Winning the game in the first turn.
Guide to Win in the First Turn
All credit goes to Anonymous!
Explaination
When you surrender to a player as vassal, your game will be register as victory if your liege wins the game.
By setting up the map to be small and only have 2 players, you can instant win by meeting the AI, waging war with the AI, and immediately negotiating peace at the price of becoming a vassal. This will give both you and the AI an instant win.
Try to follow the road for minimum movement cost per tile.
Map Setup
Realm Traits:
- Coast
- Desert Realm
- Small Underground
- No Free City
Coast will make the AI be more likely to spawn extremely close to you depending on how map generator positioned the body of water. Desert Realm is used to synergize with desert adaption trait and Small Underground is used to discourage AI from spawning underground randomly. No Free City is not required but having no free city saves you the time from interacting with them.
Racial Setup
The spell tome and 1st racial trait does not matter.
Conclusion
Needs a few tries to be placed perfectly next to the AI for fast proc to finish the game in the first turn.
Can be consistently done in 3 turns for fast 500 exp gains, taking about 1 minute per run.
when I relayed the strat to a few of my friends, we came up with an alternative version of this strat!
If you have a friend with a game copy, you two can set up a private game for two and then have your friend surrender the game immediately on game start. This is even quicker, since it does not require you to actually find anybody and still nets you the same 500 EXP for “being victorious”.
That said, the surrendering friend gets nothing, so if you two do this strat to level simultaneously, you could simply try doing the strat described in this guide, with the added benefit of both of you looking for each other now. Haven’t tried that one yet, but theoretically nothing’s stopping a player from vassalizing another player, right?
Important caveat: sometimes the AI might demand you an impossible sum of gold so you can become the vassal; if that happens, you gotta restart.
If you have it unlocked, Silvertongued gives another bonus scout. Might be a workable alternative to Seafarers.