Part 11: Turn 10 Retrospective

Let's do something a little different.

I've decided to do a writeup every ten turns and talk about what I fucked up and what I could have done better. This is being written by (Future Me) in the present as I'm posting this LP. I'm going to avoid making any comments based on future knowledge of this exact game, but I will go over what I would do if I found myself in the same situation in a new game with the new experience I have now.

The big thing I'm fucking up right now is expansion. Yes, I know, I'm #1 in expansion. But I also spent the entire early game underestimating my elephants. Those elephants are really goddamn good! I don't need four elephants in a squad to flatten most independents, I only need two - or maybe even one.

What I didn't realize is that Arco's elephants are armored. The elephant you normally see has 10 Protection, but Arco elephants have a rather staggering 17 Protection. People talk about how elephants tend to die fast - that's the unarmored variety. LA Arco's armored elephants are surprisingly resistant to just about anything you'll see in independent provinces. By this time I could well have two or three more provinces - maybe that would be one of the eastern provinces, maybe that would be more stuff around Jome, who knows. There's still that neutral province with black candle that nobody's touched. I could be touching it! I could be touching it right now!

Basically I could be doing better on expansion.

Another issue is money. Most of my provinces have been Small, with a few normal. I'm not currently aware of this in the game, but province size makes a huge huge different to income. If I'd grabbed that province of Midgard's, well, that's a Large province. That would be filling my coffers nicely, probably to the tune of 150 gold per turn. For comparison, I've got twelve non-capital provinces pulling in a total of around 650 gold per turn.

And if I had more money, I could maybe have started a fort a bit earlier - not necessarily in Jome, but possibly southwest of my capital, in one of those mountain passes or in the Lion Tribe Archer province.

Finally, I should be taking notes on the stuff I find. I completely forgot about some of the special recruitables I've seen - I'm reading through this now and saying "oh yeah, I did have access to those! Hmmm, maybe I should have been using them." A little Notepad document with a few special recruitable notes would have been a fantastic idea. And I've already got a Notepad document for notes. This stuff should be inside it!

Everything else, though, I think I'm doing quite well with. I've already started scouting, my research is trucking along at a nice rate (and aimed towards useful stuff, at that), and I'm about to have a God show up and help out.

And my sitesearching luck is fucking atrocious, but not much I can do about that.