My guess is you'll have little trouble figuring the game out yourself.

And others will be along to write walls of text outlining strategies and tactics.

I'll keep my brief and mention just one that's unique to this game design, and that's orders.

Be sure thru the course of the campaign not to neglect ways to increase how many you get each turn. Cumulatively as the campaign progresses this can either be used to overwhelm an opponent or conversely overwhelm you.

Oh and well one more that's kind of obvious, build an army early and often. The AI will beat you with a stick if you don't.

coming from civ5/civ6, I made a mistake of being too friendly with too many tribes in this game, equating them too much with city-states in civ. It means that due to the limited space for expansion, I kept stagnating vs. AI which regularly wages war and destroys their neighboring tribes.

I'm not saying you shouldn't ever be cordial with the tribes, but you should always think ahead where you can expand, so if you're not confident enough to take on the opposing nation next-door then you're pretty much left no other choice but to invade the tribes..Because if you don't, the AI will.

Scouts are the most powerful unit you have. The more terrain you know about and the more you can see of the other nations, the better off you will be. You have to be very aggressive with your scouts throughout the entire game. Unlike Civ, they remain useful as diplomatic tools later on.

If you need a tutorial on how to scout well, watch what the AI does with them. If you play like a noob, the AI will easily out-scout you and you will be in a world of pain once it discovers your weakness.

Tip 1 - it is not Civ. Do not treat it like Civ or expect Civ approaches to work.

Tip 2 - Keep an eye on your strength versus other factions. If you fall behind the AI will exploit that and will beat you.

Top 3 - Even if you don't play with the advanced difficulty settings, have a look at them and see what advantages the AI and tribes are getting. If you don't like the AI starting ahead of you that can be adjusted.

Top 4 - RTFM. Not only is the manual full of information it also includes strategy advice. I also picked up points by reading the game loading tips.

I'm just learning myself but I see tribes and their annoying raids as something to be ready for as you go up the difficulty ladder. This is just another civ game and what works there works here as well. You've got to balance playing tall with playing wide, you need cities to build up your empire but the more you have the more military units you need to protect them.

After the tutorials I started playing the Learn by Playing scenarios starting with Babylon the Just.

Scouts are not the most powerful piece on the map. Scouts are useful early on for discovering new city sites or harvesting resources. Later for setting up agent networks in foreign cities.When you're at war you have few if any orders for turns to waste on scouts.

As for copying what the Artificial Ignorance does do not waste time and stone on building forts along your border like a World War 1 style continuous front. Unmanned forts are a waste because they don't impede movement at all,

1. On normal difficulty both the tribes and the AI civs will be much less aggressive giving you more time to work out how to develop your economy and military and settle new cities. The biggest difference as you increase difficulty level is the increase in aggression. I would start on normal (The Just I believe) as this will give you a flavour of what the tribes and AI civs will do on higher difficulties but still give you plenty of time to learn the ropes

2. The biggest difference between Old World and Civ is in working out how to increase civics and orders (without which you can do diddly squat). This is because civics and orders come from all sorts of non-obvious places and it takes quite a long time to work out how to crank them.

3. The second biggest difference is that Old World military AI is vastly better than Civ's. It will set traps and ambushes you for by hiding it's units in the FoW. It will dangle a few units to tempt you into a kill zone then bring it's unseen army in to crush you. It will ruthlessly focus down you units one at a time. It's very nasty and very clever.

4. The third biggest difference with Civ (and most other strategy games) is that just because you can do something absolutely does not mean that you should do it. The game will always remind you can do x, y and z now. This does NOT mean you should (nor that you shouldn't). This is because unlike Civ you can't do everything since you are limited by your orders and civics pools therefore there is an opportunity cost to every action you do decide to take (i.e. something you now can't do that you could have done otherwise).

5. I think this is already mentioned but in general tribes = extra city sites you definitely need. Once you've taken over your local barbs sites, start working through your local tribes. Not only does this provide a rich seam of expands it also levels up your army units. There is no downside to terminating tribes with extreme prejudice.

6. Finally you simply can't have enough stone. Everything you need to build costs ever increasing quantities of stone but especially wonders do. Each wonder you build gives you +2 victory points (plus a load of wonder based bonuses). If you don't build it your opponents will which is a four-pointer against you (you -2 VP, they +2 VP). Since a default map game win condition is about 50 victory points each wonder built is worth about 8% of what you will need to win.

But wonders cost vast amounts of stone which becomes prohibitively expensive to buy as the game progresses. You must prepare for this by building as many quarries as you can from the get go taking advantage of every mountain hex location.

The same applies to iron (= melee soldiers) and wood (= archers) but not to quite the same extent. You will weep when first you realise just how much wood is required to upgrade your slingers to archers and how long it will take you to make good the shortfall.

Originally posted by omnius:

Scouts are not the most powerful piece on the map. Scouts are useful early on for discovering new city sites or harvesting resources. Later for setting up agent networks in foreign cities.When you're at war you have few if any orders for turns to waste on scouts.

You missed that an important use of scouts is to find landmarks, That +1 or +2 legitimacy is a good way to get orders and to improve family loyalty.

Originally posted by omnius:

Scouts are not the most powerful piece on the map. Scouts are useful early on for discovering new city sites or harvesting resources. Later for setting up agent networks in foreign cities.When you're at war you have few if any orders for turns to waste on scouts.

I don't understand you. You just explained in detail how and why scouts are so powerful! No other unit can do all of that. At war, you position your scouts in hidden places so the enemy doesn't see them. They will give you constant reports on enemy movements. Or maybe in your mind, it's somehow better that the enemy just comes out en masse from the fog of war to stomp your nation?

Originally posted by Twelvefield:

. At war, you position your scouts in hidden places so the enemy doesn't see them. They will give you constant reports on enemy movements.

That's not wholly wrong, scouts can be useful keeping watch on enemy movements but generally only when you just happen to have one in the right place at the right time. Otherwise I'd say @omnius is right that in a war you rarely if ever have enough orders to be moving scouts about.

I mean do you want a scout or an extra maceman on the front line? Difficult one that, innit.

Bear in mind, something like the effectiveness of a scout is one of the things that is directly impacted by difficulty setting.

On higher difficulties I will never build Scouts - namely because I just don't have the orders to move them.

On lower difficulties, I'd agree that their usefulness is pretty stellar. The extra orders in the early game and the ease of pacing allow you to build more Scouts than usual and utilize them extensively.

With respect to espionage, that's a playstyle thing; I don't really prioritize portcullis all that often. In some games I've won and skipped the tech entirely.

In other games, that tech has essentially single-handedly won me the game with it's use.

Another tip from me.

If you play any map with angry barbarians try to get a tribe alliance early if one is close then move some of the tribe troops next to your cities. As long as there's enemy barbarians close they will fight them instead of moving back. Best to use their strongest ranged units for that of course and a few melee which you can move into the cities. Saves you tons of orders if there's many attacks and you just have to sometimes move the unit to a better spot or a bit back and give heal orders. Also don't move + attack if none of the tribe units would die. If necessary to move to better spots do so but don't waste the orders for attacking and let the tribe do it in their round instead. Just give the attack order yourself if it's a dangerous situation or if you need the kills you could use a few of your own units for that.

Turn order seems to be, player, ai players, red barbarians, tribes (don't know the exact order of the different tribes but they have one as well)