[Guide] Tips and Tricks - Updated July 30

[Matt (Hooded Horse)]

Hi folks, I'm Matt, the Director of Community here at Hooded Horse. In this thread, I'd like to begin a community effort to answer common questions you may have about the game!

If you have any questions, please ask them here. I'll continue adding and crediting people appropriately when more topics are covered.

As a reminder, please take a moment to leave a Steam review too. It's the best way you can help Norland's visibility and contribute towards its success!

Here are some other resources, too:

• Steam Community Guide This guide may offer additional insights or workarounds discovered by the community.
  
• Norland Official Wiki[hoodedhorse.com] Our official wiki can help troubleshoot and learn more about game mechanics.
  
• Norland Subreddit Join the community on Reddit to discuss the game, share tips, and connect with other players.

Essential Tips and Strategies from the Community

Special thanks to RoGStonewall, ZelnCyon, NutGobbler918, and Neat_Wash_4520 for their contributions.

• Wood Management: Wood is the ultimate bottleneck resource. Always maintain a surplus to ensure smooth building, crafting, and farming. Aim to hover around 200 units to support continuous development and the maintenance of multiple farms.
  
  
• Weapon Choice: Maces are inefficient due to their low damage, leading to prolonged fights and increased injuries. Switch to spears and shields as soon as possible for better combat effectiveness against unarmored enemies.
  
  
• Bow Usage: Bows are extremely powerful against unarmored enemies early on but lose effectiveness as enemies gain armor. Later, when your population grows, mass archers can still be useful by sheer volume of fire.
  
  
• Moonshine Stockpiling: Moonshine is crucial for maintaining town happiness, especially during beer production shortages. It’s cost-effective and can be enhanced with buffs from books.
  
  
• Training Hall Utilization: Training halls are essential for developing skilled fighters without incurring high taxes. Train nobodies into warriors to keep costs low and effectiveness high.
  
  
• Exploiting AI Behavior: Monitor enemy movements and intercept reinforcements to exploit AI death spirals. By defeating incoming armies before they reinforce allies, you create vulnerabilities for easier conquests.
  
  
• Efficient Lord Management: Assign Lords to manage sections of the town to minimize travel time. Centralize temples to reduce travel for employees and ensure they spend more time on productive activities.
  
  
• Frequent Bandit Hunts: Regularly destroy bandit camps to gain reputation, gold, prisoners, and experience. The more time passes, the stronger bandits grow, so keep them in check.
  
  
• Aggressive Expansion: Attack all enemies frequently to keep them weakened while you gain resources and experience. Killing visiting lords and taking their gear can provide end-game equipment.
  
  
• Prisoner Management: Free escaping prisoners to recruit them. Assign prisoners to production buildings for increased efficiency and provide them with ruttabaga and moonshine. Reserve beer and flour for the general population.
  
  
• Economic Strategy: Maintain high prices and wages to ensure the population is happy and productive. Use patrol flags to manage prisoner activities and secure important areas.
  
  
• Roads and Warehouses: Build roads to key points, especially where your army enters/exits the map. Place warehouses for gear transitions and ensure gear is stored properly to prevent theft by deserters.
  
  
• Specialized Training: Focus on training lords with high intelligence for research and management roles. Use social commands to spread knowledge and teach essential skills like intelligence and teaching.
  
  
• Cultural Optimization: Align your population with your playstyle. Sell or replace cultures that don’t provide benefits for your strategy. Keep loyalists and fanatics to maintain stability and support.
  
  
• Production Efficiency: On the production screen, hold shift to adjust values by +/- 10 units or hold down the mouse button for rapid changes. This speeds up management tasks and ensures efficient resource allocation.

Managing Cultural Tensions in Prophecy Events

When facing the specific prophecy of drug-addicted migrants from an opposing culture, it's crucial to address the influx strategically to avoid long-term consequences in your game. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to handle this scenario:

• Identify the Start of the Prophecy: Keep a close watch for any notifications or changes that signal the start of the prophecy where 3-5 migrants per day begin arriving from an opposing culture.
  
  
• Immediate Action Required: As soon as you confirm the prophecy has started, take swift actions to either execute or imprison each migrant from the opposing culture arriving during this period. This is to prevent the influx from undermining your nation's stability.
  
  
• Duration of the Prophecy: The prophecy typically lasts about 7 days. During this time, you can expect up to 35 migrants in total. It’s vital to continue your chosen action (execution or imprisonment) consistently throughout this period.
  
  
• Understand the Risks: Initially, these migrants might seem beneficial as they increase your workforce. However, this is a deceptive benefit. Over time, their presence will lead to significant cultural tension, manifesting as a -20 mood debuff among your original populace due to feelings of displacement.
  
  
• Long-Term Consequences: If not managed, the initial cultural tension escalates into severe social disruptions:
  
  
• Economic Impact: The growing unrest can lead to economic stagnation as resources are diverted to manage crime and social unrest, including theft of crucial items like holy rings and increased banditry.
  
  
• Social Breakdown: Your original population might start leaving their jobs, turning to banditry, or even directly targeting your leadership, further destabilizing your realm.
  
  
• Recovery and Stabilization: After the prophecy period ends, focus on rehabilitation and stabilizing your nation. This may involve reintegrating or resettling populations, restoring the workforce, and addressing any lingering social or economic issues.

Effective Management of Gambling Addiction in Lords

This insightful strategy for handling gambling addiction in lords, credited to Reddit user TheWingalingDragon, provides a method to turn a potential problem into an advantage within your game. Here's how you can implement this tactic effectively:

• Understanding the Mechanism: Lords addicted to gambling need to engage in dice games to satisfy their "need for excitement." The outcomes influence their mood positively or negatively, depending on whether they win or lose.
  
  
• Utilizing Currency: The currency bet in these games is rings, a crucial form of lordship currency. Lords often desire more rings, which can be randomly satisfied through these games.
  
  
• Strategic Setup: By starting with all lords in your village addicted to gambling and managing their ring trades, you can ensure that the rings just circulate within your colony, maintaining a balanced economy internally.
  
  
• Intelligence Manipulation: Assign a slightly higher intelligence to the king compared to other lords. This small edge significantly enhances the king's ability to win more often, allowing for strategic redistribution of rings.
  
  
• Managing the Flow of Rings: The king can redistribute winnings to maintain happiness and balance among lords, ensuring no lord becomes too rich or poor, thus fostering a harmonious environment.
  
  
• Outcome Management: Whenever lords indicate a need due to gambling addiction, pair them up. It doesn’t matter who wins, as the effects are short-term, but this pairing helps efficiently manage debuffs.
  
  
• Long-term Benefits: This strategy not only keeps the ring economy fluid but also boosts social interactions among lords, fulfilling multiple societal needs like promoting socializing, controlling the ring economy, satisfying desires, and managing internal relationship disparities.
  
  
• Enhanced Research Capabilities: With all lords being intelligent enough to read, your research rate increases as more individuals contribute to learning, speeding up progress significantly.
  
  
• Guest Interaction Strategy: When guests visit, you can leverage the collective intelligence of your lords in dice games to potentially win more rings from them, enhancing your kingdom's wealth without negative repercussions.

This approach to gambling addiction not only addresses the immediate challenges but also turns them into opportunities for enhancing your kingdom’s stability and prosperity. It’s a smart blend of managing personal vices and leveraging them for the greater good of your society.

Optimizing Lord Time Management for New Players

Here's a structured approach to maximize efficiency and maintain Lord relationships. Credit to Reddit user Wingaling.

• Common Pitfalls: New players often micromanage every second of their Lords' day, fearing idleness. However, allowing Lords some downtime enables them to self-manage and attend to others without constant oversight.
  
  
• Avoid Inefficiencies: Micromanaging can lead to inefficiencies, especially if tasks are poorly timed or geographically impractical, like sending Lords across town for discussions, disrupting other important tasks.
  
  
• Effective Monitoring: To stay informed of a Lord's activities, lock the camera to their portrait. This allows you to initiate interactions naturally when other necessary characters are in proximity, rather than forcing distant meet-ups.
  
  
• Nighttime Planning: Utilize the nighttime to plan out the next day’s tasks. This period of relative inactivity is ideal for assessing needs, desires, and moods, setting up a few targeted activities for the next morning.
  
  
• Morning Routine: Check piety levels first thing in the morning. If Lords are sufficiently devout, skip temple visits and pair them with others who are also not in need of temple services.
  
  
• Daytime Focus: During the day, shift your attention to managing the bishop and children, allowing Lords more autonomy to fulfill their tasks.
  
  
• Evening Assignments: As Lords return for supper and rest, assign one final task that involves close proximity interactions, enhancing social connections without demanding extra travel.
  
  
• Routine Structure:
  - Night: Plan one or two tasks for each Lord.
  - Morning: Assign tasks related to temple attendance.
  - Day: Focus on children and bishop management.
  - Evening: Set up tasks around the hall.
  
  
• Repeat the Cycle: This routine aligns well with the game’s flow, providing ample time for Lords to fulfill their responsibilities and maintain relationships.
  
  
• Relationship Management: Regular interactions ensure progress in relationships daily. Strategically address the relationships that need the most attention, such as those between Lords with strained ties or between spouses.

[Colonel_Black]

You deleted my valid question about a functionality..

[Blue Orchidea]

Where is the post for gambling addiction?

[Colonel_Black]

I want to know more about the builder priorities. Not sure if I'm missing a whole functionality, or if they mean the tick box for prioritising building something first

[NorlandCM]

Originally posted by Colonel_Black:

I want to know more about the builder priorities. Not sure if I'm missing a whole functionality, or if they mean the tick box for prioritising building something first

Hello! When you are constructing a building, you can click on the "Priority" button to give priority during construction.

[Colonel_Black]

Originally posted by NorlandCM:

Originally posted by Colonel_Black:

I want to know more about the builder priorities. Not sure if I'm missing a whole functionality, or if they mean the tick box for prioritising building something first

Hello! When you are constructing a building, you can click on the "Priority" button to give priority during construction.

Ah, I was aware of that function already, thank you.

I think the issue with builders that some people have said, is that they have the materials, but the builders take an age to even begin building.
In this genre of game, it can be difficult to work out what characters are doing when you want them to do one simple thing.

[Matt (Hooded Horse)]

Originally posted by Colonel_Black:

You deleted my valid question about a functionality..

I made a new post. You caught the old one, haha.

[Colonel_Black]

Originally posted by Matt (Hooded Horse):

Originally posted by Colonel_Black:

You deleted my valid question about a functionality..

I made a new post. You caught the old one, haha.

That explains it then haha :)

[☭ Calabresa ☭]

If this is a suggestion:

"Check assigned buildings when lords are away and set priorities.
Uncheck priorities when lords return to avoid over-prioritization."

Then it should be a feature! Add a new toggle for "Auto prioritize when manager is away and unprioritize when he's back"!

[Corax]

Is there any way to feed my knocked out lords? They are starving on the ground while i do have rutabaga to feed them and my peasants are not bringing it to the hall. I suppose they feed peasants before lords.

[MastaFong]

I'm on day 85, the plague destroyed my population. I only have 8 people left in my village and a ton of food, but everyone is starving, they will not go get the food. No one is working in the market even though I set it as priority.

[Vashimu]

Where is the part about gambling? cant find it. I picket tendency to addiction now. With the book that reduces the withdrawal time from 4 to 2 days i hope /think it will be not that big of a deal

[suejak]

Just FYI, I like to randomize my lords and gameplay parameters completely. Keep in mind that there are players like me too!

[Reaper415]

To everyone asking where the post on gambling addiction is, it's on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Norland/comments/1e5rfcu/favorite_negative_trait/

[Lewis]

Just a tip to anyone who gets that prophecy where a bunch of drug-addicted migrants of the opposite culture begin to come to your country. You need to execute or imprison everyone from that culture that comes to your nation while you are in the middle of that prophecy. It lasts around 7 days and it migrates 3-5 people a day with an upwards of 35 migrants of the hostile culture invading your land. It's an absolute game killer if you do not imprison or execute them as they come, it might look like a boon because you're getting a lot more workers to fill the position but that's just a trap. Further down the line your culture will start to get the "FOREIGNERS PUSHING ME OUT" which is a -20 mood debuff and with the already extremely low mood that is in this game for peasants, it will make it so everyone in your culture begins to become vagabonds and cutthroats forming bandit camps as they leave and assassinating your Lords and stealing your holy rings. If you do not deal with them it will put your economy into stagnation because you constantly will have to deal with criminals stealing your holy rings, bandits raiding your villages, and people being upset all the time. In the beginning you used those mass migrants to fill your jobs, well now when people of your culture begin to disappear because of that "FOREIGNERS ARE PUSHING ME OUT" debuff, and then people of the hostile culture begin to leave or rebel because you are going to take actions opposite of them since your culture is opposite of theirs, you will now have no peasants to operate the machine that you built, so your economy collapses in on itself.

[Some Wizard]

any advice on how to manage distant resources? I have a map where the only flowers are in a corner, it's impossible to manage without prisoners and I don't like to keep prisoners