Musings on getting the most out of the early game

[WraithLord]

Very good thread.

Except for patrolling I'm using all the other tactics. By now they are routine for me, I hardly give them much thought by now

I have a couple of things to add.

-> Prophetizing. For nations with level four priests I usually wait a few turns before recruiting a would be prophet. Early on I prefer to use gold for mercs, troops and cheap researchers.

-> Assassins.. For nations with assassins, a possible expansion strat. is assassins with skull talisman (the one that makes skeletons). They are very useful vs. easy to medium level indies.

-> RB pretenders. I usually research evoc 1, alter 2 with pretender. Then script it to quickness, 4X fire arrows. Then I use in following pattern: search province (expansion army attacks another province); join army and attack new province; This way I end up both using the pretender for searching and the turn wasted for him to move to a new province is at least used for support.

-> Decoys. I use different ones depending on indie composition. For archers use high prot. troops. For xbows use fodder.

-> Site searching. w/o RB pretender always use the long range detection spells. They are most cost efficient choice between manual search and accashic records. With RB pretender, combine RB search and long range spells.

-> Patrolling. Like others I find the long term pop. (hence income) loss to outweigh to short term gains. However this is very general. For sure there might be specific cases when it's worth while to patrol.
I wonder what is (avg.) pop. growth rate for a province with 200% tax rate that is heavily patrolled to be kept in unrest level of 0.