My Philosophy on Strategy Guides

[AreaOfEffect]

Recently, a player commented on a new guide of mine. The comment implied that I had not written a guide to the nation, but rather a strategy that happened to be specific to that nation. I'm sure he made this implication because he himself had thoughts about a different approach the nation could go in. Clearly if there are subjects I had not covered, my guide must be incomplete. By extension of that logic, nobody has yet written the guide to any nation in my opinion.

This game is so rich with content and mechanics that I feel it impossible to write the definitive work on any particular nation. To illustrate my personal development, my first guide was an attempt to do this with the nation of MA Mictlan. It in my belief is a tragic failure and my worst guide to date. I played with the nation on several occasions afterword and found my assessment of some units to be flat out wrong or incomplete. My assessment of the Moon Priest is a fine example. When I choose a E9S9 bless and learned more on how to utilize astral magic and communions, I found this commander to be my preferred buy more and more. You just can't write everything there is to do with one nation in my opinion, particularly when you are working with a character limit. I could write books on the subject of dominions if someone wanted to pay me an hourly wage.

Then what can one do? My philosophy now is to avoid writing everything there is to write and instead put forth a focused cohesive strategy. Not only that, but make it a point to slim the strategy down to the minimum of what is needed to make it work. I find that guides that spend all of your points for you to be far less enjoyable and assume too much. There are all kinds of games where province count, winning conditions, map layout, and special conditions are wildly different. I find it hard to believe that those points spent in that way is the best for all of these situations.

Surely I want there to be a guide for every nation out there. Ideally I would want there to be more then one for all of them. I would like each one to be large enough that you could base your entire game around it, yet each leaves you enough points to work with so that you can integrate another players strategy into it as well, or perhaps just spend those points on taking that strategy to the extreme, or, even better, allowing the player to work out their own strategy while still having something tested and workable to fall back on. You have to understand that each player has a play style. Cornering that person into your style may not be the best way to help them.

And that's what it comes down to, helping others enjoy this game. That should always be the one thing that sticks in your mind whenever you decide to write a guide. This is my philosophy.