Meeting Hall or Totem. Witch or Sage?

[Kírby]

Hi

What do you say about this buildings and classes.

When i build the one or the other? What are your points?

[dergefata]

They're pretty similar. Witches usually have a little more gathering, and I prefer to use them as replacements for normal gatherers, since the extra skills a witch has more than outweigh the small difference in strength and gathering. Sages usually have a little more medic skill. But the real draw is that only a Meeting Hall lets your children grow up to be Scholars or Inventors, and those are very, very strong classes.

I usually get witches first, try to get that as the second or third building I make. Then I usually try to pick up a meeting hall soon after so that in mid-game, I have a chance to get those extremely useful Scholars/Inventors. Plus by then I've usually saved up enough grain that the meeting hall gives +5 Attract Human, which is also nice for rounding out the roster or picking up cannon fodder.

They're both good buildings, and both good classes. If you want to prefer either one over the other, there's good reason for it.

[Hugo]

As a straight out choice - I would prefer the Meeting Hall as well - mainly for the attraction factor and for the inventor class-possibility. Both the Meeting Hall and the Totem has a pretty useless primary function, so you can afford using basic materials to build them.

The downside with the meeting hall is that you will have to spend a research point toward the Well first. While the Well can be very useful (or rather, it often reduces micromanagement by providing food-diversity for cooking which can indeed be very useful on barren or snowy starts) it requires building materials that often are not present in a large quantities early on. Additionally, Spidersilk or Wicker is badly needed for other purposes during early game.

The path toward the totem is perhaps more logical at least during early game. You will need to unlock the smithy first, but that is not a badly spent research point point early on, as an early smithy can be built almost instantly - and entirely by using plain wood - and you will still get the benefits the building provide. (although you will probably want to upgrade it later on).

(I think the smithy is a bit undervalued actually, as unlike many other buildings, which may - or may not - prove to be useful, you cannot help but to benefit from the smithy.)

[peterebbesen]

Totem vs Meeting Hall is an interesting one.

Classes: I prefer Witches over Sages due to their gathering, but the chance to get Inventors and Scholars from the Meeting Hall is not to be ignored as they are strong classes.

Ease of building: Constructing a basic totem is cheap and easy as all that is needed is wood, allowing you to recruit witches early - and getting witches early as gatherers and (hopefully) starting magic users is quite useful. Contructing a basic Meeting Hall is rather expensive by comparison.

Attraction - The Meeting Hall can easily be made to attract both humans (+5) and another race, making it best for general attraction, but Totem is one of the few buildings that can get +2 Elf attraction (which it gets with +3 magic). So it depends on what you are looking for.

Stat bonus: Neither has a bonus good enough that you need to use your best materials to maximize it, so building a basic version or one designed with materials primarily for attraction is the way to go. That said, the Meeting Hall's bonus helps in a lot more town encounters than the Totem's making it more generally useful, but, and there is a big but, if you have two people in town with 5+ magic you open up for Hex solutions which are generally preferable when available.

Since you are likely to have few magic users throughout most of the game and also likely to dedicate most of your +magic equipment to expeditions - multiple Totems is an excellent way of ensuring that everybody in town can participate in Hex contests if playing without the realism setting. That said, most town encounters do not have Hex options, so you should probably only do this if e.g. going for an Elf attraction strategy. But in that case, feel free to build two or three Totems for +6 or +9 magic to all in town and +4 or +6 Elf attraction.

[Kírby]

Thank you all for your posts, and specially peterebbesen. This helped me a lot,
But one thing : I get a witch with the Meetinghall... Dont know thy :D

[dergefata]

With the exception of Scholars and Inventors, you have a *small* chance when a child grows up that they can grow into any class that you would normally need a building in your town to pick. So Medic, Witch, Sage, Hunter are choices that you can get, though only rarely, without the buildings.