Do it your own way the anti guide
There is common advice that everyone sees in GC. Don’t join an alliance right away. Drop your taxes to 0. Build up your storehouse. For some people, following the standard advice the standard way just like hundreds before them is “FUNN!!!!” Maybe you’re one of those people. If so, this might not be the best guide for you.
There is a reason the standard advice is standard. It works. I’m not telling anyone that it’s not A valid playstyle. What I am fighting against here is the idea that it is the only valid playstyle.
Building up your storehouse right away makes sense, but only if you plan on being active in chat. If you’re going to lurk, read a book while you play, or just feel like doing it yourself without dozens of people paving the way for you, maybe what you want to build first is resource fields, including the Library. It’s hard to keep research going without a library, and it’s hard to build anything without resources. There is nothing wrong with skipping the hand outs and doing it yourself.
Not joining an alliance right away is, and always has been, bunk advice. It’s whiner advice. It’s advice from people who might have liked to recruit you, but didn’t want to seem desperate and invite you too soon. You know what penalty you pay for joining an alliance too soon? Fewer donations from the GC crowd, and potentially having to wait 6 hours between dropping that alliance and joining another. If a 6 hour wait is too much for you, you’ve picked the wrong game anyway.
Telling people to drop their taxes to 0 is, again, not bad advice, but the benefit is so minor as to be hardly worth mentioning. My own advice is to wait, don’t drop your taxes until it’s solving a problem. If you do follow the standard advice and build the storage for your town as quickly as possible, then you may end up with a significant population increase. Which can lead to a shortage of food. THAT is when I might recommend dropping your taxes. Then it can offset some of the food shortage and buy you time to build up food plots. In fact, if you want to raise your taxes and play from day 1 at 100% taxes, it’s going to slow your growth, but it’s not going to stop you from doing anything you want to. You can always change it later. And if you’re a better planner than most, and never end up negative food? Then you are well placed to begin expanding your list of things to do in Illy by using that small amount of +gold in the corner to start building troops and diplos.
Wait, building troops and diplos? Didn’t everyone in GC tell you that you’re too small for troops and diplos? Well, what do they know anyway? Sure, it’s not the fastest way to grow to 10 cities (or 20, or 42, or whatever your goal is) but it’s a lot more interesting than spending the first 6 months building resources.
Let me digress a minute. Anyone with a calculator and some basic math skills can work out the min/max way to progress in Illy. That method is BORING. It will cause most people to quit the game and never come back. Watching your +resource grow faster than your population is like watching paint dry. You know what you should do in your first city? EVERYTHING! That city has to keep you entertained while you start the second, and the third, and the fourth. Decisions that make sense to a vet who already knows they like the game and are going to keep playing are completely different from decisions that should be made by a new player who needs stuff to do if they are going to keep coming back day after day.
So build your troops. Kill a pack of rats or a gathering of wolves and harvest the hides. Or don’t, if you feel like harvesting is as soul crushingly boring as I do.
Then grab some sov. Why? Not because it’s going to give you a benefit. People who are looking out for your best interest are going to tell you to wait for sov until your city has 10k or 20k population, to wait until your food plots are maxed and you need more. Well, so what? Yeah, it’s good advice, but there is something rewarding about that glow around your city. And if you choose to stay in the newbie circle, sov is the only thing that keeps new players from spawning on top of you.
Wait, doesn’t everyone want out of the newbie circle as soon as possible? Well lots of people do, especially people that are fond of harvesting, because they want their own space. But then, later on, lots of them will move a city back into the newbie circle. It gives them better access to sending caravans of free res to newbies, and it’s a pretty decent spot if you want to participate in Centrum trading. If you decide to keep a city in the newbie circle from the beginning, that’s a perfectly good reason to gets lots of sov as early as you feel capable of supporting it.
So when you go looking for your second city, whether in the newb circle or elsewhere, everyone will tell you to grab a 7 food spot. There is nothing wrong with that advice – it’s what I did. You can too, if you like. But it’s not the only way. It is completely possible (though very difficult) to reach 10 cities on 5 food squares. There is another thread elsewhere about the possible benefits to a 5/5/5/5/5 city when it comes to sov, military, and balancing resources. It’s controversial, but so what? Do it your own way.
Mostly what I’ve been doing is telling you to ignore the common advice. That’s not entirely what I meant this thread to be. My primary point isn’t to do the opposite of the crowd in every situation. My point is that there is more than one right way of doing things. If you don’t want to follow the common advice, you don’t have to. You won’t be doing it wrong….You’ll just be doing it.
Ignore the haters. The question isn’t “What is the right way?” The question is how are YOU going to do it?
From Rill¶
While I generally agree with the points made, and advocate for some of this stuff myself, I am a bit distressed to see people giving well-intentioned advice in global chat characterized as haters. I think it's possible to suggest different ways of playing the game without denigrating other people.
One piece of advice I do tend to disagree with is the idea that you should not lower taxes until you start to run low on food production. While the tax/food connection is strongest for established players, players who are just starting a city benefit from not only more food, but more basic resources to build and more research points -- which are very useful early on. One would not generate enough gold from a 25% tax on a very low population to make the trade-off worthwhile. It makes a lot more sense to harvest items with cotters or make cows and sell them to get gold.
The point about being able to lower taxes later on in order to avoid catastrophic population loss is well taken, but this is a relatively ineffective solution for a fairly rare problem. The people who experience catastrophic de-leveling rarely notice it until it is already happening -- and even a 25% bump in food production is often not enough to get out of the hole. It would be more effective to for example ask in global chat for an enhanced geomancy spell, or a shipment of food.
In summary, maintaining higher taxes sacrifices significant benefits in order to provide an ineffective solution to a problem that is relatively unlikely to occur, especially if one pays attention to net food production. I recognize that you give that advice in all sincerity and with the best interest of new players at heart, but I think it is unwise.
From Alcie¶
As someone who joined an alliance 10 minutes after starting, built library to level 12 almost before anything else, made enough spies to start statue quest as soon as possible, and started sov really early (in, admittedly, a sov obsessed alliance) I really like your (non?) guide! These things all worked well for me... and more to the point they were fun for me (I like libraries!) even if they were not the most efficient possible way to do things.
More generally, I agree that there are many ways to start the game. Guides are useful--it is useful to know that library/mage tower/consulate/etc. are standard buildings normally in every town. It is useful to know what changing tax does. It is useful to know about cotters. Specific guidance about exactly what level and what order to make these buildings or what percent to make your taxes? Much less useful. I sometimes tell new players to skim a couple different guides to get a sense of what the important issues are, but then to do things in whatever order they want in practice. They can experiment and ask questions to learn how all these things connect to each other.
I have been too lazy to make a guide myself, but I always thought the perfect guide would mention a lot of main issues, mention multiple different ways to do things purely as examples, and emphasize that this is a very forgiving and experimental-able game and you can try things differently. Some people like to follow exact directions--they can follow the examples. For those who don't, they need a guide which tells them the very few things which truly are pretty mandatory (e.g. make a library so you can even start research at all) versus optional (make your own res plots versus make storage for gifts,etc.).
As to the particular points being argued about a little in this thread...I feel like the main point is most of these bullet items really can be done in many different ways.. but I will throw my two cents in anyways.
As to the whole 'don't join an alliance immediately'. Some members get lost in GC and quit the game. Others who join the first alliance they are recruited by feel unhappy and unable to leave and quit the game. These are both bad situations. And these types of reactions depend on the particular player. I personally feel like we should emphasize the following:
1. don't be afraid to join an alliance as soon as you want.
2. don't feel pressured to join an alliance quickly (especially just because someone in that alliance helped you/etc.). Wait as long as you want to decide.
3. If you are unhappy in your alliance, don't feel bad changing alliances.
There are plenty of other suggestions you can make (talk to the leader, read profiles, etc.) which are good advice as well, but I feel like people often get messed up by not knowing the 3 items in my list. Being told only one of the items is fine for some but puts the exact wrong kind of pressure on others. My opinion obviously, but it goes in the general 'different strokes' theme for this thread.
taxes... Again, I think it is definitely good to tell new players how taxes work and what they affect. But Telling them to do one particular change seems bad to me. I made lots of spies and scouts when I was super small.. if I had had zero tax I couldn't have. On the other hand, I did lower my tax some. Again, suggestions in a guide are fine (multiple examples...0 percent-- what affects this has, 5 or 10 percent--what affects this has.. 40 percent--what affects this has). Personally I would tend to advise the more flexible non-extreme case (lower some but not to zero). But, again, I think different tax rates will work for different people. A guide should perhaps even encourage experimentation--you can change it every day after-all.
Again.. its not bad to have easy concrete suggestions when asked questions—newbies often want concrete suggestions because they are still learning and it is confusing to think of everything at once. But for both guides and for general chat-talk, there should perhaps be more emphasis on the flexibility of how to do things so that the players which might hate one way of doing things know that they have options.