How often do you guys lose?

[duckdog]

I got a bad planet (not metal and no oil) which made me fall behind. I tried diplomacy with another faction and it looked good but they ended up being super weak militarily and got steam rolled despite having metal. I tried to compensate but it was too late and i was so far behind with troop numbers. I was way ahead with tech and admin and civ level but not with army size. It was good run...

[Overlord]

Once you get familiar enough with the game over time it gets pretty easy to tell when you're in a rough start. Most of us just back out and roll a new game once we notice. Usually it's only ironman, mlg types chasing that high diff high that stick with rough starts until the end.

Early on before starting to develop your cities you should singlemindedly work on locking down your borders and getting enough resources to build yourself a decent standing army. You can either go for a militarist start and go for the design council, military research council, and staff council. Use these to then try to rush light tanks or AT guns if an AI beat you to light tanks while bordering you. If no major is too close to you, go for a foreign affairs council and interior council to peacefully absorb nearby minors. Careful, some minors are impossible to absorb peacefully, otherwise save scum like a MFer if you need to + use shadow diplomat cards. Then bum rush light tanks/at guns after you've absorbed one or two minors, one declares war on you, or you stumble into a major regime with the resources you're looking for. You want to knock down at least one major as early and as close to you as possible, it can pretty much guarantee you an early win and ensure no one will bother you too much until the late game if you play your cards right.

Major diplomacy is only there to keep the guy 3 tech levels ahead of you away from your borders, either through tributes and appeasement or propping up your weaker mutual neighbor against him. Unfortunately this is a wargame first and a 4X second, all tools at hand are there to help you conquer stuff, or keep stuff off you long enough for you to flip the table on them.

Early security is the name of the game, economic expansion should only happen as you start hitting upkeep limits for your army. A lot of games come down to being able to bum rush light tanks or AT Guns and RPGs before an ai major regime (or wildlife if you're playing in a death world) is able to gobble you up early on. If you have a bad resource start, you need to be aggressive and try to get access to those resources. Often you can just get a lot of farms and food to oil assets (i forget the name) to make up for the lack of natural oil sources. Then you can sell oil and food to buy enough metal to set up a light armor brigade, or a few independent light armor battalions. You can then use those to take over an aggressive neighboring minor (otherwise go for peaceful assimilation) or even a major and get yourself the resources you need before whoever's destined to be your nemesis starts painting the map.

Also, you can experiment with world generation rolls to get yourself a map with a lot of ruins. 2bn to 6bn pre-apocalypse pop is what you want to go for. Earth friendly biosphere, breathable, earth plant friendly atmosphere, and high alien flora and fauna nutritional value with no aggressive alien wildlife or sentient aliens will usually allow you to roll these numbers. If you get lucky you can even get 8bn pre apoc rolls, but those are gacha odds in my experience. Starting in dense ruins can guarantee you a reasonable amount of metal until you're able to nab yourself some proper sources or even until you get the soil demetalisation tech.

Easy mode bonus points if you can roll for a start with decent choke points without a major and only minors or wild life on the other side of those chokes. Beware, high mountains don't count as impassable terrain here, only seas do. It'll slow the major regime ai down, eventually the scumbag ai, esp in high diffs, will just paint an entire highway network even through the thickest and highest mountain ranges ez pz. They'll drive their entire army into your territory over a few turns if it catch you off guard.

[Slippy]

Originally posted by Overlord:

Beware, high mountains don't count as impassable terrain here, only seas do. It'll slow the major regime ai down, eventually the scumbag ai, esp in high diffs, will just paint an entire highway network even through the thickest and highest mountain ranges ez pz. They'll drive their entire army into your territory over a few turns if it catch you off guard.

This is probably my biggest complaint with AI behaviour that they get unlimited IP to build roads over mountains.

OP = I think Overlord has covered pretty much anything I would add. Most of my game overs come from very early from aggressive AI minors. Once you get going as long as you dont fall really behind its unlikely you will get completely wiped out unless you make some larger mistakes.

That said everyone is different and it will depend on the difficulty you play at. I would get my butt handed to me on the hardest difficulty!

[Valsalan]

Of my four games in the 78 hours of owning Shadow Empire I'm at 2 losses, one win, and one draw.

[ABoxFullOfKittens]

Almost ever time. It's a blast.

Sometimes it's about the journey, as opposed to the destination.

[Hate Bear]

I just play on normal, so I don't lose very often. It's usually a game balance issue that puts me in a poor position where I have a 50/50 chance in about 300 turns. I count that as a "loss" and restart because it's an inefficient build order. Of course, when Oceania came out, I had an AI faction expand onto my island in 10 turns and buy up the MTH stock, so I was looking pretty shafted and reported it as a balance issue.

I guess if I'm feeling masochistic I might turn it up a notch, but I haven't had enough games to feel that way yet.

[FailedNormiee]

If you are going a militarist how far do you go with recruitment per turn?

[Overlord]

Originally posted by FailedNormiee:

If you are going a militarist how far do you go with recruitment per turn?

As much as needed, don't be afraid to go into negative growth. Just make sure you don't feed your entire pop into the wood chipper. You should be constantly tweaking your recruitment rates depending on your needs and plans. Beeline for mechanization and later robot infantry and automated pillboxes if attrition is hitting you that hard though.

Mid to late game there's no magic number, how high or low it will go depends on your needs and how your wars are going. Whenever you're not trying to repalce losses or raise new formations keep your capital recruitment rate as high as you can afford to while keeping your growth rate in the green. For other cities draw 100 to 500 as long as you stay in the green. Crank things up as high as you can in newly conquered high pop cities to help your garrisons manage revolts. Then normalize recruitment rates if pop goes 25% lower than your capital or when you fully assimilate/pacify the zone.

Do note that you need to pay upkeep for your recruit reserves, so don't go too wild with recruitment if you're in a low food world.

[AranwenL]

once i learned tanks just how op light tanks could be i had no problem waging war even against high teched enemies. light tanks, even in small numbers can roll nations.
.
if we're not counting bugs forcing me to abandon worlds then i havent lost. closest was when i was learning the game and had majors on all sides but i had mountains protecting me from their armor. i had lots of oil but almost no metal, had to make a bunch of cities so i could build the mines that generated ores from power. i regret deleting the saves for that world since it was really interesting.
.
can't give much advice on the game since my entire strat involves getting enough recruits to make a light tank army and them bulldozing the enemies. even with 100/turn i can normally get enough in reserves before i start mass producing the city building to get ores and then theres nothing stopping me from rolling out as many tanks as i need. most of my games involve island maps, i obsessively use militia to hold everything until im ready.

[BrUwU]

Originally posted by Overlord:

Once you get familiar enough with the game over time it gets pretty easy to tell when you're in a rough start. Most of us just back out and roll a new game once we notice. Usually it's only ironman, mlg types chasing that high diff high that stick with rough starts until the end.

Or maybe when you actually familiar with game, you want to actually challenge yourself and try to work and utilize all the complex deep features the game provides to you, to solve more complicated games. Rather steamrolling game through easy starts.