Hints and Tips Thread

[joemama1512]

Here are some of my tips and tricks I have discovered so far...

1) Enemies only attack from the right side, so be sure to add your ballista on that right side of the core.

2) You can extend your building on the LEFT side to get more storage and such. For example, I build a house on the left of the core, then add a ladder to its left side. Add tiles from the house to the left and extend it out. Add another ladder that reaches the ground where you start your mining. Putting storage as far down as possible will save your golems a lot of walking and climbing time. Ensure efficient pathing to your storage...dont make your dudes have to go back and forth and climb lots of ladders.

3) Tiles MUST be attached to a building. You cant make a ladder and add tiles to the top that are not attached to a building.

4) Ladders leading up to a tile will cause a little pop open pod to appear so the latter can reach that next floor.

5) You can build upward. I have my ballista to the right side, but a ladder to the right of my Core that leats to some tiles overhead which also have ballista. I will add another ladder next to the house which leads to the next tier upwards and so forth. You can generally fit one above the previous onces without blocking line of fire.

5) Housing choices. The normal House works pretty well as you can directly replace it with a Steel Bunker that is the same size. This does strain your iron though. The 6x5 works best though since storage is 4 high. Any taller is generally a waste and any lower loses storage space and causes more strain on your buildings since you have to build more shorter buildings. However two small houses can be replaced by one big stone 10x4 which is an option.

6) Golems with 1 soul have 1 +10% bonus to something. Two soul golems have a +25% bonus to that something. Id assume 3 souls would be 50%.
That said, Id much rather have 3 normal golems than 1 golem with a single 50% buff! While better golems is tempting food-wise, right now it just does not make sense to build uber-golems vs spamming them. You lose way too much efficiency.

7) To move to another zone, CANCEL all building in the mine. If anything is there, they will go down and look for a path that does not exist.
OR you can build ladders on the top of whatever to make them all come running. This ensures you can leave and not lose any golems due to being not on the platform.

[joemama1512]

8) After creating a farming zone and everything planted, DELETE the farming zone. While you will have to manually harvest that area, it will prevent them from replanting which is important because you almost never have time for a second planting to grow.
EDIT: Thanks for comment. You want to delete the farm zone after all items are planted, but then create a NEW farm zone but with no designated plants. That way it will autoharvest when ready without replanting.


9) Farming tiles are supposed to attach to a house or other tiles and be flush with the other tiles and not sticking up. You can then set it as a farming zone and plant whatever. This lets you plant stuff on the tree itself and not have to harvest before leaving a zone. So you can set a certain number of oak trees, and then whatever food item and your dudes will just keep farming that area and supplying a limited amount of those resources constantly.
Farm tiles only need TWO spaces above them so you dont want to give them the usual 4 spaces. I recommend putting a giant row of them, just 2 spaces above the normal ground on the lefthand side. Then 2 spaces above that, your regular wooden tiles for holding storage.

[joemama1512]

10) You can make an advanced weapon and manually control it and avoid needing ammo for it. So say you make a rocket launcher. Sure you cant make rockets but no worries! Or you can use triple treb without blowing through 3 ammo per shot. Or reinforced ballista that shoots twice as fast, etc.
The downside of manual control is you cant use advanced ammo types.

11) Artifacts - Only the energy conversion module seems to be any good whatsoever, so just sell the rest for tech points. The CIWS sucks horribly as does the triple catapult which wastes 2 extra ammo per shot shooting inaccurately. Precision artifact is used for flak which I havent tested but its tech tree is not very useful.

[joemama1512]

12) Adding pillars to the inside of a building will help reinforce it if the building strength is lacking. Note that you only take damage during MOVEMENT, so when you start moving, set a repair to the building and the repair will keep fixing the building as it keeps taking more damage. So its not really a big deal as long as you don't collapse the entire structure.
The pillars are not as good as you might think however. Adding a steel pillar next to my wood house wall OUGHT to really help, but it only adds a modest buff to building strength. You really will need to replace with stone/metal buildings themselves to make a big difference.

[joemama1512]

13) You CAN find resources in a zone that are not the primary three on the world map. Iron does exist in non iron maps as well as coal... just not as much. You can even find diamonds and gold in non-gold/diamond maps after teh 5th or so movement. I found like 80 gold ore in a non-gold map.

[joemama1512]

14) You can REMOVE an installation(ballista,etc). It will be stored. Then find that building in storage and TRANSPORT it to wheverever you want. If you build one, it will make a NEW one... you have to use transport to re-use. This is mostly useful for the mining Drills that you can re-use and save a bit of time and resources.

15) FOOD becomes a problem as you progress. Early on, no big deal. But eventually with 7 or so golems, they eat like crazy and you can barely keep up. So, you want to ignore cooking for the first map or two, and ignore the cooking pot as the 10 extra food value from 40 to 60 isnt worth wasting wood and cooking time. But then you want to make the furnace to cook BREAD. Then just use farming tiles or ground to plant tons of wheat. The bread buffs your movespeed by 50% which is quite a bit as much time is spent moving. This also increases the food value from 40 to 70 whcih makes it more efficient and offsets the cooking time and coal needed.

Not sure the next upgrade is worth it though as it consumes DOUBLE the resources... i.e. an apple and a wheat to make apple pie. This adds a bit more satiation food value and gives two buffs instead.... movespeed plus mining or whatever. It is probably worth it as farming the raw resources is fairly quick and easy.

Note that the food buff only lasts like 30 seconds on Fast or 1/6th of a hunger bar. So I am not really convinced cooking is even worthwhile. I cant seem to have my people keep up with food demand anyways even with a dedicated cook.

[joemama1512]

16) The Defensive items do NOT block line of sight somehow. So you probably want one to the very rightmost of each level of your buildings/tiles, then your ballistas/defenses.

[Dragonlord]

You can still get + stat in two category golems using a single soul, and three soul golems don't necessarily give you three bonuses. I did a three soul golem and got two NEGATIVE stats, and one double + stat. I think it depends on what souls you use, each soul benefits a different set of task stats, and stacking them correctly will give you better golems.

[joemama1512]

Thanks for the update. Yeah I combined 3 souls and got a Bad Back debuff for my trouble...

[薄荷哈雅貼]

Originally posted by joemama1512:

8) After creating a farming zone and everything planted, DELETE the farming zone. While you will have to manually harvest that area, it will prevent them from replanting which is important because you almost never have time for a second planting to grow.

9) Farming tiles are supposed to attach to a house or other tiles and be flush with the other tiles and not sticking up. You can then set it as a farming zone and plant whatever. This lets you plant stuff on the tree itself and not have to harvest before leaving a zone. So you can set a certain number of oak trees, and then whatever food item and your dudes will just keep farming that area and supplying a limited amount of those resources constantly.

Actually Farm zone which plant nothing will automatically issue harvest without replant

I didn't realize I could reinforced a room inside it… thanks the hint

Both sides should be extend for more space
As right side structure are more health for the core survive

Manual is fun with shift key
And we could also shut down auto mode by limit the ammo

But it's nice for 1.5 damage bonus ammo and hand free
Just beware the boss dragon
more fire power always good

[joemama1512]

I am not following the tip about manual control using the shift key? If you select an offensive weapon and hit shift it puts you in manual control. Could you elaborate?

[joemama1512]

You can only have TWO ROWS of golems. Once you max out you will want to replace the crappy ones with 3 soul versions. So, dig down and if a crap golem is the one digging, demo the 3 ladders above it and just wait for it to starve.

[joemama1512]

My new housing advice: Avoid the iron houses for a while as they gobble precious iron and slow you down a lot.

I now start with 2 6x5 wooden houses on the lefthand side right next to the Core and 6 ballista to the right of the core. There is enough room to add ladders to the very left of the second building that leads to your storage on the roof, temporarily at least.

On the 2nd or third map, I will make a stone tower on the very righthand side and a ladder to the right of that. Then extend stone tiles from 2 spaces above the ground (for growing stuff) all the way to the right. Then fill it up with a stone barracade and lots of ballistas.

You can then have 3 stone tiles every 4 spaces to add a little nook for another weapon.
Eventually the stone tower is replaced with a concrete tower. then a second one on top. The idea is to allow for lots of little nooks where you add weapons vertically.

The wood houses will need Pillars to support them and eventually turn into the 6x5 iron house with 2 more wooden ones on top. That supports the tons of wooden tiles all the way to the left where you store stuff.

[joemama1512]

The tall houses suck because you waste all the space up top unless you have a ladder and make tiles across which is inefficient. They are only used on the offensive righthand side.
The short ones suck because they arent as space efficient. ie the 10x4 and they have a hard time stacking well and you cant replace the 10x4 stone one with anything.

Ideal size is x by 5 which allows for 4 spaces high for storage and best general addition of a torch up top with production buildings inside.

[Valkerion™]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2827810/discussions/0/4515505663141221908/

It's definitely worth only spitting out 3 soul golems after you get a few going. It depends on what you get, but if you are properly building turrets and killing enemies fast enough, you will get lots of souls. I reached quite far to the point fps was an issue and had almost 20 golems. Reaching the snow areas, food became the hardest thing to deal with even with tons of farming plots, I ran out. If you had more than 20 golems from spawning in single souls (I would have had over 40 if that's even possible) you would run out of food even sooner.

Originally posted by joemama1512:

You can only have TWO ROWS of golems. Once you max out you will want to replace the crappy ones with 3 soul versions. So, dig down and if a crap golem is the one digging, demo the 3 ladders above it and just wait for it to starve.

Oh, well there is my answer. I would not spawn 1 soul golems after I have my first six or so. Basically, each area change I put all my souls into my next golems. (I did not often go to areas where you get souls split between 2/3 kinds, which would make getting 3 soul golems harder.)

Originally posted by joemama1512:

8) After creating a farming zone and everything planted, DELETE the farming zone. While you will have to manually harvest that area, it will prevent them from replanting which is important because you almost never have time for a second planting to grow...

You do not need to delete a farming zone. Just change the crop selected to nothing. I use farming zones with no crop for auto harvest.

Originally posted by joemama1512:

Not sure the next upgrade is worth it though as it consumes DOUBLE the resources... i.e. an apple and a wheat to make apple pie. This adds a bit more satiation food value and gives two buffs instead.... movespeed plus mining or whatever. It is probably worth it as farming the raw resources is fairly quick and easy.

Note that the food buff only lasts like 30 seconds on Fast or 1/6th of a hunger bar. So I am not really convinced cooking is even worthwhile. I cant seem to have my people keep up with food demand anyways even with a dedicated cook.

It is worth cooking food for the increased satiation of course. And the 100 satiation food while taking double resources, takes only one cook action. And cooking takes forever, is by far the most annoying part. The electric grills are not really an improvement at all, just using electricity instead of coal and being smaller. I was doing fine in my game until snow area (said above) and quickly ran out of food.

[joemama1512]

One factor in determing food usefulness is how long hunger lasts. For example if 40 satiation food only kept the worker going for 40 seconds, then having better food would be almost mandatory as they would just run back and forth for food!
But if it lasted 40 minutes then the better food value from cooking would not really be useful hardly at all from an efficiency of the worker point of view.
Since hunter bar lasts quite a bit of time, and eating food basically costs the average distance from your food storage to your average work area, extra satiation does not seem to have much efficiency effect on the worker in my opinion.


So it takes one cycle to plant food, one cycle to pick food. BUT, both of these cycles give you 5 food total. (plus 5 wood for apples).
So raw food takes 2/5ths of a cycle basically.

Cooking ads 1.0 cycles and 0.3 coal, so now its 1.4 cycles for 70 satiation and a buff vs .4 cycles for 40. Too bad the buff is so short lived. And you need a cooking station.

Cooking advanced food costs 1.8 cycles for 100 satiation and doublebuff, vs .4 cycles for 40.

In theory cooked food takes less storage but good luck cooking enough for this to matter!

So in my opinion, cooking food kind of sucks.