Is this strategy viable?

[OmikronWarrior]

Also, take into account your scales. Somebody with generally negative scales NEEDS more territory to simply stay competitive. For example, somebody with Turmoil-3 has their gold reduced to 79% of the base, while somebody with Order-3 get 121% of the base. Thats around a 50% difference. More importantly, the negative scales make it really tough for the player to afford mages, units, and buildings.

So, if you're going to try to turtle to build up something, I recommend Order-3, at least 1-growth, and 0-hot/cold. Drain-2 might be OK depending on the specifics of your nation/strategy, but Magic-1 can make research a lot easier.

[Baalz]

Oh, another thing I forgot to mention (which goes hand in hand with scale choices) is province population variation. If you're not site searching much yet, it doesn't really make a big difference to try and root out those lizards/amazons from a 2k population swamp/wasteland province. Even with equal scales there can be quite a divergence between income and province count - it very well might make sense to forego expanding every turn if it means you can instead take out a fat farmland province stuffed with knights every other turn.

[das123]

Thank you all for the comments. It seem generally I should focus on expanding unless I have a good reason. I tend not to mess much with the scales when I set up my pretender.

Also, I usually set the starting indies at 7 or 8 difficulty so most games I play are difficult to expand every turn.

In the game mentioned I was playing as Vanheim against Ermor (EA) and it took me a while to build a strong army. I wasn't worried so much about the loss of income because when I got going my army would only lose about 10% compared to Ermor's.

[Ironhawk]

You can still expand quickly at 7+ indies, you just have plan your armies and your attacks really carefully.