I am a but confused about domain extension

[zizou34]

I just bought the game and am a bit confused about domain extension, should I build new colonies as fast and many as possible or should I just build 2 or 3 to just have few cities to de develop?

[Holy Fool Sehrael]

I'm new too. I usually try to at least get one additional outpost and then city if I find a spot where it'd be desireable to expand. But the maps are so small, I never find enough spots to scratch the city limit.

However, I only expand like that if I am not threatened by monsters or an early war and if I can sustain it. Dunno. People will probably say it depends^^

[Astax]

Well for single player, you always wanna hit cap asap. Which in most cases is 3. One of which can be the nearby Free City, which you can woo or conquer. Then you get three heroes (including your ruler) and try to level them up by clearing camps.

This is just a general rule, your mileage may vary. But you wanna get beefy heroes to resist enemy invasions.

[「SHAORUNE」]

You can play with the Megacities modifier in the Realm setup, that what i usually play with. It limit the number of city to 1, very fun if you don't like micro-managing city too much. But if you don't generally you want to have a second city when a free city can be intergrated , or you need to build a second army

[Psycho Pie]

I'm new here also. I discovered that domain extention through vassalage is far more effective economically speaking than making outposts: Vassals give you an increasing amount of ressources, they have some domains they are expanding by their own, you can pass through their domain without making them angry, they sell you units from time to time, they trigger events than help you boost your civilization (or theirs, or none, that's up to you to decide), they can fight for you if their allegiance is high enough, once at certain allegiance level, you can annexe them and directly control their city, which is developped enough to give you a strong advantage. plus, you get a free -often high level- hero

If you build a outpost, you'll only have campsite that will cost you 10 gold per turn, plus additional ressources to develop them into a city. That is only useful for when you decide to control a region that is far away from all civilization, or snatch that juicy ressource from an opponent, although that wouldn't be so sustainable on the long run.

[Blanch Warren]

You can't "build as many colonies as possible" unless you plan to release them as vassals.

[MrLuckless]

You can build as many outposts as your economy can sustain, and for cities it's usually a good idea to stay within your max city limit. You can use Imperium to raise the cap by 1 each time and is repeatable.

If you're going into vassals as a strategy, you can intentionally start a city then release it as a vassal to then continue expanding that way, but otherwise going wide in this game isn't quite the same as it was in previous AoW games.