Some Basic Concepts that aren't obvious in Ara that I wish I knew my first few games, post more if you have them

[Darkphoenix]

1. City Production is the king of everything. Its not just "how fast can the city produce improvements" its also the bases for how much food/gold/resource is pulled from a tile. Getting a better improvement/inserting a new supply into an improvement is not the only source of increasing the amount of copper you pull from the ground, for example. The bigger the city level, the more production you have, which means the more resources/crafts it produced. (This also makes Happiness very important because it provides bonuses/maluses to city production).

2. Security: Deploying a force permanently ties that force to that city. It will receive bonus strength based on its base strength, based on that cities security. This is a permanent tie which is updated every turn. If you deploy a force to a city with 40 security, march it your enemies borders, it will have no bonus. Then if you put in a bunch of Security focused amenities to boost Security to 100, that force will receive a 100% 50% increase to its base strength.

3. Food calculations are extremely complicated, you can find some breakdowns on the wiki (in progress, hopefully updated soon) and discord/reddit. But early on, just placing 4 farms together in a single region will give bonus food to each other that is worth it to a small city to give it enough to grow. Also, there is NO BONUS TO HAVING POSITIVE FOOD FOR GROWTH. You just need to not have negative local food production. Any streamer/redditor whatever that says something like "no there's a bonus for a surplus of food, its just small" is incorrect. The "surplus" listed in city growth is just a formula rounding catch all, nothing to do with food. Farms do provide a +3% growth bonus, so if you have excess zones and lumber, and just want a city to grow...

4. Do not underestimate health. Health provides a growth bonus. Early on, a +30 growth amenity might feel strong. However soon the base population growth will be high enough that +25% growth from health at amenity range 70-79 is going to vastly outclass it, if you can get over that hurdle with a health based amenity instead. Having 3-4 size 18+ cities, in the middle of act 2 puts you in a strong position.

4b. Do not underestimate Apothecaries. Apothecaries can only produce Herbal medicine early, which has very rare goods that accelerate it, and is prohibitively expensive to accelerate with gold. This turned me off of them early. However, each one provides +5 health and +10 knowledge and +25% apothecary crafting speed. This means if you plop down 5 of them in your capital city in a 5 zone region early on, they all have 125% faster crafting speed on herbal medicine (which still isn't much), but more importantly you have +25 health and +50 knowledge. Maxing 100 on knowledge means getting a +100% research boost from your capital city which is typically your largest city giving the most research from its City Level and Great Hearth.

5. Grappling with prestige. Act 1 prestige is anyone's ballgame: completing a few triumphs, defeating several armies, can boost your prestige a few hundred points and get you out of the culling range. By the time you get to the end of Act 2, a competent player with a welloiled crafting and city setup will be approaching the +50 prestige per turn from economy, as well as +50 prestige per turn from science. So certain bonuses and buildings become much less impressive in retrospect if you are confident in your ability to make it to act 2.

 

[ggmoyang]

1. The game pretends to be having a deep economic system, but this is only thing that matters. Forget the production chain, get a city with high production.
2. The strength bonus +50% btw
3. Indeed. Dunno why they chose to implement this overly complicated system.
4. Health is great in the long run, but you might want to focus on happiness first, especially on higher difficulty. If you survive act 1, then you can focus on health. BTW try to get 90+ QoL in one area, as the bonus is much greater with high QoL. ( 60+ : +10%, 70+ : +25% 80+ : +50%, 90+ : +75%, 100 : +100%)
4b. Tip: If you are going to spam Apothecaries, build a Workshop in the region first. Workshop provides +25% building production bonus to industrial improvement built on the same region. Since a Workshop is cheaper than an Apothecary, you can build them all with less production. And that's with bonus Workshops too.
5. I feel that prestige income isn't balanced at all. Why bother spreading religions or building triumphs, when you get so much prestige passively?


Other tips:

• Build Stables, its specialist gives +10 building production. Also it can produce carriage which confers +100 growth bonus which is a lot for small cities.
• Spam dwellings, supply them with furniture and basket for city production.
• Feudalist government is best. That +4 wealth per industry and commerce improvement is too good to pass.
• If you conquer other nation's city, you keep all buildings so you can go over national cap of some buildings. Also, you keep the Great Hearth building in the capital.
• When you demolish a building, supply is gone. So be sure to manually remove them before ending the turn.
• Some buildings allow to display 'Masterpiece set'. A set can display up to 5 different Masterpieces, and each Masterpiece gives +10 prestige per turn. Prestige from Multiple sets does not stack, only the biggest set counts.

Edit: corrected QoL numbers

 

[KayAU]

Yeah, I was surprised by how food production works. In my last game, I was struggling to get enough food in my capital...and improved it by adding furniture and baskets to my dwellings. I mean...I kind of get it now, but It's not the most intuitive. :-D