Move your Towers so their range covers the Town Centre, then the Towers and the TC will cover each other. The raiders will mainly go for the TC and then you will have an effective killing field, and as said those crossbows make a difference.
I go for a healer after I upgrade the Market. That doubles the amount of gold that a Market takes in
I would add that healer improves natality !
Essential at that stage in early game.
Personally, I buid it asap, eventhough it is costy and eventualy closes temporaly when Iām brokeā¦
even the stone walls do not slow down the raiders
On the contrary, stone walls do slow down raiders, but they donāt stop them: every inch of every wall has to be covered by a manned tower or a bunch of reacting soldiers or raiders will eventually hack their way through it. Even the infamous double or triple-thick walls only slow raiders down more, but never stop them completely.
This is why Point Defense is so popular: surrounding an entire town with both walls and tower coverage takes a lot of construction time and materials and labor and costs a lot of upkeep once all those towers are built and manned - and keeping them unmanned until a raid warning can leave you with raiders hacking through a wall before the tower covering it gets manned to stop them. Itās generally much easier to simply cover the Town Center and a few other important storage facilities with towers each behind its own little āknotā of walls - what another poster has rightly called ākill zonesā to discourage the raiders from staying around long enough to do lasting damage.
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yep, towers are not enough in this game. you really need soldiers to successfully defend your town going forward, walls help a great deal because it gives you time to send your soldiers to where the raiders are attackingā¦the challenging thing is that they have a maintaining costs and armor + weapons that the soldiers equip dont last forever it seems, as the game tips say - crude weapons are better then no weapons at all for your soldiers
hope these tips help!
Also upgrading markets as soon as you can helps a lot. That doubles your market income. You can do it early (in T2) if you buy the materials on the trading post, before you can make bricks yourself.
why are healers so expensive??? ā¦ built it then realised it would wipe out my income entirelyā¦ needs a buff for sureā¦ costs enough to have watch towers and soldiersā¦ why is healer like 4 times the cost no other civilian building costs that much too maintainā¦ also why is shrine costing 4 too maintain?? ā¦ early game is so hard money wiseā¦ and trying to get town centre to lv3 is sooo hard ā¦ im struggling to upgrade houses ā¦ there isnt that many good buildings to upgrade them withā¦ and they all take up loads of space which is already a premium in this game
Use the Trading Post mate it is your road to financial security.
Start with Honey, Coal, Iron Ore, Clay initially on Tier 2 as apart from the required Clay to build the School and Healers House you can flog them off until Tier 3 as they are not required resources.
When you upgrade to Tier 3 I would suggest not building Pubs but just sell the Beer as most Traders buy it and usually at average to above average prices it will make very little difference to your town desirability and you wonāt have to worry about a soldier getting pissed and running rampage through your village and killing everybody.
Donāt be in too much of a hurry to expand take your time and make sure all of the required resources are being supplied especially food and firewood.
Usually late tier 2, or early tier 3 on the healer. You can turn off production and save some gold if it is breaking your bankā and then turn it on if you have an outbreak of illness or a bunch of wounded to tend after a raid.
Just make sure to offset your desirability loss with some decorations or other amenities.
Alsoā while using the trading post can generate massive amounts of gold on surplus goods. You still donāt want to be operating at a deficit ā a little while is ok. But there are really only 4 āleversā for getting your tax income up:
- Population growth
- Housing upgrades
- Luxury item that increase tax revenue: candles, pottery, furniture, and spices.
- Mining gold
Different tier houses demand different luxuries. A good way to check if youāre fulfilling your luxury demand is to check the town hall or hit ārā. If you are producing a bunch of luxuries but still showing unfulfilled demand. Click on a few houses and see if they have luxuries in their inventory. Sometimes the issue can be not having enough grocers or an inefficient travel time impeding āshelter stockingā. A lot of players will build additional storage adjacent to markets purely to store luxury goods for this reason.
Honestly I think understanding the luxury mechanic is the most important lever. When I started playing FF I really struggled to maintain guards and troops and mistakenly sold most of my luxury goods to the trader. But once I figured it outā it was much easier to stay income positive. I try to avoid selling off my luxury goods down to zero at the trader (exception being I get a really really good price) and try to maintain a bench stock of 20-50 luxuries per category to keep my shelters stocked.
Also try and keep your cost downā turn off production on guard towers that are not needed or can easily be garrisoned due to short travel time to weapon stores. also reallocate labor to produce more luxury goodsā especially if youāre overproducing food ( you have a lot of spoilageā which indicates your producing more than your consuming)
There are also lots of really good products that can be sold to traders that dont require so much production and are what I would consider āsustainableā
My go tos:
- baskets
- clothes
- medical herbs
- cheese
- beer
Pottery is also good but sometimes clay can be limited and you need that for lots and lots of bricks at tier 3.
If I can avoid it, I almost never sale:
- iron, iron ore, coal
- tools/ heavy tools
- weapons
- furniture
- soap
- hides
- medicine
- glass
- stone
Mostly due to how hard it can be to source those items late game. Or how much labor it requires to meet high population demand for those productsā especially when you need that labor for other things. But these are rules of thumbā always exceptions.
edit: spices are OP for income late game and can only be bought from tradersā¦ but only manors (tier 4 houses) consume them. Donāt make the mistake I did and buy $50k in spices at tier 3 because they were on sale only to have them expire before upgrading town hall to tier 4. But when you do get to tier 4ā buy as much spice as you can afford when it come around. Youāll be making 400-500 on taxable income easily and able to field lots of troops, barracks and towers. And have lots of gold to keep your settlement stocked on everything else.
The best form of constant and easy income is empty homes, because it is the house that is taxed not the inhabitants. However, if you have a ton of empty homes and a food surplus your population will grow and become a drain on your resources. That means you need to ācapā your population with food supply rather than housing supply. The game encourages you to think about having a good food surplus, but once you refuse that lesson and instead build a ājust in timeā food chain then you are free to build as many empty fully upgraded homes next to t2 markets as you need for however much gold you want.
Not money but logs instead: Logs are more important than money.
I am slow to learn this game but I figured out a trick that might be handy for other new users of FF. Early on I was always struggling with having enough logs. Despite having enough selected to cut it always seemed to take years to improve the log supply. So I conquered that problem:
In the building section under Decorations click on the Oak tree leaf icon. Find an area of flat grass and brush very close to town. Now start planting Oak trees in rows, every other square. As you start placing them a grid appears to help you plant in neat rows. Each one costs 5 gold things, and the builders have to prep the soil and hand-plant each tree, and over time you can grow a forest of hardwood trees. They age to maturity (10 years) in 2-3 years or faster depending on the soil. Then if you run out of logs simply harvest a bunch of trees and in no time your people will chop them down and turn trees into logs quick and easy. I am no longer dealing with log shortages.
you can apply the same policy to meat. Just lay out a line of hunter cabins and let them be built during the winter and assign them good locations to hunt and you can turn them on when meat supplies get low to create a rapid and reliable source of meat during shortages.
I always-only play in pacifist mode because I aināt interested in combat.
I never get beyond T3 because they get too large and time consuming, I like just starting out, and wish I could stay at T2 for a long time and selectively kill off part of the population. Too bad pacifist mode cannot be toggled on and off.
I have yet to find a trader who wants to buy anything. All mine are doing at the moment is selling
the things they want to buy are usually at the top of the list and have the little green arrow pointing to the right, if it is selling only it will have an arrow to the left, when you want to sell you have to type in a negative number or slide the slider toward the right so that the sell icon lights up
Many thanks for getting back to me. I think I have sorted it now 