Expansion targets

[Halcyon]

I see a lot of people talking about 20 in 12 or 12 in 12 as critical target numbers to achieve to consider an expansion successful in MP. I haven't tried MP yet, so I can only assume it's harder than SP in general, so it somewhat boggles my mind to consider any way of achieving these numbers without an awake expander. I've tried quite a few nation and opener combos now, and in a good game I can maybe manage 8 in 12 without taking an awake expander.

I've read a lot and watched quite a few tutorial videos now, but even with the general guidelines of understanding the troop matchups, scripting to try to snipe commanders, scouting ahead to know what you're facing, and understanding the strengths of your troops and bless options, I still can't comprehend a world in which I could conquer 20 provinces in 12 turns.

Is it just mandatory to take a monster with bad scales and a bless focused on protection/regeneration? What am I missing?

[Bumc]

Don't stop making new expansion parties.
20 by 12 is doable without awake pretender, but you need to compensate your slow start by adding new wrecking balls to the field.

[Sombre]

20 by 12 assumes no resistance from other players, just an ability to conquer indy provinces. It usually, but not always, involves sacred troops with a relatively heavy bless. It almost always involves very low attrition, which means troops that have some kind of strong defensive capability and can survive multiple rounds in combat.

This differs a lot between nations but there are some nations that can do this without using any sacred troops at all - they just make expansion parties of basic recruitable troops that are very good against indy defenders - the classic example is something like heavy cavalry, where their defence, hp, prot, and offensive output mean they can often take provinces while sustaining no casualties and without numerical parity.

[Halcyon]

I am recruiting to cap from my capital fort every turn, but thinking about it I tend not to recruit too many leaders and instead focus on mages. Maybe I need to create more leader stacks to split the troops across more fronts.

In single player with no interference from other players is where I end up at 8/12, so it's not a matter of my rhythm being thrown by active interference. I just can't parse a way to hit that many provinces with a winning stack in that time scale. I've tried Man and blessed cavalry, which typically has the best results in terms of casualties but unless I luck into a really phenomenal capital spawn, it takes 5-6 months to get even one force really rolling using purely knights of avalon. If I mix them with regular knights of man, I can get going in 4, but then that's still only able to manage ~6 provinces by the end of the year. If I'm lucky I can get a second stack going by turn 7 or 8, but they'll usually only manage a province or two before turn 12, resulting in my usual 7-8 provinces. Switching to non-holy infantry was a huge failure, just got utterly wrecked with longspear+longbow combo. Wardens + longbows was more successful, but that was a round where I took a defensive bless so the wardens were able to hold out against larger groups.

I've tried ulmish infantry and knights in various mixtures, as well as caelian holy, non holy, mammoth spam, and commander sniping. Caelum has consistently performed terribly. I've given up on them, despite how cool they seem, until I get a better handle on how to use magic offensively. Ulm varies but I typically manage 6-8 with them. Tien'chi tends to have high attrition but if I can micro the troop transport with eunuchs I again end up at about 6-8 provinces. Arcoscephale just hoplites struggled, way more casualties than I anticipated and way lower killing power. Mixing in heart companions with an offensive bless helped a bit, but took too long to get moving again. I tried using peltasts and hypaspists but they just don't have any staying power and peltasts seem to fail to understand the 'keep distance' part of keep distance and fire, so the only way I ever get any mileage with them is hold and fire, where they inevitably get mulched by everything except militia.

In general, heavy cavalry does seem like the answer. If I focus on Man and Ulm then, the problem becomes that even with order 2 production 2 scales, I can't seem to build 'winning' armies quickly enough to reach the goal. Should I maybe be supplementing the cavalry with cheap indie infantry to distract the enemy?

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Do not supplement with cheap infantry, no. There are uses for them, but they're specific uses, like negating the lance damage bonus when clearing a heavy cavalry province.

This is a game that values quality over quantity in a big way. All too often, the only thing that cheap, bad troops will do for you is die and drag the actually good troops closer to the army rout threshold in the process. To take MA Man as an example, 6 Knights of Avalon with a decent bless is a perfectly viable expansion party; 40 longspears probably isn't.

Generally speaking, unless you're pumping indy strength up above the default 4, I would guess that your problem is you're making expansion parties a lot larger than they need to be. Learning to judge the minimum viable force commitment for a party to expand with an acceptable degree of attrition takes practice, but as Na'Ba for instance, I would be happy working with parties of a dozen 'Adite elites or less. You can always converge multiple squads on the same province, if you think you need more bodies.

[Tlaloc_]

It doesn't really matter much for SP just have fun, but a general note for MP is that 20:12 is basically the minimum you're going to need in expansion not to get totally boxed in by other players. In fact it is possible to expand substantially faster than this if you are making a party each turn, are efficient with pathing to provinces and don't take too much attrition. Generally the best way is taking a strong imprisoned bless that allows small parties of sacreds to take on large indie forces, such as by stacking defence stats.

[Halcyon]

Reading '6 knights of avalon' made me think of Ned Flanders' "Nothin at all!"

Clearly I am overestimating how many guys I need to clear a province

[Draken]

Originally posted by Halcyon:

Reading '6 knights of avalon' made me think of Ned Flanders' "Nothin at all!"

Clearly I am overestimating how many guys I need to clear a province

It heavily depends on what units you use.
Also what enemies you are up against.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Halcyon:

Reading '6 knights of avalon' made me think of Ned Flanders' "Nothin at all!"

Clearly I am overestimating how many guys I need to clear a province

Yeah I figured that was it. It does take some practice to recognise which province types are the exception, but for instance with a decent bless I would throw 6 Knights of Avalon at, say, a province of 120 Lion Tribe, with not a single worry in my head.

Now, barbarians, bone tribe, or heavy cavalry on the other hand...

[TheMage1]

My thoughts is that you want to recruit people to bolster your starting force turn 1, and also probably prophetize your starting commander so they can cast divine blessing, then start casting smite. You then want to form a new expansion party every two turns after that. My understanding is that there are nations that can create a new expansion party each turn, but that tends to lead to greater attrition, and those nations that can make expansion parties tend to want an early war, which requires you to preserve your army. If you merge your starting force with the first new expansion party, and don't lose any other party, you have
Turn 1: 1 province(capital)
Turn 2: 1 province(haven't moved out yet)
Turn 3: 2 provinces(initial party moved out)
Turn 4: 3 provinces(initial party takes another province, is basically wiped out)
Turn 5: 4 provinces(remnants of initial party merge with new party taking a province)
Turn 6: 5 provinces(still only have one force, since the initial one was wiped out)
Turn 7: 7 provinces(we finally have two expansion parties so conquer two now)
Turn 8: 9 provinces(still have two parties)
Turn 9: 12 provinces(now have 3 parties, so take 3 a turn now)
Turn 10: 15 provinces(three parties each take another province)
Turn 11: 18 or 19 provinces(Now have 4 parties, but the new party might not be able to expand immediately, since you would have taken 4 provinces from your cap ring before this)
Turn 12: 22 or 23 provinces(just 4 more provinces from last turn)

A point to notice is how many provinces each expansion party needs to take.
The initial expansion party needs to take 2 provinces.
The second expansion party needs to take 8 provinces, but is reinforced by the remnants of the initial party.
The third expansion party has to take 6 provinces, but isn't reinforced.

Another point is that maps might have 15 provinces per player, which would be achieved at this pace on turn 10.

[Halcyon]

Progress! I'm up to 11 now as Man using knights/longbows and 10 as Ulm using pikes/2h axes (using the rework mod that lets pikes do a 'ranged' poke)

Recruiting more commanders with smaller teams does seem to be the right course. I've already been doing turn 1 recruit and prophet, though thank you for the suggestion. The 2 turn goal for expansion parties is a good guideline as well, since I've been averaging one per 3 or 4 and that's still not good. It looks like the idea is that parties should not circle back, but rather leave unconquered provinces at distance 1,2,3 etc from the capital so the next party can conquer every turn. I've noticed that the province strength estimations can be wildly inaccurate outside of dominion. Is it worth it to recruit extra scouts during the expansion so I can see the actual troop counts?

Big thanks to you all for your thoughts and suggestions. I'm still not there yet, but I can see the missing links where before it was totally puzzling to me.

[Bumc]

You can recruit extra scouts, and even indie commanders to do a bump recon.
It sometimes gets them killed on retreat, but that's the only way to get reliable info where it matters (some human/tribesman provinces you don't really care about 50% inaccuracy in numbers).

[Uncle Al]

It's a bit of a pain to keep track of, but because the degree of inaccuracy you see varies from turn to turn, you usually have a very good idea of the actual number of enemies if you get to observe the province for a couple of turns.

Scout reports vary between half and double true numbers, so if you see 30 one turn and 120 the next it's definitely actually 60 enemies.

Of course that doesn't tell you if it's 5 of those 60 that are heavy cav, or 30, so you might still want to bump recon as Bumc described above if it's a dicey match up. Tracking the numbers is more useful for things like barbarians where the units will always be the same thing, but the quantity can matter a lot.

[Halcyon]

You know it never occurred to me that I could just attack with a scout and orders to retreat to see the actual numbers. Brilliant. I need to make better use of that against cavalry provinces. Did another round as Ulm this morning and got 14 so yeah, big progress and big thanks once more to you all.

[Draken]

Originally posted by Halcyon:

You know it never occurred to me that I could just attack with a scout and orders to retreat to see the actual numbers. Brilliant. I need to make better use of that against cavalry provinces. Did another round as Ulm this morning and got 14 so yeah, big progress and big thanks once more to you all.

That's called a "ping". Though it's not something most people do a lot during expansion. Scouts aren't free and pinging delays your expansion by 1 turn. Scouts can also die on retreat.

Scout reports are unprecise after a very specific pattern.
https://illwiki.com/dom5/scout-reports

So for normal provinces, you get a 50% inaccuracy. So if you see 50 units, it could be as low as 25, or as high as 100. If you note down the numbers over multiple turns, you can actually figure out the number somewhat.

A commander in the province, scouts count, will lower the inaccuracy down to 30%.
If you have a nation with spies, it goes down to 10%.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Halcyon:

Progress! I'm up to 11 now as Man using knights/longbows and 10 as Ulm using pikes/2h axes (using the rework mod that lets pikes do a 'ranged' poke)

Recruiting more commanders with smaller teams does seem to be the right course. I've already been doing turn 1 recruit and prophet, though thank you for the suggestion. The 2 turn goal for expansion parties is a good guideline as well, since I've been averaging one per 3 or 4 and that's still not good. It looks like the idea is that parties should not circle back, but rather leave unconquered provinces at distance 1,2,3 etc from the capital so the next party can conquer every turn. I've noticed that the province strength estimations can be wildly inaccurate outside of dominion. Is it worth it to recruit extra scouts during the expansion so I can see the actual troop counts?

Big thanks to you all for your thoughts and suggestions. I'm still not there yet, but I can see the missing links where before it was totally puzzling to me.

Worth noting, bringing longbows along with your knights is not pure upside. One of the reasons that this game favours quality over quantity is that there's an army rout mechanic where, as the total HP of an army depletes to certain thresholds of what it started the battle at, it begins to take periodic morale checks and eventually routs automatically.

So, rather than being useful as an expendable screen, poor quality troops that are easier to kill than elites can be a net drain on an army's effectiveness by panicking your elites into routing from fights that they'd handily win if they were on their own. Archers are also inaccurate enough that they're prone to shooting your own troops in a melee scrum.

Neither of these are necessarily problems for the party comp you describe, longbows shouldn't be doing enough damage to hurt knights of avalon, and they should be hanging back from the fight enough to stay alive. But if you find you've lost a fight even though only some of the longbows died while the knights were doing fine, now you know why.