Opening Gambit

[triqui]

Originally Posted by Peter Ebbesen

Beats me. From a practical perspective, in SP, it doesn't really matter as the AI is utterly incapable of keeping up with any half-way decent player, so somebody who wants to start finding all opponents early in the game isn't really hurting himself all that much as the opposition doesn't take advantage of his suboptimal playing.

In MP, it is very common to recruit a flood of independent scouts once you find an independent site or, if you fail to find such a site, to recruit a flood of independent scouts out of secondary fortresses once you cannot afford to recruit all mages everywhere every turn, since from the middle game onwards, detailed scouting is often essential to survival, but the capital should never, ever, recruit a scout during anything resembling normal gameplay in MP as there is (practically) always a better affordable capital-only commander mage or priest that should be recruited instead.

you can beat the AI with no research at all (I have done). So sure, it is not needed to buy a mage in turn 2. However, it is (very) suboptimal, and I think we should make the new players to understand why. Then they can play as they want, as this is a game, and the goal is to have fun :-)

@zorfwaddle sure, in MP is even more important to have scouts. In my game with Marignon I have like 20 :-)