In this chapter, we have collected an assortment of tips, which don't relate specifically to creatures or villages. We discuss how time works in the game, as well as some tips on using your controls effectively.

Time Passes...

One year in the life of your villagers takes about three minutes of real playing time. As you'll surely have noticed, a night in the game is far shorter than a day. In fact, a night is about three minutes long (thus equivalent to a year of villager life), and a day is about 24 minutes long (thus equivalent to eight years of villager life).

Since a villager's normal life span is between 70 and 80 years, a typical villager who dies of old age will live for about eight game days (or about three and a half real-time hours).

Creatures exist on a different time scale than do villagers, so the creatures age much more slowly.

Control Techniques

The fastest way to move from one part of a map to another (that is, without using bookmarks) is to zoom out as far as necessary and double-click on the map. This is often far preferable to using the move button alone to click and drag along the landscape at the usual height from the landscape.

Using bookmarks is wise. There is no need to bookmark your temple, however, since double-tapping the space bar will immediately bring you there. There's also no need to bookmark your creature, since tapping the C key will accomplish this.

If you want to peer into the minds of the villagers, bookmark them and follow them around.

Some good uses of bookmarks include marking a herd of wild beasts in case you need to quickly feed your creature; the village store in each village you own; and marking important silver scroll areas. For example, you should mark the singing stones spot on the first land so that you can quickly haul any rocks you come across over to that area to deposit them.

You can also observe the behavior of particular villagers by bookmarking them and then holding down the shift key when you activate their bookmark. Watching what villagers do is quite instructive--it lets you peer into the minds of your vassals. If you pick up villagers whose actions you're monitoring, the camera view will automatically follow your hand as you move it around the screen.

To quickly move around the map, zoom out and double-click on your destination.

Using One-Shot Miracles

One-shot miracle dispensers don't require worship power to replenish. If you remove a miracle bubble from a dispenser, after a matter of time, another bubble will take its place. You may remove a bubble from a dispenser and place it on the ground, which lets another bubble begin forming. That way, you can store any quantity of single-shot miracles you like. You can stockpile especially useful one-shot miracles for future use or as needed (like a food or wood miracle for resources or a winged creature miracle for village conversion and belief).

If you store a collection of miracle bubbles, you can give your creature a crash course on a particular miracle, showing him an uninterrupted series of miracles and minimizing the number of tasks you have to keep in mind.

Certain miracles, such as magic forest and shield spells, will remain in place until you grab the small icon hovering over the miracle and shake your hand to remove the miracle. Another way to accomplish this task (especially useful if you want to quickly take away a bunch of such miracles without the time-consuming process of finding each one and removing it individually) is to lower your totem to 0 percent, which cancels all worship. The miracles will all fade, and you can then return your totem to the percent it had been set to.
 

« Previous Page

Village Management »