Hey

Thought I'd make a thread to share some of my experiences from Fallen Enchantress and a bit of a strat guide with some tips i've learned

Firstly Kudos to the team at Stardock for getting FE going. I love it, there's still the odd bug and memory leak in later games but stability is pretty good and its a lot of fun. I look forward to the expansion. I think this is where we'll see a lot of goodies, and some new and better refined features. Some of the spell schools still need some work, i.e. it feels like they lack a unique theme.

So back to guide. Well I like playing Pariden because I want to be a master of magic   and I reckon they are the hardest side to master but I do like customising my Sovereign to make use of spell damage multiplier traits and I like taking the fire, earth and air spell schools. I'd recommend taking those schools if you want to have a badarse mage who can rain agonising pain onto your enemy. 

I'm going to go into some detail here so bear with me.

Starting Resources - food, essence, materials and city enchants

Starting out it's best to settle a city that has access to good materials and essence. Food is probably not quite so important early on. For instance 6 food is great for getting to a level 5 city but you won't be able to reach that for a very long time (if you survive that long ) and food does not contribute to population growth so its really a wasted stat early on - i.e 3 food or 6 food will make no difference to your first 100 turns... And if your founding city has 2 production well your going to be stuck with that for the rest of the game unless you're lucky enough to have some clay quarries nearby that you can quickly use. But even so, low productivity will seriously hamper your early progression and the first 50 turns are crucial in maximising your economic output for the following 50 turns and the next 50 etc... So to start what does matter the most is how fast you can get some pioneers out and build some key infrastructure to kick-start your economy. The early turns are crucial in this so don't waste them.

Essence is great if your playing heavily in magic so look to build a city on lots of essence. Cast as many enchants as you can immediately to boost your economic output. Depending on your available spells and the amount of essence will determine what enchants you should use. As your city and empire grows this will also determine what enchants you should keep or swap to. Make sure you keep managing your city enchants, if you research new magic technology, check for new spells, keep an eye out for new enchants when your sovereign levels in a magic school trait AND don't forget that heroes you hire may also have a new spell school for you to access so check these!

Some enchants add resources per essence. So if a city has 3-4 essence some of the enchantment bonuses can be enormous so factor that into the decisions you make.

Production boosting enchants are the priority to your capital and any new city you build. Research is also good for your first few cities until the +1 no longer makes a noticeable difference. + Mana is really important for helping your sovereign maximise use of their spell arsenal. I don't think +2Gildar/Essence is that good unless you have at least 2 essence, if you have 3 or more its incredibly useful early game to provide income to rush city improvements, pioneers etc... Also many plays recommend turning the tax rate down to reduce unrest so the amount of gildar you earn from that enchant may be even less. 

Sovereign's Call is great to get to city level 2 quickly but only so long as as you don't run out of food. It's a waste of an enchant if your city can't grow because you haven't built a garden so keep an eye on your cities population capacity. 

 Other Tips for Cities: Building adjacent to forests allows for additional city improvements that provide a great boost to city productivity so try to build your fortress (army building cities) cities near forests if you can. Its great to build a capital next to a forest but if food or essence are much less it may not be such a good idea.

Build adjacent to rivers if you find them. Try to upgrade some of these settlements to towns because they get access to specific improvements that provide a significant boost to your gildar income that goes to waste in a fortress or conclave. 

Remember that many resources can't be used early game such as iron, crystal etc but you store them and when the techs become available it helps if you have planned ahead by harvesting these so you can utilise them asap.

Economy: Unrest, Production, Research, Pioneers, Improvements, exploring....

Research the early civilisation techs as they help to give you population growth, essential city improvements, allow build rush to get your economy going etc. Get familiar with the level of unrest in your city, do whatever you can to minimise that as unrest will make a significant reduction to your efficiency. If your playing against hard cheating AIs you need all the help you can get so your economy MUST be operating as close to 100% capacity as you can get it. I recommend getting pioneers out as quickly as possible to settle at least 2 new cities. Avoid building anywhere near large monsters or their nodes.

As I mentioned above reducing tax will give you an initial boost to productivity and you can earn gold by killing low level monsters, clearing nodes and selling junk such as wolf fur etc to the city shop for some quick gold. Use your sovereign to recruit whatever champions you find, kill low level monsters to gain experience, explore to find lost libraries to boost research....

For improvements focus on boosting productivity and reducing unrest. Once your comfortable that the unrest rate is reduced by improvements start raising the tax rate back closer to 40% if you can and build improvements that yield gold.

Build gardens only when you're approaching the food limit, prioritise on other city attributes first.

Be careful with zone of control, it can be very important for gaining some extra resources, but it can disturb nearby monsters.

Once your cities begin to be established you'll need to start thinking about city specialisation. This will always depend on your geography and the resource benefits. If your city is near a powerful neighbour that looks hostile a fortress can be useful as it provides some extra defense. Ideally you should have at least 1 fortress in your empire to dedicate to training your armies. Essence is really important here as it can be used provide enchants that buff your army. Remember that any city with say 3 essence can be used to produce powerful armies if you change them to the right enchantments.

I find I tend to need at least 2 conclaves to get enough research going that will get me through most of the tech tree, again essence is really good here if you have access to revelation. I actually prefer to make my capitol a conclave. 

Personally (i can't validate this statement) I think it works well to have 2 conclaves/1 fort to begin and dedicate your 4-5th cities devoted to a town. By this stage you'll really start needing more income to support your army but with 2 conclaves up and going  you will hopefully start producing a lot of research and the food bonuses from towns are not so important early on. 

Military

In between all this you'll need to get some soldiers trained. After you have the early Civilisation techs, research the basic military technologies to get leather armor and spearmen. Always customise your units to get the maximum 4 talent traits to your soldiers, the default units rarely use more than 2. Remember that a cheating AI will have massive stat advantages or city production bonuses over you so your soldiers need to be as well trained as possible. 

Initiative is probably the most important stat - If your sovereign/champion is a spell caster make sure that they have no equipment that will reduce initiative. Basically Initiative determines how often you get to perform an action, i.e. move, attack, cast spell etc... If your sovereign is providing utility spells to buff your army its no good giving them a bow that decreases initiative by 6. Give them a dagger that grants +3 initiative. Only wear enough armor to stay under the encumbrance limit - this is the amount of weight you can take before your initiative drops. On that note its too bad that bows and magical staffs reduce intiative so much for your heroes, I hope the expansion addresses this because it's just too much of a disadvantage at the moment. This is especially important if you're relying on your caster to throw out fireballs, or to cast slow on a whole army of giants to give your archers enough time to kill them.

When starting your army you can't craft heavy armor so focus on carrying the best weapon you have, take traits that improve initiative and provide extra damage to targets with lower initiative. If you have horses always take the charge trait, that allows you to flank and usually kill archers in 1-2 turns.

Wargs provide +2 initiative, but horses provide +20 weight capacity so you can wear more gear and take the +2 initiative trait but they have 1 extra move so personally I prefer horses for that reason.

If your resource stretched for crystal and metal look to training horses with pikes, light armor, charge and intiative bonuses are deadly, and they don't cost consume too many resources. A whole army of these can kill an opposing army in 1 round! If horses/wargs are not a limiting resource  consider putting your archers/mages on them so you can take advantage of the initiative/weight bonuses. I find cutting attacks to be a disadvantage late game as they can be counterattacked by larger enemy armies. Most late game armies seem to have blunt resistance so I move away from blunt attacks as well. Piercing attacks (pikes) can't be countered and they ignore most armor, so if you can do enough damage to your enemy on the first turn, you've ensured that they can't do much damage to you in their turn so you should survive. For that reason I really like pikes and horses.

Accuracy and initiative are really important for ranged units so always add those traits. Ice/Fire staffs are great at damaging heavily armoured units so if your enemy is coming at you with slow and heavy geared soldiers forget short bows.

When you research mail armor don't be in a rush to go out and spend all your precious iron reserves to deck out a unit in mail armor. The cost is high and you really won't get the return on your investment especially if iron is a limiting resource for you. For instance a unit costing 100 iron (best weapon and mail armor) isn't going to be as good as 5 units with the best weapon and leather armor. A cheating AIs will be well ahead of you in productivity and technology so more than likely they will have even more better equipped units than you do. 

Final Tips

Also Elemental is quite a dynamic game, no 2 games will be the same, and its still early days and there are few strategy guides out there. So be creative and don't be afraid to experiment with different combinations and strategies.

My current game I recovered an item from a wolf lair that allowed me to tame a monster so I tamed a rare alpha wolf that had a very rare ability that grants extra attack per its level. Currently its level 11 so every soldier in my army has +11 attack from that wolf, the damage numbers im seeing are enormous when combined with other training and stat bonuses.  

Spamming Titan's breath is another easy strategy, just load up with ranged units and cast that spell repeatedly, you can't lose. Similar strategys work well with slow and shrink spells. If your going for fireball get as many fire nodes as you can, and look to spell damage multiplier traits. 

I'll leave it there for now