Bay 12 Games Forum

If it's not already been done, and is possible, that begs for a mod that reanimates it whenever you're not looking at it

Worms basically can't bust up the temple anymore, yeah, least without something else giving them a hand

Somewhere in the last while they implemented a mechanic to prevent worms from chewing up the temple. There's ways it can get disabled, but they're staggeringly unlikely to happen without direct player intervention.

Eh... I haven't noticed much dosh really flowing from a village, which is why I didn't mention it

Don't get things wrong, they're going to produce income (and they're fun enough to mess around with regardless), but getting it to anything meaningful is a pretty gigantic investment that takes a hell of a long time to pay off. Without the investment they tend to put out, what, maybe a couple hundred per turn? It ain't nothing but a good mine or somethin' meets or beats that pretty easily.

I'unno, to me it was always basically the exact sort of absurdity the genre tries to (heh) cultivate. It's just part of the natural evolution of "lets do increasingly ridiculous magic martial arts". You throw geographic features, you punch people horny, you hop on a sword and fly around on it. It's just how these worlds are supposed to work, heh. When you reach the point melee weapons are turning into UAVs, also being stabby hoverboards is just par for the course

Pretty sure I've read at least one where someone or another flew around on smaller, paired sword/daggers. Sworderskates, more or less.

Yeah, like mentioned, sans talent it takes about 60, 65 turns for a trade pact (25 turns with 50 income pact)+dedicated emmissary (40 for a 2k follower, and you can probably nab cheaper) to pay for itself, after which is pure profit. Bit more if you factor in follower upkeep, but that usually isn't huge, bit less if you got a better pact income. It's not a major income source compared to a lot of the resource sites, but it's usually a lot easier to acquire and defend, heh.

Seriously consider pestilence mastery, though. Blight makes mines start producing necrotite (and hunting camps ichor, for what that's worth), which can bring in very solid prices on top of whatever the mine itself produces. There's probably more things like that I just haven't noticed yet, really...

E: Another cash money thing you can do I just noticed even existed, is train workers. Buried in the economy tab, under show workers, you can click on a worker and then assign trainer. How this exactly works is a bit opaque and there doesn't seem to be a way to tell what you're getting into when you hire a follower*, but as near as I can tell you need an otherwise unassigned follower, and when you click on it, it'll show you a list of what skills they can train. This only seems to work for a +1 on the available skills, but... +1 labor is a 25% boost in quarry output. +1 herbalism is free herbs coming in for that extra bit of dosh, on every site you have a relevant improvement on. +1 seafaring boosts anything coastal by 5%... and it's all plus 1, not to 1. So if you hire a labor 2, you can bump it to labor 3 just that easily. It's kinda' fiddly micromanagement,** but it can lead to a pretty substantial economic boost.

Plus you can apparently train workers that would normally not be able to gain extra skill levels, i.e. demonic wretches, and I assume fae bound or skeleton laborers.*** That's extra huge since they might as well be free and you can easily get a good half-dozen of them without much trouble... their biggest downside is set skills and no ability to improve, and, well... this gets around both of those, to an extent. For such an impactful task, it's kinda' surprising it's as buried as it is, tbh...

*There really should be, dev, if you're reading this
** Follower task to just go out and train every available worker would be ace, just sayin'.
E: *** Steam forum suggest those two actually can't be trained, just the wretches. Interesting the demons would get that kind of advantage, really...

One of these days we'll learn not to name our hurricanes shit Murphy takes as a challenge.

Maybe we can just start numbering them or something, just skip over 11(snake eyes), 13, and repeated 6s or 7s. Though we'll probably have bigger problems if we're contemplating 2025H66 or somethin'...

You can speed up improvement construction by assigning extra workers, for what that's worth. I usually don't bother and just wait the extra turns, but you can. That's least painful for the races that can just summon a bunch of workers for cheap (demons/undead/fae, maybe something else, with I think undead having easiest access), but anyone can do it with some investment.

Trainer does indeed speed up trained unit recruitment, though I generally just... don't bother, heh. It does take a good few turns, but it's usually not that big of a deal to wait for it. War mastery (call to arms) and/or forts can help a fair bit on that front, too.

Follower costs are indeed between around 1k and 3.5k ish gold. It's tough early on, but once you get some selling going on, it becomes much, much less tough -- specifics there depend a lot on what you have access to (undead or fae have it easy, ferex, as faerie dust and necrotite make bank and you basically start with access), but starting to pull down a few thousand per turn by turn 100-150 or so is pretty easy. Get some money making tower improvements (underdark passage, furnace, etc.; bazaar helps a lot in the long run, too), lock down some expensive resources (or just a bunch of tile improvements), set up as many trade agreements as you can (they'll usually pay off the brokering investment in ~25 turns, dedicated emissary in under 40), so on and so forth.

Easy early cash infusion, though: Research ancient history. One of things you can get from that is a fat stack of cash.

Dungeon and exploration wise, just make sure you're making parties and sending folks off as a group. Unless you're playing largest size maps (probably don't do that unless you want a super slow game, heh), it shouldn't take your starting group a hundred turns to explore+search a province. Same with dungeons, they can take 10-20 turns but a 3-4 follower group not set to the slow options shouldn't take much longer than that unless the dungeon's gigantic (save those for later). Dungeons seem to be something of a wash on some points, though... I've found with four critter parties and neutral options, they tend to kill about one follower per exploration and you're lucky if they bring back enough money to replace them. The real reason for dungeon runs is probably the lore and research boosts they bring back (plus the occasional otherwise-unobtainable enchanted item)...

All that said, overall the game's pretty slow most of the time. A dozen turns to do something seems fairly normal, and even blitzing pretty hard you probably won't hit the end of things to research until like turn 300+, with conquest or whatever possibly taking even longer. If you want a shorter one, just use the smaller maps, heh.