Ridiculous is certainly very hard. I find I need some luck as well to make it. I agree with your overall strategy. I would also add one more thing - if you can opportunistically take over some AI cities that are poorly defended, that can help a great deal. The AI can be stupid about protecting their new establishments. It requires some scouting and luck though.

How many cities do you think you need before focusing more on development? Also, what faction and sovereign traits do you find are best?

sjaminei-

Let me see if I am understanding you. Basically, strong melee troops aren't part of your strategy - you're relying on 2-3 strong champions surrounded by ranged units to make your stacks, with throwaway spearmen being churned out the whole time?

After a couple of weeks playing the game on my spare time, I find the AI (even on 1.29frog) not sufficiently challenging on expert/expert, so I moved to ridiculous/ridiculous.

The key seems to be city spamming (it's fairly easy to outexpand the AI by a factor of 2), beeline for tech which allows to recruit high level heroes, scout agressively to hit all the "old libraries" and hire all of the heroes (the AI is not very competent at either). Don't hesitate to scout deep inside AI territory, that's usually where the best stuff & heroes can be found. Then kill all opposite team unhired heroes. Then put your strongest heroes and familiars in a single army, and take out the AI one at a time (get paid by another AI to go to war each time ). You want to do this fairly quickly , don't bother buiding your own troops (cities are only used to get the tech and cash for the heroes), your heroes should be strong enough to steamroll the AI before it has time to develop uber armies...

Of course the adventurer trait is very useful for this strategy, and finding heroes with the beastmaster trait are almost OP since you can get so many powerful familiars with them (river monsters, cave bears, great wolves...)

This "map is a heroe shopping mall" strategy is easy logic with only basic understanding of game mechanics. Maybe the game should have been playtested a bit more, but at least the coming expansion aims to fix some of this.

Well if the hero system is the problem, Legendary Heroes may be the solution.

I just claimed my first victory in a Ridiculous game this morning.  It took a few games, but I got it.  If you start a game and there aren't any yields near your starting city, just quit and start over, because if you can't expand, you're not going to win.  I did each of the victories (saving before each one, then reloading and not doing it).  Magic and Diplomatic victories are far too easy, and feel like cheating.  The Quest victory was also easy, but the storm dragon probably had a lot to do with that (I understand dragons are supposed to be powerful, but those are ridiculous).  Really, once I had a couple storm dragons, the Domination victory was easy, too, it just took a while.

The trick was to keep trading knowledge with the AI players so they wouldn't declare war on me.  By the time one of them did, I was able to quickly generate a powerful army and started wiping him out.  If anyone had attacked me early game, or even early-mid, it wouldn't have gone well for me.  

Also, nothing has lightning resistance, so those that Lecht Staffs that Enchanters get are pretty friggin awesome.  You've got 100 armor?  Doesn't matter.  My crystal got soaked up making Storm Riders (custom unit using those staffs and wargs), but those guys dominated.  A couple of them with a storm dragon and you can beat anything.  I had some ragtag units for defense, and then I let my main army just pac-man the world.

Not getting attacked until you're ready is the hard part.

Lot's of "cheating" going on in your games I see. Starting over if you get a bad spot, reloading saved games. Why don't you just go inside and mod it so you are "invulnerable"? heh There is no victory in cheating the game or the setup until you get the one you want. So, you really haven't defeated ridiculous you just cheated it to a socalled victory.

Now I get it- willie sanderson is just one of the forum trolls. 

Obviously the reloading of saved games was because the game ends when you win.  Kinda hard to go after a different victory conditions in the same game when the game's over.  

Generally when I lose a game, I start over.  Do you keep staring at the defeat screen?  That game's over at that point.  Move on.  You can start a new one.

Actually, we are the ones that are choosing to spend the time playing a single player game.  If we don't want to spend time winning against all odds and bashing our heads against a brick wall that's fair enough.  Besides, some starts are better than you might think, so it is almost impossible to have an "optimum" start.

I play the game without reloading once I've got a decent start position.  But since we're playing a single player game for our own enjoyment, and a Large map lasts a very long time (think 10+ hours frequently) I think there is nothing wrong with using Ctrl-N a few times to get a decent starting position.  Reloading after a lost battle, or a random artifact that could be a lot better is game-breaking I think, reloading from the start isn't.

You might disagree.  But as it's everyone's personal time to do with what they wish, and they are not playing a multiplayer game, then it's their prerogative to choose a start which provides a decent go at a map.  If they always have to bang their head against a brick wall, it's not fun, and why are they playing the game if they can't have fun?

I think it would be better if the game developers themselves could create a random map generator that doesn't provide any non-decent starts.  Since they can't do that, they have Ctrl-N.

Do you think most people would seriously like playing a game when there is no settleable tile around for miles?  I have got a reasonably significant number of those starts, as well as some quite sub-par starts.  I find the game quite challenging enough even with a decent start on Challenging World Difficulty and Opponents.  I see no need to not do pre-screening - just like job applicants need to fulfill certain criteria to be eligible for a job, a FE map needs to fulfill basic criteria to be eligible for a mostly fun game.  Pretty simple, really.

I have no problem with that ^ type of play (if that's how you choose to play your games and don't mind cheating). What I have a problem with is those that use THAT ^ type of play and then come to the forums BRAGGING about how they beat the Ridiculous AI not mentioning they restarted 10 times to get the optimum start in doing so. Now if one wants to say I LOST 9 games before I beat the Ridiculous AI that way then that would be all good as well. But, once again they LEAVE that part out. You see CHEATING the AI and then bragging about a victory "cheapens" the value of that Ridiculous AI. When that person would have probably LOST 9 of 10 games played had they played it out instead of CHEATING.

It's almost the same as those from the CIvilization game series who claimed they beat the highest difficulty only to find out later they played against ONE AI opponent on a very small map and just rushed it 100 times until they won. lol Personally imho you haven't won on RIdiculous until you've beaten MAXIMUM AI opponents all set on Ridiculous. Many don't even know there are two difficulty settings at the start of the game. The first one is for the game world creature difficulty and in the opponent setup screen is the Faction AI difficulty settings. Both of these need to be set to ridiculous and ALL AI opponents on the map.

Also, I didn't come in here "bragging" about my victory.  This topic is called "Winning on Ridiculous".  It's a discussion about winning the game on Ridiculous difficulty.  That's the whole point of the thread, which obviously you've missed.  You may have noticed how I attributed my victory to avoiding getting attacked early on, and then to having gotten storm dragons (really, you only need one of those, because they'll just walk all over your opponents; that I had two was just absurd).

I've already addressed your point.  

Darxim, Ignore Willie, he isn't bringing anything to the discussion.

Units costs Wages compared to they're Construction Costs, so I use Militia for meatshields and city defense (but only my Spear Militia, those clubs sucks)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej