Mist & seer - am i doing something wrong ?

[Khalanos]

Hello there

Enjoying this game a LOT, but i struggle in Lakeburg after night 6 and 7.
The mist starts very close to my village, and i sometimes get runners in my town spreading panic on turn 1.
Also, sometimes ennemies spawn 10 spaces away from my position and i have to run after them, causing more panic.

Not getting the item after the night fills extremely painful and usually turns into a nightmare quickly.

Now, about the seer : it costs a lot of gold and if i pay for it, my heroes get really far behind and i just lose.

Am i missing something ?
I have 5AP heroes.

Thanks & cheers

[licker34]

Seer is a must build/use around that time.

There are some guides to help with maximizing gold, but often by night 5-6 you can/should have one or two maxed gold mines, and then you have 700+ gold per turn to take care of all the stuff you may have been ignoring while you were focused on maxing your mines.

Though with 5AP heroes you probably are also missing a lot of the unlocks, or bought 'worse' unlocks just because they were cheap.

Not much to do about that other than to grind a bit as far as you can each time you start over until you have the more important (also more expensive) unlocks.

Basically, you can or should avoid the 'more @#$##' unlocks and focus on unlocks which improve starting hero stats and items. But it is a hard game, so it's not uncommon for people to struggle with it until they get more unlocks or until they understand better how to position and how/when to spend mana on the various skills your weapons give you.

[Fringehunter7719]

Exact build orders have changed since a lot of the guides were written. They also depend on your meta progression (since you can start with varying amounts of gold and gear that can be sold for gold), apocalypse level (costs increase at a certain point) and map (incomes and number of nights vary).

However, certain things are constant and if you improve those then you should get the economy going well enough to have a seer around night 5 or 6 as well as be able to upgrade gear and get more heroes at appropriate points too.

Since the rebalance the best use of resources day 1 is:

• Sell gear, it doesn't matter if you need it you'll buy it back for the same price before you end the day
  
• Upgrade your two existing houses
  
• Demolish a 4-tile ruin
  
• Build two houses and upgrade them
  
• Demolish a 4-tile ruin
  
• Build another house and upgrade it
  
• Demolish another 2-tile ruin
  
• Buy back the gear you sold (if you have wealthy town 2 and are playing with the +20% costs modifier you will need to sell 2g worth of gear)

Now you have 10 workers the efficiency of upgrading to more workers plummets and you need to reprioritise. Gold mines are the obvious choice at low meta progression. I'm not sure if there's an alternative route with shops at high meta progression, it looks likely but I haven't crunched the numbers.

Gold mines have two efficiency breakpoints, prod+++ and prod+. The mine+ upgrade is a solid halfway step as well if you have more gold to pump into the economy, but not enough to make the huge 290g (348g) step from prod+ to prod+++.

An example of low meta day 2 building could be:

• Sell gear, it doesn't matter if you need it you'll buy it back for the same price before you end the day
  
• Demolish two 3-tile ruins
  
• Build two gold mines
  
• Upgrade prod+ on both gold mines
  
• Use both gold mines
  
• Upgrade mine+ on both gold mines
  
• Use both gold mines
  
• Buy back the gear you sold (less any you want to sell to invest into economy)
  
• Invest your remaining gold into shop items (mana or energy pots are good, as are scrolls), or further economy: upgrade prod++ on one of your existing gold mines

Day 3 should also be OK to continue without buying gear, the inn or the seer, but some players may differ at this point, I guess. The same general pattern will hold going forward: Sell gear if you need the capital to get your next upgrade and buy it back at day's end. Focus on the most cash efficient upgrades. Make sure you don't use a gold mine before upgrading it, as that's just throwing gold away.

An example day 3 might be:

• Sell gear, it doesn't matter if you need it you'll buy it back for the same price before you end the day
  
• Demolish the final 4-tile ruin
  
• Upgrade Prod+++ on one gold mine (if you previously upgraded one to Prod++ then do that one)
  
• Use the mine that has Prod+++ twice
  
• Use the mine that has Prod+ twice
  
• Build a third and final gold mine
  
• Upgrade third mine to Prod+ Mine+
  
• Use the third mine twice
  
• Buy back the gear you sold

After this it's really a matter of judgement. Getting the inn and buying a hero will boost your combat power a lot. Getting the seer will give you extra turns before crawlers hit your town, which helps a lot. Upgrading your mines to Prod+++ will beef up your income a lot (always do this before you use them on the day you upgrade though). Plus you can start building shops and getting in to their upgrade tree to generate items and income over the next days.

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One more tip: Barricades are really good. Two to three layers will stop enemies from walking into town for two to three turns, no matter how strong they are. Just remember to leave the odd jumpable section so heroes can fight outside the area.

[Leiraion]

Focus the first day on scavenging (gold focus) ruined buildings and building / upgrading your houses.
Playing on normal difficulty you should be able to get to 11 workers on Day 1.

Day 2, scavenge again and then build up your gold mines as much as you can. (The Production upgrades, you wouldn't need the Mine upgrades yet)

This will put you in a much stronger position for the rest of the days. You'll have a strong economic position on day 3 and at that point you can decide whether to further that economic advantage or start building an inn/seer and making use of it.

Far more detail can be found here (this is up to date)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2729860442
However, it uses Apoc4 pricing (Apocalypse 4 makes everything cost 20% more). So you'll be able to do some of the steps faster than the day-to-day breakdown provided there.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

Playing on normal difficulty you should be able to get to 11 workers on Day 1.

You can't if you don't have wealthy town upgrades, and you shouldn't if you do.

Investing in gold mines is more efficient than workers, once you already have 10 of them.

The build orders in that guide are also not optimised, even if they are up to date, so it might be best not to follow to them too closely.

[Leiraion]

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

You can't if you don't have wealthy town upgrades, and you shouldn't if you do.

Investing in gold mines is more efficient than workers, once you already have 10 of them.

Even without wealthy haven 1 you can get to 9 workers on day 1.
Starting with scavenging puts you in a position of making a couple hundred gold and materials on day 1. As well, with an appropriate build order, you'll never have a worker wasted in any of the days going forward.
Not only does this make you the most money early, it also gives you enough materials for numerous walls, or a couple of catapult/ballista towers.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

You can't if you don't have wealthy town upgrades, and you shouldn't if you do.

Investing in gold mines is more efficient than workers, once you already have 10 of them.

Even without wealthy haven 1 you can get to 9 workers on day 1.

As I mentioned above you can get to 10 workers on day 1 without wealthy haven 1. And indeed you can get to 10 with the +20% costs and wealthy town 2 if you're willing to part with pants or a shirt worth 2g or more.

ETA: Don't get me wrong, the guide is fine. It's got all the broad strokes in the right places, like focusing ruins on day 1.

You will have slightly less gold and materials following it than using the more efficient route though.

[Leiraion]

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

As I mentioned above you can get to 10 workers on day 1 without wealthy haven 1. And indeed you can get to 10 with the +20% costs and wealthy town 2 if you're willing to part with pants or a shirt worth 2g or more.

ETA: Don't get me wrong, the guide is fine. It's got all the broad strokes in the right places, like focusing ruins on day 1.

You will have slightly less gold and materials following it than using the more efficient route though.

I think we are talking pass one another a bit -- I never disagreed with you. You are exploiting though. The guide doesn't exploit the shop as you are suggesting.
You can do this if you want, and in this game version it works perfectly fine. But it will likely be fixed at some point.

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

Playing on normal difficulty you should be able to get to 11 workers on Day 1.

You can't if you don't have wealthy town upgrades, and you shouldn't if you do.

I do however, disagree with this. My build order utilizes every single worker every day and doesn't pick up a 12th worker until much later, or at all on Glenwald.

[Fringehunter7719]

It's no more an exploit than collecting gold and reinvesting it or selling starter items to get over a break point, both of which the guide uses.

Either way, you shouldn't add an 11th worker, even if you can (because you can reinvest gold into scavenger camps if you want materials income and 11th through 15th workers cost almost double the first 10, making that route more efficient). Although I'm not sure these details are really relevant to Khalanos's issue and like you I don't see any massive disagreement here.

[Leiraion]

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

It's no more an exploit than collecting gold and reinvesting it or selling starter items to get over a break point, both of which the guide uses.

Neither of these are unintended mechanics in the game. The reason what you are suggesting would be an exploit is because it is not intended for you to sell your gear to the vendor, utilize the money, and then buy it back for the same price that turn.
The 2 instances where I sell an item to hit a breakpoint, it is lost forever.
Collecting money from your gold mine and then using it on the same turn is most definitely an intended mechanic xD....

You can get to the point where you can hit your gold mines with 3 workers every day (You never do this on Glenwald), 9 workers plus the Seer for another 3 makes 12 workers needed daily.
This starts on Day 6. Which means those 2 extra workers for 60g each, are used to collect 55g from a mine for 5 days. 60g investment (+100g for Mine++) ends up turning into 275g each by day 11, a 115g profit each. On Apoc4+, this is reduced to an 83g profit each.

However, the benefit of having a couple of extra workers over the optimized 10 is for use in the temple or mana well depending on how many mistakes you are making. This allows a lot of flexibility for these types of instances which is especially helpful as you work into Apoc5. Ending a turn once just a bit too close to the mist could result in a hero being surrounded and nearly killed from 100% in 1 turn. Or maybe your optimization with your heroes isn't perfect and you need to spend significantly more mana than you can regen daily.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

Neither of these are unintended mechanics in the game. The reason what you are suggesting would be an exploit is because it is not intended for you to sell your gear to the vendor, utilize the money, and then buy it back for the same price that turn.
The 2 instances where I sell an item to hit a breakpoint, it is lost forever.
Collecting money from your gold mine and then using it on the same turn is most definitely an intended mechanic xD....

I don't think they are patching out buyback. I don't think I share your definition of an exploit either*.

I mean, maybe the developers will see this feature being used this way (as it has been for about a year now) and not like it. But what's the fix? They aren't likely to take out a buyback feature they specifically added, and if they make the obvious fix of setting starter item prices to zero it also fixes the things I mentioned that you don't want changed.

We clearly agree that the guide isn't perfectly efficient for the game as is (and I don't think that's the only economic inefficiency anyway), but you feel justified that it's efficient enough for some hypothetical future build. Ok, sure. No problem. These aren't major issues. Let's leave it there. I'll happily agree that if certain things are changed the most efficient build orders will be too. It's happened before, after all!

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

You can get to the point where you can hit your gold mines with 3 workers every day, 9 workers plus the Seer for another 3 makes 12 workers needed daily.

Sure, but again, if you want to be as efficient as possible (which doesn't really matter) you shouldn't. Once you have enough income to cross the hurdle into item production that actually pays off better (especially at high meta progression). The Mine++ upgrade on gold mines is actually poor efficiency compared to other gold mine upgrades. The differences overall are fairly small though, just as they are with when to prioritise the mine+ upgrade over the prod++ upgrade, and I'm happy to leave it at that.

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

Another benefit of having a couple of extra workers over the optimized 10 is for use in the temple or mana well depending on how many mistakes you are making. This allows a lot of flexibility for these types of instances which is especially helpful as you work into Apoc5. Ending a turn once just a bit too close to the mist could result in a hero being surrounded and nearly killed from 100% in 1 turn.

10 workers is an economy breakpoint. You should absolutely get all 15 on Lakeburg - it's just that the first 10 are at the top of the priority list and the other 5 are much further down. They are a slower way of getting your economy up and running, which is what you want to do before you get the inn and seer. They are also the only way to increase your peak materials and items manufacturing (technically gold too, but it won't matter at that point) after you have the inn and seer.

-----
ETA:
*On reflection perhaps I could be clearer by spelling out what I'm referring to here:

As mentioned in the above warning message, your progress is NOT saved when you do this. So, you'll revert back to the deployment phase (the phase you enter after you finish the day phase and are told to position your heroes).
Don't forget, you can also use this phase to change your heroes equipment (including who has what potions).

I cannot recommend enough that you abuse this game mechanic as much as you need.
This is not an exploit. There is literally a warning in the game to ensure you realize that you will have to restart the entire night. IMO, it's quite clear that the developers intended for it to work this way.

This is absolutely what I see as an exploit and has a much more significant effect on how you play the game - indeed you can recover from any error which results in an imminent loss of hero or even total defeat with this. Not to mention it completely supersedes several of the Seer's abilities.

I think it's totally fine that we disagree and I wouldn't particularly call it out, but as I say, this is the bar I am referring to.

[Bumc]

I played Seer-less for quite a while, but with fast monsters Apocalypse level you _will_ get pressured turn 1.
Runners can be held off by making them run through labyrinth of barricades -- unlike clawers they will try to run around them and sometimes even not position themselves in a tile where they get to attack. Don't bother spamming ballistas if you aren't planning on building seer early -- every 8 material is 1 runner-blocker.

Boomers are another problem -- they will explode from the fog. I generally just have all my armor gear on a single melee-focused guy and he gets to facetank the explosions.

(Actually, scratch that post, on normal difficulty just spam more barricades than they can demolish while you kill them and go full economy as ppl are suggesting. Check shops for cheap mana potions and rain of arrows/spear AoE scrolls if you're having troubles clearing nights 5-7).

[Khalanos]

Thanks guys
My build order was not at all what you suggested. I read somewhere (can't recall where) that scavenging was trash and i should rush gold mine. I am used to working with 3/4 workers, 5 if i have too much gold to spend.

I also didn't consider the sell item > upgrade > buy back.

[Fringehunter7719]

That advice was probably old. In the first early access build that would have been right, but it changed a while back.

Good luck!