Post by essence on Mar 2, 2013 2:39:15 GMT -5
So, here's my brief summary of what it's like under the n00b shield as a first-time Battle Miner.
Your best -- nay, only -- friend in the Battle Mines world when you start is the Black Market, and the Black Market runs largely off of food. Food grows more when you have a high Growth Modifier, which means that in the beginning, before you can get attacked, doing whatever you can to get a high Growth Modifier is bueno.
That means: switching yourself to Green Industry (if you have no pollution) or Laissez-faire Industry (if you have up to 5 pollution); building as many Lighthouses (outposts where there are no neighbors) as you can, and expanding your city because every 10 unused tiles is 1 Growth Modifier.
As you start to grow more and more food (pray for sunny weather!), you'll get used to the process: harvest 3-4 food, go to the Black Market, ask Ramul for however many you can afford of whatever resource you want, and then once you've gotten what you want, go back and harvest the rest of your food.
(I've been told that more advanced players actually trade their non-food resources to Ramul and then use their food to reduce the amount of time it takes Ramul to restock, but I never had enough resources sitting around to trade -- I was constantly spending them all on new tech and outposts.)
Once you get a few outposts built, you'll notice you can start trading with other players. This doesn't happen often in my experience, but it makes a nice 'bonus' when it does. I personally switched to Bureaucracy to double my trades (up to six with a Customs House) so that I could offer my wares (pig iron) in exchange for enough stuff that whoever I came across would almost certainly have something they could trade with.
Bad things happen startlingly often -- I've been here less than a week and seen two Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride past and ruin things for everyone. As long as you're not unlucky (like me) and doing something that can be taken advantage of (like offering trades for food when the Black Horseman comes so that people have taken all of your food by the time you log back in 45 minutes after the Horseman came), it's actually not BAD bad, because it happens to everyone. It's more like a change of pace than something that makes you suffer relative to everyone else.
All in all, it seems like, after a week, the keys to the game are three:
1) READ THE FREAKING MANUAL. Yes, all of it. Yes, it's really long -- but if you don't read it and pay close attention, you'll miss details like Theocracy taking 1/3 of the techs on your current tree -- meaning that as long as you're only one tech onto the upper tree, you can go Theocracy and balls-out wartime without losing anything.
2) Use the Black Market to trade for more than you need right now. You'll be happy in a few days when you realize you need that extra Glass for a new outpost and you really need to use Ramul to get enough Aluminum to build your Refinery at the same time.
3) Your n00b shield is only up for a week -- at the end of the week, you'd damn well better be prepared to fight. Push the tech and the resource-building as high as you can for the first few days, and by day 6, start planning for those cannons and other wartime affairs.
Your best -- nay, only -- friend in the Battle Mines world when you start is the Black Market, and the Black Market runs largely off of food. Food grows more when you have a high Growth Modifier, which means that in the beginning, before you can get attacked, doing whatever you can to get a high Growth Modifier is bueno.
That means: switching yourself to Green Industry (if you have no pollution) or Laissez-faire Industry (if you have up to 5 pollution); building as many Lighthouses (outposts where there are no neighbors) as you can, and expanding your city because every 10 unused tiles is 1 Growth Modifier.
As you start to grow more and more food (pray for sunny weather!), you'll get used to the process: harvest 3-4 food, go to the Black Market, ask Ramul for however many you can afford of whatever resource you want, and then once you've gotten what you want, go back and harvest the rest of your food.
(I've been told that more advanced players actually trade their non-food resources to Ramul and then use their food to reduce the amount of time it takes Ramul to restock, but I never had enough resources sitting around to trade -- I was constantly spending them all on new tech and outposts.)
Once you get a few outposts built, you'll notice you can start trading with other players. This doesn't happen often in my experience, but it makes a nice 'bonus' when it does. I personally switched to Bureaucracy to double my trades (up to six with a Customs House) so that I could offer my wares (pig iron) in exchange for enough stuff that whoever I came across would almost certainly have something they could trade with.
Bad things happen startlingly often -- I've been here less than a week and seen two Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride past and ruin things for everyone. As long as you're not unlucky (like me) and doing something that can be taken advantage of (like offering trades for food when the Black Horseman comes so that people have taken all of your food by the time you log back in 45 minutes after the Horseman came), it's actually not BAD bad, because it happens to everyone. It's more like a change of pace than something that makes you suffer relative to everyone else.
All in all, it seems like, after a week, the keys to the game are three:
1) READ THE FREAKING MANUAL. Yes, all of it. Yes, it's really long -- but if you don't read it and pay close attention, you'll miss details like Theocracy taking 1/3 of the techs on your current tree -- meaning that as long as you're only one tech onto the upper tree, you can go Theocracy and balls-out wartime without losing anything.
2) Use the Black Market to trade for more than you need right now. You'll be happy in a few days when you realize you need that extra Glass for a new outpost and you really need to use Ramul to get enough Aluminum to build your Refinery at the same time.
3) Your n00b shield is only up for a week -- at the end of the week, you'd damn well better be prepared to fight. Push the tech and the resource-building as high as you can for the first few days, and by day 6, start planning for those cannons and other wartime affairs.