I was never able to get my sovereign over level 1 as I was not able to win a single combat against anything including a bandit and a lone spider.
Choose a sov with 20 in strength and dexterity (20 in str will double your attack value and 20 in dex will double your defense value), the book of restoration and the trait that gives you 4 points in rresearch and the trait that gives you 1 point spell each turn.
Then go west to kill a spider, then go back to your city, wait until you recover all your health. Choose the spell "mass heal" as soon as you can. then explore a little.
That should get you started.
I was never able to build any units other than peasants despite researching various military technologies. In my opinion even the weakest sovereign should be able to beat the weakest unit (spiders?) or else they'll never be able to get anywhere in the game (Can't accomplish quests, can't defend, etc)
To train other units you see in red the resources you need. for instance a pioneer will need materials and gold. So you need to build early on the workshop, then research lumberyard to build two of them and get 9 material per turn. It's better if you build the second city a little south east where there's an other forest to build lumber yard on.
Remember some equipment will need iron (so you need to research iron mining first)
And I think that a week sov shouldn't be able to beat anytime a spider. I like the fact that they aren't only XP bags.
Pacing of the game is SLOW.... Research costs grow exponentially while research ability grows linearly with building development. Seeing 30 plus turns to still research initial green techs is INSANE.
I totally agree. Even with the trait that gives you 4 more research points it's so slooooow. And there's so much tech to research at start to get your economy and a basic defense: farming, mining, construction, equipment, quests, 1 or 2 magic tech to be able to harvest crystals and get 150 max spell points for that fire giant.
For me the micromanagement of the new economy is a lot worse. I'm having to manage materials, food, metals, city size limits, (gold seems to be the one abundant material) etc to build anything in my city queues.No long build queues either, I have to come back every few turns when something completes in a town (and it is a pain in the new interface to know when and which town, isn't as obvious as before)
I too liked the old system, and I'll need some time to get accustomed to the new one. But I can see the advantages of this one : you speak of micromanagment, but in fact it's just that we lack some kind of report about what are doing our cities (like in civ where you can get some kind of excel sheet of your cities, what theyr are building, how much culture they have etc. You can even build new thing from that screen.) the actual micromanagment isn't due to the new system but to the lack of a way to keep an eye on anything important.
What I'd like to see is a way to set our custom 'triggers", like "When I finish that building I want to be warned" or "Warn me when that unit arrives at destination".
I liked it a lot better before where I could generally build what I wanted if I had the money and resources were largely a factor of time. I could also queue up a lot more and not worry about micro-managing build lists of each town every couple turns.
The problem is you can't ask to build something next to a building that isn't built. There need to be a way to ask for an entire line of buildings like in supreme commander. I can see the problem : if you ask ABCD then destroy C, should D still be in the queue ? It isn't an easy thing to implement. So what we need is a powerful UI to get the job done.
