Any tips to master this game?

[Yindiram The Faerie Dragon]

This game seems way too hard for me. I play the snake god, normal difficulty, and every time around turn 40 or 50, I only manage to set up a plague and infiltrate one or two cities. That's it, nothing else. I know this is super slow, I don't know what I have done wrong. I normally do supplicant+ courier at first, then get the plague doctor later. Every challenge action takes infinite time to finish. What's wrong with my strategy?

[EragonRagnold]

So as the snake, you have many options. you want to work on having about two people expanding your shadow and infiltration near the start. I personally don't get the complex people like plague doctors in the beginning. instead, I get the lady with monkey 3rd to have another intrigue character, or if the orcs are strong enough a orc. you want to work on getting a line of shadow/ infiltration away from the start. once the snake gets out the surrounding cities die. You also want to use your powers to get initial infiltration either in surrounding communities or in cities. this allows you to do some low-level things causing strife like stealing items or starting plagues. Plagues are more about weakening the region and providing more strife.

also, you will want your starting seed to be adjacent to inhabitable land, preferably not on an island away from the main continent.
I like to have your supplicant make shadows, so by the time you are done infiltrating the city, you can do well of shadows.

Otherwise, watch some recent playthroughs. snake has a lot of options.
Sorry if this doesn't help much

[The Grand Mugwump]

You should probably do the tutorial again and pay closer attention to what it's telling and showing you. The reason it is taking so long is because of the location's security stat. Infiltrating nearby locations will lower it by 1, which lowers the amount of work by 25 per security point (which is ~7 turns with 4 intrigue). If you don't do anything to lower the security, then a location with 6 security will increase the turns to do any infiltration activity by ~42 turns. So yeah, infiltrate, bribe, cause unrest, do stuff to lower the security so you're not just sitting there for 50 turns to infiltrate one location.

If you look at the victory points, they also give a clue of what to focus on. Killing people gives far less victory points than most other activities, though it has its place and purpose.

Also, infiltrating next to the starting tomb is almost always extremely inefficient unless you're lucky enough for it to spawn in a densely populated area. It's much better to find a city with several adjacent minor settlements that have 4+ connections to other places. Then you 100% infiltate that city (usually made easier by infiltrating the nearby minor settlements to lower its security and then bribing the guards to lower it further) and use the enshadow action there. Now you'll have shadow spreading down 12+ lanes instead of 2 or 3 into lightly populated areas if you focus on the tomb.

[Yindiram The Faerie Dragon]

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

You should probably do the tutorial again and pay closer attention to what it's telling and showing you. The reason it is taking so long is because of the location's security stat. Infiltrating nearby locations will lower it by 1, which lowers the amount of work by 25 per security point (which is ~7 turns with 4 intrigue). If you don't do anything to lower the security, then a location with 6 security will increase the turns to do any infiltration activity by ~42 turns. So yeah, infiltrate, bribe, cause unrest, do stuff to lower the security so you're not just sitting there for 50 turns to infiltrate one location.

If you look at the victory points, they also give a clue of what to focus on. Killing people gives far less victory points than most other activities, though it has its place and purpose.

Also, infiltrating next to the starting tomb is almost always extremely inefficient unless you're lucky enough for it to spawn in a densely populated area. It's much better to find a city with several adjacent minor settlements that have 4+ connections to other places. Then you 100% infiltate that city (usually made easier by infiltrating the nearby minor settlements to lower its security and then bribing the guards to lower it further) and use the enshadow action there. Now you'll have shadow spreading down 12+ lanes instead of 2 or 3 into lightly populated areas if you focus on the tomb.

I know the security stuff, I paid attention to it. Still it tooks forever to inflitrate. You see, I need 6-8 rounds for first farm, then another 6-8*2 rounds for its destruction, reducing the food production. Do the same things to second farm. Then proceed to city. City normally has 3-4 sections, each section take 6-8 rounds even with 0 security due to food shortage. Which means I need about at least 6+6*2+6*2+6*3=48 rounds to inflitrate 2 farms + a city. Extremely slow and painful.

[The Grand Mugwump]

It's usually faster (and less menacing) to steal from an infiltrated minor settlement and use that money to bribe the guards. Also yes, 48 turns is a long time at first glance. But if you have 2 agents doing it, it's 24 turns. And as they gain ranks, it will go even faster.

[forrestomintero]

First, you you usually don't need to burn the settlements. Unless it's a capital, which get a few extra points of security. Bribes are way more time efficient even if the city still has 1 point of security. Especially if you take "noble connections" on the courtier so he reduces security by 1 in any city he's in.

Second, you really want to pick a long-turn goal to pursue. You have 3 choices there. Win by shadow, win by murder, or win by deep ones. Theres also madness, religion, and orc focuses but those are better saved until you have more experience. Since you're playing the snake, it's easiest to prioritize shadow. This is also the most newbie friendly because the mechanics are relatively simple.

1: pretty much all your mana until the last couple seals should be spent on the infiltration spell. This saves your agents a buttload of time, and infiltrated locations get shadow up to twice as fast.

2: focus on infiltrating cities spread around the map, and use enshadow on them. (Malign catch is also a plus) If you have them in various places around the map the shadow spreads a lot faster than if they were all bunched up.

3: when you're using God powers to infiltrate make sure to focus on locations that surround a city you're going to infiltrate. This saves you a lot of setup time. Make sure to check every location as you do this because sometimes there's a second site within the location (usually a temple) and if the location isn't max infiltration it won't reduce the nearby cities security.

4: save your last agent slot for the monarch. She's a unique agent, and the only one who can start the dark empire. Note that I'm not saying this is a dark empire focus because that requires a more specific setup to execute. It's just a really easy source of free victory points if you simply make the dark empire and then ignore it. The only hard part is getting a capital of a large kingdom fully enshadowed without the chosen one coming along to cleanse it. Do this sometime in the last hundred turns as an easy vp boost if you need to. Just choose the biggest country in a heavily shadowed area. Every city with over 90% shadow within that country will join, and if the city joins, then the attached farms etc will also join.

[The Grand Mugwump]

An easy side objective while working towards a shadow win is to have your lore or command characters focus on influencing holy orders in heavily infiltrated and/or shadowed areas when they aren't needed to use well of shadows or their unique ability. This will help them rack up a ton of xp, which is usually very hard to get doing most lore and command challenges. And some of the holy order tenets can drastically increase the spread of shadow around the world, like dark worship. The snake also gets a moral tenet which helps manage agent menace somewhat.

I almost always keep a geomancer warlock on standby if I'm thinking of making a dark empire. They can influence a temple near a geomantic locus and then attack channeler the chosen one whenever they try redeem a sovereign. With at least 5 lore, he can zap the chosen one every other turn, which almost always discourages them before they can finish, even at geomancy 1.

[Raziel]

What I usually do is I try to give my main intrigue characters 2 daggers. Daggers give might and intrigue. When the character reaches lvl 1 I give them a point of intrigue and at lvl 2 I pick Stealthy. This should help keep your agents alive. Also grab a couple of sellswords later on. Stealthy keeps profile low, which means that heroes and rulers are less likely to find (and thus target) you. Might and minions increases the threat rating of your character, which dissuades heroes from attacking you even if they know where you are.

The intrigue boost is the real power of the dagger, though. With this method you can greatly increase the rate at which you infiltrate. Not only does this mean that you will gain progress faster, it also means that you will gain more experience. More experience = more intrigue.

As a final tip I would like to point out that you don't have to 100% infiltrate everything. Sometimes you only have to infiltrate the sewers if the only thing you want to do is start a plague. This also means that it is often faster to just start infiltrating your target, without infiltrating surrounding settlements first (A bribe is still helpful, though).

Discovering that last point really stepped up my game, as I used to waste WAY too much time on infiltration.

[The Grand Mugwump]

Originally posted by Raziel:

This also means that it is often faster to just start infiltrating your target, without infiltrating surrounding settlements first (A bribe is still helpful, though).

Discovering that last point really stepped up my game, as I used to waste WAY too much time on infiltration.

Indeed. Sometimes optimization requires sitting down and doing math. Spending 50 (or 75) work to infiltrate a minor settlement to reduce the work to infiltrate each location in a city by 25 only benefits us if we plan on infiltrating more than two locations in the city (and are not concerned with spreading shadow there).

[Tystefy]

It's not for everyone, but I typically find myself spending 10+ minutes on turn 1 just looking around the map and forming a plan based on what I see.

Doing this helps me find details that are unique to each game.

For example, I could see that all three holy orders are cramped into one corner while an untapped coven is surrounded by faithless settlements. Another time, I had a game where a house had 20(!) rulers, so that was an easy and fun curse-the-whole-bloodline strategy.

[timlagor]

Seems to me (zer0 actual experience) you should always aim to start a plague as a distraction even if you don't plan to focus on it. Does that work? Can it backfire? Any other distractions worth throwing out?

[pi73r]

I'm a newbie too, just bought a game, but I've got a rather easy win on my first game on normal, medium map. You don't have to worry about early game too much - it is slow and it will feel too slow but later things will speed up a lot.
I started focusing on plague and getting plague doctor fast. I got a courtier to help with infiltrations. In midgame I've sent the supplicant to gain control of orc tribes+ got first daughter in the meantime. I got a warlord to boost orcs fast and I stole the money from infiltrated cities to boost orc armies. I got a dark empire but it died pretty fast so I didn't get to play it that much.
So basically I had orc army and sister of daughter wrecking havoc on south, plague north and I infiltrated/spread dark in the centre. By the end game I had entire world just chase my orc agent because he killed a lot of heroes and lead some armies. I won easily before the snake god was even summoned.
There are a lot of ways to win and you don't need to worry too much if you didn't do all that much before turn 100 (at least on normal), things really speed up later.
And yea, in that game both plague and first daughter seemed really OP.

[Allorno]

I think it's also worth noting that you absolutely pick up pace as the game progresses. When you start you have a few low leveled (and thus, low-statted) agents which means you have fewer people doing things slower. As seals unlock you gain more agent slots, which means you have more people working for you, and as your agents level up they'll get more stats and be able to work faster.

Basically I'd say you're not actually doing anything wrong necessarily, the earlier turns are generally faster to play and "less productive" and later turns you'll get much more done as you have more agents with more levels doing things faster. Generally my first 50-100 turns take... I wanna say an hour or so, which consist of 15-20 minutes of reading the situation on the map (Where is the Chosen One? Are they human or elf? Is anyone Aware? Where is my witch coven? Where are the religious orders? What tenets do they have? Can I easily create a Prophet for their religion to influence it? Where is my seal relative to settlements? Which countries are biggest/desirable to influence?) and then 40-45 minutes of just speeding through the first turns with only a few agents. The latter couple of hundred turns take way longer.

I might point you towards taking a third intrigue agent instead of the plague doctor, especially on She Who Will Feast (SWWF). The Trickster comes with a lot of base intrigue which makes her great for helping to infiltrate, and as SWWF enshadowing the world is a solid win condition, which infiltration helps you to achieve. I also tend to play slower, safer games that take longer though, so your mileage may vary.

If you really want to coax all you can out of your agents the equipment you can buy in towns helps a lot, especially at the beginning. There's a dagger that sells for I believe 35 gold (Concealable Dagger?) that gives +1 Might and +1 Intrigue, which shaves a ton of time off missions of those types. Ex.: 50 complexity/3 intrigue is 16.6=>17 turns to complete, 50 complexity/6 intrigue is 8.3=>9 turns to complete. I'll generally try to infiltrate a relatively wealthy settlement with one infiltration point early on (She Who Will Feast can do this with her second power which unlocks turn 12) and then have an intrigue agent rob the treasury, netting me 100-200 gold which can then be turned into daggers worth 3 agent levels of investing into intrigue. There's a UI overlay you can use to show what markets are carrying to find the daggers (or anything else) on the map without needing to manually check each market's inventory, so definitely mess around with it long enough to figure that out, if you decide to go that route. Skeleton keys are also a must-buy if you see them, offering -1 security in the city while an agent carrying on is present making infiltration (and several other challenge types) way easier.