Military for New Players

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   Greetings everyone,

I often see new players asking for advice in global chat about building armies. The near-universal response is to tell them not to do that, it will stunt their growth, it is somehow bad for them.
THIS IS NOT TRUE, and it is extremely frustrating to see vets discourage new players who show an interest in the military side of the game.

Or, to be more accurate, it is not true with just a little bit of help from larger players. Much like we love to give basic res to new players to start them on their way, giving them a few thousand gold and some beer and spears can start them on the way to building their first spearunit army on their first day in the game, if they choose to do so. And it will not hurt them or stunt their growth at all! 

I think we all agree that the most important things for a new player are storehouse capacity and becoming self-sufficient with basic resource production. This is true no matter what path they are interested in. However, the player does not have to sacrifice these things in order to start building an army on day one if they want. The barracks only need to be at level 1 to build spear units, level 3 for ranged, level 5 for infantry, and level 11 for cavalry. That requires a rather meager amount of build time. It will not hurt their overall growth to level up their barracks here and there. They can still spend the majority of build time on resource plots and storehouse. And with a small gift of gold from a larger player, they can still set their taxes at zero, so res production is not penalized at all just because they are supporting an army.

Does a new player need to have an army? Of course not. No one is likely to pick on them when their rainbow wears off, and even if that happens, the community would come to their defense. It is certainly correct to tell a new player that they don't need to worry about building an army anytime soon, if they don't want to.

But what if they WANT to? Why discourage them? Just like you would send them a load of basics, why not send them 10k gold and 500 spears and beer and encourage them to start a spear army right away? If a new player is specifically interested in military (as opposed to just worried about being attacked), we should encourage this just as much as we encourage them to build cotters or sell cows or whatever.

When I started playing Illy, I was fascinated by the troop units and wanted to know how to use them and how combat worked. But I heard, over and over, don't build troops, it's bad, wait until you are bigger. So I waited. And I got bored. And I wondered why the game was structured so that I had to achieve a certain size before I could make use of troops.

But now I realize, the game is NOT structured that way. It's just that a lot of players are under the illusion that it is. There is no harm in having armies right away if you want them. Small players can begin learning military mechanics right away with NPC's, or they can engage in PvP with other small, like-minded players. The only consequences are losing troops - you can't damage cities when you're that small and don't have siege capability. So it's the perfect time to start practicing and learning! Why wait?

The great thing about Illy is that there are many paths you can choose, and military is one of them. I am posting this to suggest that we encourage this path enthusiastically with new players who show a specific interest in it, rather than telling them they ought to wait.

Cheers,
ELECTROK