A noobs guide for early days

[DeletedUser108240]

This guide focuses on some early and quite simple things that are good to know.
It is divided into sections. What I will mostly put here in the first post is Section headings that link to some later post about just that subject.

1: How to click on things.
2: How to polivate.
3: How to get others to polivate you. - Coming soon (Dont you just hate it when people say that?)
4: How to move things around.
5: How to get rid of things.
6: How to harvest production, income and rewards.

 

[DeletedUser108240]

1: How to click on things.

The rule is simple: Do not click on the building, click on its footprint.

Below is a pic of the area in front of my Town Hall. I will try and keep it unchanged for a while.
If you hold the mouse over the top of the pillar you will see the mouseover text for the marketplace (yellow).
If you hold the mouse over the middle of the pillar you will see the mouseover text for the clapboard house (green).
Only if you hold the mouse over the foundations of the pillar (blue) will you see the mouseover text for the pillar



It is a bit confusing at first but actually it makes very good sense. Flash sucks with overlapping 'active areas'. It gets confused and you never know what you will be clicking, By defining structures by the area of land they occupy you make sure there are no overlapping active areas no matter how much we move the buildings around.

 

[DeletedUser108240]

2: How to polivate.

Definition: To polish cultural buildings and decorations for happiness, or to motivate NPC citizens to produce more.
Happiness or production from that structure doubles and that is a BIG help for the player polivated. Now if only real life people would pay double rent when they were happy, I bet landlords would be nicer and more helpful ;-)

How to polivate for blueprints.

Each time you polivate you have a chance of getting a Great Building blueprint from the same Age as the structure you polivated. So you need to visit so you can choose wisely (Look at the mouseover text for the structure. The Age is given in the top line).

age	Great building 1	Great Building 2
Stone Age	none	none
Bronze age	Tower of Babel	Statue of Zeus
Iron Age	Lighthouse of Alexandria	Colliseum

There are many more ages (and GBs). You can find the full list here: Great Buildings

Note that the Stone Age have no great buildings. Clicking on a Stone Age structure will never give you a blueprint. It is a bit sad as Stone Age trees are one of the prettiest decorations there is, but for a blueprint hunter they are just a useless distraction. That is why most everyone recommend you get rid of all your stone age stuff as soon as you enter the Bronze age and can build better decorations, houses and workplaces.

How to polivate to help.

Look at the profile mouseover to see if the player say something about what he want. Sometimes people want happiness(from cultural buildings or decorations), sometimes they want money(from houses) or supplies(from workshops, smithies,etc).

Ideally you should know every building by heart, but if you have only played for half a year you probably dont. There are more than a hundred different buildings to learn and a few of them even look different in different Ages. Dont worry about it, only a fool will expect you to know how his "Reindeer Factory" looks.

To help there are two buttons. 'polish' and 'motivate'. click either of them and little grey stars will appear over the structures that can be polished (or motivated)

Choose a building that give a big boost (or the largest if you dont know) and click it.

There is also a third button 'raid'. It is bigger than the other two buttons together, and I hate it. You attack the town by clicking that.
Attacking do no harm to the player attacked, his defending army is automatically revived and healed after the battle; but any attacking units that get hurt or killed need to be healed or replaced. That gets quite costly as you get to the more advanced Ages (A F32 jet fighter is a lot more expensive than a spear)
If the attacker win he can plunder. I really really hate that He now have 24 hours to plunder your city. During that time he can take one production you have that is finished and waiting to be collected and put it into his own storage space.
Of course raiding is not something you do to help, but it is an option you have.

How to pollivate to get it over with ;-))

Use the AID button, either in the event history log, or under the profile picture of the person you want to polivate.

It is very fast, but you have no influence on what gets polivated, It may well be one of his stone age decorations so you do not get the chance of a blueprint. Or it may be nothing at all because his many friends, neighbors and guildmates have already polivated everything possible. You always get the 20 coin though

When you are looking for a particular blueprint the AID button is a lousy idea, you cannot choose buildings of the Age that drop those blueprints.

 

[DeletedUser108240]

4: How to move things around.

Just about everything in your town can be moved; buildings, decorations, roads, your Town Hall, ... you name it.

To move something you must first go into 'move-mode'
Open the build menu and then use the little sell/move/normal mode selector that show up under the city name at the same time. Click on the 'arrows pointing in all directions'. Once your mousepointer looks like that you are in move mode. You can now pick up buildings, roads, etc and drag them to another place on the map, Click again when the building is where you want it to put it down again.
But only if:
A: You have city foundations there. The pattern of little squares that you expand with expansions.
B: The area is empty or there is only 1 thing there.

I you try to put a house down where there is something else that something else is automatically picked up into the mouse-pointer (to be moved somewhere else). If there are 2 things there, they cannot be picked up that way, so all you get is a red square on the ground where you tried to put it down.

Remember to click on normal(the 'no parking' sign) when you are done, It sets the mode back to normal pointing, clicking and dragging the landscape. If you forget the program may think you are trying to move the next building you click on and pick it up instead of just collecting what the building has produced. that can quickly get very confusing ;-))

Another way to get back to normal mode is to simply close the build-menu. If you have something in the mouse-pointer when you do that the structure in the mouse-pointer is automatically put back where you picked it up.

When you want to move a large building it can be quite a task to plan all the moves necessary before you have enough free city foundations to put it down where you want it. Especially if you have filled every little square of your town with buildings, roads and decorations (Dont feel bad. We all do that).

 

[DeletedUser108240]

5: How to get rid of things.

As the ages pass building get outdated. Old building produce less than the more modern ones so you will want to delete the old building to make room for the new one.

Same procedure as when moving things. Open the build menu, but now you choose sell-mode (dollar sign with a curved green arrow). Click on the building you want to get rid of and say yes to the confirm-box. You get a part of the money and supplies you spent building it back (a very small part).

Remember to go back to normal mode after you have deleted what needed deleting.

Whee. somebody have actually read this guide

He wrote to tell me that with residential buildings (houses with people) you can just build the more modern version on top of the outdated one. If the old and new houses have the exact same size the old one gets sold and the new one is built there instead.

It is the same with roads, just build the new road on top of the old one. I have not advanced far enough to know if this also work for 2-lane roads built on top of old one-lane roads.

 

[DeletedUser108240]

6: How to harvest production, income and rewards.

You already know the basics: Click on a building with money, supplies or a little box floating over it and the stuff produced gets put into your storage.

But there is a quicker way, I call it Harvest-mode.

To enter harvest mode click on a building with something to harvest and keep the mouse button down.

It gets harvested and you are now in harvest mode. As long as you keep the button down any building you mouse over will get harvested. Just zigzag the mouse over all the buildings with some production to harvest everything in record time.

Note that you cannot drag the ground without first releasing the button. If you are on a PC you can use the arrow keys to scroll the map. Or you can just find another building that need harvesting and restart the harvest mode.