Strategies at game start and onwards

[gungadin22000]

I'm a veteran 4X player, but a fairly poor one, frankly, having not won in Civ4 much above King difficulty. I'm having some issues with the early game and pace of PC and wonder if anyone might offer me some pointers.

I'm very much an "expand and research" type player, not usually attacking the AI players unless they're sitting on something I really want or are obviously far weaker than me. In Civ-likes, I thus tend to build a couple of units to garrison my towns and a somewhat larger assault force to deal with random attacks. I spend most of my production on city improvements, trying to amass more research and production, usually.

Imagine my surprise when I am DOWed by the enemy around turn 100 and he has, as per the diplomacy screen, about 84 units versus my 10, almost all of them being crappy entry-level swordsmen and such. My units are far fewer, but more advanced. This has lead me to ask a few questions:

1. At game start, should you really focus mainly on spamming lowbie units instead of infrastructure? It's what the AI seems to do, when I looked at its early turns in a see-all-terrain game.

2. Should you go for mainly huge numbers of wimpy units or smaller numbers of elites?

3. Is it possible to turtle successfully in this game or do you really need to maintain a titanic military to avoid being gobbled up superfast?

In general, it seems like the AI favours militarisation far more than in Civ. In Civ-like games, units are produced way slower, so it seems that the AI just focuses all its resources on producing doomstacks as opposed to lumber mills, which I've built tons of and which have taken up all my production time.

Tips on improvement production vs unit production would be appreciated.

[Impus]

Well, they are still balancing, but right now the AI is replicating units, expanding, researching and building tall. Depending on what settings I am using, I will usually build up only around 5 or so defended cities by turn 100 and have some basic infracstructure going. I feel like I can't properly defend them if I build more than that until after I have a solid city for making upper tier units.

[En]

1 - you can make do with summons. cast them, store the spell, and you have your whoopass in a can ready to greet any invading army

2 - personally I go for a small number of elite units, with as much enchantments on them as possible, but that's late in the game. in the first stages I use 1st tier summons to take the hits and have what I start with level up

3 - eh, iffy. Usually I can turtle effectively only if the terrain aids me. This means plane of air, fire or negative with an islands-type terrain and not many "easy" portals in reach.


As a rule of thumb, I find that taking 1 point in summoning or earth is a godsend for the earliest to mid stages (with 1 dot of earth you can research stone skin too, which can make some units pretty much un-hittable by lowbies)

[Karol13]

It would be YES and YES, unless you know tricks how to capture all neutral cities on your isle/continent, then you can settle even more cities that would support your one city (does not need to be capital) that would go for top tier units.
If these tricks are not in your sleeve yet, go for quick and numerous army that will simple outnumber enemies and capture all their cities ASAP, then return to the point of building your best city up.

[KillDawg]

Just my two cents, take it or leave it:

So far, so far, I have found running 1 city for almost 80 turns works best. One strong garrison and even most AI will pass you by.

I've really been surprised that with all the economy talk, no one has mentioned the world features as their largest source of income. I start attacking every mid-level feature in sight starting on turn 1 if I could reach it with a combined solid army. The rest is a good ole, looting and plundering time.

I'm cleaning up this game here, but when I start a new one I'll stop back in here, give you a semi-step-by-step and let you know how I fare.

[madra]

Take Cartographer, take Grey Elves, at start of the game send your starting army to the next neutral city and take it, while you produce 2 archers in your starting city, summon as much mana spirits as you can combine starting army with the new archers, go to enemy wizard (if you have one on your plane), kill him. Evade rest of the neutral cities. First plane done. Produce more archers in your main city and produce income at the rest. Search for the easiest gateway, invade it, send all mana spirits for exploring the next wizard, find it. Kill it. Take the rest of the neutral cities on this plane. Rinse and repeat if you have more planes. Normally i need around 50 turns to capture 2 planes completely. No spells needed, no merchant, no alchemist, no hero. Works on every difficulty.
Edit: For a more easy gameplay just take 2 points in destruction skill and in life, healing and flame arrow/poison arrow are your friends.

[madra]

@gungadin2000 A few basics in 4X games: Find out which gameplay the devs want you to play and counter it! This is the most basic rule and the most important one.
Examples: In PQ you face lots of low-lvl creatures from the enemy sorcerers after turn 50 or such and they try to zerg-rush you. Counter: be faster! Every other style makes it more complicated.
In the Civ series you have the opposite behaviour. Not much enemies at the beginning means cityspam and/or you have to develop your cities because you need better units later.
In MoM and Endless Legends or AoW you should have a combined strategy. For example in Endless Legends you should build only 2 new units at start and not more, and then city development. Thats enough for everything in the beginning.
You will need the balance between costs and a powerful main group at start. It should be strong enough to capture the wargoals you need/want, it should be easy to maintain and it should be fast enough to do what you want. Thats the ideas for the beginning few turns of these games. The difficulty doesnt matter, higher difficulty just means that you have less turns for making mistakes.
I play those games on highest difficulty and those strategies help me every time. (except EL, which i play on second highest, because on highest its really hard :))

[Karol13]

Features (ruins and stuff).
These used to be source of mana/gold/items in MoM as well. But the funny trick was that these changed in guardians power based on difficulty. What I have observed, also against AI.

......... AI ...|.... Player .......
Easy : 2x stronger | much weaker
Normal : same | same
Hard : weaker | 2x stronger
Impossible : weaker | 3x stronger

While nodes did have their own setting (from weak to powerful) ther was also game difficulty impacting this. Normal ruins were impacted only by difficulty.
So when you played easy, you encountered 1-2 zombies, 1-3 skeletons, 1-2 sprites
on Normal you already could fight like 5 zombies and 4 sprites
on Hard full stack of 9 Zombies
on Impossible 7 Zombies and 2 Shadow Demons (or even Demon Lord )

Nodes were even more tuned into extremes, Easy + weak power nodes = 2-3 Phantom Warriors
Impossible + powerful nodes + Myrran = 9 Sky Drakes (and one had probably a laser pistol)

In PQ I feel that the features have somehow static guardians. And somehow tuned up, so I very rarely am able to exploit any features in 20 tiles square around my starting city. But I can capture most of neutral cities (just by having one more unit then they do, what is usually not that difficult to get in first 20 turns)
Sadly, for the few games I went through in PQ I could never say that I was able to exploit features (in time I was able to capture them, I could send the same army against my enemy SLs and just eliminate them... I decided to go for features just due the fun factor and army-testing reasons)

[geonick91]

I used to play with just a few cities that I built up until mid late game, and I’d then use one big advanced army to slowly steam roll the rest of the maps. But I found that took too many turns of inactivity and I was still only 50/50 winning losing.

Now I use either Grey Elves or High Men with Slavelabor to accelerate early game development, using my archers or crossbow men to take early cities. I’ll set all mana resource to gaining mana only first 50 turns, and have my goal be controlling 5-6 cities by then. I’d try to get a dwarf city to make a bunch of dwarf cities for the money, and a draconian to make doom drakes for mid game. I can have about a dozen cities and a small army of doom drakes by turn 100. This is about 50/50 civ/attack.

My latest strategy is Dark Elves for power, summoning focus with summoner mastery, take some negatives for more points, then merchant for money, mystic for more power, summoner and channeler? for cheaper spells, arcanist for better starting spellcraft. Using this you can cast free upkeep skeletons for only 13, and use alchemy to get more mana from gold. Use magic spirits to scout. Focus everything on taking early cities, when everyone is a pushover. I cast 2-3 skeletons every turn. By turn 50, I had all 15 cities on my continent, 150 gold a turn, over 50 mana a turn, plenty of food, cities set to build infrastructure by the time they’re at 6000ish pop. Set to start research and cast power allocation around this time. This is 100% attack first 50 turns.

[Lampros]

Since this is the most recent thread: How is the bugs/stability issue at the moment?

I was scared off buying at release because of this issue, and I am wondering if things are now fixed.

Also, it seems like this forum is basically abandoned. Does this mean that it never caught on among its buyers or has little replay value?

[Gilmoy]

I never had major problems with bugs or instability. I did sporadically get the end-of-combat hang bug (just shrug, task-kill, reload), but nothing repeatable.

Planar Conquest is, alas, kind of a punching bag of a game. It's fun for the first few playthroughs, until it dawns on you that there's just not much depth or challenge. AIs don't seriously try to win, don't play by the same rules you do (they don't plan; they just cheat on a schedule), and aren't much of a threat. So it's fun to explore the game depth until you've seen everything once each, but after that it's kind of a slog. And any decently prepared human will win, against any combination of AIs. You don't really need to hunt for strong starting combos or early-game theory (although that's part of the fun). It might actually be more of a challenge to deliberately nerf yourself with as weak a start as you think you can get away with, and go win anyways.

I never even reached the end of one game, so the replay value ran out before then. For me, I learned that the UI didn't scale up to the way I play, and so if I'd ever write my own game like this, the first thing I'd do is implement a true multi-plane visual display, like the 3D cutaway map you see in every subway station in the world. (Already this would be cool, and would grab the player.) And automapping, with auto-logging of every map feature you've dummy-attacked, so that you can sort them by strength and sweep your gaze across a sea of known features, and visually see what's do-able and which ones are too strong. Even if it's only visual sugar, it would totally change the player's cognitive workload, and the information flow you'd use in navigating each turn -- like going from single-cell Calc to 2D Excel, or from 2D Sketch to 3D SolidWorks.

Next, I'd write a real AI that actually does stuff. This part is sorely missing, and eventually it will grind you down through sheer repetition. PQ's AIs do spam combat groups (ignoring actual costs, upkeep, and such; it's part of their cheats), but then they meander without any coherent plan. In tactical combat, they simply pump and march, and if you figure out one tactic that counters it, it will always work. Hence ranged dominates, and cheesy tricks like flying, or invisible, or 30+ Mundane Resist on a non-flying, non-invisible melee hero (you want her to get hit for infinite free counterattacks), will always work. I felt like I was back in 1988, playing Walter Bright's Empire and using a cruiser to shore-bombard an infinite stream of AI infantry, who never deviated from the path that walked them into range.

Probably it never earned enough to complete the devs' original vision, and they moved on to something else.