Openning Strategies

by Vincent Wong
28 February 1999

This article deals essentially at strategy levels, and assumes that you have the basic knowledge of how things work in FR PBM with regards to movement, combat and composing your army. If you have not understood please take a detour and read up on the basics before proceeding with this article. Please keep an open mind, these articles attempt to give you an idea to approach the game; and by no means discourage you to try your own. Outline are basic principles and technics employed by many successful players. If you feel that you want vary by all means do. There are exceptions to the rule, and do keep in mind that anything is possible in this game, there's no real right or wrong way, only better or worse actions that could make or break your realm.

In FR, understanding the makeup of the terrain is a very important starting point of any military campaign. Taking communities as the staging point, controlling of many communities will bring you closer to victory and military strength. Also controlling unoccupied hexes are as important.

Take any communitity that you have and count out 6 hex radius and that is reach of any army originating from that community that you can cover in any single direction in a turn. If you start with a town and village, thats two staging centers, and on the other end if you start with 1 village and 4 settlements you have 5 staging centers. As you can immediately see that the more centers the larger the area you can cover. Personally, I would consider towns as staging centers, any community smaller than towns are just a gold production center as they can't muster out quality troops. Where situation dictates, I will only consider smaller communities a staging point is that there are no towns within 6 hexes. Don't worry about shifting staging centers, if you can move your staging centers to near each other, you effectively create a safe conclave to expand from. Where possible consolidate then expand, don't try to start 2 far apart expansion points as you only divide your foces and weaken both areas. Better to abandon one to concentrate on the other then expand towards your former area.

Controlling unoccupied hexes (meaning hexes without any communities in it), will help you sight important targets be it enemy scouts or wandering monsters. (Side note: always read the hexes gain, and lost section. That can give you a wealth of information that owing hexes provide. By tracing the hexes lost and gained (especially the former) will show you the route a potential target is moving, especially hexes owned by uncommitted forces.)

In the start, I must emphasize that all Uncommitted R0 forces and communities must be treated as top priority (note: these are freebies and will definitely help). Your goal is to find them all and recruit them before your neighbour, enemy or ally recruits them, recruit them with a neutral or equal align unit (good and good, evil and evil). Even to the extend of disengaging a combat to pursue an uncommitted force, because as soon as you recruited them you can crush your enemy with your latest reinforcements. This is very important as by turn 6 or 7 most uncommitted forces would have been committed to one force or another.

Lets classify some terrain types. There are heavy populated areas and sparsely populated areas, difficult ground, and very difficult ground. At the start of the game, every player starts blind, meaning to say that other than the ones that you start with and the known communities that are listed in the rulebook, all others are hidden (blind to you and your opponents). As a general guide, I have made available a list of all major communities in this website, please pay them a visit and make note of the ones that are in your starting locality. Then send scouts to these locations, it is important that you do this as early as possible as there is not knowing that any of them could be an uncommitted community, you would have "conquered" them without fighting. I have not listed villages and settlements as that would be spoiling the game.

Once you have done listing out the major community centers, you will be able to see if your map location falls into one of the 4 major areas, for the first 4 turns you must do the following. In Heavy populated areas, you need scouts but not quantity but fast scouts this is because you need all the other units to begin conquering and capturing hostile communities. If Tymora's luck is with you, you could recruit 2 or 3 communities and capture the rest. In Sparsely populated areas, you will need lots of scouts, the more the merrier. You will also need to be very careful in the direction of your main army with respect to conquering communities. Join the dots is your strategy with your main force, going from one community to another taking the shortest possible route. In Difficult Ground, you have to get as many fast scouts as you can to cover ground. Also employing the same technic as Sparsely populated areas. In Very Difficult Ground, head towards the nearest heavy populated area with less difficult terrain. All the while keeping your eyes peeled for wandering uncommitted forces. (You will need them to engage the player where you are heading.)

In turn 1 to 10, benchmark your growth to at least one order bonus gain per turn. If one turn you fall short of the benchmark try to catch up in the following turn (e.g. capturing 2 towns at a go). Getting more orders, has 3 side effects. Firstly, you pay more the game turn (this is a distributed chart after some numbers, you begin to pay less per order so to speak on the average). Secondly, you can give more orders, and Thirdly, if you don't use the order you get gold for which you could use in place (as you usually get your gold from unused orders before the muster or conscript orders are carried out.) you can sacrifice one or two orders and get 2 gold or 4 gold respectively to bring out better quality troops or just more scouts.

From turn 4 onwards, the first scouts would have travelled very far away from base camp so to speak. Managing such scouts are a waste of orders most of the time. What you can do is to program them in a repeated movement loop. A unit moving west would be set to cover 3 hex rows would be given this move order. Uxxxx Move 4451 129 or 3451 659, or some other combination that you feel comfortable. Try to give an order with at least 6 move directions to be repeated. Any shorter combinations may result in a stalled unit when they encounter an impassable hex (blocked by an enemy unit or a hostile community); what happens is when they do encounter such a hex, the computer will automatically try to plot a path around the hex using the move pattern. If the pattern is too short then it gets stalled by keep bouncing into the obstacle and retreat back into the same hex. Such a situation will arise when there are at least 2 such hexes in the scout's path. If it is uncommitted community, no problem and your unit passes thru and the community becomes yours; this will be the same with unoccupied communities as well.

To boost your new fledging army, you can attempt to capture weak groups of wandering monsters, or try capturing Lairs if the opportunity arises. Lairs are the weakest defended community. Conquering a Lair early in the game, could give you a boost as you can either capture some nice items and at the same time get some extra gold that can help you bring more troops to help you capture more communities. Avoid crafting anything at all for the first 10 turns if possible, to boost your armies make full use of Priest and Wizards. Other Leader Types avoid until later in the game, as the most useful leader characters are Priest and Wizards - You can't have too many of them.

Try to expand your realm as fast as possible, make use of diplomacy as best you can. With clever use of aggression and meekness in diplomacy can help grow your realm. Silence is not beneficial to you, roleplay your character and that will help you help some intentions. Personally, I prefer aggression to immediate neighbours while engaging a cordial and friendly disposition with realms that are far away (say about 25 to 30 hex away.) And some diplomatic persuasion to your enemies immediate neighbour to apply pressure will help you gain some time and slow your enemies aggression.

Where possible only start war on one front, unless you feel up to it. It is never wise to wage war on more than one front in the first few turns. When I say, "front" means war in one direction. It could mean war with your immediate neighbour to the east. Starting a war to your south will mean a second front - one in the east and one in the south; it doesn't mean you have one front from east to south. When you fight a "front" you are not limited to just one player, it could mean 2 or more. For other players who may have a scout wandering by in your front. Kill it and send a warning to that player not to send another that way or it will be killed because it wandered into your "territory", that will deter them from interupting you further until later.

Keep in mind, that war with a far away realm is never profitable as it takes too long for reinforcement, while if you are fighting from your fringe of your territory you can get reinforcement easier and control expansion. Do not be tempted to send a missionary or expeditionary force out of your territory because that will be a waste of resource as it can be easily hunted down and destroyed as you would destroy another player's force should they enter your territory. Your goal is to expand your borders incrementally, not hap-hazardly. Always capture territories that you can defend, if not it can wait until you can. Always, play a conservationist - that is to reduce casualties so that you are recruiting to increase the size of your armies not replacing lost units. The only to achieve that is to go in with overwhelming numbers like at least 2 to 1. 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 would be best. The more people bully the few, thats the motto.

When is a good time to capture a city? The earliest I have seen is turn 6, even then it was a weak city. Do not attempt to try to beat the clock and attempt something foolish, you could easily be repulsed with heavy losses setting your resources back a couple of turns, and all the hard earn gains - lost! Time the capture if you must, when is a good time ... I say, when you begin to have excess gold, where you don't have enough orders to muster out enough troops. Typically, about turn 8 or 9 ... Capturing a city will give you a boost in order bonus and allow you to bring out better quality troops. Early in the game, turn 1 to 7, go for quantity, there after go for quantity and quality.

Good Gaming.