Key to Success in 8 Kingdoms Map 1 vs 1

[tabanli]

This map is unique be cause the cities provide less gold than usual. Each city providing for 3-4 units only, sooner or later you will be facing lack of money. You can't have a lot of strong defense cities for that reason as well. If the game last too long and most of the ruins are explored, you will be forced to stop the production in most of your cities. Also there are no level 1 ruins that you can access early. Everything works against the early-easy gold on this map.

So the key to success in this map is to open the level 2 ruins early. This is the only way you can get enough gold for a high level hero offer with allies or power unit production. Other than that standard principles apply, send scouts., expand in two directions etc. I think the first unit that you produce at your capital must be a scout. Also the two heroes that you send in opposite directions will never meet again. So if your standard game plan is to get a Ranger for your Barbarian or making an Assasin-Paladin combo or a fast Horse Lord-Dread Knight combo, think again and figure out how you can get your game plan working with lack of resources and lack of level 1 ruins.

[KGB]

Keys to this map:

1) It's very important to know that the start spots are not all equal. The key is that the Black and Green cities are marked as Normal while all others are Powerful (an obvious oversight by the author). Therefore you are better off if you started far from these 2 cities since you get more access to free Powerful production and more gold income (normal cities yield less gold). You can't do anything about your starting spot but knowing which cities have better production/gold is important so you can target them for capture.
2) The next thing is that everything else is normal which as Tabanli noted means low income. However you can pillage a fair amount of gold from normal cities depending on what you find. There is no need to keep Dwarves, Rams (1 Ram city is plenty), Eagles (1 is plenty) so those should always be pillaged out for early gold. Even Pikemen can be pillaged in the first 10 or so cities since they are too slow to help with expansion but later Pikemen are valuable due to so much open road for them to walk and fight on.
3) Since you will be pillaging its important to have some Orc production and set the Orc to fight last to generate the max amount of income when pillaging.
4) My capitol unit is usually Lt Calv. Faster than the scout and 2x as strong. He's worth the extra gold IMHO because in mid game he still has some value in the open.
5) First hero is always a Barb. This is a great Barb map. Normal cities means Barb at L2 can take them all (with potential fodder unit up front when fighting Wolfrider/Orc). Roads connect everything and there no need for Water Walk/Fly so all his points go into learning. He expands on his own as well allowing you to expand in 2 directions on turn 1 which is huge. I sometimes take a 2nd hero if I had a lot of starting gold and he comes on turn 2/3. Otherwise you are better off waiting till turn 6+ when L2 heroes arrive in which case it's *always* a Ranger for searching L2 Ruins (which is all She should be doing). After that you can select your Assassin/HL or other desired hero and waiting for L3 heroes to arrive makes that much more sense.
6) Wizards make a great ally on this map due to everything being connected by road. They also help the Ranger search. But more importantly they can very often race by the opponent and raze a city or two on turns 7-12.
7) Ignore the middle until the entire outer ring is captured by you and you opponent. The cities there are too hard to take, yield nothing in terms of production, gold etc. You realistically need a L4+ Assassin to have any hope of capturing them without massive effort. When you are expanding around the outer ring, move as quickly through each section as possible. Don't spend time capturing every city in the area before moving on. The idea is to capture the city where you enter on the roads and move as directly as possible to the exit city on the other side taking maybe 1 or 2 cities in between. Your follow up armies that come after / get built in the newly captured cities can take down the rest of the cities in the area. The idea is you want to own 5 of the 8 areas rather than splitting them 4-4.
8) Elephants and Unicorns are the 2 production units you *absolutely* must buy. Often one or both can often be found in one of the capitols so scout quickly to know before you buy one. Elephants and Pikemen become a deadly stack and move quite well on the roads as a mobile fortress allowing you to simply walk past defended cities and force the other player to attack you in the open. Unicorns are a must to counter all the terrain bonus units you'll definitely encounter.

KGB

[tabanli]

Besides the Barbarian ride and Horse Lord Elephant combo, I also like Ranger's anti barbarian-anti assasin-anti elephant stack. I encountered this one time and I liked it quiet a lot.

Mainly you have Ranger-Assasin-Medusa-Crusaders. You can add unicorn, wolf riders and battering ram in time. You may substitute a few giants-heavy cavalry for a few crusaders. Speed is crucial in this map just as in any other map and Medusa often slows you down. But this is an important reassurance.

Both crusaders and wolf riders are plenty. There are medusa-unicorn cities as well. You may also get a ghost from ruins, which adds up a lot to the stack. Sometimes you receive Medusa or ghost as an ally as well.

Basic strategy is to get Medusa 97-105 ambush and Crusaders 100 warding. Ranger gets warding, speed and forest leadership. Assassin gets 24-40 group ambush and some city chaos. Crusaders kills Barbarians weak front man and medusa ambush. Crusader also kills the trash units that a high level assassin may have. On the road, you must carefully stay on the forest or road through forest. You may also stay in the city with few additional troops.Your forest leadership is almost equivalent to Paladin-Valkyrie as long as you stay on the forest. The only thing that would woop you is a high level Dread Knight with lots of elements attacking you. But he woops pretty much everybody else.