Editing Strategies (section)

=== Early [[Capitol]] ===
This strategy is particularly relevant when playing on Hard or lower difficulty on relatively poor, small, closed maps, in which the player is separated from enemies by border guards, long destinations or very powerful monsters. If you then rush for an early capitol, you can have much more gold than other players.
* Pros: You can have more income, allowing you to build new units and buildings with enough gold. You can also have more heroes than usual.
* Cons: With limited amount of creature dwellings, you cannot make a good defense early. You also cannot attack all the wandering monsters and may find yourself unable to conquer any important locations in the first week. As a result, while you will not have a problem with gold, you may miss out on ore, crystals etc. which can be equally important for the city development.

Rushing for capitol is of course hard or even impossible on higher difficulties. Capitol costs 10 000 gold, castle and citadel cost 7 500 gold. Many buildings, like blacksmiths, are not that useful early on (or almost useless for some time), yet they are simply required. However, after two more weeks Capitol pays back for itself fully - 14 x 2000 gold is 28 000 gold.

For early capitol, it is a good idea to pick a good secondary hero (or start with someone) with gold speciality and/or estates. [[Lord Haart]] and [[Leena]] are two best choices.

Example build order:

# Town Hall
# Magic Guild
# Marketplace
# Blacksmith
# City Hall
# Citadel
# Castle
# Capitol
# unupgraded creature dwellings (so you can have as much units as possible)
# other buildings

Note, that generally it is advised not to follow this strategy on maps that have gold more readily available on the map itself (either in gold piles, [[Treasure Chest]]s, [[Gold Mine]]s or [[Creature Bank]]s) or a large number of [[external dwelling]]s or [[Creature Bank]]s that provide units (such as [[Griffin Conservatory|Griffin conservatories]], as well as on maps where the enemy can be easily reached. In these cases, the player who decides to focus on building the capitol will be unable to conquer (and therefore recruit) those gold sources and external units, and will also not gain any relevant troops from their town within the first week. As a result, their enemy can simply focus on building an army early on and defeat them within the first three weeks, before the Capitol even pays itself off.