v0.62 optimal defensive start

How to start the game and not lose (pay) to raiders. Basic version.

The Guide part 1

Map Selection
Take dondorians, take a huge map (more area to look at) and put raids at whatever you want. This guide works well for 25% or below, so far for me.

Once in the map looking for a home, I highly recommend for beginners (and for this guide), to take temperate zones with high fertility. Nothing else matters really, though for long term results you are going to want an iron ore deposit and a coal deposit, in close proximity to each other, both with very high % tiles (like dont settle for less than 80% bare minimum). It's not really important tho, just makes you less dependent on trading. Ditto for clay, stone, plenty of trees (fertile map but you can get robbed here), and eventually gems/sithilion ore. Whatever. Water proximity doesn't matter at all because wells are stupid cheap and fishing is awful in the early game (as are most industries). Its good to pick a spot close to both forest and stone though for this guide. Dont make your dudes walk too far early on or you are going to suffer. A huge part of this game is pathing efficiency.

Starting Out
You will be building a small grid of 10x10 buildings (including walls, so 8x8 when you draw them with the tool) seperated by 2-tile roads, though feel free to put a few 3-tile roads crossing the grid in places. I like to draw the road grid out in the very beginning using the planning tool, then later fill it in as needed. Make the grid about 5x5 to 6x6 in terms of number of buildings, and put it close to trees and close to your best ore deposits (the latter is for later in the game, after the guide).

If you are smart, you will build the grid such that your throne room building can be repurposed into a new building. In other words, build the roads so that one of the northern corners of this building are right up against an intersection.

First Building
All the other guides telling you to build a warehouse first are stupid and wrong. Sorry guys, but what are you going to put in your warehouse that is so important? Nothing, that's what. I will tell you what's important in this game: furniture. And lots of it. Thats why you picked dwarves I mean dondarians ok I mean dwarves and so does the dev who is he kidding. Anyhow..

Build an 8x8 carpentry building. Im not gonna explain where in the grid, you can come up with your own design optimizations. (protip: you want a lot of industrial production buildings right next to a central warehouse that holds building resources, but dont build that warehouse yet). You are dwardarians so build the carpentry building out of stone. Dondwarvarians love stone, because dwarves i mean dumdarians. Keeping your people happy is almost exactly as important as not screwing up your pathing routes. So build it out of stone. Most likely you wont have enough stone or wood at some point soon, so also highlight a SMALL close-by area with "clear all" that contains stone and wood. Your dudes will go collect if they run out while building. This is far more efficient than them idling until you find out you forgot to tell them to not be retarded.

Once you hit unpause, you will get some immigration. Take dwarves, humans, and I find no problem with this guide to take cretonians as well. You will need as many people as possible. A huge part of this game is maximizing immigration. Dont take races that kill each other. Its a giant hamstring on your early game.

As soon as the building is done, put five of your dwarves to work. No more. They will work here forever. In general, try to make all of your job appointments permanent. So. Congratulations on your first IKEA, hope you like it, this game loooooves IKEAS. Did you know the dev is Swedish? Anyhow... Don't worry about where the chairs are stacking up for now.

Second Building
Start building an Eatery. Build it out of whatever you want. Also 8x8 (protip: ALWAYS maximize the number of workers you can cram into this space, while at the same time ensuring 100% efficiency - i like to shoot for whole integer number of workers too, because you cant have 0.2 dwarvdondorians in a building but there might be some fringe cases where thats optimal, its not important. As soon as the eatery is done, put it on pause. You dont have anything to serve here because its still early spring and therefore you dont have any food to cook. PS cretorians make the best cooks, you let some of those pink vegan wimps in your town, right? PPS they look like orcs. Because they basically are except plot-twist they hang out on twitter and reddit all day instead of ravaging the hillsides, but whatever, there's another orc race who covers the violence. Anyhow.

You are building an eatery because you want to staff it as soon as you have food, because food is happiness and happiness is immigration and a big part of this game after minimizing pathing is maximizing immigration. But you dont have food yet as I said, so deactivate the building.

Third building
NOW you build a warehouse. Finally. I like to make it out of wood, because cretorians are only good for a few jobs whereas duergarians and humans have more important things to do, so the pink pig people can be your menial labor. And cretorians like wood. That means I dismantle part of the throneroom walls, and rebuild out to an 8x8 area, and save myself all that extra work not that it matters immensely. I like this building to be at the edge of my settlement because food comes from outside for now. Deactivate this building if you were efficient and it finished building before summertime.

Summer time
Right about now it should be hitting first day of summer. Put 1 pig to work in the warehouse, and make it a food warehouse. Also allow it to collect cotton and opiates. Go ahead and highlight a fair amount of close by food (dont bother with the whole map its over-kill for now), and once some food trickles in to your inventory, put another pig to work in the eatery. Make sure you pick a lot of mushrooms by the way, your bois love mushrooms.

Next buildings Getting that eatery up is going to give you the biggest possible happiness bonus for now. Keep taking immigrants from your chosen races. Then build a hunter shack with space for two workers (pigs). I like to stick it right on a pig-longhouse, saves on building materials which saves on time, and saving time in the early game is a big part of getting ahead of the curve. If you are good at pathing efficiency, you placed your hunter at the edge of town, your food warehouse one square in, and your eatery one more square in, all in a line. But I didn't tell you until now because I only reward people who either figure it out themselves or read the manual first.

After those buildings are operational, put in one square of apartments for humans (only as many as you need), and one square of apartments for dwarves. If you space them out you can fit 8 apartments in a minecraft-circle around a central well, all inside the 10x10 grid space. Human housing should go away from your industry buildings, dwarves right up next to it. An IKEA, for example I could have picked any other industry but IKEAs just popped in my mind, an IKEA radiates noise out exactly covering the nearest neighbor squares in your grid, in another bigger minecraft circle. Convenient. Anyhow.

Next to the food warehouse, one square over, build an hearth, an export center, and an import center. There is just enough room for the throne if you want, but later its better to put a speaker here. Whatever. Once the import center is open, put a pig to work selling opiates and cotton, and eventually meat once you have a lot of it (its best to keep food surpluses because surplus = happiness and you can see where we are going with that).

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The Guide, part 2

The First Laboratory
Get this building going as soon as you can (once the others are completed and operational). Build it out of stone cuz humans love stone. It should finish pretty quickly, and you should find you have just about enough chairs (furnitures) to stock it as it completes building. I can usually get this up sometime in the fall, if you make it just before winter you are good. IMMEDIATELY put all humans, and ONLY humans, to work in here.

The Strategy
Continue to accept humans until you have 17 of them. 16 go to work in the labs, 1 oddjobs until another human goes crazy, then replace him. Hire 9 pigs, put them to work in menial labor. Take the rest as dwarves until you have 49 citizens.

Research lavatories and build one. (pig of course), enjoy the happiness boost. Use wood and stone access to make your people happier, but dont give out furniture yet (you will need a stockpile for other buildings) or extra food (you lose as much happiness due to low surplus it seems as you gain).

Build a wood and stone warehouse eventually next to your IKEA and allow other resources like leather and furniture and things you produce. Dont allow ores you will build a warehouse for that when you finally get to mining, after your first victory over raiders.

Research a smithy next and build it the second you have the tech- max 6 people needed but dont activate it until you unlock weapons, then start making weapons. In the meantime, you should have been selling cotton, opiates and meat. You can sell leather too, but it comes in handy later so I like to stockpile it. IMPORT METAL. DO NOT HOARD MONEY spend it as soon as you can on metal (or occasionally clothes if you need them: happiness) Just keep importing metal.

So here is the deal, you can either coast at 49 people and flesh out your town in safety, or you can pump your population as fast as possible. The game is currently broken if you get invaded too early, so gaming it at 49 isnt really cheating in my view, but who cares what I think. Do what you want. Once you have a smithy built, research weapons, followed by armor. And make them using your metal imports. Make 20 swords first, followed by 20 armors. Yes I wrote this part twice because its doubly important.

If you coast, dont bother building thick walls, its kind of a waste of time at first. Also lol raiders will tunnel thru mountains so yeah, dont expect a giant literal mountain of granite to be any kind of reasonable defense against invaders. Especially since you cant build fortifications in mountain tiles (lolwut). Sadly. Just get your smithy running and your stockpiles going.

The moment you hit 100 people, you unlock training (this will change in the next update). Build a training grounds building that can take 20 dwarves and immediately put 20 dwarves to full time training. Give them weapons and armor if you have them stockpiled already.

You should also build a couple catapults (they shoot in a 90 degree cone centered directly forward, that is to say they can aim at most 45 degrees to either side of the front of the machine), and you should build them so they aim towards the path of most likely approach.

Usually you will get raiders to pop at some point here, in most of my games I am starting training at least by the time this happens. When they first come, you have like a stupid amount of time to prepare, we are talking a couple in-game years I believe. So dont panic. Just train your guys.

Then they will come and they will send about 10 people and a catapult. Your bois should be fully trained and armed in most situations by now (especially if you coast at 49 dudes for a little bit), and I gotta say, the first time you defeat them is pretty f-ing anticlimactic.


Dont bother with archers by the way. It takes just a completely stupid amount of time to build the bows (you need them for both the archery range and to equip, lol) and for some reason, you have to train them in melee first before they will learn ranged BECAUSE REASONS so its just a giant waste of time for your first wave of raiders. 20 well trained dwarves with swords will ruin the first raider wave and after that, its just a matter of keeping ahead of the curve.


For later game, get masonry (tho its waaaay faster and easier to import the blocks omg this game right now) and unlock better roads. Because pathing efficiency. Only research the lab upgrade after you have three labs built and staffed. Then it is worth it. Also once you finally get into mining, all the efficiency upgrades really stack up big time and are definitely worth it.

[Magicalmarrow01]

mmm. sorry, but excuse me for a second.... RAIDERS!!!!!!!

[daggaz]

Apartments in v62 dont need walls for isolation etc (or rather they come with their own skinny walls already included). Not sure if that is changed either for v63, last I read the Dev said he didnt intend to change that, though there was a LOT of feedback so maybe he changed his mind.

[tim.ltp]

Hi daggaz, could you post a screenshot or sth? It would really help. I am on v63 now. Each apartment takes 3x3 as interior. And 8 apartments means 72 cells. And you mentioned 4x4 space in the center (16 cells). That means we have 10x10-72-16=12 cells/walls? That's not possible with good isolation.
I understand the circle-ish layout you are suggesting but how did you place wall without going out the 10x10 grid?

[daggaz]

tim, leave a 4x4 space in the center (for a well or whatever). top left corner put one apartment. skip a tile space to the right of it and put two more apartments adjacent to eachother along the top edge. do the same along the left edge, again leaving a single tile space below the first apartment.
now put three adjacent apartments in the lower right corner, one above the corner flat, one to the left. you now have a 4x4 courtyard, with a single wide sidewalk crossing in both the north/south and east/west directions.

[tim.ltp]

How the heck did you fit 8 apartments in a 10x10 grid!?

[KLAP]

This guide chose violence and I can feel the author reprimanding my spaghetti-esque logistical decisions. 11/10 would get yelled at through a guide again

[daggaz]

Dondorians are important as a starter race because you want to get into IKEA production ASAP and they get a good bonus. Later on you can mold your population demographics anywhere you like, this initial choice has zero ramifications on the late game unfortunately.

The second your lab is running, you will find that humans flock to your city by the way. Humans love some scientific tinkering, apparently.

[daggaz]

By the way, the 8x8 building size is important because early game you just dont have the manpower to staff anything larger, and larger buildings cost too much resources which just wastes time. Wasting time in the early game puts you behind the exponential growth curve. Dont do it.