I've beaten the game and here are my gameplay tips

[Ludi]

I've beaten the game.
360 days
287 hours played

Here are some tips that I found that would have helped me to know sooner.

-Build your village near roads, I built mine next to the first village Haerndean.
As you expand the village you'll setup travel posts for quick travel.

-As you explore have resources with you to build travel posts as you go, preferably near the villages. Travel posts are a real time saver so you don't need to track back. It's even more handy when you do quests from one village to another.

-Don't rush to liberate the first village as the reclamation parties are a handful.

-Liberated villages can be traded with, when you click it next to the overview there is a trade button, Haerndean can trade you bronze bars which is great.
Defending villages from reclamation parties makes more sense to have them for trading.
Once I liberated Horndead I got all the iron ore and steel bars I could want and didn't need to mine iron ever again.

-Let your villagers build the buildings.
You do not have the laborer skill, only villagers have it, so even though the T1 buildings seem really easy to spam click build them, don't. Let the villagers rank up their laborer skill as for T2, T3 buildings they can build 3 dots at a time while you can only do 1 at a time with a long animation in between.

-Getting feathers is a blocker until you get the T2 hunters camp.
What you can do, instead of trying to be Legolas and shot crows urself, you can equip a companion with a bow and have him attack the crow. Issue command then look at the crow in air it will pop up.

-To create a personal storage that villagers don't put/take stuff from, build a camp chest then change it to another settlement, named "MineDontTouch".
I have camp chests this way all over the map, near fast travel points and near bandit camps. Leave them empty and no raiding party will spawn for it.

-When having companions with you for long excursions, they will get hungry and leave you. It's a pain to find who's that when you have an army of 52 companions.
I'd create a new squad and recruit that person, so they come up to me, feed them and recruit them back to the main squad.
They should add a companion hungry icon over their head when this happens.

-Always be reading skill books.

-You'll end up running naked 99% of the time because you are so much faster with high agility.

-Leave a low level bandit camp near your village for farming Strap.
You need a lot for research until you can make it.
Leave 1 bandit in camp, zone out with a travel post, let them respawn, rinse repeat. You can train your combat skills also. There is also a crafting vendor you can find that sells them, but only 1 per day.

-When preparing for a big battle, position your companions on higher ground, small hill, with hold command.
I'd go myself to agro the enemy group, the enemy archers will stay behind trying to shoot me while the melee will follow me. Once near your companions change their behavior to charge.

-Attack archers with a shield, arrows do a ton of damage once near them you can stun lock them with fast hits while they are still taking out their melee weapon.
Position yourself so that the enemy archer you are fighting is between you and the other archers so that they hit him instead of you.

-Game setting to disable fluid blocking I think works better for me. This is similar to the combat in Bannerlods 2.

-Don't let villagers farm with a Hoe.
They drop their shield or arrow to be able to equip it with 2 hands and it's a paint to find where the hell did they drop it and to equip them again.
I just had 1 hoe, kept in my personal chest and I would seed what ever I needed and let them take over from there.
Digging mud villagers don't drop their weapons as the shovel is not equipped but it stays in their inventory.

I'll do some additions If I remember something.

edit:
-If you kill all wolves and boars in an area it will take them longer to respawn.
I like to exterminate vermin near the village so my villagers don't get injured while they are collecting stuff.

-How to find things in all of your storage, barns.
This is impossible, going one by one is a hassle. Especially after you trade items with a liberated village. Where did they go? In the storage buildings you can put a minimum item so your villages will find them for you and deposit them there. Also useful to have some minimum food, dried berries and mushrooms delivered to your storage meant for food.

-Don't pick up tin or copper ore single items on the ground.
Get some companions with you and order them to gather it, they will sniff out all of the tin, copper ore that you would have missed.

-Build village houses in villages you want to liberate to increase the chance to spawn 2 high lvl recruits.
High lvl recruits wear fancy clothes.
Build a storage near the village with a travel sign and fill it up with needed resources during the day. Build the improvements during the night so that your villagers don't go bringing resources from across the map. I build up the reputation until 1900/2400 from bellwright. Once I'm ready to liberate it I'll gather everyone up, liberate the village, build the village belltower + 500 to get max rep, recruit everyone I want and bail on the village If I don't need to trade with it.

-Do not use the Lumberjack Spot for a work order to top up wood.
I ended up with a barren martian landscape because you always need wood and the villagers would first use up logs. Young trees respawn, trees for logs do not.
Good thing they added the forester so I could have a nice forest again.

Have fun :)
LooneyVille

[r4nc]

Great tips, some I didn't know about, like aiming at crows.

I think the last tip on building a village house is not well understood by the community. I build many houses to make sure I get better villagers. It might just be the most important tip as well.

[c-*****]

Thanks for your perspective! It is good to know that someone has finished this beast!

If you don't mind, here's the feedback of someone who will likely never complete this game - at least not in this EA state:


1. Build near roads, absolutely. Build near villages.. well.. for different values of 'near'. Haerndean, Padstow.. maybe all of them have some wiiiide areas they claim for themselves and disallow building, so it seemed better to me to rely on the Travel Posts and find an open space to settle in. Near, but not close to Haerndean. Closest I can build to Haerndean is the road to the north - also the most straightforward approach to the elder and merchant.

2. Huh. It only seemed necessary for me to carry 2 crude stones for Travel Posts - it is simple to locate trees and young trees, but stumbling on reliable stones was more work for me. But I always carry an ax for trees, simplifying things. Often I'd carry 3 or 6 Flax as well to be ready to build a storage - possibly surrounded by fences - if I needed a defensive outpost.

5. I had villagers building 3 dots at a time when building the T2 Town Hall. Must be skill-based? I would amend this to "Leave it to your villagers to build the T2 and T3 buildings, because they're such a PITA. But up the building priority so they _do_ actually build." Though I think because of inventories and such it can be easier for you to still load up the blueprints with ingredients - unless you can't find the stupid things in storage...

6. I have no idea how to issue a command to have a companion attack a crow. Interesting. It can be a test of skill - so far in my games I've killed enough to equip everyone with the highest T1 armor ("Simple C..."). But I'm a slow player.

7. Why not just "PRIVATE" so it stands out? Also: how can you store items you don't want villagers to touch, but ALSO leave all storage for that outpost empty? Outposts always accrue RAIDs - unless you turn them off for the game, right?

I would also issue a warning: if you forget to empty any PRIVATE storage outside of your village, that raiding party will head to the nearest one first AND THEN THE GAME STOPS TRACKING THEM EVEN THOUGH THEY WILL CONTINUE RAIDING.

8. PLEASE ADD 'HUNGRY' COMPANION ICON FLOATING OVER THEIR HEADS, yes! Make it RED if they're halfway through their last food item! It can appear and be ..yellow? black? when they finish their 2nd-to-last food.

10. I never ran naked. Does seem to be the meme for YouTubers. Takes too much inventory space for me, and I use Travel Posts. But I haven't gotten much into even T2 yet.

11. I couldn't leave nearby bandit camps - the nearest seems to always spawn the raids, and having an L10+ raid hit me with less than a minute to prepare is a no-go, even with fences.

Also: There's 2 craftsmen near the starting area, right? Put a Travel Post next to the one at the pond east of Haerndean, and another next to the one between Haerndean and Padstow (by the broken cart). Sell them each 8-15 simple cords a day and you end up with 2 straps and 10-200 gold per day. You still have to dodge patrols and animals - at least until you control the area.

12. L12 RAID is the biggest fight I've had yet - and I use fences for crowd control. My militia doesn't have your army's discipline, though: they always start attacking before I give any command once the bandits get close enough.

15. This is what I did the first time, too. But it is easier to have a 'battle prep' stockpile with a couple extra shields and weapons (and food) than prevent my dedicated farmer from hoeing and fertilizing all your crops. I have 2 hoes for villagers (they still end up on the opposite side of camp...), and one in private storage for me for when I get annoyed.

16. I like to protect my villagers, too, but 2 updates ago they added more bandit patrols - in areas where there are no bandit camps, so that's getting harder. And now the July 11 update seems to have more random wolves....

17. The storage meta is pretty messed up, yeah. Best way currently seems to be to dedicate each storage to as few types of items as possible - chests should be 1-3 with current 50 storage. But then have one larger storage for 'everything else' or villagers moving items will get confused with no open storage for the items they carry, and just put anything everywhere.

For dedicated storage, it seems to help if you raise the, eg. chest's priority so the next free village will move things around. Still doesn't seem to be any guarantees.

18. uh.. until you have a humming village, it never seemed worth bringing companions along - except for clearing camps. I also do recruiting jaunts to each town and picking up 3-4 people at a time. You have to walk back anyway. But I don't know the commands to get them to pick up random stuff - I always had to pick it up and give it to them. Besides: companions tend to clutter, obscure, and run into things, and I hate having to constantly reset their flag instead.

20. Huh. With how enormous T2 and T3 buildings are, I thought the goal _was_ a 'Martian landscape'. Why not set up a lumber camp next to the Padstow herbalist? There's always about 100 young trees plus saplings over there - granted, after eliminating that bandit camp and culling the wolves and boars.

[Ludi]

With a companion, press E, then mouse over the crow and from move order it will change to attack target. A companion with a bow will easily shot down the crow. Similar to that mouse over a tin ore, the command will change to loot area and the companions will find all the tin nearby.
When on expeditions, I'd kill wild wolves and boars myself, so that they don't waste arrows then have them pick up the meat and furs with loot area and have them carry the stuff.

[Muhammad2126]

Ah, "why be Legolas, when you can hire Legolas", great advice.