Starting tips?

[Jack Ketch]

I don't feel like I'm making any progress thus far. Resources seem really hard to collect, and thus far I've only built:

Campfire
Field Kitchen
Gymnasium
Herbalist’s hut
Smithy
Farm

But I'm really not clear on how these are helping me (other than adding certain cards such as Wheat and Village).

I've been dying a LOT with only 30% resources returned.

Given the starting buildings above, what is a good set of cards to start with?

Any particular combos I should focus on?

For example, people talk about placing Villages next to Vampire Houses to create Ransacked Villages which should give a bonus three loops later, but I'm not sure I've ever survived three more loops?

How do I get out of Act I?

Thanks!

[water]

I beat act I without knowing the game very well by raising my evasion to about 45% as the warrior for the boss fight.

[Saberia.Aria]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2415119821

btw, choose rewards carefully after you defeat bosses.

[Woody]

Make sure you upgrade your campfire, it allows you to rest before boss fight, which is a huge game changer if you don't have a reliable healing source before boss fight.

[MINOS PRIME]

You need to up your Evasion for this first boss. I went into the fight the first time with 40% Evasion and beat him pretty easily. Just pay attention to your equipment.

[DarkeSword]

I'd suggest doing a couple of runs where you deliberately retreat after getting a good amount of resources. Will help build up your camp. Don't get greedy, haha!

[Warden of White Spire]

Honestly Man, its all about the Item Level Quality, making sure your paying attention to stat synergy(AKA if you have the counterattack heal, focus on items with counter, and stack things you have alot of to maximize it) And make sure your deck is focused on things you NEED. You NEED meadows on warrior, you NEED Rocks, Oblivion is basically required but you can go without it if you get lucky.

Road Lanterns are a HUGE deal for new players, they put on the training wheels, and the effects stack. Any given tile can have up to 4 enemies, and 1 road lantern lighting it reduces that to 3. Two road lanterns stacking the effect take to 2, and then a third to 1. While youre learning the game, dont be shy to use them to tone down the difficulty in an exceptionally hard section of the loop. I usually used them to make ransacked villages easier.

By the way, swamps, graveyards and wheat fields are all noob traps. They get more useful later when you start getting into more advanced strategies, but if youre still working on Act 1, they might as well be a mean joke on noobs lol. Oh and go through the game settings, make sure you have the auto-pauses set up the way you like them, accidentally burning cards because you werent paused after a big fight that filled you up SUCKS. It's also worth remembering the first section of the game is a bit grindy, youve gotta get your potions, your villages, the crafted supplies, etc. before you can be consistent.

Heres a decent low level Loop Deck:
Road: Grove, Villages
Roadside: Vampire Mansion, Blood Grove, Road Lantern, Chrono Crystals
Landscape: Rock, Meadow
Special: Oblivion, Treasury(Optional)

Keep in mind you dont have to turn the villages immediately, and if you do, use the road laterns to keep the difficulty managable. Bloodgroves take priority over Vampire mansions, and you need to plan out the road, starting from the campfire on. Place the Chrono Crystals on the outer loop with meadows, spread out so they can get maximum short term benefit, the outer corners ALL belong to Crystals, thats to make sure the first few are as impactful as they can be, to stabalize your early game. Oblivion can be used either on goblin camps(High Priority) Bandit Camps(Low Priority for chapter 1, they become immediate removals later on) and Vampire Mansions(Conditional, if you think you made a village area too hard, remove the mansion, the villages still transform) Past that, just make sure youre upgrading gear to the current level if you can in a way that actually helps your stats. Oh, and dont be afriad to retreat, it doubles your take-home for a failed loop. Better 60% than 30%, dont be a hero.

[1eyedking]

There's four variables to look out for during your loops:

1. Cards drops
2. Item drops
3. Land management
4. Encounter management

Card drops are the most important in the early game! You need card drops to create encounters that drop cards, items, land cards, and encounter management cards. So the most important thing you should do early in the game is setting lots of high volume, weak creature road cards such as Groves and Spider Cocoons on snaky paths so they don't concentrate on a single tile.

As you progress and you get Lanterns, you drop them near these high-volume areas so you can keep them from becoming too much of a nuisance. You Oblivion encounters that might ruin your run.

Better item drops can be gotten from Battlefields, Cemeteries, Vampires, and Ruins, but they require placement management. Battlefields should minimize overlapping because Blood Trails offer no loot benefit. Cemeteries should have empty tiles around them at the beginning because Skeletons hit very hard and resist non-magic damage. Vampires should be placed early near empty roads so you only fight them with Slimes, later near Swamps with Mosquitoes. Ruins should be near a Bloody/Hungry Grove unless you can one-shoot worms, and tiles around it should be empty.

Items/stats make or break your mid-to-late game. Generally speaking, you want Counter+Vampirism+Evasion on your Warrior, Evasion+Critical+some Attack Speed for the Rogue, Skeleton Level+Mastery+Max Skeletons+Attack Speed for your Necro. Magic Damage and Damage to All can help the first two classes a lot but are not as defining; both are wasted on the Necro.

All the time you should be placing useful Land cards to improve your stats, while keeping a couple of Oblivion cards in case something obnoxious spawns (Harpies, Goblins, Bandits) in a very tricky location you can't manage with Lanterns.

[Jack Ketch]

Just wanted to add that I used the recommended deck from Warden above and got decent equipment (regen 7, 20% counter, 18% Vampirism) and was able to (finally) kill the Lich for Act I. I think it was on Loop 8?

Looking back I was under-using the Road Lanterns, stacking them together on the Ransacked Villages really helped (well that and not bothering with Wheat Fields).

Thanks for the help!

[Blackwall]

Also just starting out. Couple of tips for generating resources early on.

Pay attention to land placement. Group mountains (4) surrounded by rocks to generate a mountain top, which dumps a lot of resources. It also spawns a harpy occasionally.

Use Treasury, which when all eight spaces around it are full (mountains, rocks, meadows), gives you resources, items and/or cards.

Put meadows beside rocks or mountains, this will cause your meadows to heal +3 instead of +2 and generate additional resource on placement.

Don't be quick to equip an item with only a minor upgrade. Items fall off the bottom of the stash and turn into iron. This is true especially on the first few loops when mobs are not that strong. Once I paid attention to this and waited to equip items until after good drop fights, my iron (not sure what it's called in-game) generation went up considerably.

Appreciate everyone's tips in this thread; had yet to figure out how to kill Act 1 boss, so information here was helpful.

Cheers, all.

[Jamjars]

If you feel like you're about to die, run, you'll get to keep 2/3rds of your stuff instead of just 1/3rds of your stuff

[Aieonae]

It seems your answer is likely when to retreat to get the most?
1) try to stop and retreat in camp fire the square. This is important as its both a 100% loot recovery and if you have a lot of equipment on you scrapping them give metal.

2) try to stop and retreat on the square before the campfire. This is important if you want to do a 100% loot rercovery, but you accidentally hit the boss bar but having no intend to fight it.

3) Use oblivion deck to clear the hardhitting to allow a campfire retreat, if you realise you are dying facing those mobs coming later.

4) last ditch retreat, just retreat alive should allow you to keep 50% of the resource you uncover.

For resource focus farming,

1) Try reduce the deck count to those you need to expand you camp. This reduce the odds of decks that you do not want to show up as they might not be useful for your camp for the moment.

Do short retreatable runs, until you fluffed up your camp

1) There are no rush to fight the boss let alone doing repeat boss fight on a single session.

Pick of hero?
Warrior- great for basic game function before unlocking rogue or necomancer.

Rogue- great for 5-10 retreat intensive farming loop sessions.

Necomacer- This is for the long haul, yes it stand a higher chance to use it against boss fight and repeat boss fight session.
The returns are those more rare resource orbs as the session goes on longer the more the chance these orbs turn up.