Jon Shafer's At the Gates

Jon Shafer's At the Gates

Flax/Olives are your key to victory
After having a gatherer, a reaper, digger and a surveyor (explorers are kind of useless in the early game) build weavers and oil pressers as your first settled professions. Oil pressers especially. Oil can routinely be sold to the caravan for quite a high value throughout the game and can be attained from Flax or Olives. Flax has the added benefit of also being turned into cloth. You need cloth and oil to heal your units, so having a weaver and oil presser will serve you the rest of the game. As soon as I could, I had farmers start flax and olive plantations and within a few caravan cycles, I had more oil that I knew what to do with, so I sold the excess. Once you get enough surplus and enough gold, you can just buy as much food as you'll need and focus your attention on training a rancher, an instructor and a priest (to boost your knowledge and speed up research times) and once of the professions that produces parchment. You can delete any unwanted trait from any clan with an instructor and 50 parchment. So once you have lots of gold, build men at arms (4 should do), merge them together into an unstoppable horde and seize every farm, mine, ranch, etc from your neighbors (don't pillage them). Seize their camps (again, don't pillage), then fortify all the farms, mines, ranches etc that you seized and you'll extend your borders handsomely. Sacking your neighbors is also a great way to get a bunch of extra clans without waiting for them to come or expanding your limit since you can keep taking new clans even after you've surpassed your limit. Use your gold to upgrade the caravan a couple times, buy all the steel armor and weapons you need, send your slaves to train as roman legions and you too can sack Rome like the Goths did in 410 CE.
< >
Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
warhawk_rider 28 Jan, 2019 @ 12:01am 
Nice. I like it. But, I think you'll have to modify this strategy somewhat after the caravan food bug gets resolved (according to the "Plan & Tasklist," around mid-march). Right now, food bought from the caravan converts straight into turns on a one-for-one basis, instead of being based on the number of clans (and families) you have. But for now, I guess feel free to exploit the caravan!
ravaleks 28 Jan, 2019 @ 3:51am 
You can do much better without any missable resources.

tl;dr kingdom and coinmaker in april 402 a bit later if unlucky

GENERAL
Start with one or two wood collectors. They should not be annoyed by active proffesion or crafting tree. Every other clan should be Guide regardless of their preference (maybe with one exception for single hunter or gatherer for food). You should have something link 2 wood collectors, 4-5 guides, 1 wood bundler, 1 food collector. Mood does not affect multiply proffessions such as Guide or Wood Bundler. When you research Wood Bundlers create one as soon as you have 10 tools (you can probably live with just another guide). Fortify once to make sure you have enough forest in supply range for winter. Move settlement before winter if not enough forests near starting location. You need to produce enough timber to be able to buy caravan upgrades and some other important resources. In 401 designate coal maker and coinmaker (coinmaker should be someone with bunus resource production, it can be for example one of wood collectors created at the beginning). Train them in metalworking using parchments (coal maker to level 4-5, coinmaker to 7-9 to train proffesions faster). Somewhere in middle 401 when you feel you will be able to buy 5 steel tools when they appear (200 gold) switch all guides for lorekeepers. It will crush your timber production but will skyrocket your knowledge production. With 5 lorekeepers you will be able to reaserch coinmaker in 12 turns. Train coal maker in advance and start producing coal from timber. Eventually you will research coinmakers, if this happened before you get a chance to buy steel tools wait and decide what you want to do next. Train coinmaker when possible. Profit. This strategy needs only timber to work which is most common resource. Remember to increase clan limit size and declare kingdom as soon as you can (5 cloth clan size and 25 parchment for kingdom). By middle 402 you have: kingdom producing fame, ~150 coins per turn ability to train second coinmaker if steel tools available from ext caravans, freedom as you can buy many things from caravan (fine cloths and armor for ennobling, steel armors and weapons for legions, sometimes horses to train or warhorses for future knights). You don't have to produce food, tools, weapons, alcohol, oil, parchment, cloth as all those things you can from caravan every few turns. To make things faster you can train clans in particular jobs. You need 1 upgraded wood collector, 2 coal makers, 2 coinmakers to produce enough coins to buy almost everything from caravans every time.

Sometimes you can have bad luck with caravan selling timber so you will sell for 1.5 not for 2. Just sell enough to buy what you need.

CARAVAN
Won't write here what to buy when as I don't remember details but:
upgrade each time!
sell timber each time
20 tools needed
30-40 parchment (25 for kingdom, rest for training)
5 cloth
5 weapons
5 stone blocks (coal maker)
5 steel tools (coinmaker)
few food if missing food collector

RESEARCH
Discovery -> Guides -> Wood Bundlers -> Woold Collectors Upgrade #1 -> Lorekeepers -> Minning -> anything from next row metalworking -> Coal Makers -> anything from next row -> Coinmakers
< >
Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Per page: 1530 50