Musings on getting the most out of the early game

[Ironhawk]

izaqyos said:
-> 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.

I used to wait but I hardly do, anymore. Having an L4 or L5 priest is nice but I find that it is sort of overkill in the early game. If you build your indy-killer forces right you can do fine with SoCs for a long time. Plus you can spend the money you would on a powerful priest (usually expensive!!) and that turn's time at the fort to build another researcher. Usually I will just prophetize my starting military commander. Then later on, if he has no good heroic ability, I just kill him off and prophetize a powerful priest or an SC.

[Emelio Lizardo]

Humm, I set all my provinces to 90 percent on the idea that I might promote population growth or migration (anyone know if this actually works?). Never bothered to make a prophet until the first ArchAngel, by which time everything on the map was dead or 'gentled down'. This was playing Ulm, indy 9, and I just churned out smiths, spys and Arquebus men/siege bowmen. In a few turns i had my neighbor ai's capitals in raging anarchy, and with little income for the rest of the game. As for sites, I created a special group for that purpose and constantly upgraded them until they could find anything. Thoughest things to find are those pesky level 4 unholy sites. Oddly, the ring of wizardry will upgrade unholy on your basic moundfiend but not holy on your basic holyroller. But that's much later, I just made do with earth & fire for a long time. I do very much agree that hiring mercs early is a must do, if only to kill em off so they don't come back to haunt you later.

[Endoperez]

It doesn't improve population growth, unfortunately. It is a good idea to lower the taxes until unrest goes below 5, however. After that, the unrest doesn't affect your income or resources, and you can up your taxes to 100.

F1 screen is a great help on this if you haven't already noticed. Press Tabulator (<- -> above Caps Lock) to change whether you want to see commanders or not. Tabulator also hides researchers on the main map.