It’s on my short list of things I’m thinking of getting this sale. If you try it soon please let us know what you think :-)
I bought it in the sale but only was able to put an hour or so into it. I can’t say much about the game play. I spent that hour fiddling with the many starting options. You can really tailor this game through options to play however you want. There’s even a steam guide with settings for a faster paced game. It does involve fiddling with a text file a bit, but just about everything can be configured to your liking. And I love the map settings feature where you choose your map parameters, and then you get a rough version of what it will look like. (And the settings you configured in-game get saved until you change them; they don’t revert to the default).
I also installed two workshop mods to improve the graphics of the units and items. I don’t even really mind the original graphics – I enjoy the old schoolness of it all – but the mods were a cinch to install.
Then I finally played some basic exploratory early moves. The depth (or maybe its breadth?) of everything is amazing, but it all seems clearly presented. My initial exploration party got wiped when it ventured way too far down a multi-level underground lair and got in over its head. Fun stuff, happy with it so far.
I’ve got about 9 hours in, but spent more time watching some DasTactics videos of this and perusing some forums discussions here and elsewhere. I put together a quick and dirty starting guide based on all that. It includes some great tips from @Coldsteel (I hope you don’t mind my including them). I will add more when I have time.
Deity Empires Quick Guide
Summary
Suggested beginner start:
Bozorc, Blood Orc (good melee units though poor ranged units)
Ability not shown: Necromancer
Suggested Turn One:
- Settler: begin looking for a good spot to build your first city, ideally a patch with grassland for ranches/farms.
- Troops - Move out and battle outdoor lairs. Avoid underground lairs for now – they have great loot in lower levels, but you’re not strong enough yet to reach them.
- Engineer: build ranch on grassland (better early on than building a farm) and some dense forest
Early Turns:
Magic Research order:
- Barkskin
- Summon Skeletens
Cast Spells order:
- Call Lesser Hero
- Increase Meditation Skill (get it to close to mana level)
Building Order
- Builder’s Workshop
- Blacksmith
- Mana Conduit
- Craftsman’s Workshop
- Forester’s Guild
Civic Research
- Production
- Food
- Ranching 1
- Logistics
- Road Building
- Farming Tech 1, then 2, then 3
- Mana Link
- City Walls 1, then 2
Early Turn Tips:
- Avoid losing any of your starting three troops at all costs. After a battle, if they’re hurt, taken them back to within your city limits for faster healing.
- Start building a new settler unit. Start thinking about where you want to put your next city.
- City Goals: After ranch is built, build road, then a lumber camp in the forest. When new city workers appears, move them around to focus on growth more than production.
- When Mercs offer their help, hire them and add them to your troop stack. When Lesser Hero appears (thanks to your spell casting), add them to your stack troop. When your stack has about five-six units, including the lesser hero, you may be ready to take on some of the less difficult underground dungeons. After emerging from a dungeon, get them healthy by returning to city limits!
- When your stack is back in city limits, be sure to send the city the resources your units have gathered during its battles by clicking this button:
More General Tips:
- Study the spell compendium for the Magic Schools for which you have books. Work out a plan for your magic development!
- Similarly, don’t forget to closely manage your Civic Research – the AI will do this, but you should have a plan and manage it manually
- For new cities, settle on grassland for best growth, or light forest if not grassland is available.
- Construct a ranch first to speed the growth of workers
- Generate extra mana ASAP by raiding, and constructing buildings like Mana Conduits in your cities
- You can spend mana only up to your meditation level, so don’t forget to develop meditation skills as well
- Don’t waste underground lairs by doing only one floor – wait until you’re strong enough to survive through all the floors to get the good loot. If you do only one floor, the lair is closed when you leave.
- Engineers can forage if they’re out of things to do.
- Biggest single combat tip: make sure you spread out killing blows to level up your units better. Ideally you want all your units to get to level 5. Protect your lower level units in a battle but let them get the XP of a killing blow.
- Cast Summon Lesser Hero early on – this hero can greatly boost the might of your initial stack of units.
- Speed up returning your stacks to your city for healing and unloading supplies by building portals.
From Other Sources:
From Yojimbo in Octopus Overlords:
I am having a lot of fun with my newly changed settings:
- AI set to 3_Hard
This makes the opponents a lot more fun to tangle with. I did not see a huge tactical chagne - but on the world map the AI seems smarter (could also have been the recent update that I still can’t find the details for).
- Lair Density set to 45 - up from 25 (Lair difficulty left on 1)
This gives me A LOT of dungeons around the map and it slows the rabid growth of the AI (the first is good, the second may be bad long-term for competition).
- Map size set to 60 x 60.
This is up from 40 by 60 default - a bit more room.
- Players set to 5 opponents.
This seem to be just right (for now) with the harder AI.
- Sound volume down so I can play music on VLC
There is a very non-obvious “8 tooth-gear” in the lower right (left lower corner of the right-side interface menu bar) that open up an option panel that let me turn the volume down. I then ran some old OGG/MP3 files in VLC in a different window - tweaking the volume of each so that the game battle sounds could be hear over the music.
One Tip: I learned to spend my unit upgrades on the “To hit” bonus. Most of my units start off with a to hit % in the 20s. Damage doesn’t matter when you are not connecting. I have done much better since I focused on upping my To Hit %.
From Coldsteel:
I start the game materialized and while I have only one army and very limited spells I run around with my deity’s single army and get the deity as much XP and levels as possible. For example, in my current game on turn 42 my deity has gotten almost to level 6. At level 5 they were able to choose a level-up perk and I chose the one that adds +2 magic levels. They’ve also increased their mana and other attributes while leveling.
Now that I have 2 towns, as soon as I get enough troops to field two full armies, I will cast the “Etherealize” spell on my deity and start using them as an invisible, omnipresent caster as you do. At that point they will be a stronger caster than if they had not been materialized and actively gaining XP for a while.
It can take forever to get through hills and forests back to your city. You can build a supply wagon unit and bring that with you. Then when your units get full of resources/food you can load it on the wagon and send it back to town to unload.
When your deity is materialized (as a unit operating in the game world) their spell power is the spell power number you see on the unit page and can be improved by leveling up. However, when they are dead (etherialized), then their spell power is determined solely by how many spells they have researched in a spell tree (fire, arcane, nature, etc.). You can see that info on the Deity tab at the top. To improve your etherialized deity’s spell power in a spell tree, learn more spells. To improve your materialized deity’s spell power, level up.
The amount of resources and gold you get in the game from your cities depends on population. The more population you have, the more city workers you get to work the city hexes.
Every time your city grows another 1000 population, you can build another civic structure there. The number of buildings you can build in your city depends entirely on how much population it has.
Population growth rate depends on enough enough excess food being grown your cities. For that reason, at the start of the game your engineer should concentrate on building farms around your city.
After you build improvements (like farms) with your engineer you can then improve them in up to 2 different ways. Some improvements have levels (like mana farms) that go from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. After building the initial improvement for 500 gold, you can then level it up but each level you build costs more.
The second way to improve them is to build roads on the improvement. This needs to be done for farms because your farms initially don’t have levels like some other improvements do until you first research the appropriate civic technology and then you can level up farms as well. Once you build a road, you can widen/improve the road by building a road again on the same hex at a higher cost. Each time you build a road on a hex, you increase the number of city workers that can work that hex. THIS IS HUGE. I really wish I’d figured this out sooner as it is the key to expanding your city. Build lots of roads on farms.
The first civic structures you should build in your town are the production structures. They allow you to build following stuff faster.
Building stuff in town requires both production and resources. At first the resources your town gets per turn will be lower than your production per turn so your build speed will be capped by that.
When your units fight critters in outdoor lairs and dungeons, they get food and resources afterwards. They can only carry so much so when they get full, you need to go to the nearest city and transfer it to the city’s resource and food warehouses. If that city has less resources than production per turn, then it can pull from the warehouse you just filled to max out production speed until the warehouse is empty. There are civic buildings to increase the size of warehouses.
You can build a supply wagon unit and take it with you to dungeons and lairs. When your units get full you can dump the food and resources into the supply wagon and then send it back to town to unload.
Once you get some upper tier troops and get them leveled up, you’ll be finding a lot of nice stuff for your item vault. At first you don’t get that much but later in the game you can find 5 or 6 items in one dungeon, depending on how many floors you descend. There’s loot on each floor so after 4 or 5 floors you’ll typically have found a few spell books, soul gems and equipment items (plus gold, mithril, adamantium, etc.).
Speaking of dungeons, make sure you turn dungeon loot/levels on in the in-game settings if you enjoy dungeon diving. Once you’re in-game on the main screen, look at the bottom right where there are some icons and one of them looks like a gear. Click that and it will bring up the game settings menu. Check the ‘Dungeons contain treasures + levels’ box there. I also check the ‘Dungeons are explored’ box, so I can see the dungeon outline (though everything within that is hidden and must be explored). The final thing you might want to change is the dungeon size. I changed that slider setting to 25 and it gives me decent sized dungeons that aren’t as huge as the default ones. It makes clearing the levels out faster.
Edit: BTW, finding spell books in dungeons is by far the fastest way to get new spells to learn. If you find them, you don’t have to research the books. I’ve found about 20 holy spellbooks in dungeons so far in my current game. Due to that, I just got the upper tier holy Summon Archangel spell. I can’t wait to summon one and stick it in my main army.
@Coldsteel Are you sure of this? As best as I can tell, an etherialized deity’s spell power is from casting spells in that school, not the number of known spells in that school.
It is also strange, but it appears that if you run your deity materialized early on (which allows for a much faster start), that any level up that you use to add spell power is totally wasted, as soon as you etherialize the deity???
Such an interesting game, but documentation is beyond aggravating.
Yeah, I’m sure. I was a bit bummed out about it once I figured it out. It was at that point that I realized why most folks were playing with their deity etherialized. All the leveling up you do when materialized does not transfer over to the etherialized state. As I said, you can take a look at the the info on the deity tab to see this after changing the state of your deity. It makes for some interesting strategic decisions. These days I start etherialized and only switch over to level up my deity some when I can afford to spare some downtime for that and then swap back when I need the global spells/support elsewhere.
The good news is that when you are materialized and finding spell books in dungeons you are still increasing your potential power once you are etherialized again. Once you learn those spells in the books, that is.
@Coldsteel But look at this from the Deity page. His Poison magic skill level is 0.0 despite knowing some poison skills. I am confused.
Thanks for figuring this out. I’m glad it’s this way. I think without that downside to being materialized, there’s little reason to start in the ether; having your Deity alive and leading your first stack of grunts has such big upside in the first 40-50 turns. That design decision makes our starting decision much more interesting.
Join the club! There’s s a lot to be confused about. I’m trying to understand why my production is limited to the level of natural resource production some turns (as the compendium-thingy states) but then is allowed to exceed it other turns. And a number of other things.
Production is limited by the number of resources you have. If you drop off some resources at your town, you can then produce more, up to your Production limit. Maybe you knew that, in which case I’m stumped. If you have multiple towns, they can ship resources too each other, but I believe they do that only when they have maxed out their resource storage.
That could be it; I did return to my town so perhaps I had some resources with the party.
Heh it is my first game…
Well, you have researched the spells but you haven’t built up any skill in those categories by actually casting the spells in them yet. When you do, your spell book categories go from grayed out to filled and you gain casting skill in that category. Take a look at my deity in my current game in the screenshot below for an example.
As you can see, I have learned a lot of spells but I have only been casting a lot of them in 2 categories, Holy and Fire. Due that, my deity has the highest skill in those spell categories. Hope this helps.
It is still pretty foggy in my mind. So what does each of these scenarios do for me?
a) I currently know 8 Alteration spells. But I have yet to cast any of them
b) I know just one Alteration spell, but I have cast it 8 times.
a) You have a good general knowledge of Alteration, but your lack of practice means any of the 8 you try to cast will be weakened.
b) You don’t know much about Alteration, but you are pretty good at casting the one spell.
I don’t remember the exact bonuses you get for the Skill. I think it is more if a spell can heal 2-6 hp, you are more likely to do heal 2 with low skill.
Also the second number isn’t Spells, it is Spellbooks, which is essentially your level in that field. Of note, if you only have 1 Spellbook, your max skill is 1. The more your read up on a subject, the more your knowledge on that one spell will improve and strengthen your ability to cast it, provided sufficient practice of course.
Thanks!
So casting Magic Missle 8 times will make me better at casting Magic Missle, but not better at casting other Alteration spells?
Sorry, I didn’t make it clear. Casting any spell from Alteration will increase your Alteration skill and thus increase the power of all Alteration spells, up to the limit imposed by your Spellbook limit in Alteration.
Thanks! I think that this helps explain my long term tendency towards physical rather than magical combat. I avoid unnecessary spells in order to save mana, so when I do cast a spell, it is weaker than it ought to be.
It is another nice strategic decision that needs to be made in the game. I too hoard mana. It appears @Coldsteel does as well.
My bigggest problem with this game is I run out of stuff to do at the precise point where I’m starting to move up the power curve (get paladins or similar). Because 98% of the lairs are empty at that point.
What starting parameters do you guys use to keep the fun rolling?
I haven’t gotten that far, because I used to play on bigger maps, and would often restart. Isn’t there a setting to make liars/dungeons respawn?
Aren’t you supposed to be in the Exterminate X at that point?
I guess I need to play this game sometime.