Re: Immaculate-002: Late Age for Noobs (progressing through the early game)
Here's my take on things...
Provinces
The early game baseline is conquering one province per turn every turn starting on turn 2, so by turn 13 the baseline is 12 provinces. Now that becomes an increasingly meaningless baseline over time as nations get additional expansion squads, bump into nations, engage in early wars, etc, but we just entered our second year so it still has some meaning.
Man, Ulm and Gath are behind the curve in this regard, Patala is exactly on track and T'ien Ch'i, Marignon, Jomon and Atlantis are ahead. No one's line has dropped meaning it is likely that no one is currently warring with anyone else. It bears pointing out that Jomon, Atlantis and, to a much smaller extant Patala, can expand natively under the water. Some of their size might be because they have more provinces to choose from when invading. No one conquered two provinces on turn 3, indicating that no one has an awake SC pretender.
Forts
Only Man, Ulm, Atlantis and Jomon have an additional fort, built in that order. At this stage that means either profound luck (getting a fort creating event, finding a fort creating site, getting a lot of money from events) or having decent scales. Atlantis and Jomon are the two largest empires so they probably have money to burn on forts. Now, LA Man has a lot of synergy with their forts (having strong and high admin forts, good siege-bonus troops and commanders, etc.) and uninspiring sacred troops. As a result, they usually opt for good scales which they can invest in forts to compound that income scales by the high income. This behavior backs that interpretation up. Ulm has many gold-cheap, resource-expensive troops who are effective against indies so they can recruit fully with money left over for forts.
Income
On turn 1, everyone's income is the same +/- their scales. As such we can tell that Man has the best income-enhancing scales and Patala, the worst. The top four incomes belong to the four largest empires, so no real surprises there. The spikes followed by dips this early on usually indicate overtaxing the capital. Note that this graph does not show income from events (whether good or bad), gifts from other players, nor does it reflect upkeep. We are looking at gross income from taxation; nothing more.
Gem Income
Jomon and T'ien Ch'i are both leading the pack by a wide margin, which makes sense as both nations can recruit very diverse mages who make excellent site searchers. Also, Jomon looks to have an awake rainbow pretender and their research curve eased off around the time their gem income started to shoot up so it's possible their pretender is out site searching. That dip in Jomon's gem income is probably from a bad event (barbarians attack, for example) stealing a province from them and then being reconquered the following turn.
Note that this chart gives no indication of income gained from blood hunting; something which both Ulm and Marignon are well equipped to do.
Research
Ulm and Jomon must have awake pretenders with decent research to have such good turn-2 research. Also, Ulm and Jomon's research lines have sharp climbs followed by plateaus which usually mean a pretender who has left the lab to go indie stomping or site searching. Of course, Ulm could be sending out mages to go blood hunting, which would also explain the declines in their research. Everyone else's research lines are more-or-less curving smoothly; this indicates that they have been hiring one mage a turn and sticking them in the lab. The fact that certain lines are curving more sharply upwards indicates that they have better national researchers and/or better magic scales. The rank-and-file mage of Atlantis, for example, pulls in a meager 4 research a turn whereas Marignon's recruit-anywhere Goetic Masters get almost twice that. And if someone has magic-1 or magic-3, the lines get even more divergent.
Dominion
Jomon and Ulm had the top dominions early on, which jives with them having awake pretenders (since a pretender counts as three temples for generating dominion). T'ien Ch'i and Atlantis have since gained in the ranking, hinting at them having either a really high dominion (which would make it likely those nations are relying on sacred units for their expansion, and as such might have a strong bless). Alternatively, they could have built additional temples early on. Man's upswing in dominion coincides with the turn they built their second fort, meaning they likely built a temple there too. Gath's losing dominion might mean they're hemmed in between high dominion neighbors, or they've just had a run of bad luck (there are several events which lower dominion, which make a big difference on the charts early on).
Army Size
First off, note that army size is literally the sum of the actual size of all the units for each force. Therefore, a nation with 35 size-6 elephants will have a larger "army size" than a nation with 100 size-2 humans. Since the absolute values aren't very telling, you instead want to look at the changes. None of the nations present get free-spawn save Ulm, who can hire commanders who spawn wolves. However, the chart doesn't really show that Ulm is building enormous wolf armies, or if they are they are dying almost as fast as they are being raised. T'ien Ch'i, Jomon and Patala all had spikes on their charts. For T'ien Ch'i and Jomon (whose troops are fairly resource intensive), that probably means they hired mercenaries and then threw them at indies until the mercenary force was depleted. That or they had the "good" event where they get a bunch of militia. Since those militia suck but cost upkeep, it is common for the player to use them as cannon fodder or outright suicide them to get them off the payroll. Patala has had the largest spike and they can hire a bunch of troops who are low-resource (monkeys), large (gorillas) or both (elephants) so it is possible that they turned a lucky event into a primate or pachaderm army overnight.
Gath has the smoothest army size line. You get that from recruiting the same thing every turn from your only fort and then never suffering meaningful casualties... which, given that they're giants, could be the case.
Beyond that, Jomon, Patala and Ulm all had moderate losses this most recent turn. Normally that would hint at war but the province chart doesn't back that up, so it could just be a coincidence that they all attacked difficult indies this turn and took losses. A quick glance at the Hall of Fame shows that Marignon's prophet is dead, so that's probably related. T'ien Ch'i and Man both seem to be growing their armies aggressively for the last 4 turns. Either they've got lots of indies to stomp, or they're gearing up for war.
Anyway, that's my take on things. Take all that with a grain of salt because I'm still a noob and Dominions is a complex game where a lot of stuff can happen which can cause the charts to be misleading.
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