A Town Guide

Starting strategies, continued

If you go the economic route, you will be at a disadvantage in terms of the level of creatures you can recruit. Often times, you'll have so much more gold than the opponent who took the military route that you'll be able to buy sufficient lower level creatures to overwhelm his few high level creatures. Taking this route means you won't have the most powerful creatures at your disposal right away, but it does mean that you will have plenty of gold to buy hordes of cheap troops and acquire a little magic as well.

Obviously, you can choose to blend the two strategies, but a hybrid strategy usually doesn't end up working as well as choosing one of the pure strategies. Also, some towns, such as the tower and castle towns, require you to build up your non-military parts of your town in order to access the higher-level creature dwellings, thus forcing you to take a hybrid path. The castle town, for example, requires you to build a blacksmith for the griffin tower (a third-level dwelling) and a mage guild for the monastery (a fifth-level dwelling). You can't climb up the tech tree quite as fast with this town type. The stronghold, on the other hand, allows you to jump straight to the behemoth lair (a seventh-level dwelling) in less than four days. Choose your town carefully depending on which strategy you want to take.

Again, this decision is one to make in the first week. As the second week begins, you can have the luxury of slowing your tack and mixing the build orders. By then, if you haven't already done so, you'll need to upgrade your halls and bring in a lot more cash to support your army.