So you want to win...

This is a guide with general steps that should help you get to the victory screen consistently.

Warning: Contains spoilers for the game.

Early game.

Without further ado:

1) Early game.

This game won and lost by your advisers. I recommend starting the game either with Warrior or Scout Adviser (scout being best) at a cost of 5 fate dice. This means you won't have any fate dice at the start and that's totally fine. Entire early game is to be played without any fate dice. If you fail here, just restart.
Once the game starts, immediately trade all but black and green dice for fate dice. This should give you 3 fate dice but do not use them at all.
Next steps are highly dependent on events you get, but the general idea is this:

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Whatever you do, you need ALL your advisers to be the highest level possible as soon as possible. That means entire early game is about getting as many fate dice as possible, then hiring highest possible adviser. Advisers generate dice, dice win the game, period.
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You already have green dice adviser, next one should be black dice. Those two advisers are best at generating additional fate dice through quests in the wild: get artifact, sell it. Do not keep any artifacts of 1 or 2 bonus dice. Sell as fast as you get them, generate fate dice, get upgraded adviser.

Don't bother with intermediate advisers, only hire the most expensive one (except yellow dice, 4 yellow dice adviser is just fine)

Sell yellow dice for fate dice as you generate them.

Recommended order is: Green, Black, Red, Blue, Yellow.

Your next goal is: Delay pilgrims at all cost.

- Do not let them settle in the city.
- Allow them to work but not live in the city,
- Do not allow them to build temple in the city.
- Ignore first request to destroy the temple.
- Agree to destroy the temple on the second attempt.
- You can wait a turn or two, but then destroy the temple.

Mid Game.

Now you should have 5 best advisers you can get. Play the game as you normally would with following focus: You need at least 3 cities allied to you.

First one get through marriage (force advisers to marry, you will lose some but it's irrelevant as you already have the best).
Other two of your choice: do spy missions, then diplomacy. You want black market as well as trade to be as high as you can get in as many cities as you can get.

Get to neutral state with all cities asap. Do NOT fight any wars. Fighting a war, even if you win, will likely delay your development too much and reward is minimal.

Quests in the wild serve to get artifacts to upgrade your advisers (+2 or +3 dice bonus is fine) even if you get better one by 1 dice, sell it. Now you need as many fate points as you can get for re-rolls.

Don't bother upgrading your city, you will not need more than 15 dice until very late game and if you have 15 dice stored, use them.

Events can help or hinder, the only way to be successful with them is to learn what those events do and always pick the correct choice (for the current state of your dice).

As a general rule, always use at least 2-3 dice more than opponent. This should give you around 75-80% win chance. Sometimes you will lose, and that's where re-rolls come in. Do not lose any advisers, you won't be able to recover from it.

At some point, you will be given event to destroy the temple. You can delay it a bit, but when asked second time proceed with temple destruction. This will initiate a timed race against the opposing faith.

You will likely have only one alliance at this point, so your goal is to get allied with at least two cities before the other two cities are converted to enemy's faith.

End game.

As you getting closer to getting three alliances and enemy faith is getting closer to taking over two cities, do the following:

- Build barracks in your city allowing you to store 30 black dice. Other dice are unnecessary but if you want you can build improvement to green and red. Ignore yellow and blue improvements.
- Start stockpiling black dice. You'll need 25-30 dice by the time two enemy cities declare war on you.
- Stockpile other dice but don't be afraid to use them as needed. You will need 20+ red dice and 20+ greed dice (more the better) after the war is over and about 15 yellow dice.
- Once both cities are converted to enemy faith, war will be declared.
- Sit tight and let them attack you. You get 2 (or 3) bonus dice when defending in your city. They will attack with 10-12 dice which you should easily defeat.
- Don't attack the cities at this point.
- The dice send to attack you are subtracted from remaining dice of the city, so attacking them now will drain your dice and leave you open to counterattack.
- Instead, spend two turns generating black dice by any means necessary (roll or buy them, trade or black market). You should have 25+ dice by the time second attack comes.
-After the second attack (and depending on how much you infiltrated the cities with red missions), there might only be 6-10 dice left in each city.
- You can let cities attack you again if they have enough dice, leaving them virtually undefended, or if you have a sizable amount of dice left, you can attack one or both of them.
- At this point, crushing them is inevitable.

Once you control all 5 cities, you have 6 turns before the game ends.

If you paid attention, you should have 20+ red dice, which will allow you to easily complete the red mission in the final city (you can commit all of them, you will not need red dice again).

Next turn, use your stockpiled or purchased yellow dice to discover the location of the ritual (commit all of them, you will not need yellow dice again)

When asked if you should mobilize your army or send scouts to kill the leader, pick scouts. You should have 30+ dice at this point (commit all of them, you won't need green dice again).

Finally, during all this time you should be stockpiling black dice, get as many as you can as it is the final roll of the game.

Victory.

[Galdred]

I now win consistently, and I fully agree with needing best advisors ASAP.
I usually go Blue (for trade, as each trade route is +1 die/level/turn), Black (because you want to be able to wage early wars), Green, Red, Yellow.
I try to get one neighbour to go to war against me as soon as I get 4 black dice advisor. I find it eaiser to diplo 2 othercities, conquer 2 (one before cult, one after), and get the last one depending on what's available.

I like starting conciliatory for early trade route, and because I find conciliatory answers to fit my needs most of the time, but merciless is also good (because it works with delaying/removing cult).

Note that diplomacy becomes useless end game. I usually convert diplomacy guy into another black dice guy (just by putting some +black items on him, I don't bother replacing him).

[AlexTheRussian]

I typically start either bold or merciless as it generates green/black dice, but choosing any other should be fine as long as you played through enough to know the correct choices for that style. Style changes the events you get and your responses to them, so there is no optimal choice.

[Nobody]

Which style is better with this strategy? Bold, merciless or conciliatory?

Ps: thanks for the guide, this game is really hard.

[Zhein]

It's better to sell everything in the first few turns, even green and black, and ignore quests.

You get a fate point for 5 dices, but even first level quests require 6 or more dices, so it's better to sell them at this point. This means starting the second turn you have 2 5-points advisors.

Then later when you need 6 or 7 dices for fate you can start doing quests, but by this point it doesn't matter, you have a full roster.

[54mCr4p5]

Great! Thank You