This game is hard

Zackers14

Zackers14

New member
Elder
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
174
I forgot how hard this game can be sometimes. Well, "hard" isn't exactly the best way to put it, it's just overwhelming sometimes. Starting to play this game after so many years, I forgot the feel of having several villages all pressuring me. I find the desires to be a bit ridiculous, with food and homes being raised almost 80% of the time. Trying to find food and wood for a village when there's 5 others that also need food and wood, and having my creature barely helping isn't a desirable situation.
So, what are your strategies for multiple villages? I'm starting to just ignore the children desire and don't bother making disciple breeders, gives me time to build up and acquire resources before the big building boom.
 
They always have at least one desire. The more of everything else they have (the less they want it) the higher the Children flag goes. If they are not literally out of a resource or about to die off, and have enough houses for now, ignore them.

Also, the creature can be a big help if you are willing to put days and days into its training.  :p

But, yeah, you don't get evil for ignoring the children flag, so don't worry about it. The game is designed so they always want something. The hard part is getting six villages to keep believing in you for long periods of time.
 
Well Zack m'boy, in the words of Bill Clinton, i feel your pain, i used to fret alot over desires but, not so much any more willin to spill a lil advice though.

Some of this may seem very obvious and you may say "Jeeze i know that, what does he think i am, stupid?" no, i dont, just, assumin ya may've forgot some things, and im just gonna try and jog your memory here n there.

As far as food goes, you dont have to fully fufill that desire, as long as the storehouse has plenty in it, your people will not die dont stress so much over that, (Assuming the store is fairly full) one of the biggest helps can be to teach your creature the proper applications of the food and wood miracles.

Doing so requires that, of course, he know them, and, you use them at the storehouses in front of him, then leash him to the store with the compassion leash,
patiently wait and watch for him to do one, then, reward 10%, wait for him to do the other one reward 10% quickly after again, wait for him to do the former, then up to 20%, and the same with the second, so that both food and wood are prioritized equally, this is the reason for the reward/punish system being percentile based, prioritizing.

Secondly, if there are ANY available fish farms, make plenty of desciple fishermen.
Same goes for farms and farmers, if you've no farms, of course 4 scaffolds equates to a square field.

Of course though, the scaffolds creates a greater need for wood, if you have any forests within spitting distance of any town, make some foresters.

If you have a worship site with food, and/or wood, its miracle spammin time, get people worshipping there, leave at least 5k food, and check in regular, as you may remember, stupid villagers are stupid, and will worship themselves to death..  :laugh2  

One thing that is a boon to your production, is a big norse or Celtic wonder as you may remember, greater belief equates to a bigger wonder, a bigger wonder makes for more powerfull effects. The Norse/celtic wonders will up the potency of Food, Wood, and the norse will improve the output of fish farms so the norse is preferable.

If you have a norse village slowly work their belief up to about 2.5k this will provide you with a sufficient wonder, secondly, make a scaffold with a value of 7, ALL the scaffolds for the norse wonder must be from a workshop of the culture you need the wonder for, otherwise the wonder will be that of another cultures, the wonder will take alot of wood at this point, probably nearly 45k or so, be patient with your little workers, and spam a wood miracle on that wonder it will take quite a while.

The end result of this, i have found if you are using a norse wonder fueled by 2.5k belief your wood miracle will be bolstered from 1.8k wood to almost 6k wood per cast, and the food will go from roughly 1k to 4k.

And remember, homes arent 100% neccesary, your people can survive without them, though it is good to eventually keep that desire in check just keep the food stores full, as long as you keep the desires down to 2, or three, mostly under 50% everything will be okay, and people will not lose faith quickly, just dropping a miracle here and there will keep them from losing much faith at that point.

This is the best i can come up with this time of night, i do hope it helps.

Peace out - Havoc

 
My strategy has never been to make my villages humongous, because it does indeed become overwhelming, and also depletes natural resources too quickly (much like the real human population). What I do is build my villages up to whatever I think is sufficient at the time and make sure they have what they need to be stable. Then I let the population grow old. When houses start getting emptied, I make a few breeder disciples out of the oldest dudes I can find (three max), and let them make babies until they die of old age. Normally, the offspring they produce before they keel provides enough new stock to repopulate what I've already built and keep everything nice and even. It's an ebb and flow.

I should mention I am an Evil God with a Good Creature. Whether my tactics make me more Evil, I do not know.
 
Evil god with good creature for the win. :)

Havoc, I ended up reading your whole post in Bill Clinton's voice, didn't realize I was doing it until halfway through.  :laugh2

But, yeah. Keeping village size down, letting people take care of themselves, ignoring everything that isn't dire.

Although I admittedly like a large village, in the first file that I finished the game in I used the CachePack to turn the first Norse village into Tibetan (because I like the Tibetan buildings more) and subsequently covered the entire half of the land.

Resources are limitless with a Norse wonder or nine. It becomes easy, after your people have collected all the wood in the land except a few trees you keep safe on an island (assuming you're on Land 2?) to reforest afterward, to just spend fifteen minutes supplying stores and then you don't need to again for about eight hours, and even I rarely linger that long. In the final land, I suggest picking one race and town, and moving everyone to it as the town swallows them up if you keep playing, in other words, you use Greek and reach the Tibetan village that had the spiritual shield, you build however many extra houses and move all the Tibetans to the Greek village. I have literally had over 9000 people in one town before (not that it is difficult, since villager reproduction grows exponentially).
 
Okapidragon said:
Havoc, I ended up reading your whole post in Bill Clinton's voice, didn't realize I was doing it until halfway through.  :laugh2
Click to expand...

Awesome rofl.

Also, on a "Villagers helping themselves" note, the indian wonder doesnt just make the villagers reproduce faster, makes em do just about everything faster, run, gather, ect, not really important by any stretch of the word, but, i believe it'd help.

Btw, if you have both a celtic n' norse village, and you already have norse wonder(s), the celtic wonder, no matter the size, will not override, nor compliment the norse ones bolstering effect on the resource miracles. and doesnt do much else so.. probably shouldnt bother with it, unless you fancy havin your own stonehenge.  :p
 
Actually, the only purpose of a Celtic wonder, though I think it also boosts weather miracles (let's say the only practical purpose) is to boost your influence. Wonders really expand that influence ring, making it easier (particularly on Land 3) to take over the next town, as long as you can get wood for them.
 
Zackers14 said:
So, what are your strategies for multiple villages?
Click to expand...


This:
I usually differ my strategy from land to land.
The first time I got to land two I was kinda overwhelmed, I almost couldn't find the way back to the temple. :laugh2
Anyway this is pretty much my style of village management: first take my creature to some training map, usually Killroys.
Then after about a while there, teaching him some basic miracles, such as wood water heal and increase, birds, and if I feel like it, some destructive miracles.
Then take him to land two and have him watch/help the villagers, usually once the village store is built he'll cast a good few miracles.
Tip:
If there's a need you want him to deal with then attach him to that flag.
Anyway here is my strategy of village management:
First I like to nail the food need, then have my creature deal with children.
Then whether they need housing or not I expand my building influence with huts, then build a Wonder if I need the influence and if don't I will go ahead if it's a Norse or Indian wonder.
And the unnecessary housing can be used for holding off the housing need.
Oh and I always nail early! the civic building need.
Another tip:
On land three you need (even if you have a ton of people) a ton of breeders.
Hope this helps!  :)
If you want more detail then ask!  :D
     
 
:shocked I had totally forgotten about the flag thing. But, yes. If you just attach him to the store/center, he will take care of the village in general; Attaching to a flag causes him to work for one need.
 
Well, pretty much everything as far as general play has been covered, but I'd like to add that what villagers do is actually somewhat complex based on their desires and what is going on in the town at the moment.

For instance, get the villagers attention and you will see desire flags drop for a moment. Drop a scaffold, the expansion flag my stay raised, drop 2 more and it will go down all the way. Could happen even if you exceed max population by 20-30 people.

I've noticed that while buildings are damaged or not complete villagers reproduce very slowly if at all, even breeders (aside from manual mating). I've also heard that villagers get lazy, but I don't know if that is an aspect of the game that is based on current conditions or how you have treated the villagers overall in the land. Zap a few people, toss some children, that will stop people from chilling out more often than not, though good things obviously get them moving less, enough can be done either way.

Also, villagers will starve to death with food in the store especially if they have to walk large distances, if the food desire is too high I'm guessing 75%+. But even if villagers are starving, if the wood desire is higher you will find them running to the forests instead.

The food desire is actual a bit less straightforward actually. You see, as you add enough food, assuming you have room for more population, the children desire goes up. Adding enough food coupled with a few breeders can cause overpopulation between 10-30% of your max. --- And of course, after something like that happens you will not have any children desire which means there will be generation gaps in your populations (mass deaths due to age) down the road.

Using all of this information you can keep a close eye on your population, and if you see a problem with the balance of things you can either choose to capitalize on it (more people = more belief/influence/prayer/working hands in the villager/missionaries). High populations means they will need massive amounts of food to satiate their desire meaning you can steal food from there to give to villagers that may have less access to food or you want massive belief in. - Putting 20k food in empty stores does wonders for converting towns and solidifying belief in your own villages as well.

Hope I provided some insight, and hope to see you around more.
 
Thanks for all the help guys.
Training my creature to be more helpful, taught him a few increase miracles and forgot the game doesn't save during skirmish when you exit.
Crap..
I've been preoccupied trying to screw with the EA Download Manager, since it's really buggy and I've been playing other games.
Apparently it runs through Internet Explorer, and if you don't use it as a default browser and set a nonexistant proxy a few months back, it can cause some problems :laugh2
 
The game doesn't save  but the  creature  will retain his memory's.
Game saves  and creature mind are independent.  Every moment of your creatures life is remembered except  for between the last save and a crash.
 
Yeah, the creature mind seems to silently save every thirty seconds or so. I've lost the last bit of knowledge on some miracle from the game crashing, but never more than thirty seconds, it seems, so it must save pretty often if not every second. And since it does so silently, the save system must be quite clever. The point is that I doubt you lost anything, as Gremxula does.

vezrilx, that is pretty epic for being before even your fifth post. I know about the first few things, but will have to look into the later ones, as I've never looked so far into it. Pretty neat job.
 
Ugh the offspring desire flag really annoys me... I mean, I'm usually evil but I have to go after my villages desires.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top