Tien Chi, Spring & Autumn or R'yleh Astral strats?

[KissBlade]

I was thinking, I thought in multiplayer, you don't want to look too aggressive with your expansions? Or is it more every man for himself a la Manifest Destiny?

[shovah]

but chances are as ryleh you wont be the fastest expander and there-fore not look too aggressive. also consider this: you expand 1 provine per turn while researching while your opponent expands 2 per turn. it dosnt sound like much but he is on average gaining twice as much income as you each turn: 1 turn he is 20-50 income ahead, 2 turns 40-100, 5 turns he should be hundreds of income ahead of you, allowing him to recruit more and probably out-research you aswell (although being very aggressive may make people team up on you)

[Boron]

KissBlade said:
I was thinking, I thought in multiplayer, you don't want to look too aggressive with your expansions? Or is it more every man for himself a la Manifest Destiny?

In MP the aim is to get as many indy provinces as quickly as possible. A war in earlygame is normally very very risky so most players avoid it unless they have a very specific early game oriented rush build like a dual bless.

So if you can get 50% more indy provinces than your opponent(s) this is already a nice advantage. In our blitzes QM normally is the fastest expander and he wins most of the blitzes too.

Ryleh can turtle and clamhoard though so with them you can try a lategame wish strat. It is very risky though because while hoarding you are vulnerable but often you can persuade your neighbors to stay at peace with you by bribing them or giving them good trades and the like. Also while hoarding you look very innocent and like a minor threat .
I only recommend hoarding strats with vanilla, if you play CB there hoarding is only very rarely worth it...

[shovah]

hoarding is still quite possible in cb imo but i would just suggest about 20 mind blasters min per hoarding province

[Endoperez]

I thought Conceptual Balance mods severely raised the cost of Clams to make it much more expensive to hoard... So while you might be able to get back your initial resources, it would take too long to noticeably help in the forging of the next clam, and the chain reaction would take too long to be viable in any normal MP game.

[Tom_Scudder]

Not too severely - 15 gems per clam instead of 10. The bigger obstacle is that you now need 2 water 1 nature to make one, which means you'd need to be pretty lucky to have more than one forger out of 20 starspawns (1/32 chance of getting the 2 ?s to line up just right) - although you can add water bracelets, that means you can't start clamming until you hit Con 6. Or I guess if your pretender has a high water, he could forge a couple water robes at con 4, but that's still a lot of extra fuss for a clamming strategy.

Jotun Skrattis have pretty good odds of being clam-forgers under CB (1/4) - among independents, amber clan mages are all clam-forgers, and jade amazon sorceresses have a pretty good shot at it. Atlantis, Caelum and Tien Chi (I think) also have decent shots at clam-forgers among their recruitable mages.

[shovah]

yes. it is more difficult to hoard but imo it just balances it instead on just making it worthless

[Cainehill]

Especially since it does provide a way to get an astral income when you otherwise wouldn't have any.