Broken Lords, Managing cities & other questions

[Val]

Hi! I'm new to this game.

After 4-5 fail attempts with Wild Walkers (serves me right for skipping tutorial) and finally winning the game on 1st difficulty I want to move on 2nd one. I want a more agressive playthough and torn between Broken Lords and Allayi, with slight bias towards Broken Lords.

So, the suggested victory type is Expansion, which means controlling 80% of the land provinces. In my Wild Walker game I had controlled 50%, and it was hell to manage (large map). The main reason is that with number of cities growing, their production rate growing and number of available buildings growing as well it quickly becomes a micromanagement hell. At some point I was just queueing up to 10 buildings just so that a city won't bother me anymore every 1 or 2 turns. Obviously, it has it limits, because 3/4 of buildings require strategics.

Is there a simpler way to manage a lot of cities? I haven't had this issue in Civ5, because turns to build were bigger there on average, and I could just puppet conquered cities or set my cities to build gold/science if I don't feel like developing them further at a time.

Or maybe I should just aim for economic victory?
And what stockpiles are for, by the way? I had read somewhere that they are a cornerstone part of the game, but I'm not sure.

As for Allayu, what would be a good victory condition to aim for if not "quest"? I found Wild Walker faction questline not hard, but long and dull, so I'm pretty sceptic about this VC.

[ElPrezCBF]

I think Vaulters/Mezari would be much more newbie friendly than Broken Lords and Allayi because it's quite a well balanced faction (singular because they're just reskins of the same faction). But if you have to choose between BL and Allayi, I'd say BL because you only need to focus a lot on dust. Allayi requires you to manage the extraordinarily high expansion penalty from its trait, which not only hits your dust output but everything.

If you click on the cities icon (think it's the top left 2nd icon), you'll be able to view a list of all your cities, whether their populations are growing, buildings, approval levels etc and manage them from there.

Stockpiles have to be researched. I think the tech is found in era 3. You don't need to get them but they provide a huge boost in food, industry and science, depending on the type of stockpile you build. Of course, they cost a ton of production points because of their huge benefits, so you would need cities with very high production (industry) points to build stockpiles in decent time. Once completed, you just select a city to apply a stockpile to and voila! But science stockpile is independent of cities.

[Val]

I dunno, I built a dozen of stockpiles, like 2 turns each in my best city. So I have to activate them from Empire menu? Hm, okay. Hope they are worth it.

I'll consider Vaulters, ty.

[Wendek]

At some point I was just queueing up to 10 buildings just so that a city won't bother me anymore every 1 or 2 turns. Obviously, it has it limits, because 3/4 of buildings require strategics.

Note that Wild Walkers are the masters of Industry and thus building stuff. You won't have that "problem" as easily with other factions. Also at some point you can simply build units (make an alternative design without strategics if needed) to serve as garrison or to get a secondary army. It's unneeded in the lowest difficulty levels but it can't hurt to prepare for later I think. If you suddenly unlocked a new building from research and it's more important, you can move the unit below in priority and resume working on it later once the building is complete. (Tip : using control-click on a building will queue it in every city. Using shift-click will queue it and move it to the top of the queue everywhere. If you don't have enough strategics, it will queue as much as it can but you don't get to decide the cities, so that's something to keep in mind. I do it with the Caravenserail for instance that I want to build everywhere, and which doesn't require any strategic ressource)

Yes stockpiles have to be activated from the Empire menu. Industry and Food ones require a specific target city. Default stockpiles have a value of 100 (mostly irrelevant), researching the Era III stockpile tech will move that to 600 and the Era IV tech will further improve them to 1600 (and without at least one of those techs, or the Pearls tech that also creates stockpiles, you can't create them at all, but you can still buy them). You can build/buy stockpiles when their value is low and it'll automatically update once you've reached the new tier if you haven't used them until that point.
Stockpiles can definitely be worth it especially when you're Wild Walkers and can build them easily.

Wild Walkers have by far the easiest questline, but yes it's not exactly an exciting one. However because they're good at building stuff, finishing the quest gives them access to the Wonder victory which they can build incredibly fast - in my last WW game I think I built it in two turns, and one is definitely possible. Almost all %-based bonuses stack additively in this game , so you can have 33% cost reduction from Empire Plan + 25% from the quest + 24% from a WW governor + 10% from two Urces villages = 92% reduction. 36000 Industry (the cost of the Temple of the Earth's Core) becomes 2880. With 4 Urces villages instead of 2 it'll be literally free and instant to build, there's a recent thread on this forum about someone "breaking the game" this way.

Also I personally find the Drakken the easiest of all to play (the ability to force a truce means that you'll never have to lose a war and can go do whatever you want to) but not the most exciting either. Mezari/Vaulters are one of my favorite faction and they're pretty strong so that's a pretty good choice as well I think.

[Val]

Drakken are visually appealing to me, but I'm infected with achievement hunting, and Drakken have one for winning the game without ever being in a war. And I kinda want to burn villages now.

[Wendek]

Oh yeah I hunted a lot of achievements at first too, and there's one to win with every faction so you'll get there in the end. :p
If you want to burn stuff down I highly recommend Necrophages. I mean Vaulters or Broken Lords are certainly good at it too, but Necrophages are based on being at war. They get free food after getting 8 corpses (which is a unit dying in battle, including your own, as long as you don't actually lose said battle), to compensate for the fact they get less food from the cities themselves. Plus they're one of the most interesting "evil factions" I've ever seen in a videogame, honestly. I actually enjoy their faction quest.

Also Cultists literally can't take cities and always burn them down instead. But I would definitely not recommend them to someone who's starting out.

[Val]

So I went and tried Vaulters as you suggested. Did 4 starts, each up to 50 turns.

One thing that instantly became apparent to me is that your province's biome means much more than racial bonuses. I had the easiest time playing when starting in Palm Forest and hardest when starting in a land without production. Playing as WW you just don't notice this because you always start in a forested biome. Vaulters have a highly varying starting biome, which makes playing them either a piece of cake or pretty difficult. Starting in forest also means extra production even later, cuz Lumbermills. Forests are OP.

Another thing I learned the hard way is that if you aren't lucky with Forest start you don't need Public Library, and you don't need Geodic Lab early in either case. There's just no point in all of this early science if you can't build a thing. So I pretty much open with Founder's Monument -> Mill Foundry -> Seed Storage -> Titanium/Glasssteel if available -> Settler.

And the third thing is that unhappiness penalty can grow pretty severe (which is, again, you don't really notice as WW, cuz they are swimming in production), therefore it seems that limiting yourself to 3 or maybe 4 early cities would be the best.

Overall it feels that playing WW vs playing Vaulters is like growing a plant in a greenhouse vs growing it in mud by the highway.

[Wendek]

Not only do the Wild Walkers always start in Forest, they naturally get +1 Industry in Forest with their faction trait. Then you add an additional +1 from Lumber Mill and an additional +1 from Wild Walker governors (though the one you get at the start is better used in an army I think)... it's really insane.
Meanwhile Vaulters will start in "Science" places, which can sometimes be Forests... but also barren snowy lands where nothing grows.

[ElPrezCBF]

Originally posted by Val:

So I went and tried Vaulters as you suggested. Did 4 starts, each up to 50 turns.

One thing that instantly became apparent to me is that your province's biome means much more than racial bonuses. I had the easiest time playing when starting in Palm Forest and hardest when starting in a land without production. Playing as WW you just don't notice this because you always start in a forested biome. Vaulters have a highly varying starting biome, which makes playing them either a piece of cake or pretty difficult. Starting in forest also means extra production even later, cuz Lumbermills. Forests are OP.

There are 2 separate effects on default tile output. One is the terrain spawn effect, the other is faction trait. You will always face a harder time if you happen to spawn in a barren land and settle there. This isn't a faction thing but a terrain spawn thing. For the faction trait effect, Wild Walkers get a forest tile production bonus but that only applies during summer. Their FIDSI distribution tends to be dust poor (tiles that lack dust), perhaps to balance out their production bonus and even if they can find dust tiles, these usually appear outside forests, which means there's a possibility they would have to sacrifice some forest bonus tiles for dust rich tiles.

If you play as Vaulters, you don't get a forest tile bonus, but a science one (in all seasons) and strategic resource bonuses. If you read their faction traits, they get insane science bonuses. No matter where they spawn, the FIDSI distribution for them is usually all rounded. I did mention that barren lands give a hard time for all factions, but the difference is that Vaulters tend to get all rounded FIDSI tiles even if the overall FIDSI output is lower when settling in barren areas.

If you play some other factions, their tiles will lack one of the FIDSI types due to their faction trait. For example, the Forgotten have no use for science tiles because they buy/steal techs. The Broken Lords have no use for food tiles because they use dust to grow their population. These require decent knowledge of the game's mechanics and the reason why those factions are not recommended for beginners.

Originally posted by Val:

Another thing I learned the hard way is that if you aren't lucky with Forest start you don't need Public Library, and you don't need Geodic Lab early in either case. There's just no point in all of this early science if you can't build a thing. So I pretty much open with Founder's Monument -> Mill Foundry -> Seed Storage -> Titanium/Glasssteel if available -> Settler.

Mill foundry is pretty much usually the first you go for no matter what faction you play. After that, it could be either seed storage (if your starting tiles are food poor) or public library/geo lab (if they are science poor) to compensate. It really depends on the situation and faction trait. For example, as Allayi with the 150% expansion penalty, I would delay my second city even as late as turn 40 and still perform decently well. You'll get better at prioritizing research depending on the situation as you gain more experience.

Originally posted by Val:

And the third thing is that unhappiness penalty can grow pretty severe (which is, again, you don't really notice as WW, cuz they are swimming in production), therefore it seems that limiting yourself to 3 or maybe 4 early cities would be the best.

Overall it feels that playing WW vs playing Vaulters is like growing a plant in a greenhouse vs growing it in mud by the highway.

Production also takes a hit when approval is penalized, as well as growth, income and science. Every building costs different amounts of production points depending on how advanced they are. Even if you have high production for an early era building, if your population growth suffers as a result of the expansion penalty, you may not have enough population to allocate to production to build legendary/more advanced buildings in decent time. Boosters and approval bonus buildings play an important part in helping to offset the expansion penalty. Ideally, it's always preferable to settle your starting city (and for that matter any city) on anomalies to get huge FIDSI or even approval bonuses. You won't do yourself a favor by immediately pointing to faction traits as the cause of fundamental problems. Rather, it's usually due to inappropriate strategy and poor choice of settling location. But you'll get better at managing these with experience.

[Val]

Thanks, that was pretty interesting to read.

You won't do yourself a favor by immediately pointing to faction traits as the cause of fundamental problems. Rather, it's usually due to inappropriate strategy and poor choice of settling location. But you'll get better at managing these with experience.

That wasn't my intention, I was just saying that WW have it pretty smooth. As WW you don't really need to take anomalies into big consideration, you see big forest - you drop a city here. As Vaulters I would prioritize locations that got both food and production anomalies close by, like Azotics + Rumbling Stones.




By the way, I've got a question. Is it worth going for lvl2 cities/districts early on? Because I can't help but go for all the useful tiles first.

[ElPrezCBF]

Originally posted by Val:

Thanks, that was pretty interesting to read.

You won't do yourself a favor by immediately pointing to faction traits as the cause of fundamental problems. Rather, it's usually due to inappropriate strategy and poor choice of settling location. But you'll get better at managing these with experience.

That wasn't my intention, I was just saying that WW have it pretty smooth. As WW you don't really need to take anomalies into big consideration, you see big forest - you drop a city here. As Vaulters I would prioritize locations that got both food and production anomalies close by, like Azotics + Rumbling Stones.

By the way, I've got a question. Is it worth going for lvl2 cities/districts early on? Because I can't help but go for all the useful tiles first.

Glad to help. Anomalies are a huge bonus for all factions including WW. Sure, it's cool to have production bonuses but you'll never have "too much" of a good thing. Even in my WW campaign, I never felt like forests were enough to feed my empire's hungry demand for legendary buildings and advanced buildings. These take much more than forest tiles to build efficiently.

Some of these anomalies can also give you a very huge science or dust bonus, which are areas the WW are relatively weak in compared to say the Vaulters or Broken Lords. Or if you're lucky, they may also grant +10 or even +20 approval bonus, which is huge.

Every extra district you build will +10 to the approval penalty although they are still needed to expand your FIDSI output. This penalty will only be removed once your city reaches lvl 2, which means from the time you build your first district till then, it would be advisable to expand onto anomalies to help offset the district penalty. Even if the offset is only partial, it's still way better than ordinary tiles. As far as possible, try to go for anomalies or tiles with good FIDSI output that also overlap with your expansion path to lvl 2. But otherwise, it's not really a big deal. That said, lvl 2 is the desired state to remove the district penalty as mentioned, so it's good to go for it asap if possible. But otherwise, don't sweat it. You can still use approval buildings and boosters to keep up approval levels anyway as long as you don't do something extreme like steamroll a huge chunck of the map in just a few turns, which would of course drop a ton of expansion penalty on your empire too quickly.

[Val]

Finally had a good start (red rocks, many rivers and anomalies), but my neighbours were Drakken and suddenly they were beating me up in score whole time. At some point they declared war on me and took down my unprotected city in 2 turns because my army was too far. But looking at their 150 defense units I don't think I could've won anyway, even utilizing Tech lovers. So frustrating.

Edit: rolling a new one, starting province is snow/dirt fields. Haha, NOPE.