Here's the report for my Freya game that I started yesterday. @Drift: I made a save game every 50 turns (and will continue to do so), this should give you a good impression on how the game is developing. First four saves are being sent to you right now.
Settings:
- MoM version beta 10 pre-release 2 (without the WoS/Shrine update)
- Monarch difficulty
- standard worldmap, all map settings standard
- eleven opponents
- I chose Freya to play
1. Initial Expansion
I started on a river, amidst forests and ancient forests, and (like before) in immediate vicinity of a node of my magic type. Goblins, tobacco and a chaos node were also in the city radius.
Initial exploration showed that I was on the north-eastern section of a larger continent (map attached below). To the northwest and southwest of me were two rather large lakes. I decided to secure the bottlenecks and hoped that I could settle the whole are behind them. Feeling that I could settle there later, I directed my initial expansion to the south and made the mistake to overexpand myself. I couldn't produce settlers fast enough, and soon settlers and escorts from Raven, Rjak and Ariel were invading my territory ... well, actually it wasn't even mine yet, as I had procuced settlers instead of culture and so had large gaps between my cities. The borders that I had planned for my empire turned out to be much to ambitious. Rjak managed to build a town beneath the nearest life node, which left me without a life node (but I still like the fact that the nodes are slightly more scarce now so that this was possible). Raven even managed to sneak three settlers in, despite the fact that we didn't have a mutual border and he had to cross Rjak's territory to do so. And Tlaloc set across the sea and circumvented the scout with which I blocked a peninsula to the north (which has quite good land), founding two towns there.
Some observations: Research rates felt about right. The racial resources are a bit too common now for my taste. I had goblins near my starting spot, trolls not too far away, and also elves. I could've also had men I had expanded a little more intelligently. And just across my border, in Rjak's territory, there are dwarves. Rjak also has orcs (two of them actually) and trolls. He doesn't even use the trolls because he concentrates on the orcs. I'm also unsure whether he uses the dwarves, I have seen a single clansman running, but apart from that I've only seen necromancers so far.
Imho the appearance ratios of the race resources should be lowered. Their being common devaluates them somewhat. I have goblins and elves, but I rather ignore them in my curent game, because I also had trolls and based my military on them. It's just not so exciting anymore to discover elves when you know that you also have a good chance for trolls being around. I also think that scarcer race resources will lead to a higher replay value because you can't follow the same tracks as easily. I fear that with more common racial resources, players may develop strategies like "always search a dwarves resource, secure it and build dwarves for defense". I think in the long run it would be more fun if you had to follow different tracks in each game you play because you cannot get these resources as easily.
However as I said, I'm always for scarce resources, even in the main game - so don't base any changes on my opinion alone.
2. First round of wars
Because of my building settlers and nothing else, and because of my overextending (which led to higher corruption in my cities), I couldn't keep up in the tech race. Tlaloc beated me to two nature techs in a row and traded them to the other mages, which effectively took me out of the tech race. I just didn't have anything to offer to anyone (besides Raven, who didn't have anything for me). Being scientific finally saved my day: when I reached the second age, I got Nature VI for free and immediately traded it around.
But before that happened, Tlaloc recognized me being weak and backwards and attacked with Ents. I defended with gnolls, I did have half-gnolls by the time, but because auf my overexpansion, my road net wasn't ready yet and I couldn't build them at the borders. I was lucky that I had hooked up the trolls resource. I started building those in all my cities.
Tlaloc dragged Rjak unto the war, so that I was facing enemies on both of my borders. I immediately made alliances with Ariel and Raven, which put Rjak in a very awkward position: his whole empire was basically a horizontal line of cities, and now he had enemies on 80% of his border. My plan worked: Rjak pulled his forces back from my vities and directed them to the south. Ariel took one of his cities, but lost it soon afterwards, and lost another one. Raven also lost one of his cities to Rjak, who seems to make good use of his orcs.
I researched Orcs & Trolls II and am now in the process of upgrading my military to ettins. I already conquered the city that Rjak had planted in "my" territory and will soon be ready to attack one or two of his core cities. Things look okay right now, but I don't know how well Rjak defends his cities, after all he has dwarves. Also Tlaloc might want to exploit the situation that my army is fighting Rjak and my border with Tlaloc is rather weakly defended right now. I'm also not sure what Lo Pan will do, so far he stayed out of any wars, but if he decides to attack me, I'll probably lose one or two cities to him.
). More later.
