DarthTrajan wrote:I want to second just how great the map looks! Do you have any recommended settings for it (Army MP, mercenary settings, etc.)?
Thank you!! For the settings I use, I would HIGHLY reccomend enabling Annoynimouse's extended buildings - the world being as big as it is, wealth generation is extremely important, especially for the number of armies and garrisons you tend to have (in the mid game, most surviving factions tend to have somewhere between 8-20 armies) - I've also cranked gold mine generation to 120 per turn, and even with all the extra wealth generation, it feels like I can only just keep up in terms of expenses. I get the higher level buildings at a steady rate - not nearly too fast, but it doesn't take an eternity either - and a lot of times in the mid to late game, a lot of my armies I need to just hold position in cities, and so to keep their strength on par with the AI armies I make sure to do a lot of army training. The extended buildings also gives you something to continually work towards in the later game besides just leveling up your armies - in the past I've had it to where I'm earning 30,000 gold per turn, and I STILL manage to spend it all in one turn while holding off 3 or 4 massive empires on my boarders and pushing into another territory with my leader's army from one angle and an auxillery army composed of a mash of special mercenaries and other units I've trained to absurd levels.
I keep the default army and garrison sizes and most other default game settings, so modify those to your personal preference.
Probably set the victory condition to owning all capitols, but do what you want there!
For army MP, I keep it at 3 during the early game, but once I've conquered most of the immediate surrounding villages I'll bump it to 4. Might even go 5 towards the end game, but might not be necessary.
There are already a number of default monster spawn locations built into the map, but it only accounts for a few of the possible feral monsters (namely the ones I thought would be thematically appropriate - sharks are common along coastlines, dragons are in reculusive mountainous areas but also frequently near gold mines, lizards are usually from the desert, fairies from the forest, etc).
You may notice there are a LOT more human villages than anything else - they have 16 whereas most others are 3-6. This seems to work well though as early game, humans make EXCELLENT army fodder, and their clever trait means that in later game when they have lost a number of villages, they start to scale well to remain strong without being overpowered. I also made sure that any race that had 6 or more villages at the start (like humans) were more spread over the world - still in small clusters, but not one full united empire, as that would probably make things a bit too difficult.
Mercenary settings I mostly just tweaked to my own preference in terms of what is avialable, but I definitely made sure to keep all the special mercenaries. For monster spawns, I would tend to turn up the spawn attempts with certain races (especially faries) as well as crank up their scaling value.
Definitely play with diplomacy, but I start with the diplomacy scaling set to suspicious so alliances don't start too early on.
I don't play with fog of war, but I don't see why it would be much different in terms of difficulty than any other map, though you may want to be careful if an empire gets extremely strong without you seeing - I find this rather fun though as it means I have strong empires to face in the late game, rather than it petering out as I become the strongest with none to oppose me.
When I play this map, I usually do it with the intent of playing the Lamia race which is positioned about at the center of the whole map which provides even access to most stuff, as well as a neighboring human kingdom which makes for easy army XP early game - my most recent playthough I've been doing sharks though, but I liked the center map placement so I swapped the shark and Lamia village placements. The map also doesn't include EVERY single race, so check if there are any particular ones you want to either play as or against before getting into the game.
Last couple things: Overall especially in the early game, most factions are pretty evenly matched - the ones that start to win out over others in the mid game often change each time, but I do tend to notice a few particular races fare better than others. Cats, the octopi race, lizards, harpies, panthers, and imps tend to do well, but again this will vary. Humans would probably do better if I didn't have a habit of targeting them first every time, but they tend to never be too easy or too OP. FOXES however I think are a little OP with their racial traits, as no matter what map I've played on with foxes enabled, they almost always become crazy powerful and unstoppable very early on - so I'll tweak their strategic AI between basic and legacy as needed to keep them in check, but if you don't feel like doing that then maybe consider replacing their villages with another race (they're all over on the left side of the map).
And finally: Armies get STRONG in this world over time. Like, in the mid to late game, many of the remaining empires will have at least 2 armies of strength 36 or higher, and I've seen as high as at least 40. They'll then probably have 3-5 at strength 20ish, and then another 10-15 armies at strength 10-15. If your armies aren't battling or moving, definitely use and abuse army training, even if it's just the smallest amount of training you can afford. Doing this with my more idle armies they tend to keep as strong enough to go toe to toe with most armies that aren't the royal armies (the ones that have the leader), whereas my most mobile and active armies remain my strongest.
And a final tip on army composition that's led to success with me - I'll usually build my armies so that ~50-75% are my own race, and the rest is made up of alternative units - perhaps casters for utility, special mercenaries or extra tanky characters. It's also a totally viable strategy to raise an army of only 2 or 3 units so that you can constantly use the max trainer setting to level them up very quickly, and then I'll send them to reinforce an army that's lost some of its stronger units while they recover at a town.
Hope this all helps!
Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2022 11:34 pm