I do not recommend trade guilds so early in the game. It converts production to gold, and there is hardly any production to speak of. Maybe there is a successful tactic out there that makes use of trade guilds early on, but I bet it involves building a lot of settlers and increasing the population. Don't forget to raise taxes though. It can be a great boost to the economy, and with small cities, no one is going to complain.

To get the economy going, you want a large population. Hence, if you scout a nearby city which has weak units in it, try to grab it as soon as possible. A granary is a great first choice, because it increases growth, production and food. Build settlers and create more cities basically, and somehow survive in the process.

My favorite strategy is to play with dark magic and start by summoning ghouls. Once a ghoul has killed a live enemy troop, it will become undead under your control, and for free. This helps the economy alot, if you let your cities have almost only undead troops. Also if you have the spell create item and enough dark spell books, you can create a weapon that leeches life force from enemy troops, so a hero can kill troops using this weapon and have a good chance of converting it to undead in the process. For best result, I found that mediocre/bad heroes work well for this. Heroes (and your wizard) can also cast a spell that leeches life force, which is costly but good for later in the game if you want more undead troops.

Why arm a mediocre/bad hero with an enchanted item? For that matter, why have them at all?

My favorite tactic? Play all sorcery, build warships as fast as possible and cast fly on those suckers. Then you can do a quick blitz, maybe take out a few opposing wizards as fast as you can while working on those spells to protect it, by say, making it immune to arrows and slings, or immune to magic. Enchant them to deal more damage, ect. Unless I was playing without the patch and this was nerfed. It's possible. My uncle had it on disc.

Because they create undead creatures. When you are richer, you don't need them anymore.

The simplest approach is probably to keep improving your city, going from the cheapest buildings to the most expensive. You could pop out a settler and give him a guard every other building if you want.

I tend to rely more on magical troops than city-built, especially at first, before the ultimate city unit can be built. Halfings are the easiest--those slingers have serious killing power and it doesn't many buildings before a city can make them.

Must agree with Ratbreath. If you're a newbie, the Halflings give you a huge starting advantage (the extra food per farmer) and what turns out to be the biggest damage unit for its cost, the Slingers. They're not fancy, and there are lots of ways later in the game that the enemy will counter those advantages (Guardian Wind spells, fast-moving units, surprise attacks and Corruption spells to cripple food production, etc...) but hopefully by that point you'll have built up enough of a power base and enough diversity of units to deal with anything that comes your way.
Another good tactic for a less stressful game is to custom-make your own wizard and choose the "Myrran" advantage. It costs three spellbooks but, if you're lucky (and no one else has it), you'll have time to significantly develop without the other wizards cramping your style, and you'll be better positioned to choose the place and time to start "diplomatic relations" (i.e. large-scale murder). Also, it allows you to take fast-moving, flying Draconians as your starting race, giving you a huge advantage in mobility right off the hop. Being able to colonize other islands and explore the whole of the realm without the use of the Floating Island spell or having to produce watercraft is a pretty big deal, and very handy if you choose the "small land mass" option at the game setup. Draconians also get flying creatures that shoot in combat and are thus immune to ground-based melee attackers until they run out of ammunition, which provides an easier time taking over neutral cities.

Ultimately, you need to be flexible. In general:
- early in game, be expansionist; grab as much territory as you can afford to manage, and then grab some more
- don't neglect your military development, or you'll lose ground when the others show up, but you'll still need to push your city growth
- there are two sets of resources that you can use to create and maintain your troops; if you're running out of food, start summoning and make use of the mana. Don't forget, though, that money- and food-based units get better with time and experience, while summoned units do not
- when you start to run out of money, don't build Trade Goods - build Housing. Trade Goods are a band-aid solution, sometimes necessary when the kingdom coffers run dry, but not viable in the long-term. Housing increases your tax base and production speed, and provides for long-term stability, making things easier later in the game. Buildings that improve your revenue are also wise investments. I usually develop a town by first building up food stocks (which also improves citizen growth rate), then revenue, then military establishments
- don't go out of your way to make enemies (until you can wallop them), but don't give in; the AI is very much a bully, and will threaten you into doing things and then attack you anyway
- in the midgame, when you've met up with everyone, practice safe military expansion: pick on the weakest enemy wizard (assuming that he's not allied with someone stronger than you) and try to isolate him from the others so that you can devour his cities. You can even pull this off with carefully-placed settlements before actually going to war.
- upgrade those old troops, and decomission useless ones. There comes a time in the game when spearmen, no matter their experience level, are merely a waste of food. Or, use them to explore caves and nodes and the like to find out exactly what's inside - kind of cruel, yes, but effective
- never raze a city unless it's extremely badly placed or you can't hold it. A viable (but really nasty) tactic is to take a city away from someone bigger than you, then burn it to the ground so they can't take it back; lather, rinse and repeat until they're no longer bigger than you are. In general, though, you'll want to take advantage of the work that others have done in building up, even if it means having to deal with races that are unfriendly (and thus constantly revolting).
- in corollary: make sure you know whether or not you're burning a city down before you attack it; if you intend to raze the structure, you don't need to win the fight decisively - that one spearman who somehow survived is still enough to sack and loot the entire village - whereas if you want to keep it, you'll need more troops to hold the city against counterattack until you get it making its own defences
- the only way to stop a rampaging army (apart from out-rampaging them) is to divert them, so if you're getting hammered, don't neglect your defence, but do attack the cities of your enemy to try and pull the attackers off you
- it's better to avoid a lost-cause fight to preserve your armies; sometimes it's best to pull out of a city and let the enemy take it so that you can use your troops elsewhere
- as the endgame approaches, don't let up. Enemy wizards will use any opportunity to break out of whatever hold you're keeping on them. Don't assume someone's done in until every flag of theirs is wiped off the map and their picture on the Magic screen is shattered
- global spells and high-level summons become game changers, as destroying an enemy's economic base no longer puts the enemy out of commission, and someone with a little extra mana lying around can create huge problems for everyone on the field

I think that that covers just about everything. Any questions?

When I first time started this game and got in a fight right away, i got nice tactical view where I could order my troops around. I started a new game now with a (unofficial) patch installed and the tactical combat is off. Every combat goes with auto resolve. And I lose (probably would lose anyway, but that's not the point). Where can I find setting of auto battles? Or does it depend of difficulty? I have the easiest setting now.

During a game: Game>Settings>uncheck Strategic Combat.

For a total newbie, I would say: choose a CUSTOM wizard. Pick whichever picture you like. Choose the ability "Warlord", and as many books of White magic as you can afford. ("Divine Power" is also nice, but entirely optional.) Choose Halflings as your race.

Now; the first thing you should build in your starting city is a Granary. It produces 3 food, independant of population.

Then, a Smithy, followed by a Marketplace. This enhances your gold production.

You may need to take time to build a Shrine next, to reduce Unrest.

Then build a Farmer's Market, which produces another 2 food.

While doing all this, use your starting Swordsman to explore the area around your starting city. Find a few good places to plant new cities (use F1 to enter Survey mode, and pick out the BEST spots possible). Two or three such places is plenty for now.

After building the Farmer's Market, switch to building spearmen - one for each place you want to put a city. When those are built, build your settlers.

With those built, put up a Library and a Sages Guild. An Alchemist's Guild is optional, too.

Now, start building Slingers. Put together a stack of nine of them ... march the stack to the nearest Node, and attack!

If you won, summon a Magic Spirit (or Guardian Spirit, if you're using White magic), send it to the node, and bind it there.

That should get you on your way reasonably well.



In general, across all races: it's a good idea to defend your cities with at least two units, and Walls. Only ONE unit should be a Melee unit ... Halberdiers, if you can build them. If you have access to Mithril or Adamantium, even if in only one city, build ALL your Halberdiers there. The rest of the defending units should be ranged attackers (Halfling Slingers, Elven Longbowmen, etc). The Halberdier will hold the gates, while your ranged units kill everything in sight.



Two interesting (but Advanced) combinations for you to ponder, by the way:

TROLLS and BLACK MAGIC (Requires ability "Myrran") - Black magic can eventually turn it's units into Undead, which cost little or no maintenance .... but Undead don't heal. Trolls *regenerate* ... which means, they heal to 100% after every fight (even DEAD units come back at full strength, if you won the fight). EVEN UNDEAD TROLLS DO THIS. :)

WHITE MAGIC and WARLORD - Warlord lets your units gain 1 experience rank higher than normally possible: "Ultra Elite". There is a White magic spell that can do the same thing. Both togther? You can get another rank, one above Ultra Elite: "Champion". You haven't seen amazing, until you've seen a stack of nine Champion Halfling Slingers with adamantium weapons. :)

Full stacks of Adamantium-clad Champion Slingers (with Lionheart and Holy Weapon cast on them just for kicks) are among the most frightening forces in the game, yes. Even more so if you have a well-armed Hero with Leadership to guide them - and if you're going full Life magic anyway, you can grab Torin the Chosen (the best hero in the game, exclusively obtained through the Incarnation spell).

Going with life magic can make things go very smoothly, especially for beginners. The healing spell alone is worth the price of admission, being one of the only methods to quickly patch up wounded units; the only other efficient methods are very high-level nature magic spells, or some patience. The Crusade spell, especially backed by the Warlord ability, is mindblowingly good at bolstering your troops. Death magic has some uses - Black Sleep is a stupidly good common combat spell, and skeletons make for cheap garrisons - but Life is far more user-friendly.

On a more general note though... I'd say to always choose a custom hero. Very few of the pre-built heroes are nearly as good as a custom wizard can be, especially since custom wizards can select more than one special trait (at the cost of some spellbooks).

When you get a new city, you should always try to rush for the following, Builder's Hall -> Granary, Smithy -> Marketplace -> Farmer's Market. The Granary and Farmer's Market are the two most important buildings a city can have, because they provide extra food (so more of the population can be used as workers to boost production) and increase the town growth rate (so you get new workers faster). You may want to build a Shrine and/or a pair of spearmen or swordsmen before the Market, to reduce unrest.

Also, try and avoid pumping your power points into mana generation (except for maybe at the very start). Once you have a few cities under your control and you can bump the tax rate to 2.0, you can just use alchemy to convert your excessive treasury into mana. Faster research and greater casting power is far harder to duplicate; being able to cast over 100 mana worth of spells per turn is really impressive.

For a change of pace, once you get the hang of things, try out a "rainbow" wizard - grab a couple books from 3 or 4 different schools of magic. This may not guarantee that you'll get all the super high level spells (like Herb Mastery or Sky Drakes) that you'd get with 9 or 10 books of one color, but it will let you grab almost all of the vital low-ranking utility spells. It also unlocks the Node Mastery trait, which doubles your magic point income from all captured nodes, and makes it so none of your spells will fizzle when trying to conquer new nodes.

Oh I love Sky Drakes. I have summoned them and enchanted them with invisibility (ranged immunity) and invulnerability (melee damage reduction). Plus water is no obstacle since they fly. The mana cost to maintain is a bit high but taking down enemy armies and cities isn't too much trouble after that.