Quote:
Originally Posted by phillydilly
regarding balancing techs and national ideas since both take leader points.
in my england game, i had two national ideas, one diplo, one military, and i ran way over on admin pts. I was to the point where i was getting penalties for being multiple years ahead of time on admin tech. I think my base play will be to always stay as close to the ahead of time tech penalty as possible, but when i would take a penalty, instead get an idea. This would change if an idea would bring a crucial advancement.
From my ~30 hours of play so far (staycation op, lol goofy) it seems like the most optimal move for western europe non-colonizers is to go diplomatic idea 1st, then military, then maybe religious (if you are large and converting), then probably another military idea.
Reasons for this:
Admin seems like by far the most important stat, especially early on. You need admin tech 4 to get your first idea asap, then you still need admin to get subsequent ideas at 7 and 10. Plus you also need frequent large chunks of admin for boosting stability and for coring. Plus all of the tax buildings require a bit. Therefore imo admin idea early on is dumb because you have no admin to waste.
Diplomatic points by contrast don't have anywhere near as much use early on. Changing culture, reducing war exhaustion, and peace deals are the ones off the top of my head. Diplomacy also has some decent groups, trade being by far the best if you can make use of it, as +2 merchants and all those nice trade modifiers can bring in tons of income early game. Diplomatic very strong in some ways, meh in others, more diplomats/diplo rep/lower core creation/more relations is great, but the capstone is very subpar and rev/counter-rev seems pretty worthless. Naval extremely powerful for any naval country, with +1 morale off the bat and +100% forcelimits as the 3rd idea easily giving you naval superiority over anyone without naval idea. And obv the colonization stuff useful if you are rushing to do that.
You can't afford to initially fall behind in mil tech, as you need to get men at arms asap since they are massively better than the starting infantry. You also want to be getting all the little shock/morale/width/etc bonuses and especially the tactics bonuses. You start with .5 tactics and get +.25 at techs 4/6/7/8 which is an enormous increase. Tactics reduces the amount of damage your troops take in combat. Due to all these very important early techs, you can't afford to dump points in a mil idea early on, despite some fantastic initial bonuses in a few groups. However, mil doesn't have as many point sinks as admin, so you will eventually become ahead of time in tech. Luckily, that doesn't start to happen until you are close to getting admin 7 for your second idea, so once you go ahead of time in mil tech and are getting close to the idea, save up to the max, then when you get your 2nd idea pick defensive/offensive (which seem like the best early mil ideas), and get 1-2 ideas. After that, just keep getting techs when you are no longer ahead of time, otherwise when you get back ahead of time in tech get more ideas.
tl;dr: Diplomacy idea group--->mil idea group seems optimal, even though mil >>> diplomacy groups in general.
Last edited by Nonfiction; 08-16-2013 at 10:48 AM.