan on combining Watch Towers and madcastling and also building large numbers of troops. Especially not if the troops require large amounts of resources.

[Tannath]

Thanks for all your answers.

It's really good to hear all that.

I play the game mostly for fun, but of course I try to win, and it would be really bad if strategy "x" of "y" if correctly played would only be defeated by the same strategy.