As what was said, your first bet will almost always be the first few civ lines of technology, get spears and leather armour when your main city have lots of items in its production queue.

I change the research path every time I play, there are no "real" research path except that you have to start out in the civ tree, and then with the first 1 or 2 lines of civ techs finished you figure out what is in your immediate vicinity (iron, crystal, shards) or what you really need (more research, more food per grain), or what you could really use to your advantage (higher hero hiring tech, more production per mat without constructing a building). It all really depends on your layout of the map, well for me it is anyways.

The same goes with constructing stuff in your capital, but as a general rule, pioneers, when you are done building pioneers, build more pioneers.
An early "Study" (+1 RP per turn) really helps, "Bell Tower" (-10% unrest) if you plan on having low or medium taxes. More production (Lumber-mill, Workshop), is always good.
But, when you're done with your building, MOAR pioneers...
Well you should stop building pioneers at some point of course, but the early game in Elemental is just about settling every damn last spot of green or purple grass as possible, even if you have to go to war for it.

Also if your hero is weak, or the world is tough (depends on world difficulty too how tough the start is), then you want to construct an early spear-militia, if possible edit the scout to grab the weakness trait, and then equip a bare unit with weakness trait and spears for a quick to produce efficient units. If not, just equip a bare unit with spears and nothing else for a semi-quick to produce efficient unit. Don't ever bother with the pre-designed "Militia" unit, I would rather just design a new unit, give it nothing but staves and build that instead.

PS - This is a reflection of what I think is good, it have no hold in Tuidjy's opinion, or the real world for that matter

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Thanks much for the guide. Any tips for dealing with Ophidians? I cringe every time I see a stack.

A few tips:

- Ophidians have "Deadly Bite", a special ability that deals tons of damage (with a something turn cooldown), This attack Cannot be dodged.
 If you can keep track of these bites, try to have a squad of "tanks" use the "defend" ability just before being attacked by it.
 (Any unit will gain bonus defense when they pass they're turn (hotkey: Space), if you have a shield, you gain bonus defense when passing your turn, or as the game calls it "Auto Defending")
- So have a few tanks with Maximum HP and Defense, since ophidians have decent move, its better to "tank" them, hopefully with expendable units.
- When you move a unit in melee with a monster, it will not engage anything but stuff in melee, so archers and mages should be safe, and with proper placement.
 You can have 1 stack take the majority of the attacks, and let your hero only suffer from 1 ophidian at a time.
- A few archers, or trained unit "mages" can help take down Ophidians without paying metal to armour.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Well, considering that I don't want them (monsters) dodging my 'special' melee attacks, I'll learn how to live, or let my fodder die, to theirs.

Yep, I use purpose built spear troops in my 'mid' game for doing most of my lair clearing, but I was trying to use a stack of leveled (9-12) champs in my last two games, and come to think, most of them were assassins, so low HP, minimal armor, high dodge, great for most things, but essentially meat for these guys. I had absolutely forgotten about deadly bite. Thanks much to you both!

Thanks. I wonder how I should organize this info.  It doesn't belong in the concepts... we really NEED a wiki, don't we?

Older post here.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/434647

What we really need are 18 little slaves to do all this writing for us

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I think that on easy monsters will not attack your cities by design.

I also believe that the higher the difficulty, the more likely monsters are to attack your cities.  By ridiculous, monsters pretty much head straight for your cities as soon as they awake.

There's no way around it - if you want to play on high difficulties, you will need to know how to delay awaking monsters, and how to deal with those that come after you.

Great thread for new players, appreciate the work!

Grain/Materials/Essence

Yup.  I had forgotten that.  And I have no excuse, because by the time I had written this, city size had been giving production bonuses for a while.

I have, somewhere, a quicksave with level 5 cities.  I will check the stats there.  I do not think it's important to have the stats in the 'Concept' section.  What we do need is a document/wiki/whatever that serves as a reference, as opposed to a guide.

Is there any growth buildings for conclave and fortresses. As they grow incredibly slowly when you can't build well/inn/festival? I have a largish empire and am only getting around 1.5 ish growth on all of them from faction prestige is there anyway round this? 

Thanks Tuidjy.

How would I make a governor champion. All the champions are lvl 5 or higher apart from the sovereign and your first one. What level do you get to choose game/defender/governor/etc ? Apart from 4. Surely at that higher level you wouldn't want to be keeping him as a governor. All of the hired champions in my current game are not governor champions.

Therefore with your fortress and consulates which you want a high pop in a medium length of time in you should build consulates in.