The objective of the game:
The first objective is of course to reach the Eye. But on the victory screen, there is also a count of points, it is this count that will allow you to improve. Here is the detail :
- Pupils: 100 points per living pupil.
Tip: The more pupils you have to manage, the more difficult the game is, when you recruit a pupil, make sure you have enough food for all for the next 15 turns and especially that this pupil has a real function in the colony for the next steps. Ex: if you recruit a farm ward but there is no wheat objective or fields to harvest in the next two steps, then it will be useless.
- Pupil health: 1 point per VP. This encourages you to keep them healthy.
Hint: In this game, the adage “Prevention is better than cure” is incredibly true. Healing the pupils with potions is time consuming (Build a dispensary, collect spices and peppers as well as wood then make 1 potion). Thus, if one of your pupils has the trait at the start of the game causing them to lose 5 health per harvest cycle, it is better to restart the game while you get used to the game mechanics.
- Resources: 1 point or 0.5 point (depending on the resource) per resource taken to the Eye.
- Diversity bonus: 100 points per stack of different resources.
Tip: It forces you to diversify your crops. If you are a novice, this is not the criterion that should be privileged because the ease of this criterion depends on the organizational capacities and especially on the biomes that will be visited as well as on the difficulty of the objectives of each stage.
- Movable buildings: 100 points per building taken to the Eye.
- Upgrade Bonus: 50 points per mobile building upgrade, including buildings linked to beasts of burden.
- Harmony (see next section).
Harmony
This is the most important point of the game and yet the most blurry because we do not see it during the whole game, or rather we see it without understanding it. Harmony is the “Karma” that the caravan maintains with the nature that surrounds it at every step. It can increase or decrease depending on the actions performed.
Here’s how actions negatively influence harmony:
- Completely empty a resource space when collecting.
Tip n ° 1: You will understand, this game forbids you to pass the turns too quickly, or one of your pupils will shave the resource without your taking care.
Tip # 2: When you assign a pupil to a harvest building, the latter always sends the pupil to the same resource, so you must reassign the location of the harvest each time you reassign a pupil.
- Collect resources without taking them to the next stage.
Tip: To see if you will have enough room to take everything, regularly check the place you have by clicking on the next step as if you wanted to leave.
- Leave the beasts of burden on the map without having collected them.
Hint: The game assumes that any workhorse left on the map will drown, which is why you are punished by losing harmony. There is everything to be gained from bringing back these beasts of burden, as any beast not used for a building can carry resources until the next stage.
- Loot sacred sites.
- Let a friendly caravan leave without having performed its action.
Tips to confirm or deny:
- It seems to me that destroying a resource by constructing a building does not decrease karma.
- Likewise, when a hazard destroys a resource, it does not affect karma.
- Collecting beasts of burden is the only resource that does not decrease karma.
Here’s how actions positively influence harmony:
- Pray or make an offering at a sacred site.
- Perform the action of a friendly caravan.
The impact of Harmony in play
The more negative your Harmony with nature, the more the latter will punish you. As you can see, Harmony influences the frequency of minor hazards.
So, if you are used to games where you gleefully loot resources until you empty the map, AFATE will punish you severely by preventing you from reaching the eye, ruthlessly killing your wards or ruining your resources and buildings.
Your main objective during your games is therefore to find the right balance between taking resources, constructing mobile buildings to facilitate the following stages while guaranteeing the best final score AND not losing too much harmony to avoid dying in the last stage. or have a negative score at the end of the game.
The start of the game
Pupil traits: As soon as you start the game, go to the pupil skills tab so you can find their positive and negative traits. Relaunch the game until you get a fairly balanced team. I will not be doing a guide on traits since they are quite understandable and their effectiveness depends on individual playstyle.
Note: The unlocking of new traits for games depends on the playstyle of the game you won. So the game encourages you to diversify your way of doing things, I find that interesting for replayability.
The location of the caravan:Care should be taken with its location because appendages can only be built on forests or plains. We must therefore not confuse forests and jungles. Afterwards, two upgrades will allow the caravan and appendages to be placed on hills and jungles.
The buildings
Most permanent buildings only cost wood, a resource that is particularly easy to obtain in the early stages. It is therefore necessary to favor them while waiting to develop the skills of the pupils and to have a good return on resources to allow the construction of mobile buildings.
Mobile buildings are more expensive and time consuming to create due to the cost of three different resources. They also have the disadvantage of taking quirky places in the caravan, making it more difficult to optimize the placement of resources. Their usefulness at the beginning of the game is almost zero since they cannot be improved due to a slow harvest of resources.
As you will have understood, it is easier to play a fair game with permanent buildings (provided you anticipate wood on the stages that do not offer any) than with mobile buildings. This is why the game rewards you with victory points at the end of the game. So, if you haven’t yet managed to win your first game, I strongly advise you to avoid moving buildings.
Buildings of beasts of burden:Their usefulness will depend on the type of game you choose to play. However, for a simpler first part, I strongly advise you to build the “Council” and to unlock from the first stage the two points to 350 Knowledge allowing to know the costs and the biomes of the next two stages. The “Market” is a difficult building to make profitable when you do not know the mechanics of the game, I advise you not to build it until you have managed to win a few games. The “Workshop” is an essential building if you play with many pupils because it will increase the number of collectors per building and the yield of these buildings if several pupils are working there.
Biomes and the cost of stages
The cost of the stages increases over time, making it impossible to collect all the resources (between 1000 and 2500 resources) by relying only on the harvest boxes of the last stage. Optimizing your caravan (work animals, additional spaces) is therefore essential in order to anticipate these needs, come with a sufficient resource base and allow access to the Eye to complete the game.
This anticipation requires a good knowledge of biomes in order to choose the best path and collect the right resources to go to the end of the journey. It is generally this point that penalizes the most because a lack of knowledge of the map pushes the player to choose the cheapest routes at the start of the game to finally find himself blocked at the penultimate stage or at the last against a quantity. astronomical amount of resources impossible to harvest.
Example:In your game, the last step leading to the eye requires 1250 Ore and 960 Wood. At the start of the game, you took the simplest paths and often took forest biomes. When you get to the end in front of this last biome, unless it is a Canyon biome, you will be unable to complete your game due to lack of minerals.
Tip: To see the cost of steps beyond your current leg’s goal, simply hover your cursor over the dotted road. Reminder: The improvement purchased thanks to the “Council” building allows you to see up to one or two roads further.
Types of biomes and their specificities
Tip: In general, it is strongly recommended to explore the entire stage map as soon as the caravan is installed in order to have a global view of the resources present and to optimize the placement of buildings.
- Starting biome: It is balanced, you find everything and during the first half of this stage, there are no minor hazards. It is therefore necessary to take advantage of this to attribute specificities to each pupil and enable them to reach rank 3 of the first level, or even rank 1 of the second level of competence. This step also makes it possible to anticipate the resource needs of the next two steps if we organize ourselves well. There is only one workhorse in this biome.
- Biome “Ancestral Forest”: Many “Forest” and “Vestige” boxes; very few “Stone” and “Ore” boxes, sometimes a few Auras. A biome that does not have much to offer without a Druid specializing in the exploration of the Remnants, but which is not penalizing.
- Biome “Sacred Lakes”: Numerous “Fish” and “Sacred Site” boxes; moderate number of “Forest” spaces (but containing a lot of wood: 700-800 units); very few “Stone” and “Ore” boxes. A very quiet biome that allows you to regain your strength after a difficult biome, an excellent biome if you have an Herbalist (rank 3) to analyze sacred sites.
- Biome “Protected Stage”: Many “Aura” spaces and balanced but very well supplied resource spaces (more than 500 resources in one space). Extremely penalizing biome without a druid specialized in calming auras but very prolific if you have said druid, it is a “Left or Double” biome.
- Biome “Tropical Forest”: Many boxes “Jungle”, “Spice” and “Peatland”; very few “Stone” and “Ore” boxes. Biome to avoid late in the game if you have negative Harmony, the Mosquito hazard in Bogs and its equivalent in Jungles can be devastating.
- Biome “Fertile lands”: Many “Fish” and “Field” boxes; very few “Stone” and “Ore” boxes, sometimes a few Auras. A very quiet biome that allows you to regain your strength after a difficult biome, but which has very specialized resources (be careful of the anticipation of the following steps).
- “Marsh” biomes: Many “Jungle” and “Peatland” boxes; many boxes containing “Venison” and “Fish”; very few “Stone” and “Ore” boxes, sometimes a few Auras. Biome to avoid late in the game if you have negative Harmony, the Mosquito hazard in Bogs and its equivalent in Jungles can be devastating.
- Biome “Gorges”: Numerous “Mountains” boxes (containing “Stone” and “Ore”), “Llamas” and “Beast of burden”; very few “Forest” and “Field” spaces, sometimes a few Auras. Biome which causes a slowdown in harvests because of the many mountain huts to cross, you have to go there being well prepared with a good stock of wood and food on pain of starving, but it brings a significant gain in space in the caravan thanks to the many beasts of burden.
The skills of the pupils
Tip 1: The trait “Eternal Novice” is extremely penalizing because, although it is indicated “The pupil can only have a specialized trade”, in reality he will not be able to specialize in any trade. Likewise, the “Clumsy” trait is very penalizing if you do not know how to manage and anticipate the loss of life point. If you have any of these traits among your wards, I suggest you restart your game to avoid unnecessary complications.
Tip # 2:At the start of the game and the choice of specialties for each pupil, avoid having your pupils specialize in professions that will interfere with each other: Cooking + food harvesting profession, which means having to go back and forth between two buildings, decreasing the pupil’s performance, ditto for Builder + craft of collecting materials.
Tip 3: To better distinguish your pupils, you can change their name and the color of their balloon string, for example by giving them the color of the profession you plan to assign to them.
Details on the “Builder” branch:The skills unlocked in the specialties “Architect” (permanent buildings) and “Engineer” (mobile buildings) are only valid for buildings of this specialty AND if these buildings are built AFTER unlocking the trait. Example: The skill of the rank 2 of Architect “-50% of the cost of improvement for the buildings constructed by this pupil” concerns ONLY the PERMANENT buildings.
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