User:Rwb

Yet another guide

Some notes about what works for me.

There are a lot of guides on the wiki, some more useful than others.

The Guidance For New Players is worth reading, and the Beginner's Guide to TR is good if you are completely new and clicking about of stuff to see what happens still leaves you bewildered.

Axioms

These statements should always be true:

1. Have 299 workshops.
2. Have 2.5% of your land as barriers.
3. Match food production and population capacity.

Getting started

The natural instinct is to explore to get as much land as possible, and then build lots of farms and towns. Wrong! This makes you land-fat which means you will be attacked by other mages who want your land.

The first thing to do is to research every spell. The following observations should make this as turn-efficient as possible:

1. Build guilds in preference to farms and towns and anything else.
   Over 1,000 guilds are recommended, and some people report having over 2,000.
2. Donate most/all of your geld to science to get favour.
   You will have to make repeated donations in order to keep favour. This increases the rate at which items are generated. Later, you will have fewer guilds so item generation will be very slow: take the opportunity to get as many as possible.
3. Research blue (phantasm) spells first to get concentration, and then cast it on yourself.
   This enchantment spell increase the rate at which you research. As you research and your spell level increases, dispell and re-cast concentration on yourself.

While researching it may be necessary to keep a small defensive army.

Next

After research, take guilds down to about 15% of land, and build nodes, farms, and towns.

To do:

1. defense, and
2. attacking

just as soon as I've worked out how. (The Understanding Stacking page is hard work!)

War mechanics

The mechanics of war are very complicated because

• of the large number of permutations of units, spells, and items. This keeps the game interesting, and
• the meta game, i.e., the way other players are using units, spells, and items.

It is entirely conceivable that you may discover some particularly powerful combination and use it to great effect. More (but still not very) likely, you will discover a combination that is powerful against the prevailing strategies currently being used.

So, down to business.

First things first: each unit has a

• attack power, and a
• hit points.

If you read and understood both of those pages, then you should be able to identify that:

• Archangel might be a good defensive soaker for white (Ascendant) mages, and
• Dominion and Spirit warrior are the main offensive hitters for white (Ascendant) mages.

Observe also that:

• Archangels cost 5,000 / 1.25 = 4,000 MP per pit point, and
• Dominion cost 80,000 / 72.5 = 1,103 MP per pit point.

The net power of a unit appears not to be used in battles -- net power is for rank whores.