You bought this game to hurt people and make their lives miserable. Let's get started!

Everything is subect to change because this is an early access game.

Once upon a time the goal of this game was to kill all the villagers. But that's not the goal anymore as you win the game when you upgrade your portal to level 8.

Now if you kill someone the angels get mad and they will eventually come break your stuff. This is bad because they changed how summoning works and the new defensive structure basically doesn't work.

Once upon a time you could make a kennel and it stored 3 monsters (each one stores a single monster now). Whenever the ability was ready you could just summon a copy of that monster anywhere in the world. This allowed for example the ability to capture a spider and use the kennel to spawn several of them very early on. And then those spiders had two offspring that had two offspring until one day there were 32 spiders in a tiny little cave. An adventurer would step into that cave and think : oh spiders are easy. And then they die because instead of being 8 spiders there were 32 spiders.

We've strayed off the point a bit but here's the key point :

At the time of this writing you don't want to kill you want to cause misery. Misery translates to chaos points and chaos orbs. These are used to upgrade your powers and your portal respectively


Let me point out that I hate the new patch. Why? you start with one ability pretty much and you just spam it to get chaos points. Less variety would be fun they said.... yay.

So anyway how do you make a good start now? You want to cast things like narcolepsy and gluttony on people who are not blessed. For best results cast spells on low risk persons who tend to stay in the village.

As soon as you have some extra chaos points you can click on your portal and get some limited use abilities. Some of them will be more useful than others unless you find a way to cleverly use them. Other spells like ignite or destroy are very obvious and can easily be used to create chaos.

Some spells will take finesse such as the wall spell. This spell literally makes a 1x1 wall block and that's pretty crap unless you do something like block someone in a cave who doesn't have a digging tool. In theory you might be able to block someone in their house but they will likely yell and someone will free them. You might be able to burn someone's house down by blocking the door after they leave and starting a fire inside. By the time they return the house will be ablaze.

There are a number of spells that work well as a combo and are not so good when alone. Poison cloud for example is one of the strongest spells in the game because when cast near a fire it explodes. You can destroy 2-3 houses with a single cast if you spot a natural flame at just the right moment or summon one with a fire elemental or the ignite/meteor spells. This can be especially useful early on when people take 1/3 of the village out on an adventure. Those left behind sometimes dont have enough resources to take care of the fire. If you have a destroy spell with an ignite you could always destroy their well. Fires are incredibly difficult to extinguish if the water source is 20-30 tiles away or more.

But remember to be careful with your mayhem - unlike previous patches the angels take count of how many people you kill and it creates a threshold. Previously you could kill 4-5 people and then lay low and your aggression from the angels would reset.

If you just want to end the game quickly then you might want to bring the Biolab if possible (making sure you have access to the plague affliction).

The Biolab allows you to customize your plague. Without it the game randomly selects some features and you get whatever it selects. Be aware that if you take the biolab your plague will be very weak early on compared to not having the building. In other words without the biolab your plague will start with say 200 plague points worth of affliction. If you take the biolab you can easily spend more than 400 points to build the perfect pandemic.

Starting weak is bad right? No - it's quite good. If someone is puking sneezing and all sorts of other things they will get kicked out of the village before they can spread the plague. If someone dies and becomes a zombie the virus is exposed and may not be able to spread as quickly.

Once you build the lab you can click a villager and inflict them directly. You can also deploy a plague rat under the monster tab that refreshes on a regular basis (up to 3 charges). You might want to wait for villagers to be mostly asleep or away from the village before unleashing the rat. It needs to finish eating food or it will be caught and killed. Sometimes villagers will butcher the rat for food not knowing that it is tainted (you can trigger this by sending locusts after crops or the old poison splash+meteor combo on a building storing lots of food).

The best target to summon your rat is a tavern because people don't generally hang out there and often come to eat. If the rat does not get caught it can come back to nibble again later.

What to invest your points into first?

• You need symptoms to help generate plague points
  
• You need more forms of transmission to generate plague points
  
• Lastly you need longer plague lifespan to make sure people get sick

I would suggest picking one symptom followed by an additional form of transmission as soon as possible. Note with the biolab you are always forced to take consumption so you cannot have all 4 transmission forms. I've had the best success by skipping combat transmission (unless there are lots of ratmen on the map in a custom map).

Make sure that you don't pick a combo that makes no sense. If you picked sneezing and don't have an airborne plague you are not going to make many people sick. If you can inflict plague twice then you will get 35 points + 5 points per use of the ability (actually this got nerfed - so nevermind). In other words you can start with 45 points to spend. All plague effects are retroactive immediately if the host is still alive.

Once you have at least one symptom and and additional way to spread you might want to consider how quickly are you getting points. If the rat was successful and got more people sick you might very quickly have 20 points. If not you might consider getting something cheap like the lifespan increase to object duration.

Next I would advise getting a new symptom. Follow this with the final form of transmission. At this point you will likely start getting lots of points (somewhere around day 2-3). Make sure to keep using your plague ability when possible. If there are multiple towns try to infect them all but you might start by making two people sick in one town.

Making people sick is great but there is a slight problem in that nobody is dying, right? Wrong. The trick here is to get lots and lots of people sick. Start going crazy and grab all the abilities that give you symptom points. Then increase the transmission rate and lifespans as your plague budget allows.

So then it's time to put points into Fatality so we kill people, right? Nope! Go ahead and max out the on death category first. Once that is finished I increase the durations a bit - if needed and then spend points to make the plague lethal.

What's the best combination?

This is currently my favorite:

Transmission: Airborne, Consumption, Contact
Fatality: Septic Shock, Total Organ Failure
Symptoms: Vomiting, Seizures, Poison Cloud, Sneezing, Hunger Pangs
On Death : Zombie

Consumption makes a great combo with Hunger pangs and Septic Shock. When villagers move Hunger pangs will drain their health meter. If they get hungry they can get affected by Septic Shock (which is a higher chance of death than pneumonia). I prefer the zombie on death as it can make a giant zombie that can often slay a single villager or more alone. And then if that zombie kills another person who is sick you have two zombies that go attack the next person...

Note: the explosion effect is ok but fireproof villagers exist. Eventually this upgrades into creating a fire elemental (you might be able to capture that with seize monster ability if the map normally has none). The final upgrade casts a free meteor spell with no threat. This makes for a great combination with poison clouds as it can easily burn down a village. But if you can already cast meteor you can target this directly with your spells.

Many of the monsters of this world are better than others. I'm going to mention the ones that you can capture that you should keep an eye out for. Build one kennel when the game starts and remember that you have only 3 slots for the first building. Wait 2 days and you can build another (and you can keep building them).

Note: if you build a kennel over animals such as sheep or pigs you can sacrifice them for mana. If there are too many captured objects you must sacrifice them before you can capture more monsters. This can be a problem because sacrifice is on a cooldown. On game start villagers love to go out and find monsters to kill so you need to grab important targets first. Note : now monsters respawn eventually but why wait for something you want?

Be aware that ratmen love to go kill wurms/spiders in caves.

High Priority monsters

• Golem- high health defender. You have to awaken them before you can seize them. Lightning bolt works fine for this purpose but strangely agitate does not. *might be slightly bugged as sometimes they seem to act like an invader*. Note : while this is definitely a monster you want you can almost certainly wait to grab it because it should be around for a while.
  
• Fire Elementals - arson invader (fire). If summoned while villagers are away can often destroy an entire building. If it's about to die to a villager in combat cast a poison splash or poison cloud for a nice explosion.
  
• Abomination - high health invader (no element).
  
• Trolls-high health snatcher (no element)
  
• Giant Spider- Infestor (poison). Summon two in a cave. given time they will each have two spider babies that start as small spiders and become giant spiders- who then also have babies. With enough time can eventually become 15+ spiders in a cave with minimal investment. This is useful when you have one or more small caves between you and a city of villagers.
  
• Sleleton Knight/Barbarian - high health snatchers that can be used as guards. (knight =water)
  
• Wurm - low health poison turret. Ranged summon unit that does not move. Powerful in groups

Medium priority monsters

• Skeleton Druid - high health snatcher (wind)
  
• kobold- low health snatcher. immune to frozen and randomly places frost traps.
  
• Ghost - casts mood debuff (ice). Questionably useful if you are trying to make cultists.
  
• Ice Nymph- low hp defender (ice). Sometimes there just are not many good monsters choices to pick from and this at least gives you something that can help defend with another strong defender.
  
• Succubus - demooder (ice) :applies a temporary mood debuff on hostile targets.

Tricks

If villagers dig into a cave that has a mass of spiders they will often run out the exit they just made. Throw down a frost trap if they are alone and they will die to a single monster.