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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
1 
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Turn 1
1. Construct Gold Mine
2. Purchase Source of Wealth (Gives passive 10 Gold per wave)
3. Hire a Worker
4. Assign 4 Workers to Gold
5. Upgrade Vein Tracing
6. (Build your tower of choice)
Turn 2
1. Purchase Endless Wood (Gives passive 20 Wood per wave)
Turn 3
1. Construct Quarry
2. Purchase Rock Steady (Gives passive 20 stone per wave)
Turn 4
1. Construct Mill
2. Purchase Boon (Gives passive 20 wheat per wave)
I think you see where I am going. I will concentrate purely on gold and upgrades to boost it first. Then I'll rely on passive generation of resources to perform upgrades.
This has carried to wave 36 and I'm working on going past wave 40. Wish me luck =).
For context I sat with a list trying to perfect my first 10 turns, adjusting the list accordingly at each step, constant restarts etc. I was getting annoyed and wasn't even making it past lvl 10. I put away the list and just freestyled it -- that run ended up being my first victory and the run after I beat ascension 1 with a completely different build. So I would say tinkering with fixed starts is good for learning what's possible, but I encourage you to simply try to make it as far as you can each play through, instead of trying to perfect the first few turns. Also, you'll get so many unlocks, what you thought was 'optimal' assuredly won't be after a few more unlocks.
Even for the absolute best players I imagine their starts are quite varied depending on their starter relics/chests, preferred towers etc.
Edit: Yeah for example, Cicoles posted their starting routine, which is completely different from mine. I never put workers on gold ever, and 36 is also my max wave on both base game and ascension 1. All that's to say, it doesn't really matter what you do, as much as it matters that you're doing something
I didn't include a ton of micro because I don't really know what I do exactly, and that's half the fun :)
Nice! I think the main reason why it works is because Gold is needed almost everywhere.
There are two reliable ways to make gold early on, gold economy (that includes gold mine, guild, castle, tradeport trade and to a lesser extent outpost and statue) and wood economy (that includes building ships in trade port, guild). Early focus on gold economy is obviously slightly stronger at first, but for either ones you still need both gold and wood to grow. Statue is the only source of gold from stone and it is more of mid game rather than a starting investment, because it requires larger waves and the ability to take them down to provide some perceptible benefit).
A general decent start is to go for 2 levels of Economy Budget (cost 10+23 = 33) then buy a worker for 40 wheat, build the gold mine for 50 wood, build the Trade port for 45 wood, buy one ship, trade 30 wheat for 12 extra gold (trading stone might be possible too... if you really want to get funky), buy 2 levels of vein tracking for (4+15 = 19). Put the 4 workers at work for +39 gold per turn, which you get on round 2. If you select 40 wood as starting resource, you might be able to get an extra boat for an extra +5 gold per round, bringing your gold generation to +44 on round 2.
If you took "final rags" (allow 20 gold debt at flat -2 gold interest rate) you might use those 20 gold for some alternate spending, like spending an extra 19 for tax burden (which will provide +1 gold per worker = 4, but since you would then be in the red, the benefit would be 4-2, bring your gold per turn to +41 but only provide you next round with 22 gold, yet still with the ability to go in the negative so technically you would have 42 gold).. Again, with starting +40 wood, this could be +46 per round (so technically 28 gold in the positive and still the ability to spend 48 in the 2nd round).
If you took "golden incentive" (+3 gold per tower built) which works best with cheap single towers or cheap combo towers (i.e. bow, cyclone comes to mind, especially considering those can be also used to boost their respective resources through banners) then you could for example build 3x bow tower and get 9 extra gold on round 1. This though will prevent you from getting a boat, unless you have also selected 40 wood as starting resource.
As a rule of thumb, it is generally good to get Economy Budget maxed as soon as possible as well as stave construction as soon as possible.
Now depending the type of tower you use, you might carry on focusing on gold economy for 3 rounds and buy more levels of source of wealth, vein tracking in the gold mine, and get tax burden maxed out asap if you plan on acquiring workers in the few next rounds which might require building the mill and then passive generation (considering you will leave all available workers in the goldmine).
Generally speaking, since wood and gold are the most important resources at start to generate gold efficiently and that the lumberjack camp is already constructed, you might want to get endless wood asap to generate +20 wood per wave, which in turn will allow you to either increase your housing and build the mill to also generate +20 wheat passively and then after 2 waves buy your first extra worker. This approach would be mainly done to allow for a legendary mission to be undertaken, as a side benefit, though this is a pretty costly and risky tactic. If you really want to focus on gold generation, then building a couple more levels of ships or even saving wood for a few rounds and go for the guild is better (provided you have unlocked the 20 gold available from start upon building the guild hall - also noting that the upgrade that cost 15 gold and 1 worker might be desirable in some cases).
Speaking of which, that is also a possibility, to actually go for the guild hall if you have that upgrade (through honor). You might on round 1, directly build that with wood and get that extra 20 gold directly. Then the guild will generate 5 gold next round, 10 gold on round 3 (total 15) if you leave the gold there, then 15 on round 4 (total 30), 20 on round 5 (total 50), etc... which might also be a good strategy to have a boost a few rounds later. But going for that approach means you can't also go for the trade port if you take the mine, so you would lose the boats and the ability to sell your wheat surplus on round 1. If you are planning to take the hero that offer boat cost reduction, then this start with the guild hall might be better, since it would give you 5 turns to accumulate as much wood as you can through lumberjack passive generation, get the stave construction in the castle, and then on round 5 you can build the trade port and pretty much all your ships in one go, as well as get those 50 gold from the guild if need be. Of course considering you did not rely on tower that actually cost wood, but only those that cost stone, unless you took the extra 40 wood as starting bonus.
Focusing on wood generation, you also need to think about specialisation. Indeed if the passive generation of gold mine, mill, lumberjack and quarry is equivalent to respectively 2, 4 and 6 workers without production bonus (so 2x5, 4x5, 6x5), the passive production spec is equivalent to 8 upgraded workers (so 8x10). This without considering the runeforge choice of course.
Since you are at best limited to 4 houses and max 3 workers per house, can acquire one extra worker through a legendary relic ghost worker and the guild consume 1 (not mentioning sacrifices that also remove workers for relics or banners with an item) you need to consider what production you are going to put your workers on, also depending on your runeforge choice of deity.
So to conclude, there are many ways to have good starts for a specific tower strategy. Some starts are better depending on which tower(s) and hero you plan to rely on. You can aim for a round 2 payoff or like a round 5 stronger payoff. The item you being with, common or rare, and the extra bonus if common are also very important in defining what works and what doesn't.
There are several items you don't really want to begin with unless they are part of a long term plan. For example if you take pact of prosperity, then to get any benefit from it early on, you need to refrain from spending gold. In such case, it is likely that you want to focus on wood economy, build the trade port and likely guild and ignore the gold mine. It is likely you want to start with 40 extra wood in such case. That way, you get the extra 20 gold from the guild on round 1 (as explained already above) which means you can invest that in the lumberjack +20 per wave passive and also put your 4 workers in the mine. If you also sell some wheat, you can get that extra +12 gold on top and either upgrade the lumberjack production per worker to further boost how many ships you can get next round. Then you need to rely on towers that do not require you to spend gold and refrain from spending any gold for as long as you can. That way, round 2 the pact will stack 6, which mean at the end of wave 2, you get +6 gold, then +12 at the end of wave 3, then +18 at the end of wave 4, and maybe if you really good you can even push it to +24 at the end of wave 5 (which would mean that you've earned 60 gold if you pull that off) till there. Pact of prosperity is easier to benefit from end game (though you need to de-activate auto-upgrades of towers) and can be.
I won't cover all possible starts and crazy stuff that can be done (also with other common relics or rare ones, or even outpost strategies which can be reliable starts too with the relic that reduce 3 first outposts cost by 50% and extra wood, considering there are always 2 decent tiles to build them on at start), but I think the few examples I gave are providing some perspective already.
Anyway, enjoy the suffering of experimenting with all the possibilities.
-I spam restart for Burden Cart + Wood or chest for wood
-Build 2 general collectors on spots 15-14
Wave 2
-Build second tower to keep enemies away from collectors so they don't lose their honor upgrade gold generation
Wave 3
Take guildhall gold and cap Castle Economy Budget THEN buy guild halls Gold Manager
GUILD HALL WILL BE YOUR EARLY GOLD GENERATION
Let it stack up to cap out your gold mine (it will take some getting used to to know when to yank out your gold for other economy upgrades)
After this its just cap gold upgrades and other things
On first hero choice my priority is trade ship costs, if you get hero who has wood and trade ships you now have capped trade ships
I've barely unlocked anything and have yet to pass wave 10 after about 30 games.
I've been trying to focus on gold, but I barely get past wave 9 as is. I used to have like worker in each thing and that got me to 10 everytime, but still no progress.
Well that is I think the problem and why you fail. Jack of all trades is rarely the way, not at all. You want specific upgrades in a specific order and it is generally not efficient to wait 4 turn to accumulate 4 different resources and then on the 5th turn make all the upgrade. That means you had 4 empty turns where nothing was produced. It is better to focus on one thing at a time and have it running. Once done, move to the next project, adjust your workforce to achieve that asap. Ideally you want at least one thing done that give immediate improvement to your economy each turn. It is hard to catch 2 fishes with 1 hook.
Typically to beat the game you have to focus on generally one or two tower types. That also means you have to build an economy that is specialized for that specific strategy. That is one reason why wheelbarrow and outpost seem to be a popular start over village buildings and workers. It provides a decent amount of everything with just 2 cheap ouposts which supports almost any tower selection.
First I recommend that you pick a single tower type. Lightning and Rune are typically very strong and easy to play. A single rune tower lvl 1 can easily deal with the first 5-6 wave by itself. Two lightning will do the same.
For both those strats, focus on gold first. I made a TL;DR post if you need details on what is possible. By round 5, you should have a gold prod of 50+, and start generating wood and stone. By round 6 or seven at the latest, you should add towers to the ones you built in round 1. If you can't achieve that, that means you spending your resources on low priority upgrades.
Now you need to choose your banners and stick to a strategy for that tower. The advantage of building only 1 type of tower is that you get banners only for that. It makes things random easier to restrain. For a starter pick Surge for lightning. The base rune tower is very powerful by itself, and while prism is a very strong upgrade it can be slightly more complex to figure out how to make it work, so take focus or aura.
Once you chose a main banner for your tower out of the 5 choices you have, pick 2 other "secondary" banner types that will support your main one. You can banish the 2 you are not gonna use, so only those 3 will show up. Now always try to pick the main one in priority, unless there is a better quality in the supporting banners.
This will simplify your defense management. Now, both those two towers I recommend to use as a start require two resources. So you have to build your economy around that from round 4-5 to support building more towers starting round 5-6 at the latest. Also don't forget that in normal mode taking a bit of damage is acceptable, since the Druid can repair some later.
It is also important to pick the appropriate tower upgrades on level up. Typically for Lightning Surge you don't need the tower itself to do that much damage, as the main damage will come from the spell being cast by the banner. When you reach around 20% chance, it will trigger often enough to compensate for the lack of native damage from the tower. Therefore, since it is a percentage based build, what you want is some range and most importantly fire rate. You can do 1 point in range for 3-4 in rate, and place your towers wisely on heights and runes and places where they can shoot consistently.
If you play rune, then try to focus on range if your build is around the aura banner that increase rate (so each tower - up to 5 - that is in the range will feed each other). Also the rune tower benefits immensely of being able to shoot at the same target for as long as needed, especially if as a supporting banner you pick "focus". But that also means you need to "program" your towers, assign how they work out targeting prioritize.
You can do that on the panel and while I won't explain all the advanced and amazing things you can do and fine tune in your defense here - as this is already a long read - if you fail to set that up, then you will hardly beat the game. For both the starter - noob friendly - strategies I suggested to you, you wanna setup priority 1 on bosses, priority 2 on regen at least and check the box "till death" so the tower tries to remain on the same enemy till it dies at least for the rune tower.
You can apply those settings to all towers, same goes for the upgrades and if you check all the options you have, you'll discover that you have many tools to customize for your current and future games. Take some time to study that, it is important.
Ok, that's a lot of reading already and there is probably enough to say about this game to write 200 more pages of what I adviced here. I did not even touch to 2 tower or more combinations, which requires some more banish/reroll management and likely work better with some of the relics to make sure you can have a consistent roll of the banners you want. Yet there is one more thing that is very relevant for a new player who struggle to understand in the form of unique banners and fusion banners tho, so let me touch briefly on that here below as a basic introduction.
When you get your first banner, it will appear on the left bottom side of the screen and this will give you some information about possible "evolutions". If you use only one type of tower and get all your banners with that type you will get a "unique" banner when you reach 10 banners. This is very, very powerful. So getting as many banners as fast as possible (of the highest quality possible) is paramount for success (well, every damn mechanic in this game is... this is not a casual TD at all). Now if you play with 2 towers type which have the ability to synergize you can get a "fusion" banner instead of the unique. Each tower type can synergize with 3 other tower types and that information is displayed when you get your first banner.
Understanding that those special banners are a very noticeable spike in your power level is the reason why you want to stick to the simplest strategies till you have some more experience with the game. So even if you fail (RNG being what it is) try again the same strategies, don't disperse yourself. Once will have beaten the game with those "simple" strats you will be able to experiment with even stronger turrets like the raven which requires some more advanced understanding even, or more complex combinations like introducing the frost tower (which is too weak to begin a game with if you don't fully understand what it does well and what it doesn't).
Pathing is also important, so use the oracle wisely. Some strategies benefit more when the tiles are clustered (which typically occurs with abundant branching) like if you plan to build more outposts or if you want your towers to be able to shoot at two distant paths. Since there are 3 types of terrain that have specific features, in some cases you want to reach that terrain as early as possible so you can generate more tiles in an area of the other. It is also important to understand how pathing affects the waves and enemy concentration. Again, if you use towers that have strong AOE (i.e. Mortars) then you might enjoy if the timing of the enemy columns coming from 2 branch overlap, so you get more damage done per shot. If your towers are more efficient at dealing damage to a single target, then you want the pathing to allow for enemies to come one after each other. All that need to be considered, and the game provide (through oracle and heroes mainly) a way to influence that (it is never absolutely perfect though, because RNG), so be aware of what your towers and banner need to best perform and try to achieve that too.
Lastly understand the mobs abilities like block, armor, regen, barriers, sprint, troyan horse and even varying base speed on how they have an effect on your efficiency. Typically for armor and block, you might want to invest a couple of points in allowing your tower to counter them as soon as such enemies start appearing. Also be mindful on how you spend your gold for upgrades. Try to prioritize your towers that have the best location bonuses first and then try to maintain a certain level of upgrade on the rest of your towers so they don't become only cosmetic.
Normal wave 30 is not that hard to beat once you have grasped the basics of this game and have unlocked at least a couple of the most important base honor upgrades.
Round 1.
1. Take 100 wood if you can from reaching lvl 10 (hopefully not to bad traits)
2. for 10 gold Odins Path
3. gold mine + passive upgrade
4. 170 wood special 40 gold passive
5. +1 worker
6. anyone on wood, you will need it ^^
but for me thats the best way to get heavy early 50+ gold
But even then, you're extremely "stone" starved and can't really survive with a single runetower to wave 6 for example... so now you're forced to almost get a mix of towers early on just to survive waves and hang on by a thread.
So for those on higher ascensions, what are you doing? So far the best start I'm seeing is to basically buy the guild hall right on turn 1 (at least it's the furthest I've gotten by doing so...). Everything else is too expensive for the returns you get so far I can tell.