Expansion 101
This is an effort to outline some general principles for successful expansion, aimed at new players so many things are quite basic here. Each nation will have different means to achieve the goals, but the goals and tactical baselines themselves are pretty generic. Expansion is pretty much the same in single(SP) and multiplayer(MP), but I will assume that the goal is to play MP competitively.
What is the minimum required expansion rate?
This depends a bit on what your nation needs. Some nations need more provinces than others, and some are more dependant on getting early forts up, and some are more concerned with getting gems or blood slaves going fast. A general guideline is you want to get 12 - 16 provinces and 1- 3 forts under construction by late winter, which is turn 10.
That is assuming a game with 8+ players on a map with 13 - 20 provinces per player and normal settings. If the settings are different you will have to adjust your goals accordingly. Some nations or strategies may have different goals entirely.
Examples of national variation: Man wants many forts to lay a base for overtaxing, LA ulm wants blood slaves for counts as fast as possible but can deal with slow expansion, Caelum wants many provinces and gems, but can deal with relatively few forts because they are so mobile and cap centric, etc etc.
But they all want a minimum of 10 provinces and 1 new fort, that is the absolute baseline for most games. And you only go that low if there is important other goals to manage that warrants it.
The overall mindset of expansion should be that you secure the resources and infrastructure your specific nation needs to move into it's midgame strategies. So the first step is to think a little about that, do I need many gems? Do I need a lot of gold? Do I need many forts? What kind of territory can my troops cover with their mapmove? It makes sense to have a good surplus of those resources, but it's not a good idea to go crazy with taking as many provinces as possible in a large MP game. People will gang up on the biggest nation to prevent it from running away with the game, and it is almost impossible to deal with a very early multifront war without either getting killed or crippled. Therefore focus on what you need and stay in the race, but don't run ahead to far. It's a bit like a horse race actually, where careful positioning and timing in when to take the lead is important, and the best jockeys usually aim to stay 2nd or 3rd until the final lap comes.
(against the AI it's the opposite, it attacks you less the more powerful you are. One of the bad habits SP will teach you is therefore to overexpand and recruit maximum amount of troops. That is suicide against human opponents most of the time)
Go the easy way first, kill all the weak indies and use the resources from them to build a more powerful squad to take the tought indies. Analyze which indies are weak in relation to your nation, it's not always the same, and go for those first. If your nation is resource heavy you can take the provs around your cap first to speed up recruitment, but if not then it is often better to move on, leaving the closest provs so that as many of your expansion parties as possible can take a province the turn they move out. If your nation is highly gold dependent you can try to take high income provinces first to afford more troops for more expansion parties. Secure chokes and desired borders, then take the provinces left behind. Don't lose expansion parties, it's generally better to take a weak indie, stop and reinforce or combine two parties than fight a risky battle where you might lose an entire expansion squad.
How do I beat the indies?
The indies are a number of varieties that may require different tactics. Some nations have sacreds or elite units that can beat all or most indie types, but some nations needs to build expansion squads tailored to each type of opposition, and some nations should avoid certain indies and expand around them to take them later.
Awake expanding pretender
The awake expanding pretender is exactly what it sounds like, a pretender god designed to kill indies so you can use more of your resources for other things early. A typical expanding pretender is the dominion 10 pathless wyrm. Pathless expanders have the advantage that your priests can recall it when it dies without any magic paths being lost, so you can throw it over and over against enemy players. Nations with very weak troops and strong mages can consider this option, since they can build a lategame without having the pretender plug magic diversity holes. It is also possible to make hybrids that can both expand and fill importand mid/late game roles. Like for example a Moloch expanding the first year, then forging soul contracts a couple years and then casting big blood summons. But keep in mind that spending too much on trying to make a pretender fill many roles comes with the risk of losing all those design points, I really recommend newbies to build more focused pretenders that do one or two things very well. You should really try expanding without an awake SC, because most nations don't need one and you will learn a lot more that way.
Sacreds
Some nations have nice sacred troops that you can bless for easy expansion. One example is EA TC with warriors of the five elements, that can expand very cheaply with a water 9 bless. Or Mictlans Jaguar warriors with a dual bless. There are too many of those to cover here, but the tradeoff in using sacreds is that you need to spend a lot of points on the bless and use priests or magepriests to bless your expansion squads, which often means using valuable capital recruitment slots and mage turns that could have been used for researching and site searching. Many sacreds are nigh invincible in melee against indies, but vulnerable to arrows. So use archer decoys.
Archer decoys is generally any troop with a decent shield placed in low numbers in front of other units to draw archer fire. This is a basic tactical element, even many powerful sacreds wants to have a few shielded units taking the arrows for them. Get used to using them most of the time. You can use indy infantry for it if you don't have any usable units in your national rooster.
Elite units
Some nations have very very good troops that can expand in small numbers due to their sheer superior quality. Ulmish black infantry, Abysias heavy infantry, mans knights and longbowmen, Ermor and pythiums infantry, bandars elephants (special, you need to understand how to best use tramplers), LA pans dryad hoplites and minotaurs. And many more. If your nation has units that expand effectively in small numbers that's a very strong point of that nation, because that means you can focus your build on other important things like magic diversity, good scales and infrastructure.
Regular troops
But then again many nations does not have cost efficient elites, and there you must make do with more mundane options. The rest of this guide assumes you are in this position, because it's the one that really needs some skill. First of all you need more numbers. Josef Stalin wasn't a nice guy, but he said something very true: "Quantity has a quality of it's own!" With normal units there is simply a critical mass before they start working properly, you wont kill anything with 5 archers, but 30 archers with 10 shielded infantry as arrow catchers can take a lot of indies. The tricky part is to find out what the critical mass is for your nations units against which indies, you have to test it. If you have cavalry or other flankers, putting some of them on hold and attack rear can really improve a squad of infantry and archers.
Different types of independents:
Tribesmen
These come in a few varieties, but are quite similar. They are archers + weak melee units in large numbers backed by a nature mage. The mage will typically cast vine arrows while the melee units rush forward and the archers fire closest.
Tribesmen are usually the easiest indie to beat, but sometimes they can swarm squads of heavy units in low numbers.
Killing tribesmen can be done in lots of ways, but a standard setup of a few shielded arrow catchers backed by lots of archers or just a squad of heavy units kills them easily. As will cavalry or flying high offense units. Awake SC gods or sacreds should have no problems with tribesmen. So there is a lot of leeway with this indie type.
Edit: Wolf tribe melee guys has dual daggers which can sometimes be a problem, protection is better than defense against low damage dual wielders, so think about that when choosing blockers for this one.
Infantry + archers
This is a very common indie. You can kill it with any squad of better quality. The general archer + arrow catcher works well because the AI doesn't know how to decoy. But you need a little stronger shielded frontline than against tribesmen, and punch enough to penetrate the heavy infantry protection. But generally this is an easy indie type to kill. Sacreds and SC gods should win 100% or they are just not good builds. Cavalry with lances is often a good choice too.
Barbarians
Barbarians hit hard, so they can kill a heavy or elite squad that lighter indies cannot touch. And they can also kill SC gods that don't have awe because their high attack and damage may cause afflictions and overcome the gods defences. But they have a glaring weakness in very low protection and morale and no shields. The trick to take barbarian provs without losses is to abuse these weaknesses. Either by using enough archers to rout them before they connect, use a god or units with awe, or get the first hit with fliers or cavalry or other high offense troop placed so it hits first. But archers is by far the cheapest and easiest, if you don't have them recruit some indie archers or tribesmen archers and kill them with that.
Horse Tribe Cavalries (Quoting Calahan)
These can be a little tricky sometimes due to the all-bowman line-up, meaning none of their troops come forward to engage your troops in melee. And if you go forwards to engage them in melee then you will find they are no pushover, due to high defence (of 16) and (in CBM) two attacks. But like a lot of Indys they are weak against projectiles, and have another glaring weakness in only having one unit with leadership, who will also be mixed into the bunch of troops shooting arrows at you. So it's not uncommon to beat these in just 2-3 turns if you manage to take out the leader with your own arrows and projectiles. (or damage him causing him to fail a morale check, forcing all the troops to flee).
Heavy Cavalry
This is one of the harder indies. The lance charge can often kill stuff that other indies can't, and archers don't work so well because the heavy cav connects and breaks your frontline and then kills your archers. You need some way to deal with that lance charge. This can be done in a number of ways, swarms of size 1 high defense units will tie up heavy cavalry. Flying squads on attack closest will stop the charge as well. A frontline with high enough HP to take a lance to the face, like a number of giants, will get to hit back and kill the cavalry, or you can just buy some cheap units to die for you with your real troops behind going in for the kill. Squads of troops with awe works well, but a single god with low awe isn't good enough. Astral blessed sacreds of any type can take a lance charge due to the twist fate effect. Basically you don't want the lance charge to kill valuable elite heavy units or sacreds, or to get first strike on your awake SC. Once the charge is negated you deal with the cavalry as any heavy troops, you need something that can punch through the armour. So some types of expansion squads simply shoudn't try to take heavy cav, but adding a little something to negate the lances is often enough for them to do it. You also need your squad to be big enough since the heavy cav is ofte backed by many regular troops and archers, so if you lack the numbers just wait and expand another way in the meanwhile.
Knights
Knights and longbowmen are probably the toughest indie. The same principles as heavy cav applies but you need more numbers and a good archer decoy.
Amazons
Amazons are a bit like heavy cav in that they often have lance cavalry. But they also have mages with some different spells. Here it is important to be careful with valuable units. But generally you just deal with them like with heavy cavalry.
Lizardmen
Those are a bit like the barbarians with their high offense and no shields. But you should never ever send a SC god against them because the shaman will invariably curse him. Send archers instead.
Woodsmen
Those are like tribesmen, weak archers. But with blowpipe troops that can paralyze and fatigue and therefore sometimes do well against a few elite units or a SC god. Archer decoy + mass archers is a good choice. Or just enough troops of almost any type.
Bloodhenge druids
These are really hard and can do lot's of damage. The mages will spam agony, a quite dangerous AOE spell, at your frontline. And the dark vines are terrifying monsters. Plus the blowpipes will fatigue the frontline from behind the vines. The trick to beating them is to combine a tough frontline that can take some agony (pun intended) and go toe to toe with the dark vines with something that can flank and kill the weaker troops and mages. An example would be giants flanked by cavalry. This is non trivial for some nations and they should wait with this indie, don't be dissapointed if your regular expansion squads can't take it. Lifeless units work well because they are immune to agony and blowpipes.
Elephants
These can be tricky to kill early if you can't make an elephant counter of some sort, they kill most any number of normal infantry with trample. Countering elephants can be done either by frontlining a few size 6 blockers, size 4 or 5 works in a pinch too but will be pushed around and take some damage. Ethereal units are ok as well, and anything with animal awe halts them full stop. Animal awe can be either a national troop or commander (Pan, beast trainer etc) or a commander given a rat tail whip. You can also rout elephants with critical mass of crossbows or other source of high damage ranged attack. They can also be dealt with using magic in a pinch, spells to hold them in place or single target damage spells or paralyze spam are examples of usable anti elephant magic, you have to look at what you can cast. Elephant provinces are often good targets for awake size 6 SC gods. High defense units also have a chance to avoid trample damage, but be aware that parry values from shields do not apply to this roll, so units that list a high defense only because of high parry (like ermors infantry) are not good against elphants.
There is more to say of course, and lots of scripting tricks you can learn. And countless specific national expansion tactics. But following these general guidelines you should be able to exapand with most nations.
Please complement with your own wonderful insights.
