Guide to Early Gameplay For New Players, Please read, comment and add.
Elemental Forums
Early Gameplay for Elemental Faq version 1.0
December 15, 2010
I wrote this to help new players get used to the new environment of the game for version 1.1 since there are several game mechanic changed that occurred over the beta testing leadin up to this change.
There are usually 2 resources placed near the starting location although there seems to be a 1% random chance of getting extra or different starting resources.
Under the current game economy, the usual seeded resources are 1 Farm, which will provide 4 food for kingdom, and a mana shard of a random element.
The settlement founded by the sovereign starts with a maximum population of 10 people, later settlements started by settlers will have a max population of 5 people.
Population is generated in towns at the rate of the prestige bonus. Towns have a basic +1 prestige plus extra from buildings and hero/sovereign bonus’s through traits and charisma. The hero/sovereign must be stationed in the town to give the charisma prestige boost. The bonus from the royalty trait is kingdom wide.
Population is a resource that serves 2 purposes:
1) Source of gold – every person gives 0.1 gold per turn, 10 people -> 1 gold per turn, which will be modified by buildings and town level modifiers.
2) Resource of people available to work. This shows your available working population. Training people as soldiers takes 1 person. Groups train multiple soldiers into a single unit and take more people.
Buildings require people to run them, for example a workshop uses 5 population, costs 1 gold per turn to maintain and gives you 1 material per turn.
So back to our starting game.
Lying on the ground should be several goody huts, you should send your sovereign around to pick them up since they will give you some choices as to what you can do in the first 25-30 turns of the game.
These are your priorities:
1) get some defense for your town.
2) get gear for your sovereign.
3) build a workshop for materials.
4) build a study for tech research, the first tech you want to research is equipment under warfare to improve your peasants into spearmen with armour.
Now then, the game starts you off with 100 gold and 5 materials. You should pick a spot to start your kingdom within 5 turns of the start. You don’t want to be behind in production from the computer players, but more importantly, you don’t want wild animals and bandits to kill your sovereign.
Usually the first thing I do is get my farm into production in order to get my first hut as quickly as possible. Population drives so many things in the game that you want to hit 15 population fast. This gives you the gold you need to support your first workshop and a few peasants for defense from the wild animals. keep making peasants until you have 6 or so, be sure to buy a spear for your sovereign when your town hits level 2 as this adds some option to what you can buy at the shop. if your town is attacked, tank with your peasants and kill with your spear wielding sovereign and heroes. 3 attacks will usually drain early monsters of action point so they can't counterattack. It's ok if peasants die, they are expendable and you will dismiss them later and replace with spearmen when you can.
During this time your city will hit level 2 and you will get a level up option. You have 4 options: 1) a tech research bonus, 2) an arcane research bonus, 3) a gold bonus, or 4) a defensive unit.
(although I think the defensive unit can move outside of the city if you want to attack with them, and I don’t think they get replaced if they die)
arcane research bonus : It takes so long to get magic going in this game that I find this to be the worst pick early game unless the wild resource for arcane is near the town. This rarely happens, moving on.
tech research bonus: A strong pick if you know your way around the research options to get the tech you want quickly.
gold bonus: A good option if you plan on building your peasants up because everyone needs a paycheque. It will help pay for more buildings later on, very versatile.
defensive unit: These units don’t scale in the game at all, but it can give you a strong defense against the early monsters now that they can join up together and attack your cities. I might take this if I intend to tech up warfare early to tide me over while I push out some high powered single person units early game.
Whether you want to try for a military victory or not it is important to build up a decent military force as the monster spawning will slowly get stronger, the AI might declare war on you, and you will want a stack of heroes with units to hunt monsters for gold and xp.
So Where Do I Go From Here?
From this point on you can go in any direction you want but here are some things to remember:
- Bigger cities are stronger than smaller cities; you need a level 3 city not to make grouped units.
- I recommend making three cities, one specializing in gold, one in tech and one in arcane. Since you can build many of the basic resource buildings over and over you are only limited by the 50 tile limit of a city (some buildings take 4 tiles)
- Should you find a wild resource that you want to take advantage of, such as a gold mine or lost library, it is not unreasonable to slowly collapse a city and move things over to the new location but buildings that are only 1 per faction are lost if they are destroyed, so you can’t move them. Your game will last as long as you want it, 300+ turns, so have fun with it.
Things you will want to find for later in the game.
- a source of metal to pay for higher tech weapons and armour.
- a source of crystal to pay for magic equipment.
I’m sure there are tech’s that will spawn both of these resources for you, Channeling for crystal, and an adventuring tech for metal.
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