I decided to go through all my old saves and take a birds eye screenshot of the final state I reached on each build. It is interesting to see the evolution and adaption of new tricks and techniques as I grew to understand the game more and more. If anyone else feels like doing the same feel free to post your own process of evolution below.
Getting a hang of the basics.
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More basic learning. Vanquisher difficulty from here on out.
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First build through all tiers with all possible buildings and upgrades used. Basic game complete. Discovered illegally large farms before they were patched out.
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Starting imposing arbitrary challenges to my builds. In this one there are no roads and no walls/gates. First exploration of the terrain tool, used to create artificial choke.
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More serious terraforming, abandoned early as I realized towers couldn’t shoot through the ground.
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Playing around with terraforming to flatten a mountain, lessons learned.
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No walls, forts only. First map on a carefully selected Arid seed to start exploiting a defensive choke point. Discovered tree rings were sustainable. Pop cap of about ~500 introduced to help avoid the slideshow.
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No bows, no meat. Test game to work out the strategy to beat the imposed restrictions.
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No bows, no meat, again. Rolled seed for large areas of 90+ fertile ground for farms to test max output. Explored the trader by concentrating on producing a single good for export (beer), and then importing everything else from the profits. Ringed in first boar spawn, didn’t exploit it because no meat allowed.
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Returned to an adjacent seed to the one used in my first natural choke point build. Proved the map would work, then 8.0 playtest released.
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I have left out my latest build for now, which is the first one where everything has really come together to a degree I’m really proud about. I’ll post it when I’ve found a way to show it off in a sufficiently suitable manner.
Their range 4 reaches through a house to also buff another row on the far side, so make the most of that in your design.