I played the tutorial & started my 1st game last night. Got killed on average AI, monsters etc. Looks like I really need to roll-up my sleeves & start reading the Newbie thread to understand the game better. It's simply a "massive" game. Reminds me somewhat of Masters of Magic (wonderful game that still holds up today) There is much to learn here & I hope I'm up to the challenge. Love turn-based games, but I usually play simpler games like Horeos of Might & Magic series, Age of Wonders, Kings Bounty etc. Looking forward to reading the threads on these boards & hope to pick-up more knowledge from many of you! I'm glad I decided to read some reviews on Gamespot & found this gem.
Some general advice that helped me when I was new here...
1. spam pioneers
2. spam leather spearmen
3. Swallow your pride, and start on novice difficulty.
Borg: Got it. Pioneers, Leather Spearmen. Too funny...You're so correct. Been PC gaming since 1993 & I hate starting on the Easy difficulty. Maybe I should to get myself further into the game. Many Thanks.
Yeah, nothing wrong with starting on easy to get used to the game. I do it all the time.
Real men start on impossible!... And after a while they ragequit and restart on some easier difficulty... (I can't help to think how many times I have ignored a tutorial and started a game on normal or hard )
Sincerely~ Kongdej
Its funny how different people play this game so differently. I always hear "build melee troops and level heroes to mages", frankly i've had much more success the other way round. My heroes are warriors and defenders, and i tech to the magic staves early if i need troops.
That being said, i rarely even need troops on the lower difficulties. You can win the game with heroes alone sometimes (Though it is getting more difficult each patch). When playing hero-heavy, i research mounted warfare first to get an early speed buff, so you can get more goody huts and find easy prey around the map to level them. It's sad that fighting enemy troops gives nearly no XP though, so if you're forced into a war, the hero development will be kinda stunted.
I'll also say: Put Autosave on at every turn. Reload if you misjudged your chances when engaging in a fight. It happens. Don't collect injuries on your heroes.
Savescumming can win you any game on any difficulty, given enough time is spent. It has nothing to do with skill.
If you take a risky action, you should bear the result if your luck fails you, otherwise the game balance goes down the drain. If you replay such a game, you all you will see is a chain of extremely lucky shots and clairvoyant, brilliant decisions.
Has nothing to do with balance. This is a numbers game, RNG has very little to do with it. There's no difference between somebody knowing exactly the strength of their units and that of the enemy units, only fighting battles they know they can win, and somebody who is just learning the game and doesn't fully understand all the mechanics using autosave and reloading when they make a mistake. They can both finish the same battles with the same strength units, at the same rate. If you want to "own up to" a mistake that basically causes a game over situation (losing your core unit stack can often mean that) and have to start a new game, that's your prerogative, but don't bash reloading as a valid learning tool or something essential to more casual players.
There is no savescumming, this isn't nethack, the game doesn't delete your save when you make a mistake. Autosave is on by default.
We're talking about learning the game here and what might help new players. I don't reload much anymore nowadays, but it very much helped me learn about the strengths of my army/playstyle in relation to the rest of the world.
(Most reloads now are to avoid attacks of overpowered monster stacks let loose by another faction razing my cities. I don't like to take that, it's just plain unfair )
While I agree in what the essence in your reply, (and generally hate the term "save-scumming"), I have seen some amazing results from reloading battles, you can turn rather unfavourable battles with 10 ish reloads (I know that is alot of work, but due to dodge being very powerful, one battle ought to be filled with dodges for your own side, and no dodges for the opposing side).
THAT SAID, every player plays the game the way he think its fun! If you think its fun to save before each and every mouseclick, I greet you welcome. It doesn't matter, as long as you are having a fun time, the game is working as intended
I do sometimes suffer from bad decisions, (Airhead walking through... I thought my militia could totally beat that dragon!). The AI suffers from somewhat similar bad decisions, so I personally enjoy living through it and losing a couple of games due to me playing extremely poorly.I am also on the contrary though, as I have played both the original and new "X-com" game, and in that game I cannot help to save/reload due to being annoyed at random streaks of critical hits wiping me off the face of the planet.
In general, I advice new players to set autosaves to each turn, or each other turn, and atleast for the first game try to reload some battles and try a different tactic, I personally find this a very effective way of learning about what tactics work, and what tactics send you plummeting towards the ground, It also lets you try to test monster strengths so you know what some monster "is about" instead of delaying doing combat with a monster, and coming back with superior forces where you usually just blast it before seeing what it's capabilities is.
There have been made some very helpful threads along the forum, some should probably have been forwarded in a "helpful links" sticky somewhere so new players looking for some form of tutorial could find the help they needed, if you need any more advice though, just ask, we are all gentle people on this forum...
I played X-com to the end both "iron man" (no reloading possible) and normally (reloading available), and they were very different experiences. Without reloading available I found I was cautious to the point of tedium. It really dampened the sense of heroic glee I had experienced in my first game from breaking down the doors and sometimes yelling OH CRAP about what I found inside. I would NEVER storm a room unseen on iron man mode, because that would be a stupid unnecessary risk.
The flip side of the issue in favor of iron man play is that there is a heightened sense of danger and consequence, and I suppose "pride" in having done it "the right way". I don't value gaming as one of my "accomplishments", however, so iron man mode changed an experience that I found to be joyful and made it a grind. The results were no different in the end, I won both games. One play style just provided a better vehicle for relaxation than the other, for me.
In Fallen Enchantress, I don't mind the hero injuries so much, but if my starting location is 2/3/0... I reload the map. I want my capital (and my game) to feel powerful and heroic. If I wanted to make myself suffer there are better avenues to achieve that goal than a video game. Many people often say "but the challenge!", however, I don't see many of them playing with zero skill picks on impossible in iron man mode. In my mind one of the main goals of game balance is helping achieve a state in which a game is challenging but reloading is simply unappealing. That means the elimination of cheesy and overpowered methods (to maintain challenge) and also the elimination of random uncontrollable catastrophe (99% of people will reload).
To address the OP specifically about the original topic:
1) Expand quickly, like in almost every other 4X game, but be careful of dropping a city next to a (to steal a term from forum poster Tuidjy) Big Beasties. Most monsters will stay near their lair... unless their lair is encompassed inside a border in which case they will be "set loose". If any monster wins the battle against your city the entire city dies. As cities grow, their border grows. You see the issue, I'm sure.
1B) Get a Big Beastie clearing stack as soon as possible. This is often your Sovereign's stack. Cannon fodder is necessary for this stack.
2) It will be difficult to build every building in every city. Because of this, it's important to specialize. You want a city (Fort, usually), which focuses on production, pushing out grunts (leather clad spearmen, typically). Another city focusing on research, etc.
3) The AI hates you if you're lower on the power scoring than it. That's diplomacy in a nutshell. I don't know everything that goes into your rating, but I can tell you that number of cities, and especially troop strength are important factors. If you want peace, you have to maintain (theoretical) military parity.
4) Protracted wars are bad. Keep the peace if possible, get a killing force together and kill an AI decisively. This will gain you territory, and make you a less desirable target to other AIs.
5) Your Sovereign and Champions are best as leaders of individual armies. Experience is divided among the champions in an army (slowing their advancement considerably). High level champions of any combat specialization are a force to be reckoned with, and you want them asap.
6) A city with high potential production and high essence can make incredible troops. Use the essence to put city enchantments which buff troops (+1 defense per essence enchant, etc). Combined with other Fortress buildings even your SCOUTS will be tough.
7) Things which I believe to be strong in the current build in no particular order are: The Arcane Monolith spell, Kraxxis (race) dodge stacking combined with the Death Rank 2 spell blindness, Death rank 2 + Water rank 2 spell Horrific Wail, Ceresa's personal sovereign spells, the city spell Gentle Rain (2 ranks water + 2 ranks air), the starting pick Wealthy. There's more, I'm just running short on time here.
8) Set your tax rate to NONE before you do anything on your first turn. Don't raise your tax rate until your stored gold hits 0. While your city population is low... you get almost no gold, but you still get the 22% unrest (inefficiency) penalty for having a tax rate set above none.
9) USE city enchantments. Essence is very powerful and flexible in this game. Get city enchantments going from turn 1, and modify each city's enchantments according to it's assigned role. (combat city enchants on grunt city, research, production, etc)
Alright. I'm out of time, but this is probably so long most folks won't have the patience to sift through it anyway, so good enough. Best of luck and welcome to the game. It can be modded into something quite amazing.
I suppose that's true with dodge, but you need probably a good deal more than you would get normally to make it effective enough where reloading a few times could change the battle results. You basically need to be playing wraiths (or kraxxis?) with everything tilted toward dodge to have a game where dodge is somewhat reliable and battles can be lost due to unlucky hits (or won after a few reloads full of lucky dodges). With every other strategy you might get 10-20 dodge, which is a 50-20% dodge chance, and most battles could require much more than 10 reloads to win if you are relying on perfect dodges. That is I think balancing in itself, somebody redoing a battle 10-20 times to force a win in a situation they shouldn't be able to, that's a pretty big time investment and I would say they earned it.
I don't think this is worth it. It goes against common sense which is why some people may not realize it, but taxes on "None" still causes like 10 or 15% unrest. So by switching from Low to None you gain only 10% production and research while losing 1-3 gold per turn, which you could be using to rush productions, set up treaties, or pay a couple more early game units. It only takes one building to make up for that unrest difference, and two to erase all unrest from a city on Low taxes. So I really feel there's never any reason to drop taxes to none.
Just did a game where i went the assassin route (never did that before, because i thought the crit/dodge stuff to be too unreliable, my custom faction also has the lucky trait though, so i thought : why not) and.. wow .. I never so easily killed big monsters oO .. no, without reloading. Got a sword that ignores defense early on, it was ridiculous.
Also played with the low tax rate, but i didn't feel it made much difference. Had to build less buildings to reduce unrest, but also had less money to rush things. Feels like the same outcome in the end.
My advice (haven't played the last 2 patches) have always been, set taxes to "None" for until your first city reaches level 2, OR you build a second city, mostly because I prefer getting the first few techs some turns earlier, rather than have a 0.4 income per turn.
Unrest on taxes "None = 10%, Low = 22%".That said, I do use my gildar, so once my gildar producing ability is beyond the silly level 1 city, I start taxing my population so I can either rush units or purchase items for my heroes.
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