The Expansion Gap Issue

Let us speak regarding the expansion gap issue that has plagued the noob team in the past. Calahan had posted some good advice (which I will repost here). I can't remember what it was right now though. Since I was voted down on my cap bonus, we will have to use our brains this time.

How can we expand as effectively and as fast as the Vets?

Anyone have any good general non-nation specific advice?

Seems to me that try to take a province on the first turn is simply too risky even with indies at 4.

Every nation starts with a commander, a scout, and smattering of troops.

1. Is there a general strategy that applies to all nations?

2. If so, what should we recruit first turn, second turn, etc?

3. Can we expand into two provinces by turn 2 (indy strength permitting)?

4. Do we make use of sacreds and priests/mages?

5. The manual (wipes off the dust) advises that we take neighboring provinces of the cap first, before heading in the direction of the vets. Should we do this or head straight for the vets and fill in the rest when we've time? It would seem this would bolster our cap and enable faster expansion, but we also do want to cover ground quickly to deny it to the vets and set up forts,defences.

6. Is there any sort of positioning for regular troops that is best when attacking indies or pd? Do we want to outflank with our faster troops/calary on the wings? Do we put a few chaff in front to draw archer fire?

7. I like to keep my cap tax high for a few turns at the beginning for extra income but this ties down a commander and a few troops for patrolling? Which is one less commander to expand with. Is this wise?

Lets get this information here, so it will be convienent to refer to rather than having to search through a bunch of guides.

1. I don't know of one, generally though every nation has a particular unit or set of units that's reasonably cost effective to expand with, or sacreds that can expand with one or two turns of recruitment. Or you may have recruitable commanders with which you can solo provinces. Generally the big expensive things tend to do well at expanding, ie elephants, hydras, etc.

3. Yes, but probably only if you have an awake SC.

4. You can make use of sacreds if you have a good bless for them and can reliably take most provinces with no or few losses with just one or two turns of recruitment. One is much better, for obvious reasons.

5. Taking cap-neighboring provinces is important because it frees up resources to buy more units a turn, but you tend to expand much faster if you go where there are weak enemies you know you can reliably beat. Then when you have a few armies running around you can combine them to take out the hard provinces. You do want to take the cap-surrounding provinces fairly early though.

6. Well, it depends on what you're using. Generally you want to have something with high prot and a good shield in front of your army to absorb missiles so your lighter units don't have to. Behind them go any offense-focused infantry and archers that you might have. If you don't have heavy infantry, you can use small groups of javelin-equipped troops or something like that to draw fire. You can even use militia if you have nothing else that's reasonably durable or disposable. Flanking is not hugely important against the independents with the way they stack commanders, but could be useful. It's a bit dangerous for your cavalry though if it doesn't work right.

7. It's probably better to just tax high for one turn, especially with the settings that will be used for this game. I found that one turn of high taxation left me with a decent surplus for at least a few turns testing a bit with the game settings you're using. And you don't really want to tie things up for so long at the beginning of the game. That said, if you have an awake pretender with a really nice patrol bonus that you don't mind leaving behind for a few turns you might be able to get some decent mileage out of overtaxing. The main purpose to that though would be to quickly spring up a bunch of forts.

Yeah, it's hard to answer these kind of questions, because there are so many variables. Indies 4 should make expansion easier, but unless you've got a rock-solid starting army, a first turn attack is always risky (never know if you're going to run into elephants, etc.).

Beyond that, it's all about match ups. If you've got lots of recruitable archers, you wanna go for things like barbarians and lizard-men first (they can't shoot back). If you've got good heavy infantry but no archers, your typical infantry/archer indies are your target, while avoiding barbarians and lizards. Basically, once you know your race, and have designed a pretender, I think you just need to load up SP game after SP game, and practice your first 10 or so turns to see what works (without hiring mercs). Efficiency is the key. Within reason that is - meaning, you might be able to afford higher casualties if you can take a valuable money producing 'farm' province in return.

That goes as well for troop placement and orders. In SP, I often neglect that aspect (after all, I can always restart if things go badly). But in MP, I think you should check your orders every turn, as there are no standard set of commands that will work universally. Every indie should be treated differently with the appropriate commands given for each situation.

Yeah. When, ie, you go up against barbarians you don't really want your heavy infantry to engage them. You want to try and kill them at range, and you may even want to place lighter infantry in front of your heavies because they may take fewer losses than the heavy infantry should the barbarians reach you.

It really does benefit you a lot to try out different strategies for expanding in sp. If you can't reach quite as good of an expansion as calahan was talking about it's not so bad. If you get, say, 50-75% as many provinces as the vets do on average you're still coming out ahead.

Let me give you an example. Like I said in the other thread, I've fooled around a lot with MA Mictlan. They have sacred troops that fly in tactical (but not strategic) combat (Eagle Warriors). This totally alters the usual indie expansion paradigm.

First off, they don't work well with your own missile troops - too many friendly fire incidents. So they are least useful against indies like barbarians and lizards (don't get me wrong, they can do the job, they just take an unnecessarily high level of casualties, whereas if you used a horde of slingers instead, you'd likely save lives and money).

But with proper orders and placement, they can take out what are usually the toughest of indie foes (heavy cavalry and elephants) with little problem - your commander/blesser in a corner, your Eagle Warriors also in the back with Hold-Attack Archers or Rearmost orders, and just enough regular infantry fodder to hold up the enemy long enough for them to do their job - well, you can often kill off the enemy commanders, slaughter enough archers to cause a rout, or, worst comes to worst, engage the enemy heavy units from the rear (at a risk of slightly higher casualties, but you'll still most likely get the job done).

So yeah, this is a very 'nation specific' expansion tactic. Caelum with it's non-sacred fliers cannot mimic this. But that's the moral of the story. Every nation has it's own angle regarding expansion. Aside from the most basic military advice (have a lot more dudes there than your enemy), it's all case by case.

So once you know your nation, and have designed your pretender, just practice, practice, practice. I would say, after a lot of SP practice, if you haven't conquered at least 12 provinces by the end of the first year (baring special Team Game scenarios - like you're playing a special focus race - forging or whatnot), you've still got a problem, and should ask for some nation-specific advice.

Unless you have an Awake Combat God or are one of the Giant Races. Never attack on the first turn. Or thats atleast what my experiance says. Exspecially in MA or LA when you might go up against Cavalry or Crossbowmen.

Also I've been having alot of fun with Order -3 Luck +3 as that gives the highest random and good events. Though I mainly seem to get more gem events then gold events. So good setup for MP games where you can trade, not so much SP games.

But on the matter of expanding. NAP we go straight for the Vet team. Once we make contact set the bordering regions to 200% Tax, while building our new forts behind these buffer regions. No NAP then consolidate of power base around our capitals before advancing towards the Vets. Those adjacent regions with both low income and resources can wait, as it wont help much with recruiting in teh capital.

As for combat tactics, my basic idea is. No ranged weapons, move everything to the front on attack.

Otherwise, a couple 5-10 man squads in each forward corner. I prefer slingers or light infantry, basicly with hold attacks.
Behind them in the middle I place my ranged units. Thrown Weapons front, then Slingers, Short Bow, Long Bow. Cross Bow would take up the flanks. These ranged units would have gaps in there formations.
So that I could place Infantry behind or amongst them. So as they get to the front its just in time for the enemy. Or they intercept flyers attack my archers.

Personally I tend to be a bit lazy with scripting since I have carpal tunnel and it's literally painful to do lots of scripting, so my formations tend to be fairly simplistic. You can largely get away with this against independents, as long as you script intelligently. However, the more thought and effort you put into scripting the better your results will be, especially once you start fighting the other players (obviously). Edit: Okay the purpose of me saying that is maybe a bit unclear. Anyway the point is that complicated scripting can help boost your expansion, but making it work can be a bit finicky and you should really test run what you need to do to achieve a decent expansion rate. With ma c'tis for example I can get 15-18 provinces by the first turn of the second year with just elite warriors/falchioneers with the current game settings.

If you want to use small squads of chaff to take arrows, it's probably a good idea to keep a group on guard commander so you have reinforcements you can quickly reposition for the next battle in case you need more arrow sinks and your old ones all got killed/ran off.

One thing we definately all should do is when we know what nation we are playing, go into single player and try to expand as fast as possible, at least a couple times. this being said, I've done this with a few nations, and can match vet expansion rates with c'tis or vanheim.(partly thus their high position on my list) I've managed as many as 19-21 provinces by turn 11.

regarding whether you want to take the places bordering your cap first - there's almost no reason not to. it will enormously boost your expansion rate if you take the bordering zones first because of higher resource income. the only reason I would not capture all bordering provinces first is if I had something really nasty in one of them(like elephants)

Hey rdonj, have you ever tried a trackball or even a gyromouse to help with the carpal tunnel?

Nope. A trackball mouse wouldn't really feel much different in the right sense to help me. I'd honestly never heard of a gyromouse until now. That could be interesting, though it might be a bit of work to get used to. I'll look into it at some point though, thanks.

doing a test just now, with Ulm I can reach 46 or so provinces(hard to count that many) within one year(that's 11 or 12 turns), with 9,000 spare gold, 4 forts, and another fort under construction. With of course some site-searching and some research going on.

Very, very, good advice. I am proud to call myself a Noob with responses such as these!

Wow melnorjr... you getting a raiding party out every turn and none of them ever lose a battle?

Stretch wrote:Wow melnorjr... you getting a raiding party out every turn and none of them ever lose a battle?

Actually, running it mathematically, if you assume each province borders an average of 4 more provinces, your created one army each turn, your armies were invincible and never lost a battle, and you used ideal pathing, that would only barely be enough. And we all know things never go that perfectly. Not only is your expansion speed limited by your armies, it is also limited by geography(less so if you are, for example, Caelum however). after a while your armies will have to move through already captured land, which, even minimized with ideal pathing, will take a toll on your expansion speed, and this is ignoring the inevitable mountains/water provinces, and unlucky zones with very limited connections.

I'm taking advantage of some other things to help me along.
This being a teaching game, and you being on my team, it wouldn't seem right to hold back though. So, in case this is helpful to anybody, here is what I did:

First of all, I used an awake SC, and captured one province every turn starting turn two.

Second, I had order/productivity 3, so once I captured all provinces adjacent to my cap(by about turn 3 or 4) I actually COULD build an army every turn.(I could actually build armies significantly larger than necessary also, so even if I lowered my scales a tad, or the game setting weren't at 150/150/150 gold/resources/supplies, I would have still been able to do about the same, or a little bit less. It wouldn't have kept me under 40 provinces by any means)

Third, remember all that gold and extra forts I had? my scales gave me a huge income beyond the cost of training troops, so I started building my first fort on turn 4 or 5, and it finished by 8 or 9, and my second a turn or two after, so once I had those forts up, I could build MORE than one army per turn.

and while my armies did occasionally lose a battle, it wasn't very often, so I was able to get them through quite a few provinces before I had to combine them with another weakened army, then continue taking more provinces that way.

A lot of this relies on my extremely massive income, and the fact that ulmish troops have low gold-resource cost, so, provided I had the resources, Gold would never limit my troop production, and my productivity scales took care of the resources. I also planned on going for riches from beneath, further increasing my troop production, but I didn't get quite that much research in my game, and it wouldn't have been the most useful of goals at that point, unless I planned to just overwhelm somebody with massive armies - which is almost definitely going to fail in an MP game, so I'm scrapping that and probably going to look into construction early so I can try to get thugs out to actually get anything accomplished - if I use this strategy again. Most of the point of this was to see just how fast I could expand without making a really big, but useless, nation. This nation would be awesome as a cash generator to feed other nations, or as a nation to try to rush somebody with large armies early in the game.

In this particular game, I would bet you could hamper the vets quite a bit if you dedicated a player with this strat to expanding toward the vets ASAP and ruining their expansion - most nations would have trouble countering a 200-300 man army by turn 10 or so, and if you succeeded in gimping the vet's expansion that make an enormous difference. And one thing to remember - in this game, we as individuals are relatively expendable. If one of us can stalemate a vet at all, even by sacrificing ourselves, we are trying up/losing 1/12 of our team, to 1/6 of their team. I'm thinking like chess - if you have more pieces than the opponent, trading is in your favor, because they lose a greater portion of their strength than you do.

Earlier this year I wrote a guide detailing positioning and scripting for expansion against independants that should help when playing almost any non-giant or non-flying nation:

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=42211

Hopefully someone will find something useful in there...

Umm.. Guys, you say your noobs, but wow! Those write ups had my head spinning. And I guess I turtle too much, 22 prov by turn 12. I have never done that before.

Well, I guess I am going to need some hand holding so you guys can count on me.

Once I know the nation, I am going to ask for advice like crazy.

That's a well-written guide, Raiel. Thanks for posting it.

That's a damn good indie-expansion guide Raiel. You know, I didn't bother to read it for a while, because I figured I'd played enough SP, and certainly I already knew everything Well, I had never used the "archer/javelin pull" before, for one - I mean, it's not a huge deal, you'd probably win that kind of battle anyhow, just with a few more losses. But every battle you can win with just a few less casualties can mean an extra province now and again (instead of having to wait for reinforcements). That can be huge during the vital initial expansion phase of the game!

So all you other Noobs who thought you had expansion covered, check it out if you haven't already! Remember, this game will be 150% gold and resources, and an indie strength of only 4! With these tactics, you have no excuse for not cleaning up during the expansion phase (at least 15 provinces by the end of the first year, but 20+ should be more like it).

Remember, you'll have 11 teammates, so no reason to go for some expensive Rainbow pretender. You should either have maxed scales (I'm talking Order/Production/Growth-3 at the minimum), a monstrous blessing for wicked sacreds (if you have them), or a brutal SC Day-1 killing machine pretender. Whichever way you go, your expansion should be blazing.

I agree, Raiel, that is a great guide. Together with the other info in this thread and some practice with your nation in SP prior to starting, we should finally close this expansion gap. I'll keep this thread seperate so everyone can refer to it, most of the others I think I'll fold into the pre-game discussion thread to remove some clutter.

Thanks for the feedback!

Like I said at the beginning of the guide, only a couple of the ideas were original (the Gauntlet being one of them).

I have more to share (like how much I love these settings because they allow me to have a second fortification up on turn 5), but the wife is insisting that I am not my own person for at least the next couple of hours...