The God’s Guide to Macro

Overview

A magical guide on how to use the media to control your plebians. This guide adds on to the in-game tutorial, providing (relatively) detailed info on buildings, strategy and how to play at a level higher than mill spam!

Welcome!

Greetings fellow human, and welcome to an extensive guide (compared to the other 0 guides, anyway) to the basics of iubes.

This guide will go over the different aspects of the game, including the new things about Iubes 2, the new resources and buildings, as well as some ideas on strategy and the importance of friendship.

Just as a quick heads up, despite the game being called Iubes, I tend to refer to the units as ‘plebs’, since it’s too much effort to type Iubes out every time and, to be honest, I find it to be rather funny. Also, this guide assumes that you’ve already completed the tutorial (which is offered to you the first time you open the game and under the help menu).

Disclaimer and other similar things

• Obviously, I am not the top player in the game, nor am I one of the best. There are also one or two aspects of the game which I am still not 100% familiar with. With that in mind, I am completely open to improving this guide as much as possible.
• This is a fairly detailed but not very advanced guide. Anyone using this guide should be open to finding better strategies, tips and tricks than are shown here.
• This guide is incomplete and so is missing things like pictures to make it a little easier on the eyes. I’m getting to it, don’t worry.
• Praise our lord and saviour Coderer for a very unique and fresh take on the strategy genre.

Iubes 1 vs 2

• Time is now locked during play (I believe to roughly 4x). That being said, pausing the game (esc) will slow and eventually stop the passage of time, giving you time to think.
• You can demolish buildings
• There is no longer a day/night cycle (RIP cemeteries ;-;)
• Playing against player’s clones online throws you into a map screen, giving you an option to fight against one of six players as you party around.
• Buildings now have limits as to how many can be built (IE you can have up to 10 houses, so you need to build barracks, the inn replacement, to reach above 100 pop)
• A new resource, gold, has been added, with it’s own fun late game shenanigans

• You can now see every building in the queue!
• Plebs don’t dance on top of buildings which they can’t find the resources to complete.

Resources

There are 6 resources in Iubes 2, each having differing requirements to obtain. All buildings require a combination of these resources, and many buildings are locked behind these resources, so knowing how and when to gain access to these resources is vital in optimising your empire.

Equivalent to clay in Iubes 1, plebs summon sand using the power of friendship or something like that. There are no requirements for sand, other than the time it takes to add to buildings.

Trees randomly appear on the non-buildable rough terrain (always raised in comparison to buildable land) at the start of the match and slowly reappear every now and then.

There is no special requirement to gaining wood, but since it relies on plebs collecting from trees, having rough terrain (and trees) nearby to your constructions will boost the speed of creating the wood part of a building.

Water is sort of everywhere on the map, always available on the whirlpools(sides of the map) and is often placed inland aswell.

Plebs use it to build much like with wood, except that water never depletes, so having just one water tile is effective enough when building with it.

The first resource you’ll encounter which requires a building to obtain (Stone pit, in this case).

Any construction which needs stone will require plebs to move to the nearest stone pit, spend time collecting it, and then moving back. With this in mind, placing stone pits near where you’re constructing a stone-reliant building greatly reduces construction time.

The second building-locked resource, requiring an iron forge to be obtained.

In order for plebs to gain iron, they must collect stone from a stone pit and process it at an iron forge. Therefore keeping the stone pit near the forge and the forge near iron-reliant buildings is vital for efficient construction.

The final building-locked resource, relying on a gold foundry to obtain.

To obtain gold, plebs must walk to the nearest gold ore deposit and take the ore to the gold foundry to process it. The gold ore is placed in dents within land (of differing colours), but the gold ore itself is only one or two tiles across.

The Basics of Strategy

Iubes is a very interesting RTS in the sense that macromanagement is king. APM and other fancy micro is completely useless, so those arriving with experience from RTS’s like Starcraft, DotA/LoL, etc will get a bit of a shock.

That being said, since micromanagement doesn’t exist it’s also very easy to pick up and play at a decent level if you can think and adapt to the differing maps, so with this in mind, let’s get into the thinking part!

To make things a bit easier, i’m going to break everything down into fairly simple points in order of importance.

1. Have as many plebs on the field as possible, as fast as possible
   • plebs are the guys who do everything for you, including building, farming, slaughtering your enemies at your whim, etc.
   • If you run out of them, you lose, so don’t run out of them 😛
   • if you have substantially more than your opponent, your chances of winning skyrocket.

2. Sacrifice all of your opponent’s plebs to the blood god
   • Much like how you lose if all of your plebs explode, the enemy will too.
   • Your plebs will naturally wonder around and pick fights with other plebs, thinning out eachother’s population.
   • sending alot of your plebs to attack lets you kill eachother alot. This is why having more plebs than the enemy is so important.

Seems pretty simple, and ultimately it is. At some point, you must fight your enemy, but you can approach this at any point in the match that you have the advantage. Keep to your strengths, Adapt against the enemy’s weaknesses, and you’ll win most matches.

The build queue needs to be managed very carefully. Too many, and everything gets built so slowly that you waste the resources you could get by completing the buildings one at a time. Too little, and half of your plebs will begin idling, and otherwise being useless.

To balance this, my instinctual queuing leads to a certain method:

1. Limit yourself to one building in the queue
2. Once you build your second house or so, increase that limit to 2 buildings
3. Afterwards, if your personal queue is full, and more than 20% of your iubes are idle, increase your limit by 1.

As you learn to play, you’ll develop your own preference, but this is a good place to start. After the first few buildings you want to have at least a few idle plebs to collect food from trees and such.

What NOT to do

• Building more than two houses initially. While it’s cool that you’ve got more pleb space, it’s just space unless if you either do nothing or build farms. Because of that, unless if you’ve got a very strange start or strategy, having more than one or two houses before building farms slows down your economy’s development, which can be devistating early on.
• Building fields instead of farms early on. Fields are 4x more expensive to compensate for the 2x increase in food. In other words, given you have the same amount of idle plebs messing around, building 4 farms takes the same time as building a single field, and produces 2x more food overall. Coupled with a granary, the 4 farms will have at least 2.8x the output in comparison to a single field with a granary.
• Building amill instead of granary early on. If you do this, you’ve wasted 5 minutes which could have gotten you more plebs to build it before the 5 wasted minutes are up. It costs too much for an early economy.
• Building towers early on. 4 plebs being taken up doesn’t seem like much, unless you’ve got a pleb population of 30 and you’ve built 4 outposts. Towers by nature hit your economy slightly, so don’t use them unless you are confident your economy will be fine without them.
• AFK’ing for 30 seconds before starting. Get a house planned first, then get dinner. It’s a lot of time early on.
• Don’t build 6 warriors when you only have 60 population. Please, learn from my mistakes ;_;

  But basically, don’t lock your plebs into the military when they’d do better building more pleb storage.

Starting Strategy

Here’s how I tend to start every match before branching out in different directions. I so far haven’t found any issue with using it and it’s given me many a win before, so feel free to steal it!

• You will start with 2 totems.
• 5 plebs will appear at one of these totems.
• You want more plebs.
• You want the enemy to not have plebs.
• The camera begin above the plebs and lower.

That’s about it. You will not have enough time to scout for practically any resources for the first few seconds. With this in mind…

Basically, press H, wait for the camera to almost finish panning down, and click on/near the totem.

This accomplishes two things:

• Your plebs will have less time to run away and thus less time to travel back and start slaving away at the house.
  • In a grand majority of cases there will be nearby areas for more farming space, but if you’re concerned about a particular map it won’t hurt to look.

• You get a good 15/20 seconds to look around for potential places to look for your inital farming area (as open as possible, with some trees nearby), for your barracks, and for your military.
  • I myself place my barracks(es) next to/inside my military area, saving time by building a single quarry for both, and stressing me out less when scouting out land. I have seen players place them apart and together, and I’ve found that those who place them apart safely and efficiently work just as well(and sometimes better) as placing them together.

When the house is almost built, build a single farm on the edge of your newly allocated farming area. Once all of your plebs are busy building that, queue a house.

In this case, the plebs will work on the farm until wood is needed, and then one pleb will go make another pleb in your first house. These two plebs will likely begin working on the second house as the farm is almost complete.

Then, whenever you feel like it (hopefully before your plebs become idle), build two more farms, to continue on the creation of your food economy. Add another house to the queue, and chill for a bit.

when your third farm is nearly finished, begin building a granary to double your food output. Keep in mind that plebs need to run to the granary once they’ve harvested their farm, so try to place it in a place which can be surrounded by lots of farms.

After this, your goal is to hit the 10 house mark, and reach 80 or so plebs as quickly as possible, which means maximising food output while allowing space for plebs to replicate. This stage is more so an instinctual exercise, where you have to balance out house and farm construction depending on how you think the map can handle it. In general, get a feel for how quickly plebs are being made. If you’re about to run out of space, build houses, and vice versa for farms.

Upon hitting the 70-75 pleb mark, go to the area where you want your barracks to be and place a stone pit down. You can also choose to place the barracks straight away, since if plebs can’t get the stone straight away they will go and do something else for a while (keep in mind that you won’t be able to do this currently due to the building lockouts).

Once you’ve got your barracks(es) building, your options are a bit more open:

If your opponent is behind you in population, you may be able to push your farming further and start building warriors, inhibiting their economy while letting your own take it’s time. Feel free to pursure it on your own accord or, once I create it, refer to the Rush Strategy section.

If your opponent is similar in pleb count to you, creating warriors will be fairly ineffective due to your pleb count and farming output, and so the only real option is to make your army better by going for the long haul. This includes maxing out your population and food output, and pushing for the biggest and most powerful army possible. Again, you can try going for it yourself or referring to The Agrarian Strategy section once I’ve completed it.

If your opponent is stronger than you at this point, then you have to keep a careful eye on them. If they have warriors being built early on, get ready to build some towers to keep them at bay. If they’re boosting their economy, it would be smart to build up your economy a bit further and then create pyromancers and warriors to try and stop their growth. You can alternatively grow your economy with them if you think you can outdo them.

[WIP] Strategy: Agrarian

Alright, so now you’ve got your little economy up and running, as with theirs, so it’s time to make yours better faster!

By this point you should have at least one barracks being built. Now you have to look at your opponent. If they’re building towers and no warriors OR they’re slightly behind you (whether building warriors or no), start building your military sector. When i say start, i mean start: build a single warriors. By the time it’s finished, you’ll have enough food to support their creation, and it means that you’ll have a headstart on your military for later on. This is the path I go in a grand majority of cases.

If your opponent is building warriors, it’s your choice. You can choose to build towers if you’re willing to sacrifice some trees and plebs, or you can join in on the warrior train too. Placing towers isn’t too complicated: Keep them near a source of wood, and place them to take space, rather than right next to your farms. This gives you more space to build, and it also means that you can delay pyromancers if they become a threat to your economy.

Farms

MORE FARMS

Basically, make sure your houses are finished, get to building barracks, and capping out on farms. At first, it will be too difficult to replace your first granary with a mill, since your plebs will be working on barracks. With that in mind, you will cap out on food for a bit. That’s ok. Every time you build a barracks, it will clear out in 2 seconds.

When you finish your second or third barracks, you should have enough idle plebs to destroy your granary and build a mill in it’s place (by right clicking on the granary and pressing the ‘destroy’ button). This will bump up your food production further, increase food storage and (if you’ve got the “everything’s locked” option enabled) allows the construction of fields. However, make sure your farm building cap has been reached before doing this so that your food production is somewhat independent while the mill is being built.

Yes, unfortunately you can’t win most matches by smothering your opponent with all this food you’ve made.

When you’re finishing your last barracks or two, start building an iron forge and another couple of warriors in your military area. Then, build an armoury and some more warriors, and then more warriors. put a pyromancer down; two if they’ve decided to tower it out. Did i forget to mention more warriors?

Basically, you want to smother your enemy with blobs of fed armoured warriors rather than food. The only thing that can survive 100 armoured warriors is another 100 armoured warriors.

In the meantime, however, take a look at your opponent’s military buildings. If they’re out in the open for some reason, it’s the perfect time for pyromancers. Since the ai pattern won’t rebuild buildings, if you can get in and destroy a couple of warriors early, that permanently affects the enemy’s military.

If they’ve locked themselves in, you still want to build pyromancers, but place them on the edge of your empire, facing their undefended side. Get some warriors, and if the side is still undefended, bye bye eceonomy.

[WIP] Strategy: Bulldozing

[WIP], I will be getting back to this once I finish the building glossary.

Advanced Military

So as mentioned before, the objective of Iubes is to:

1. Don’t lose all of your plebs
2. Force your opponent to lose all of his

This can be expanded much further, of course. You could say that, for example, there are ways to prevent your enemy from making plebs. Let’s consider occupation.

• When two groups of warriors meet, they tend to try and mob onto eachother but otherwise they sit there, not letting anything past. I will refer to this as a frontline.
• When a frontline forms, since nothing near them can pass onto the other side, they have occupied the area behind them and any area which they cut off.
• If an occupied area has opposing buildings of function, that function cannot be performed in that area. For example, if that occupied area consists of farms an a granary, plebs can’t work the farms else they will be killed by warriors.
• If you can occupy a vital part of their territory, they lose functions necessary to make more military or plebs, and if they can’t reclaim it, they lose the function permenantly. For example:
  1. I have 30 warriors vs their 10 warriors, followed by some farms and a mill, and then an outpost behind that.
  2. I easily beat the 10 warriors, then I begin to attack the enemy plebs on the farms
  3. Once they’re defeated, I can’t pass the outpost since it will soon be reinforced by warriors. However, they have no plebs on their farms and they are behind my frontline
  4. They will lose the ability to farm, and so they have to rely on their food storage to either take the farm back or run out of food, run out of military and i can take the outpost and win the match.

Frontlines can be static or dynamic. Towers and outposts create static frontlines, and warriors/knights dynamic ones. One can support the other given the right conditions.

Get Into Multiplayer!

Each spot on the map is the game’s estimation on the strategies and tendencies of a player in their most recent successful match. You can try to beat them as many times as you want without penalty to move across the map.

Your goal is to capture all four of the points on the map and then defeat the middle tile to claim victory as the king of Iubes!

If you lose against a player, jump into the match as many times as you feel like, even spend a match just staring at their clone building stuff, pointing out weaknesses or stealing their build orders.

Otherwise…

Get out there and enjoy Iubes!

Don’t be afraid to jump into multiplayer, as losing barely penalises you and there’s people of many different strategies and levels to play with.

Find your own optimal strategies, and work to them or adapt them to your needs, it’s up to you.

If you have any suggestions or feedback for this guide, feel free to share it! I’m not that scary to talk to online 😛

Glossary:

Buildings (Population, Food, Resources)

[Care, this is still a WIP, but it’s on top of the priority list!]

You can search for any heading by pressing ctrl + f and typing ‘_headingName’

House
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: H
Resources

Use
Increases max population by 10
Cheapest of the two pleb sources, requiring only time to create it. This is almost always the very first building one will build in a math

Barracks
Max 5 at one time
Hotkey: B
Resources

Use
Increases max population by 40
It is alot more expensive than the house, so like the upcoming field it is not recommended you build this until your economy is up and running.
Due to the imposed limit on buildings, you require barracks to increase your population past 100, up to 300.

Farm
Max 30 at one time
Hotkey: F
Resources

Use
While a pleb is working on it, generates 10 food rougly every 6 seconds
1/4 the building time vs the field, with 1/2 the productivity per pleb/tile. While you have alot of space and plebs to spare until later on, these are the ones to go for.

Field
Max 30 at one time
Hotkey: Shift + F
Resources

• Additionally costs 209 Water

Use
While a pleb is working on it, generates 20 food per rougly 6 seconds
The more expensive field option, but it is both more space efficient and pleb efficient. Get these once you need to push the food supply that extra mile.

Granary
Max 5 at one time
Hotkey: G
Resources

Use
Every time a pleb works a farm cycle, they will walk to the closest granary if nearby and obtain an extra 15 food. This effect is mutually exclusive with the mill’s effect.
This will more than double your pleb’s farming efforts, and so after the third farm it becomes more efficient to place the granary before creating any more farms. Therefore, grab this ASAP

Mill
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: M
Resources

Use
Every time a pleb works a farm cycle, they will walk to the closest mill if nearby and obtain an extra 30 food. This effect is mutually exclusive with the granary’s effect.
The mill will double or quadruple the output of your fields/farms. This is very powerful later on when you need a constant influx of food to maintain your empire. However, early on farms + granaries can usually sustain you with few problems (not to mention they’re MUCH cheaper).

Stone Pit
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: S
Resources

Use
Allows plebs to collect stone.
The stone pit is needed for any building that requires stone, and so is usually built once your initial economy is up and running. Keeping the stone pit close to the reliant buildings reduces pleb walking time, and thus decreases build time.

Iron Forge
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: I
Resources

Use
Allows plebs to process collected stone into iron.
The iron forge is required for any building reliant on iron, and so is almost always built before those buildings begin construction. Since iron is processed from stone, keeping the stone pit and forge close together can reduce pleb walking time.

Gold Foundry
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: O
Resources

Use
Processes gold ore found across the map into gold.
It is very rare that a matchup will require gold, unless if a match is neck and neck for at least 15 minutes (which is difficult, to say the least).
Gold ore is found on every map, generally as a black, icy or, well, gold, crater. Keeping the Foundry near to the ore reduces pleb walking time, and therefore increased collection speed. The gold foundry doesn’t need any wood, so it’s building speed is dependent on a stone pit and iron forge alone.

Buildings (Offense, Defence, Utility)

Warriors
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: W
Resources

Use
Each Warriors building allows for up to 10 plebs to be converted into warriors, for 50 food each.
This is the cheapest unit in your military and will likely be the most popular one. Use them to either disrupt your opponent’s economy if you’ve got the upper hand or delay their military if they’re ahead. Keep in mind that you’ll need a high throughput of food to keep up with dying warriors.

Pyromancers
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: P
Resources

Use
Each Pyromancers building allows for up to 10 plebs to be converted into building nukers, for 100 food each.
Though useless when alone (due to being eaten by enemy warrior and pleb alike), when supported by warriors, even 10 pyromancers can tear down an unprotected village, and given time can destroy defences aswell. Use these when the enemy’s economy and defence are well-developed to the point where warriors alone can’t kill them off.

Knights
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: K
Resources

Use
Good question.
Each Knights building allows for up to 10 plebs to be converted into sissies behind the front line, for 100 food each.
I’m not 100% myself, but I believe they attack warriors directly and effectively. They don’t attack anything else, so using knights by themselves is fairly useless.

Armory
Max 5 at one time
Hotkey: A
Resources

Use
Forces all of your military to move to it, and then gives them all 50% more health!
Effectively, the armory decreases food usage by keeping your military alive and increasing their fighting prowess. It also acts as a rally point, so placing it in the front lines is a possiblity(though I haven’t tried it myself, so looking for clarification it’s maximum range).

Catapult
Max 3 at one time
Hotkey: C
Resources

Use
Turns 10 of your plebs into catapult cultist members, reloading and nuking enemy outposts and towers
I have never used these in a match (since I have yet to meet someone who uses 12 outposts as their defence) but these are potentially useful against a stubborn defence. Pyros tend to do fine for the most part, though, so use them before the catapult, if possible.

Tower
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: T
Resources

Use
Puts 4 plebs on a nice position, increasing their health and (To be confirmed) increases their attack range.
This can be very useful early on to deter the enemy from taking trees that are rightfully yours, but be careful about using these early on, since 4 plebs out a population of 20 being taken out is a major debuff to your economy.

Outpost
Max 10 at one time
Hotkey: Shift + T
Resources

Use
Puts 8 plebs on a nice position, greately increasing their health and increasing their range
This outpost alone can hold back a small army of warriors, but it’s cost of 8 plebs can be devistating early on, not to mention its massive stone cost, locking a lot of plebs into working on it. Use these if you’re behind on building your military or economy but don’t want to die in the process.

Totem
Max 3 EVER, 2 are already built
Hotkey: L
Resources

Use
Increases health of (I’m assuming) all pleb types by 10% per totem, and causes plebs to actively attack enemies in the area.
You already start with two totems, and if they get destroyed, you can’t rebuild them. That being said, the 10% bonus to health and the benefit of using spare plebs as meatshields and spare builders are very both very useful, and so placing your third one in an area where you have isolated buildings is very useful.

Water Tank
Max 2 at one time
Hotkey: R
Resources

• Additionally costs 390 Water

Use
Allows plebs to repair buildings that have been damaged but not destroyed.
This is useful if the enemy has suicide pyros or catapults taking potshots at your outposts. Otherwise, if half of your farms are gone, then you’ve pretty much lost 😀

Sanatorium
Max 2 at one time
Hotkey: R
Resources

Use
Restores a pleb’s life to full.
I have never used this, since I don’t consider my plebs to be special enough for them. You might consider this if you have very little food output and every pleb counts, but otherwise it’s probably a waste of time.

To-Do List

1. Putting the agrarian and rush strategy into words
2. putting pretty pictures everywhere!

Yeah, not too much, forts.