Topic: Help with campaign - "Struggling for a new home again"

Hi, I have a problem with one of the campaigns scenarios - "Struggling for a new home again"

I'm playing it over and over but without any luck. I had one almost successful attempt but now each time I have the same problem - yellow immediately looses to red. In my previous attempts I didn't know what I was doing but somehow got to like 4 in-game hours. (Scenario spoilers ahead) Somehow yellow tribe successfully fought of red tribe (even without me taking a fight with reds) and we went onto the last stage of the scenario where I built a temple. But yellow defeated me before I could make any priests. I did not know what I was doing. I did everything very slowly and started upgrading my soldiers right before attack from yellow.

But now when I restarted I have different problem - yellow immediately looses to red. This is weird because I know what I should do. I'm making trading post like 2x faster than before. Sending everything much faster. But yellow just starts to crumble faster and faster. Why is that? Was my previous attempt just lucky and yellow was unusually strong? Now they are getting basically completely wiped out in one hour, long before I even touch territory with anyone else, and forget about fighting.

Example of statistic after one in-game hour. Yellow is loosing dramatically. And it isn't even one of the worse scenarios. Sometimes they are loosing much worse.

And this is how statistics looked in my previous attempt. Yellow was head in head with red for like 1.5 hour.

Is there something I could do? Or is it just luck-based? Is game somehow reacts to my more optimized play style and is more aggressive with reds? This is the feeling I'm getting, because when I did everything very poorly then yellow did much better.

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Servus, fellow struggler. I've been playing this exact scenario for the last 3 days without much sleep nor success. All previous scenarios of all the campaigns were pushovers, so I got excited to finally lose and having to optimize, but this is a bad joke. I usually ran into some totally solveable problem in my first few attempts, like getting too close to yellow before making friends, or building wrong tools. Also, I completely missed the crystals on the eastern hill and went without mining and training until recently. I even had some success then, training about 300 soldiers, beating red basically on my own - heading north, finding some crystals there, even training the priests, but lost my last 100 soldiers to yellow while doing so. Didn't know I had to keep fighting anyway...

I also had had strange developments, like red immediately beating yellow and attacking me in under an hour, or even yellow beating red on its own, so I wondered about scripts and triggers. I somehow believed that pushing east/north would trigger attacks, but always thought that sending help to yellow immediately would be best, so often built the scouts house very early. No idea if that help even makes a difference.

So, after finally noticing the crystals at my start location, I thought I could totally beat this scenario with trained soldiers and a single well placed fortress - right near the north/east hills... I get smashed harder than I ever gotten before, even with memorized, perfect building placements and timings.

I tried getting the western coast iron, cutting wood as fast as possible on the way, because of my believe that pushing north/east was a trigger, but the fastest I can make it to finally training soldiers is about 1:30-2 hours. Distances are very long, even with a well placed storage. Usually by 2 hours red already is attacking me. So, lately I went for the northern iron first, but had no luck either. I still need wood and space for food production, so it's hardly even much faster, and somehow it seems I get attacked a lot earlier, but that was without me knowing the trigger.

Sorry for my ramble. This scenario just seemed impossible to me. You really have to hope that both keep smashing each other until you can actually build up to their level, which I'd estimate would take about 3-4 hours.

SOOOO - what you, dear hessenfarmer, actually are saying is that I've spent 3 days totally obsessively optimizing every building placement, providing every additional wood cutter as fast as possible, even pausing the game to do all that... And the only thing I had to do was relax, build a simple economy, put the game on full forward for 5 hours and ONLY then, when ready, build the freaking scouts house.

Well, I've seen you in the credits, wondered who you guys are, making such challenging scenario... I got to say... I'm somewhat... disillusioned. -meh

Let's see if I can gather enough motivation for one last, boring run to beat this scenario. I still want to play the rest of the campaign.

Just on a side note. I really like the game, and there are few suggestions I would make for improvements, but while I'm here, maybe someone will read and implement. [list][]running animation needs to be halted when destination is blocked. []I'm missing a way to manage soldiers between storage/hq as with other goods/workers [*]the only way for setting tool production seems to be clicking flags - strange (selecting the whole collumn option would help as well)[/list] I guess I had 1-2 more, but can't remember atm. Pretty well done game anyway, thanks!

*Forum text formation and writing options are horrible. No idea what software this even uses and no motivation to look it up - my problem solving failed and results are obvious... You guys programmed a freaking game - you could really do better here

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Hi Thork and welcome to the forum!

SOOOO - what you, dear hessenfarmer, actually are saying is that I've spent 3 days totally obsessively optimizing every building placement, providing every additional wood cutter as fast as possible, even pausing the game to do all that... And the only thing I had to do was relax, build a simple economy, put the game on full forward for 5 hours and ONLY then, when ready, build the freaking scouts house.

That wouldn't work. The Barbarians would find you in less than an hour anyway, and start smashing you hard until you don't finish that scout. But it's certainly part of the strategy to try to put off your encounter with the Barbarians for as long as possible.

I helped testing the last adjusments of this scenario, and we tried to balance the fight between the two enemies to last longer. But IIRC about the same time or soon afterwards there were some important fixes in the AI code, that may have thrown off that balance. Unfortunately it's very tedious to test changes to scenarios, because they always have to be started over, because the controlling scripts are part of the saved game state.

• I'm missing a way to manage soldiers between storage/hq as with other goods/workers

What do you mean that you cannot do? Soldiers have the same options in warehouses and configure economy as other workers.

• the only way for setting tool production seems to be clicking flags - strange (selecting the whole collumn option would help as well)

Warehouse windows also have a configure economy button. But yes, this is unfortunately not very intuitive. The reason is explained in the help, under Tips.

• Forum text formation and writing options are horrible. No idea what software this even uses and no motivation to look it up

It uses the markdown format. You don't need brackets, nor opening/closing tags. The documentation is available right under the link in the top right corner of the edit box.

You guys programmed a freaking game - you could really do better here

Well, the people who developed most of the game are no longer active. And IMO the website is and works quite nice as well.

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I didn't want to admit it, but yes, I'm kinda obsessed about this scenario as well. Previous scenarios were quite easy and it is very steep hill in difficulty compared to them. I'm playing it on and off for like two weeks now and restarted it countless of times.

I'm finding myself micromanaging many things. Especially tool production. As resources are very scarce I constantly need to set correct tool to be produced. It is very easy to get stuck with bunch of unneeded tools and no way of making the necessary ones. Or it can simply delay progress for very long time when you run out of iron before making necessary tool. I get that this is kinda point of this scenario and part of the fun, but the way of setting that tool demand is pain in the ass. I'm setting this with economy option in the Port, basically setting everything to zero all the time. But anyway sometimes different tool is being produced, even if the demand for it is zero (and it is showing as zero in the inventory evaluation). Also it is kinda pain in the ass to watch out for the light trident production, because couple of times I ran out of iron without any light tridents, for some reason it started producing better tridents and it delayed my progress.

I don't want to turn this thread into suggestion list, but managing where soldiers will go and what soldiers will be trained would be a godsend (I already asked a question about it and know it is impossible).

no fighjting is based on pure luck,

I'm not sure about this. I saw that sometimes on paper stronger soldiers are defeated by weaker ones. It looks like this is luck based and there is a chance that soldiers will miss.

And where it comes to my strategy. After this information from hessenfarmer:

however they only start fighting each other as soon as you build a scouts house.

I started delaying building the scout house. And now I'm building it at like 45 minutes mark of in-game time. I find this much better as they both have time to develop and in that way fight between them is much more equal (and yellow does not lose immediately). Difference between army strength stays the same in absolute numbers, but percentage-wise it becomes smaller and smaller and fight becomes more equal. Maybe there could be a logic for turning soldier production of one side on and off to keep them equal for longer?

But anyway my most successful run was just an accident, as I didn't even touch my territory with red. I didn't even know there is iron on the top mountains so yellow took that all for himself and sealed the passage on the north where usually red is coming from. But since I didn't have access to big iron field I only found "some iron" and my mines ran out of it pretty quickly.

Overall maybe more space for buildings would be nice. I'm struggling to fit everything on the small space between all the mountains with enemy on every side, Also better access to ocean for fishing. On the bottom left where rocks are there is a space where no building can be placed, I think this could be changed to allow more fisherman huts. Closer iron source also would be nice. I only found iron far away from starting location. And I have a problem getting there because I choke on building resources if I'm trying to get there fast or ran out of iron ore before I build a mine and I choke once again.

But anyway this scenario is very interesting and besides my struggles I'm having much fun so thank you for that. Once I have some more time I'm considering helping out with development.

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Spoilers ahead!

Facing the same/similar problem as @gumaa, I'll have to start over again - and that despite myself doing quite well and even starting to fight back red - because yellow looses even its last warehouse and thus, the game is over. My strategy was to build the scout late while still getting to the iron in the northeast reasonably early. If I build the scout too early, red invades too early, so I built it at around 75 minutes, when I otherwise could not have held back yellow. Not long after, red was starting to slowly demolish yellow, but for quite a while I could do nothing to help (no soldiers, let alone trained ones at the point yet). By the time I finally could carefully do something about red, I was surrounded by red and yellow already had essentially lost. I effectively used the scout as a way to "evade" yellow because I was still too weak, but the game uses the scout to start the 'map fight', which I should ideally only start when I am strong enough - but then I wouldn't need the scout in the first place.

After reading this thread again, it seems like the best strategy would be to find a way to hold off yellow for even longer so that the two start to fight even later - when I can actually make any difference. Does that sound right?

As others already said, this is quite a step from previous parts - not saying this is bad, just quite a difference and requiring more fine-tuning than I expected.

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