Deciphered if you don't feel like doing it and want to read it here:

There are 3 basic strategies in the early game:

1. Rapid assault. Wait for a decent-sized army on your capital, then start charging around the map and hope that you are able to capture another player's capital while it's poorly defended.

2. Rapid growth. Focus on capturing territory and neutral cities. Vulnerable to rapid assault, since capturing cities will deplete your forces in the short term and leave your capital vulnerable.

3. Defensive growth. Slower and stealthier capture of territory and neutral cities, where you grow cautiously and focus on surviving rapid assaults. It tends to lose to rapid growth, but win against rapid assault.

So the three strategies have a rock/paper/scissors relationship. If you notice that a particular strategy is popular in the current metagame, you can adjust your own strategy accordingly. In eight-player, you know there will be seven losers.

If you want to be the one winner, you have to get lucky. So it makes sense to lean towards a high-variance strategy like rapid growth or rapid assault.

In the mid and late game, players tend to be overmatched against each other. You'll have just 2 or 3 empires remaining. Usually one empire will be significantly stronger. If you are the weaker empire, your best shot to win is generally to form a massive army with all of your forces, charge into your opponent's territory, and see if you can take their capital during a moment when it's poorly defended. If you are the stronger empire, you know you're going to win by default due to the snowball nature of the game. So the important thing is to defend against the sort of surprise attack I just described. There have only been a few times when I lost from a position of strength, when my weaker opponent managed to outplay me on the basic mechanics of territory and city capture. Areas with a high density of cities are especially valuable to take control of, if you can manage to do it, which tends to be difficult.

If the GP wanted to hide it, it’s a pretty strange thing to explicitly unhide it.

To be honest it's a strange thing to rot13. I get why OP did it, but I'm really not sure the benefit outweighs the negatives or that it accomplished what it was supposed to. Those aren't exactly spoilers in the same way as visual media, where a fraction of a second can reveal the whole story.

Brb painting a shed.

It's just one person's perspective on strategy not some sort of spoilers or cheat codes.

I appreciate it

I appreciate it too. The deciphered version is clearly noted as such, which even respects the OP intent in giving readers the choice to skip reading it.

There are many problems here. Taking a neutral city costs 40 troops, taking a long time to recuperate. You're better off looking for the enemy and attacking immediately, only taking neutral cities in the late game when it takes 20+ moves to deploy men against the enemy.

Attacking the enemy is better than taking neutral territory, n.b. you want to do this towards the end of the turn so your conquered territory will respawn.

Was going to reply to say the same thing. It's tempting to take neutral cities at the start and sometimes I do it, but it's almost always a mistake, and I can usually tell when other players do it and they make easy pickings. It takes a long time to recover from taking a city, and the payoff isn't worth it until you have a lot of them.

It's better to cover a large swathe of territory. This can hide where your general is, and every 25 turns you can collect armies from the squares. Build up that way and then you wait for someone next to you to get into a fight with someone else, or take a neutral city, and then bomb in on them in force when they can't defend, and take advantage of all of their hard work.

There's also a bit of a "dark forest" aspect to the game, where you can benefit from being hidden for a long time at the beginning of the game, but you have to trade this off with the disadvantage of not being able to build adequate forces in that time.

I'm "bubbles" in the game.

In high level play you have to manage your land, the hard thing is how to find the optimal route to collect your army: It's advisable to take around 15-18 turns to collect your army from an area and attack in the remaining 10-7 turns, so you can attack before the enemy numbers increase. In high level 1v1 play what matters most is the area you have, if you can get +1 area per 25 rounds from your enemy you'll probably win.

But! As both of you collect more and more area it gets really time consuming and after a point you just can't collect your army optimally. I'd argue that the biggest difference between skill levels at the highest levels is how efficient the collecting is. At that point you'll need cities. Always look for the opponent's counter to know how many cities your opponent has.

Not that it matters but I was a top 5 1v1 player quite a while ago.

I don't propose taking a city, waiting for recuperation, and then attacking an opponent. I propose taking a city, then soon taking another, then another, then another. Basically moving along an exponential growth curve. If you get lucky and no one attacks you during that period, you stand a very good chance of winning. Even if someone does attack you, the rapid regen from all your cities gives you a fighting chance. This strategy works especially well if you discover a lot of cities in your region during the early game.

The problem with attacking an enemy is that it's easy to get into a war of attrition where you both fall behind other players.

I think it's important to emphasize that you won't win against random luck without the rush strategy:

- If you begin in a corner (best) or side (ok), you can win if the side opposite to the one you are rushing towards does not rush you. If you begin in the center there is no way to win.

- To rush wait until ~17 because then you'll fill a full run before your lands get 2, enabling a second rush if the first fails.

If you win against one player before 50 seconds the chances get exponentially higher to win. Beat 2 in the first 100 seconds and you probably have 90% chance of steamrolling the entire board.

Oh, well done mate! gratz. Maybe he ROT'd it for a reason.

Yes, and I unROt'd it for a reason too

Or you could have posted a link to an unrot site instead of possibly spoiling it for others.

Seriously just post the strategy with a spoiler alert.