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 Kongdej, this might explain some of the difficulty I've been having.  I've mostly been focusing on Magic and Warfare. Cuz ya know, it's cool.

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

Ophidians are a problem mainly because of their deadly bite. You may have the armor to endure their regular attack, but the deadly bite will seriously damage you.  So it helps if you keep track of who has used their x3 attack, and who has not.  Obviously, try to kill those who have yet to use the deadly bite before they do, and make sure to pull back your injured units, or at least redirect them to the ophidians whose bite has not refreshed.

As how to actually kill them... well, this mostly depends on what you have.  Archers work quite well.  Magic, obviously, doesn't.  Dodging troops are great, spears are best early on, because of their armor piercing.  Just remember that you cannot dodge the deadly bite.  It's a bug in my books, although the developers may think otherwise.

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

Oh right forgot: You should not see the 3 tech trees as separate tree's, they are not.
The UI does a horrible job to explain this, but you need to focus on both/all the tech tree's to have a somewhat proper and balanced empire.
If you neglect 1 tree you will miss out on either infrastructure, heavy armour, or whatever the magic tree provides

This should really be part of the tutorial if you ask me

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!

 I finally got a Fortress to level 5. Here are the choices.

Fortresses:

Great Arena - +1 Attack to trained units and +3 hit points to trained units. When selected the description says it also gives +1 faction prestige, but this doesn't show up in the tool tip.

Underforge - +1 Earth Power and -50% to armor production times.

Onyx Throne - -30% unrest in all your cities.

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

Yes, we really need a wiki.

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

One thing I find unsure is random monsters attacking sisters. In my first game on easy I had no cities lost to wandering monsters but my second game on medium I have lost 4 cities to random monsters. Seems strange. Is it totally random?

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.

I always hate when upping difficulties "changes the rules" of the game, really annoying.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Great thread for new players, appreciate the work!

Thanks for this. I'm a struggling Newbie still and get squashed very quickly: so a true Newbie question.

When you describe cities "Atlanta was settled on a 3/2/-, Boston on a 2/4/1 tile" what are those numbers referring to? I presume some sort of resources but which is which?

Grain/Materials/Essence

Very useful guide. 

Minor nitpick 

You did not mention city size as a factor for production output and also neglected it in the production example ..

City size might not be as big of a factor for Production as it is for Research output - but it is still a factor (it just gives a small flat bonus)....Most relevant for high food low materials cities/towns ...
------------------------

Cities get bonus research/production/gildar/population_ threshold 1/0/2/0 2/2/6/50 4/4/12/200 8/8/24/400  16/16/50/800..

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.

My stats in above post are wrong ..Don't quote me on them .. Got them quick browsing through the .xml files... Checking in game I get 8/8 in a level 4 town so the lvl 5 bonuses should be more significant ....

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.

All stats will not be necessarily but some general lines on their magnitude/potential impact  might .... 

The amount of flat production cities gain per level is low and doesn't have much impact on a overall city production output unless it has really low materials but the Research and Gildar amounts are significant so settling some high food cities and growing them fast to level 3-4 can help the early game (on top of  the specialization bonus options ) .. And of course a link towards all the stats from external resource (wiki or whatever) .. Pretty sure those are the stats :

Cities get bonus research/production/gildar/population_treshold 1/0/2/0 2/2/6/50 4/4/12/200 8/8/24/400  16/16/50/800 ... 

Also hide/show tags to present extra information and numerical examples  could be an alternative to external links... 

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? 

1. Build outposts nearby, and then upgrade them to consulates.

2. Hire a governor champion, or make a lower champion into one, and move him in the city.

3. Kill wildland bosses, and stick the trophies into the city.

4. Complete the "Theater of the Wind" quest, and build the theater in the city.

This post has a picture attached, and one of the fortresses in the picture has a really stacked growth value.

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.