I’m a new player! Without a new user tutorial, I feel I’ve done pretty well for myself finally creating a town with decent defense. I can’t exactly tell you how many days I’ve defended successfully (because I can’t seem to find where it would say how many “game days” I’ve survived) but I’m on Rainum Day 11.
Being that I can mine downwards to gather resources needed for higher level tier crafting, I haven’t had to venture out into the shadowed lands except the adjacent areas to kill aggressive goblins and such. I’ve pretty much stayed put in my town and just defended.
Is there any reason why I should venture out and explore/discover the full map?
At the present stage of game development there isn’t really a reason to go exploring. Only reason to go out and about would be for your own curiosity, if your at your max population and gone through the Goblin encounter past the General’s Gong and done the Township quest line your pretty much done with main quests, only thing left is random encounters/attacks, so your only limit is the size of your town.
The encounters, are the difficulty and frequency based on town population?
I’m finding I can play the game just fine at 25 populationmax when I’m running it in windows bootcamp but when I try to play the same saved game on the mac side in a wine loader, it lags to hell and nothing moves… and frequently crashes.
I’m thinking I may need to start another game on the mac side with less population but I fear if the population is too low, I won’t be able to defend myself unless the encounters are less difficult.
Some encounters trigger based on town wealth, which sort of indirectly relates to population assuming you’ve got plenty of food. Mostly the difficulty of encounters is based on game difficulty. A game at Normal should be roughly similar with 15 hearthlings as with 35.
You don’t need very many town defenders on Normal mode, and even on hard mode six or eight is probably enough. As long as you make a good effort to keep your troops well-equipped, and have chosen your troops from your high-body and high-spirit hearthlings(especially important for clerics), they’ll mostly do ok. Try to get a knight fairly early on for solid tanking; get two clerics to keep that knight alive even when he’s tanking half a dozen orcs at once. Get some archers and make sure you’ve got a weaver to make the advanced quivers, which make a noticeable difference. And before all of that, make sure you have good physical defenses; at a bare minimum, a fence around your town. I prefer natural walls and a dug moat just because that doesn’t count against item limit. As long as your well-equipped, level 6 army can meet the enemy on ground of mostly your choosing, you’ll do fine without a huge devotion to military.
I don’t prevent enemies from coming in. Active experience gain (fighting) is much, much faster than passive (patrolling) exp gain for military types, so I want the enemy to get to my settlement; I just want them to do it from a particular place so I have the upper hand. By letting the enemy come at you and die, you’ll keep your troops levelled up. Those passive abilities that they get make those levels really, really worthwhile. If you rush a cleric you should have one by game day 5 or 6, and once you have a cleric, you don’t need to win fights without a scratch, you just need to have everyone survive and that cleric will get everyone healed back to full in moments.
The only downside to peninsulas for me is that you don’t get nearly as much stone and metal ore; that’s very valuable stuff, both in wealth value and equipment opportunity. It’s lovely to get a level 6 Blacksmith early on and have all the best gear waiting for your troops to level into it. But even without mountains to quarry, you’ll be fine as long as you have a good combat team and can control where the fights will happen.
All that said, if you want to let hearthlings cross and not monsters, then you need to create bridges when you want to cross and tear them down when you’re done. There’s no way (that I know of) to just set up a pure one-way entrance. Me, I create a killing maze. Defensive designs
And then there’s the new mod that @Froggy and @micheal_handy76_mh started conjuring at our PAX West booth. It has a very interesting storyline – not a holiday mod like Candledark or Frostfeast – but is a whole new gameplay scenario built around the notion that you must explore beyond the boundaries of your settlement. If all goes well, we’ll be releasing this mod sometime in Q4.