pioneers are really strong

i was just playing a regular game expanding leisurely (by the standards of insane + fast doomsday). by the time i claimed almost all the shards i noticed it was only turn 48. i never had much of an army and it stayed near my starting city the entire game.

i customized kayla with chant of vitality

i picked kayla to try out the stuff that makes land better, but she gets 2 very early abilities that allowed this situation to happen:

1) reveal all shards (also reveals a little bit of the land around them)

2) outposts have +2 range/ZOC (cover 81 squares instead of 25!)

usually it's not that easy to send pioneers through forests and chokepoints since they either get trapped or run out of movement points and die

but chant of vitality lets them push through without too much risk. the monsters/bandits don't actually leave their lairs to attack, so i only have to worry about the ones that aren't in lairs

and you only need to get through each chokepoint once, because once you get an outpost up, cloud-walk lets you teleport all future pioneers way past it

this would probably be even more silly if you somehow got extra movement for the pioneers

claiming lots of resources does put some strain on the logistics. however, it generates so much mana that you can just summon all the logistic improvements at a level 1 city. and since you get so much map coverage, you can usually find some faraway place to teleport a pioneer and settle on that same turn for just 10 mana

this could probably be done by turn 30-35 if someone planned to try it as their main strategy. i just stumbled upon it in this game