Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
I'll post this again since it always works for me and I always win with gold doing this.
Just try until you get it. And yeah this token can be a little tedious but that's because it is very specific in what you have to do leading to samey repetition.
Worst comes to worst and try it after you calm down another day.
The advice I got from Cheeseness is to never let the fort be idle. Always have it be building something. Time is your most important resource and it's easy to waste it.
The biggest p*** take in my opinion is the General Store just south of the fort. It's pretty much useless for this challenge and if you step on it, the Northerners get a free step. That one step can and has been the difference between success and failure for some folks.
My last attempt was the closest I ever got I think, the second I dipped below 500 I concede.
This time I did do that "never idle", or at least tried to, strategy instead of the "get all the resources you need in 1 go", which I never end up with enough food to do.
I had some bad stuff early on: I had to run back to the fort for food early a few times, I had like 2 or 3 failures at the quarry + took 2 tries to find the passage.
It seems pretty rng here: Pendulums are fairly easy as long as I don't get too cocky, I'm usually able to get the the whole light forest in just 2 goes (50+50 for 2 huge success). But the chance cards, even with the best eyes, will have some chance involved unless the one you want stays on top. Even if you narrow it down to a 50/50%, that's still a chance.
If I had got an encounter on the way to the quary that got me some gear and/or a lot more food, things would have had probably gone better. If wasting just this much time trying to get just the min amount or resources I need, I can't imagine exploring around would be a good idea either.
I didn't even go down that bottom track, I just used the bridge and the tunnel; I didn't need to go there, nor did I have the time.
Maybe it is just luck in that case, and if I end up losing that many turns or not having what I need soon enough, I should just forfeit. Ugggg.
But I also think the gold token is both badly signposted and too constricting, in that you really need to execute the entire mission in a very tightly controlled way with a very narrow margin for error. A first time player has virtually no chance of succeeding on gold (unlike a lot of missions), and even after running it a few times and consulting guides, may not know how to get it done.
I don't necessarily know how to fix it. My suggestion would probably be to do the opposite of what the devs did, and *reduce* the number of soldiers required for the token to maybe 350, give or take. That would allow for a greater margin for error on wasted moves or perfect building planning, but still require that the player is moving quickly.
Edit: Out of curiosity I went and replayed this. After one failed attempt while I was remembering how the encounter worked, stepped onto the bridge without getting stone, etc. I finished with 573. I followed Emilio's strategy, except that after getting to the dense woods I only got enough to build the central tower (and the tunnel blockade), went back and built those, then went to collect more. I went back one additional time once the tower was done to start the palisade/gatehouse line, whichever was the first one for that, made note of exactly how many resources I needed, got just that much, then sat in the fort building until it was done. One of the biggest things that may be screwing people up is to never reveal a card that isn't required. You never need to step south of either forest. Once you have collected everything you can go exploring (as long as you are back by the time the building is done), but if you wanted to optimize really hard you can instead intentionally fail at hiding from the northeners over and over along their path to thin their numbers.
I'm curious as to why it didn't work out. I wound up with over 700 and wasn't bothering to fight the patrols to soften them up, so I figured someone else excuting on the same strategy would have a successful outcome even if their implementation differed a little and they explored some face down cards or visited the merchant south of the fort or whatever.
Does the map come out differently for other players? For me you started at the top left, woods below, fort to the right, quarry top right, bridge top middle, land route some appauling curly thing down the left hand side then up and around. I only touched one river for the whole thing, which was directly above the bridge, the others and the light woods were all in a direction that I never had reason to walk. My approach very much suited that geography, but I can see that if the bridge route wasn't dramatically shorter than the land route it wouldn't be the best approach or if the cave route was longest then fortifying it might be a waste of resources.
In terms of having more soldiers the only three things I can think of are
1) The fortifications seem to reduce losses so there might be an optimum build order that takes a few more turns but is front loaded so that the extra attacks are offset by fewer losses per attack
2) Attacking an invading force reduces its numbers, so walking along with one matching it step for step would let you cut out a lot of its people over a relatively large number of battles (but boy it'd be tedious)
3) If you are standing on the fort when a building completes then the game gives you a bonus turn to start a new building in which the enemy forces don't seem to move. I was never calculating my buiild times and routes quite precisely enough to always get this, but you could if you were so inclined.
On a design level I like the lengths the devs have gone to in order to make the different missions feel significantly different. I really enjoyed my first encounter with this one and it was great to be trying a mini wargame thing in context.
I also like it when I don't get a gold on my first try. I want the game to be replayable and to encourage me to come back at levels I've completely and try new things (On this note stuff like the jousting armour token are fantastic! There are so many good design decisions in this game).
Where I think it suffers is replayability, with the approach I eventually used I think I only flipped 2-3 cards other than the fixed scenario ones ('fort 'bridge' 'river' 'quarry' and the two 'wood' cards) until the fort was finished. The scenario makes every card flipped count against you in terms of running out of soldiers, so it encourages you not to flip anything other than what's required for the scenario. So one attempt was almost identical to another, making the replays not tremendously interesting.
If I were inclined to try to fix it I'd broaden the available structures. Instead of needing to build everything, make it necessary to build to a total of 800 defence but have the strcutures add up to 1000 and include a logistics building that requires food, an armoury that requires gold and a statue of you that requires fame - making it more rewarding the flip the other cards and being a bit more forgiving of players who don't 100% optimise the strategy layer in favour of the regular gameplay as well as having it be a bit more replayable.
I guess the reason it didn't work is because I tottally had plenty of situations where the fort *wasn't* building anything, usually because I failed at resource gathering and had to use more tries to get what I needed.
But maybe I also did that wrong: I swear I read to start building the most expensive things first, so even when building was almost done I didn't go back until I had X amount of stone; maybe that was my mistake, I should have gone back and built whatever was the next biggest thing.
And you are absolutely right, it's the replayablity that suffers here. I did find it fun and interesting the first time, and I certainly don't complain that I don't get gold on first try every time, it's all the tedius attempts afterwards. The other challanges that required me many attempts to make gold were just more fun, for reasons I can't really pin down, nor did they take *this many* tries.
And you are right about just ignoring the bottom track. I guess I shouldn't have explored there even when the castle was building and I had all the resources I needed. Maybe trying to create a hybrid (edit: not sure why my first word choice was censored but okay) of both strategies hampered me? Need to pick one and stick to it.
I recommend starting with the most expensive thing you can build that doesn't stop you building the bridge, then the most expensive thing you can afford after 2 hits of the forest and then the msot expensive thing you can afford with however much gathering you can do before the last building is done.
I can see how the resource gathering minigames could be punishing in this regard. If you have a few failures, you might build something cheaper, which means you have less time to gather before the next build, which means you build something event cheaper - which ultimately forces you into a corner when there isn't a cheaper thing and now you have a bunch of dead turns while you gather for the expensive thing.
Maybe if that's the issue the thing to do is to put thomas the ogre, back alleys and illicit trade into your events and all of the pendulum boosting items into the equipment deck and do a few restarts till you get one in the events that are "on the way" to the quarry?
I think with the bottom track the important thing isn't whether the fort is building right now, but whether you have all the resources you need. If you explore while it's building, but run out in 10 turns, then the lost time there could've been saved by not exploring earlier. That being said if the answer to your situation is (for instance) the ring that makes the pendulum beam wider then an extra turns exploring early on might translate into more resources than a turn or two gathering.
Thanks for the big help though! Guess I should expect such knowledge from The Mindsculpter himself though ;)
(and thanks to everyone else too, not just X_Equald_Speed, just pretty cool to hear directly from the people who are the experts themselves!)
My day job is board game designer though, so I spend too much time kicking systems like this scenario to try to see how they work.
Salaried game design is rare, the usual way into the industry is to design a game and pitch it to a publisher. Get rejected. Pitch to another publisher. Rinse and repeat until you realise the game is terrible. Design a better game. Eventually find a publisher who'll take it. Get 5% (ish) of the sales of your game. Realise that's not enough to quit the day job. Either design something that sells like Settlers of Catan or start outputting a game every two months.
There's also a route through Kickstarter and its ilk these days. Be aware that doing things through Kickstarter will make you not only a game designer, but will also make you a games marketer, copy editor, graphic designer, artist, logistics expert and publisher. With the option to hire other people for those skills if you happen to have a lot of free capital you don't mind losing if your project doesn't fund. Some people have done really really well going this route, but it's a mistake to see it as "the easy way"
If you're seriously considering it I'd recommend hopping onto boardgamegeek and asking for advice. It'll be brutal, but there are enough people there who really know their stuff to point you in the right direction.