Hints, tips and clever things.

[Zhitzu]

I was thinking of making a thread offering hints and tips for people having a hard time getting started and to share clever ways of doing things.
Obviously trial and error is a natural part of learning to play any game. But sometimes a helping hand might be wanted.
So if you have any hints or tricks or warnings of what definitely NOT to do, leave them here.
If you have any questions, or have a specific problem leave it here too.
I saw a thread titled "Everything to do with golems [...]" by ExoticButts, so if it's golem related go there instead.

I'll start.
If you've lost a lot of villagers to the monsters, look out for a fullmoon, during that you will have a good opportunity to resurrect many of your fallen worshippers, but it is very essence taxing. (Their ghosts can also appear without a fullmoon, but much less so)
On that note, if you're in a pinch and need essence for a spell, you can hover your god-hand over essence collectors and siphon some of that sweet goodness.

[Tiberiumkyle]

Rezzing isn't always successful, 1 in 5 chance of getting a zombie instead, though cause RNG is RNG, you may get a couple dozen successful rezzes, or 4 zombies in a row, sometimes.

Learn what the spells do. Don't be afraid to experiment. Same for buildings and towers. Quite a few ways to mix and match things together so they compliment one another, making everything work better overall.

[Zhitzu]

Originally posted by Tiberiumkyle:

Rezzing isn't always successful, 1 in 5 chance of getting a zombie instead, though cause RNG is RNG, you may get a couple dozen successful rezzes, or 4 zombies in a row, sometimes.

Yes I forgot to mention that. It isn't always successful.

[ExoticButts]

Past around Day 10/15, start paying attention to resistances/vulnerabilities on your enemies. Playing to suit their vulnerabilities will help significantly with hordes/Spectres. Many are weak to ice, some to fire, some to lightning. You can examine the resistances/vulnerabilities by clicking on an enemy.

Both towers and golems can inherit elemental damage at max tier (one above Established), and you always get a choice between 3 elemental damage types, including poison in some cases.

[Hunt Daddy]

Dealing with with damage resistance enemies before you are ready can still be accomplished with the god spells. Grab spell and drop skeletons, spectres, fire elementals into the cullis gate if your map has one. Now your row of only bow towers can handle the zombies and headless just fine. If you don't have a cullis gate on your map you can use the god spell take to limbo and then when you do have a defensive tower line that includes towers that throw rocks to deal with skeletons and towers that do some kind of magic damage you can take the monsters out of limbo and deposit them near your towers. These tactics are so effective for me I wonder if Ray will take them out of the game at some point or modify them. For example, there is no reason I know of to ever take the monsters out of limbo. They can stay there effectively removed from the game. Or maybe, in nightmare mode these tactics don't work cause there are just too many monsters and you run out of essence to take them to limbo.

[Tiberiumkyle]

Nightmare and beyond, limboing monsters does indeed stop being worthwhile, just too many.
My last big nightmare+ village as an example https://i.imgur.com/U4tGnOm.png
Also, once we have a reason to start villages on other maps of the World Map, you're going to not want mosters in limbo, cause the code that grabs things from limbo when you place a village center, grabs randomly. It'll grab monsters just as readily as villagers and resources.
If you play on skirmish, which is what the game was intended to be, not the world map, you don't even have limbo. The world map, and limbo, got tacked on due to player demand.

[Hunt Daddy]

I think an early waymaker station is not a bad way to start off. Get as many villagers assigned to building roads early and it can save you a lot of time and increase efficiency. Once you have your early roads constructed pull off most of those workers and leave a few on to maintain what you have built. This also brings me to the idea of surging a resource. Sometimes I alternate between having many resources gatherers like lumberjacks and miners and crystal harvesters in an effort to build up a surplus. I am surging production of raw materials. Then I switch most of the population over to construction and organizers. I am not sure if this is more efficient than just balancing your work force between all available jobs but I enjoy doing it.

[MyNameMeansBentNose]

Some nifty tips? Well, following up on Tiberium and the god powers, its worth knowing how to get some emergency influence.

You can use the Motivate spell to grow crystal fields as well as plants and trees. It's an idea to spare some influence in times of plenty to grown crystal fields outside town. When you find yourself running low you can use Dissolve on those fields outside for a quick influx of influence.

It's nice to have a set of essence collectors in a block. You can draw from up to 9 collectors at once if they are next to each other. This is a good to quickly refuel yourself if you want to do some heavy casting.

As far as the cullis gates go, you can help yourself along by periodically just throwing enemies into the cullis gate as that'll usually net you a bit more influence than you use, and if you stay on top of it you can keep the population of more dangerous monsters down. This is important to remember because if those monsters sit around too long they can build spawners.

On the topic of ressurections. If you see a bunch of your people at night just standing around with question marks around their heads, they are either reacting to your hand, or there is a spirit nearby. If you have the res spell selected, spirits will also show up with a white selection circle. Keep your eyes open!

[ExoticButts]

This one is a "clever thing" I just worked out;

Enemies are subject to the same few frames of pause that villagers get before becoming confused, e.g. when sending something to or removing something from Limbo. This means that you can remove an enemy in an oncoming horde to Limbo, the rest of the horde will stop, and most (if not all!) of the horde will turn around and head back to their starting position! This, of course, gets you less drops, but saves your defences a lot of ammunition and repairs. Note that the enemies have a high chance of coming back again once they reach their spawn, but you can easily rinse/repeat this to heavily reduce nighttime/Eclipse hordes at the cost of requiring your active attention.

I have tested this thoroughly, and it works consistently. Might be a bug, if it is, don't tell Ray!

[Planetary Rubber Cutie]

One tip that helped me a lot, Drop fire elementals into water, it's really effective late game too, when you need to clean the map and it's covered in fire pit spawns.

[Hunt Daddy]

yeah exoticbutts, i use the 'confusion' of monsters when they are struck dumb by my hand of god amongst them as well. i even time it so that i send a ghost to limbo just as he is surruonded by a large group of enemies in my maze. this briefly 'stuns' the largest amout of enemies possible as my towers continue to fire.

[Tiberiumkyle]

Pretty sure that limbo confusing the monsters bug was supposed to be fixed already, I helped confirm the bug and bring it to Ray's attention something like a month+ ago. Massively exploity, really shouldn't use it if it still exists.

Edit: Yeah, that's fixed in current game version.

[Slimurgical (Stormy)]

You can also delay when monster spawners happen by even a day or two by continuously sacrificing every monster you can witohut overloading any cullis portals.
Most monsters will refund the pickup spell's cost, while some such as fire elementals and spectres will give you more than what you put into it.

Plus fire elementals and spectres are more the most dangerous enemies (that I've found) so it's more recommended to sacrifice them until you can get magic towers or alot of iron-equipped guards. Tho Spectres are only dangerous in their health bars, and ability ot ignore walls. Also Fire Elementals will usually be able to kill one person even alone in a 1v3 fight, due to how strong fire is against villagers.

But I've noticed that if you keep killing monsters before any spawners can happen, you can literally stop spawners from appearing for as long as you can keep killing/sacrificing them.

I imagine this is less possible outside of Traditional difficulty.

Also don't overdo it with laying down path blueprints, they can and will time out, unlike the gathering commands.

[Tiberiumkyle]

Road upgrade orders don't time out. I've tested this just to be sure. Paths/roads themselves can and will degrade with time and use, but the order to upgrade them doesn't go away until filled, or canceled.

[Slimurgical (Stormy)]

Originally posted by Tiberiumkyle:

Road upgrade orders don't time out. I've tested this just to be sure. Paths/roads themselves can and will degrade with time and use, but the order to upgrade them doesn't go away until filled, or canceled.

Ahhh okay.
Also one thing I forgot to say also, is that Ballista Towers, while being able to one-shot most weak enemies as well as Fire Elementals at Established level, they're IMO alot more useful in being a lazy-man's way of destroying spawners beyond meteor-spam.

EDIT: Do final-level roads expire? I imagine it would likely take so long that it might as well be infinite if not actually unexpirable.

Tbh actually if said roads of such a level were to be so durable, I think it would make them completely worth it. Then again the highest level should also give a little bit more speed boost than any other level if it arleady doesn't.

[ExoticButts]

Originally posted by Tiberiumkyle:

Pretty sure that limbo confusing the monsters bug was supposed to be fixed already, I helped confirm the bug and bring it to Ray's attention something like a month+ ago. Massively exploity, really shouldn't use it if it still exists.

Edit: Yeah, that's fixed in current game version.

I'm using current game version. It still works. I don't necessarily know how you tested it, or what game version you're supposedly using, but in Indev 28 it still works.

Ninja Edit: Indev 28c, to be precise, aka the latest update. Still a fully functional trick to turn around hordes and such.