First playthrough as Wild Walkers on Normal difficulty was a success, won the Wonder victory by turn 125! Explored and colonise lots of regions until turn 60, then gathered a small army to conquer my neighboring Necrophage and took all 3 of their cities, made peace with everyone else to get trade routes, and finished all 8 parts of the Faction quest and built the final wonder! I had a lot of valuable input from asking on this sub, so thank you!
For my next playthrough on Hard, I'm debating between Drakken and Vaulters:
- Vaulters seem like the basic vanilla human faction, but I did really enjoy have a strong ranged unit for the whole game, made most combats very fun and dominant. Also really enjoyed having strong science output from my first game, and these guys seem geared towards that as well.
- Drakken getting Language Square at start seems fun (I love picking up quests from Minor Factions), and the knowledge of everyone else's location is great intel. They do only start with a tanky infantry rather than high DPS ranged, which might make warfare less oppressing for enemy units. Also they seemed geared towards a Diplomatic Victory, but I think ELCP nerfed that victory type?
- There's also maybe Broken Lords and Roving Clans, because I really like buying things out with Dust.
Some stuff I've learnt from the 1st playthrough:
- I like settling 1 city on turn 20, 2 more cities on turn 40, maybe 1-2 more on turn 60, and then if I need more strategics then I'll make extras as needed, so 6 main cities + extras.
- I REALLY like having a high Dust income and just buying things out. Early game having high production is good, but by turn 60 as I'm expanding out, I much prefer buying out all the basic infrastructures of a new city, rather than waiting 3-5 turns just for a Mill Foundry or Empire Mint. By the end I had 15k dust in store to buy out all the legendary era wonders as needed.
- Heroes as Governors: I learned to buy a governor for most new cities, based on the Boost skill and their faction tree.
- Empire Plan: I didn't touch the military part at all, but the other 3 are all really good - 20% Science and 33% production discount is great, 25% buyout discount I believe also stacks, and +25 city approval is almosts always a must.
- Diplomacy: The easiest way to make peace is just gifting the AI a random tech (usually Imperial Highways for trade routes and roads, but almost anything works). Take map exchanges if they offer, but most of their deals are horrendous (20 titanium for an Era 4 tech, lol).
Some stuff I have questions about:
- District Expansion: I've read up the Triangle layout and the 2-tile-wide stick layout, but I almost never built boroughs for tile expansion because of the -10 approval, only building city improvements, and mostly expanded using the Legendary wonders (Museum, Megapole, Pearl Altar,...) and then lategame I picked up Abbey of Anomaly and the Intensifiers. Most of my cities stayed as 1 tile the whole way through, only the first 2 cities really gained meaningful expansions. Is that normal?
- Army: Wild Walkers have a quest where you need an army of 4 archers + 2 Minor Faction units to progress. And that was basically my entire army for the whole game, plus 1 or 2 Heroes I got for class-specific quests. I took out 3 Necrophage cities just with that main army, and then during Winter I split them up to collect pearls. Is that normal, or will I need more military on Hard or Serious Difficulty?
- Region size setting: my starting region had a weird snaking layout, and then several of the neighboring regions were flat out tiny. Should I up my region size from "Normal" to "Large", would that change this?
- This first game I turned on only a few expansions - Guardians for legendary deeds, Shifters for more engaging Winter, and then Lost Tales/Monstrous Tales because why not. I'm thinking of putting on Inferno this time as well since Dust Eclipse sounds cool. Probably not gonna do Tempest, Shadows, and Symbiosis yet because they seem to add too much. Does this sound alright?
If you have any input, I'll greatly appreciate it! Thanks everyone!