Tips for an Easy and Effective Win

Overview

The “guide” is a set of tips to help you going through the islands easily without doing unnecessary stuff. I must say I haven’t played much and found gameplay to be pretty straightforward after my initial 4 failed attempts at island 1, learning the mechanics. This works well in version 1.2.0, late December 2016.

The Tips

• In the first 2-3 days explore the island in both directions. The reasons:
  • You NEED to know on which side the dock is situated.
    

    Originally posted by Flain:

    You can tell which way the boat will sail by how it looks, the larger bow of the boat points which way it will sail

  • You NEED to know how many portals stand in your way to the dock.
  • Get to know what you have on the map.
  • Find chests with coins early on.
• Having a fast mount helps in exploration. The stag is a good choice.
• Island 5 is the largest, so keep in mind that you do have about enough time to run to the end and return, IF you set off a bit before sunrise AND you do not interact much with the environment.
• The mount recovers stamina by grazing in the open. When you run out of the woods, stop for several seconds to recover. You will be surprised how much you can cover at full speed after that.
• Wherever you are, if there is a portal between you and your camp, start retreating early. Monsters begin spawning BEFORE SUNSET. And they run in YOUR direction. This means that if you are in the wood right before sunset, you are in for a nasty encounter.
• Even if you encounter greed in the forest, you can survive. You just need to have enough coins to feed them. There are few of them in the first days. After that it’s game over for nighttime forest dwellers.
• If you hire an NPC from a hut, make sure you don’t meet greed on the way home. They bump into your horse and take the NPC. If that happens to be the cook on island 5, it’s practically game over.
• Don’t bother making farms and hiring farmers. I tried 3 times and saw zero return on investment. Even if I did it wrong, it’s way easier to win without farmers.
• You may find yourself in a situation when you should be able to upgrade the camp, but you are not given the option to. Especially true on days 1-2-3. The workaround is to exit the camp and enter it again once or twice. I think it’s either a bug or devs didn’t want players to upgrade too fast.
• In the first days fell trees on both sides of your camp to make room for hunting grounds. If you do it, you will make tons of money (over time, of course).
• Do not cut trees next to vagrant tents, if you can, or they will disappear. Hiring vagrants is crucial and they restock near the tents every once in a while.
• Regularly venture into the wood to hire vagrants. The nearer they are, the better.
• On island 5 vagrants are very far from you. This is remedied by going deep into the wood, finding a shack from which a cook comes out and hiring him. Bring him to the camp to make a bakery. Here’s how. Make a fully upgraded tower as close to the castle as possible (not near the city limit). Make the final upgrade from 3-archer tower WHILE the cook is on your saddle. This will turn the tower into a bakery. Just KEEP IN MIND that if you bring the cook early, when you don’t have the resources to make a bakery, he will drop from your horse at some point and start walking around, venturing outside the walls even. This is easy to overlook and you may end up losing him. This is valid for any NPC from a hut.

• Originally posted by Flain:

  You can take the Baker with you to the next island which is a HUGE bonus. Just remember to pick him up when you arrive at the next island.

• Bake bread and attract vagrants from across the land. 2-3 of them will arrive daily and hang around the bakery, eating bread. Make sure to check on it regularly, so that they don’t go away before you hire them.
• Don’t worry too much about the merchant on the first 2 islands. His contribution to your economy is not that important, especially after the first couple of days.
• Concentrate on making archers. You should also have several builders so that you have enough to man catapults (2 per catapult), repair walls, build a ship. Catapult builders can leave the machines to help with nearby construction or repairs.
• You don’t need catapults very early on, as long as your walls are decent.
• Upgrade, but DON’T EXPAND your city. You don’t need to make more than 1 wall and 1 tower outside of a castle in each direction (so that the catapult shop and the scythe person are within the city. Reasons:
  • The more you build, the more money you spend.
  • Beyond the borders outlined above, places where you can build are random, making defense less effective.
  • It’s easier to manage a smaller city.
  • Greed arrives later if your city is small, losing time in travel, thus dealing less damage to walls.
  • You don’t really need multiple lines of defense because you can escape island 5 in ~25 days.
• When you have enough archers for good income, THEN you make a knight (six coins on one side of the castle make a shield; an unemployed serf will take it and become a knight). That’s because a knight will instantly take 4 archers who won’t hunt any more. Later you make a second one on the side of the dock.
• Build towers only if you have enough archers that don’t follow a knight, so that they keep hunting and bringing you coins.
• Note where the statues of an archer and a builder are. You may want to pay the archer statue for 3 days (= arrows always hit) and the builder statue for 1 day (= enforced walls, denoted by sparkles at their base) before attacking a portal, in order to face the revenge wave better prepared. If one of the statues is way too deep into the forest, you can live with just one of them. You will probably also use the statues in the last few days before you leave, just to make sure you make a safe exit.
• Once you are prepared and have enough backup archers, on an early morning send 2 knights and their armies to attack a portal on the side of the dock. You do this by paying 4 coins per knight at the flagpole at yout border. You need to repeat the whole process up to 3 times (or 4?) depending on the island before the way to the dock is clear. At some point you will hear a growling sound denoting the fall of the portal, the sun or moon will turn red, and a little later a very strong wave will attack your city, most probably only on the side opposite the dock.
• There are no attacks on a day following a blood moon. Not that you need to do anything about it.
• You need to have 2 knights on one side of town, for reasons explained above. Having knights on the other side is optional. The negative is that knights retreat to an inner wall if the outer one is badly damaged. This can sometimes leave you with 10 units fewer to help in the final phase of defending an attack. The advantage is that in certain scenarios this can save you some coins that you would otherwise spend on hiring and equipping everyone again if you lose a wall.
• Since you are supposed to have a lot of money, every once in a while work on the ship, as long as you don’t need builders for something more important. Drop the ship in the water when there are no more portals between it and the dock. It will take 3 builders a long time to push it to the edge of the map. On island 5 it takes about 5 days. Remember that you destroyed all portals along its way, so you don’t really need the knights on this side of your castle. Pay them 4 coins each at least a day before the ship reaches the shore and they will run to it. Thus you can take them along to the next island for a strong start. Just wait for them to board the ship before embarking yourself. Bring cash.

Speedrun

As a bonus, here’s my recording of an island 1 speedrun. Its goal was to just finish the island as quickly as possible, without being well prepared for the next island.