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[Cruxador]

I've been playing this more recently, and I have what is probably a newbie question: how do you all keep track of what you're doing with all your units? I understand the mechanics at a microscale level to do things like chain path boosters together or script units in a sensible way, but whenever I try to do that over dozens of provinces I always seem to miss something, and the inefficiencies pile up until I'm swimming in gold or mages or blood slaves or other things that are not themselves directly helping me take provinces while other necessary things are lacking. So how do you handle all the bookkeeping?

That's part of why I do an AAR blog, it forces me to think about what I'm doing in greater depth. Aside from cognitive tricks like that, don't forget to spam the [n] key every turn. Between that and the turn's announcements, you should get most things. Just treat every announcement as something that needs a response. So battles take troop movement and training after you watch them, completing research merits considering your research goals, and finding new sites inspires you to look at your incomes and think what else you might spend it on. That kind of thing.

[Radsoc]

The shortcuts will help you. However, the real management problem is if you have lots of mages and need to cast things in a special order, and carrying that between battles through losses. It's only important enough in multiplayer, but I tend to have to make a commander - spell check list

[Cruxador]

The shortcuts will help you. However, the real management problem is if you have lots of mages and need to cast things in a special order, and carrying that between battles through losses. It's only important enough in multiplayer, but I tend to have to make a commander - spell check list

And on the subject of hot keys, don't nobody forget that you can press Ctrl+a number when hovered over a commander's orders to save those orders to the clipboard, and then press that number again when hovered over a commander's orders in order to paste.

[Trekkin]

The shortcuts alone will help so much, as will using messages as reminders. Thanks!

[Frumple]

You can fiddle with some of the display options, too, iirc. What provinces show and whatnot. Can't quite recall which were something approaching useful, though, just seem to remember there was a thing or two not enabled by default that helped with non-battle management a bit.

[Jilladilla]

And on the subject of hot keys, don't nobody forget that you can press Ctrl+a number when hovered over a commander's orders to save those orders to the clipboard, and then press that number again when hovered over a commander's orders in order to paste.

And you can use Ctrl+s to look at any saved orders, if you don't feel like browsing 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.

[Micro102]

This is driving me crazy. I had 3 Global enchantments. Then we hit 5 global enchantments and all the new ones wiped mine out. I try to cast them again but the other global enchantments are overpowering mine. I am putting at least 40 extra gems into them. How many gems does the AI use???

I don't know if you can call this a case of the AI being odd here, I don't think many players would use only 40 either, when a late enough for slots to be heavily contested.

Well considering that I am playing a large map with every nation there was plenty of early globals. But either way,  how many gems normally get put in?

[Cruxador]

This is driving me crazy. I had 3 Global enchantments. Then we hit 5 global enchantments and all the new ones wiped mine out. I try to cast them again but the other global enchantments are overpowering mine. I am putting at least 40 extra gems into them. How many gems does the AI use???

I don't know if you can call this a case of the AI being odd here, I don't think many players would use only 40 either, when a late enough for slots to be heavily contested.

Well considering that I am playing a large map with every nation there was plenty of early globals. But either way,  how many gems normally get put in?

Well, it depends. Sometimes people will add no extra gems, if it's early, in order to bait people into countering and using up their pearls. Especially with the toxic globals. But when globals are heavily contested, it's normal to throw in as many gems as you can, which would often be at least a couple hundred.

[E. Albright]

Against the AI (which sounds like what you care about), I'd overcast by at least 100. Do 200 if you're feeling cautious and/or the caster doesn't have (m)any levels above the minimum needed (each excess level in the primary path counts as 10 more gems for the open-ended contesting roll).

[etgfrog]

So I decided to play LA R'lyeh, is it normal for them to get a bunch of prophets due to insane commanders?

[E. Albright]

Yep. National quirk.

[Trekkin]

If I can ask another noob question, what do people mean in terms of turns by early-/mid-/lategame now? It seems like dom3 moves a lot faster than dom4, and while I get the general idea of progressing from troops to mages & meatshields / thugs and then on to some nation-specific late-game plan (which is often supercombatants of some variety), I worry I may be undervaluing mage turns and taking too long to get there.

[Cruxador]

If I can ask another noob question, what do people mean in terms of turns by early-/mid-/lategame now? It seems like dom3 moves a lot faster than dom4, and while I get the general idea of progressing from troops to mages & meatshields / thugs and then on to some nation-specific late-game plan (which is often supercombatants of some variety), I worry I may be undervaluing mage turns and taking too long to get there.

There's never anything concrete, but I'd say that in general early game might be the first twoish years and lategame begins somewhere around five. However, when you hit early and late game are more characteristics of what you're doing than the time, and they're really vague anyway. Making sure your mages are always doing something useful is probably more practical than setting timing targets.

[Trekkin]

There's never anything concrete, but I'd say that in general early game might be the first twoish years and lategame begins somewhere around five. However, when you hit early and late game are more characteristics of what you're doing than the time, and they're really vague anyway. Making sure your mages are always doing something useful is probably more practical than setting timing targets.

That makes a lot more sense than some of the timelines I've been seeing. I suppose I'm just trying to get a handle on when a given task becomes the most useful thing to do, operating on the logic that ideally one would want to start putting the infrastructure (boosting, blood hunting, etc) for the next thing together before whatever is currently working stops being adequate. For example, by the time my early/mid armies are usually running into trouble, I've often got a number of mages en route that could have spent those turns researching or site searching or whatever, had I known they would be obsolete (or inefficient) by the time they arrived.

Maybe my entire conceptual framework for this is off, but it seems to me that the best way to think about getting a counter to your opponent's turn-X army out on turn X is to plan on building that counter on turn X-Y based on an ongoing Bayesian model of their likely strategy, for which a general timeline is a useful prior. Or am I overthinking this massively?

[Jilladilla]

Have a plan and research goals plotted beforehand, use the mod inspector to help. Know your nations strengths, but try to be adaptive to what you are facing on the field... I know, non-help there.

Try not to engage a large hostile player army if you don't have any idea of what it is capable of. But them attacking a 1 PD province would give you that intel.
With a bit (ok, a lot of) familiarity with the spell list, you could figure out their rough research levels from the spells they cast, and checking their mages for gems would give you a rough idea of what 'big spells' they're bringing to the party.
If it's a game where the score graphs are on (or you have a site that reveals the research graph) you could get a vague guesstimate from their research score, though.

Generally, I'd say it's a question of: What does he have; what do I have to bring to the table, what can I research in the next turn or 3 that would have a significant impact, do I have enough ablative territory to accept territory losses to allow me to blob/tech up just a bit more, or am I just able to smash it without expending too much effort?
But that's just me, everyone has a different style/idea of what is fun in this game, I enjoy having to sit back and do extensive sifting through the spell list to sort all of those things out.