Help needed: How to defend? / Guides to nation

[thejeff]

Short answer: Expand faster. You should be able to average a province a turn for the first year and increase that as you can field more armies. As long as you are just take indy provinces at least.

Boosting the independent strength level will slow the AI down more than it does you, so that helps you get to a decent strength before running into other nations. Try playing a larger map.(Not more nations, just more provinces per)

PD will stop raids and some attack spells. Don't expect it to stop real armies. You'll need to meet those with armies and mages of your own. PD backed up with real troops, especially mages and archers, if your PD doesn't have any, does help. The PD serve as a disposable meat shield to give the archers and mages time to do their work.

The AI chooses to attack based largely on it's estimate of your strength, which is based mostly on troop numbers. PD does count toward this, so that helps. Having more provinces will let you build more PD in them to boost your numbers and give you more gold to buy real troops. The bulk of defense is reactive.

Strategically, take chokepoints and aim for short borders. Build forts in those chokepoints. I'd do that, rather than spend a ton of money on PD.

Most importantly, as said above, you're expanding too slowly. With more provinces/income, you'll have a lot more options. Take your nation and play through the first 10 turns or so a few times, trying different strategies and different pretender designs. Find what lets you expand quickly.

Bless strategies.

Awake SC pretenders. (For the simplest, try a no magic, dom9 Wyrm. He can take pretty much any indies except knights solo from turn 1.)

Random thoughts largely, but it's hard to offer specific strategies without specific nations.