Age Of Darkness: Final Stand seems, on the surface, to have a fairly simple economy compared to other RTS games. That perception won’t last long, though, because your production and expansion can come to a grinding halt if you aren’t particular with your development and defending your outposts.
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Every game of Survival will be different, but nailing down an efficient build order will help you move up the tech tiers quickly and stand a much better chance against later waves. Try using the strategy detailed below on your next run.
This build order was devised for Normal difficulty.
What To Build First
Your immediate goal is to get Wood and Stone production online. As soon as the game begins, send your Hero and starting units to explore the area around your Keep. They shouldn’t wander too far in any direction, but instead should get the lay of the land and note any resource nodes and choke points that will form the basis of your early construction.
While they’re exploring, use your starting funds to construct a Dwelling. This will give you more Villagers available to work, and a little extra Gold income. Once it’s done, save up 300 Gold and build a Lumber Yard that will generate a minimum of 16 Wood per cycle.
The more trees are in a Lumber Yard’s radius, the more Wood it will produce.
Once you’re producing Wood, keep exploring and clearing nearby Nightmares until you have 30 Wood, and use it to build a Quarry. There will likely be a few Stone deposits available, so choose the largest one, or the one closes to the Lumber Yard so that you can eventually enhance them both with a nearby Storehouse.
Don’t hold out on building your Quarry waiting for a perfect Stone deposit. Build one even if all the options are bad just to get production going; you’ll build more Quarries later anyway.
Best Way To Produce Food
Once the Quarry is built, construct three more Dwellings, making sure to leave enough room for future Farms, Warehouses, and other buildings. Once all three Dwellings are done, you should have enough population to build a Wood Workshop, your first key upgrade structure.
Instead of building Food Huts, research Farms at the Wood Workshop and build one as soon as the research completes. Farms are much more efficient, and since Food Huts can’t be directly upgraded it’s a lot faster to just rush straight for them.
Now that you have more food, research Lodges and start upgrading your Dwellings. While that’s in progress, build a Training Hall along with your second Lumber Yard and Quarry.
From this point on, you can build Lodges and Farms as needed to increase your population and food supply.
Farms produce less food if buildings are constructed over their fields; be sure they have plenty of room!
Growth And Expansion
Now that you have a Training Hall, you can start adding troops to your starting army and replacing any losses that you may have incurred while exploring. Start bulking up your forces – in particular, try to have two to four extra Archers to garrison in towers for the first Death Night.
While your troops are training, build a Storehouse to increase your resource storage capacity. Advanced buildings require more than you can actually have at a time without one, so this is a necessary upgrade. Remember, Storehouses increase the production rate of nearby resource buildings too!
Finally, if you’ve been able to collect 15 Iron from Points Of Interest, build a Watchtower next to your Keep. When the first Dark Crystal is revealed, it will show the path the Nightmare Swarm will take. Once that happens, quickly build some defenses and move your army into position.
The first Swarm is just 140 Crawlers, so as long as you meet them at a choke point supported by walls and a tower, you should be fine.
After the first Death Night, your next priority is to find a source of Iron. This will require some expeditions into Veil territory, and worthwhile deposits can be hard to come by. If you find a vein that’s six or more tiles, do whatever it takes to secure it and build a Quarry on top of it.
Night Patrols
While you’re searching for the site of your ironworks, upgrade your defenses at the Wood Workshop and keep two or three soldiers near the Keep to serve as a “night patrol.” You’ll find that wandering Nightmares will often attack your defenses or outlying structures at night, so use the patrol to deal with them without having to recall your main army. Having to repair or rebuild structures is a major slowdown, so you don’t want to have to do it if you can avoid it.
Reaching Higher Tiers
Once you have access to Iron, focus on growing your population by expanding into usable farmland and building Lodges until you can research and build the Refined Workshop. Along the way, you’ll need to build a second Storehouse, but the extra storage (particularly for Wood) will make it easier to build efficient buildings like the Fishing Port when the opportunity presents itself.
When the Refined Workshop is finished, upgrade your Farms and Lodges like you did before to get Refined Farms and Houses. You’ll probably need to split your focus between defense and growth by that point, but the next goal is to research and build a Treasury near your Houses to increase your income and Gold capacity, then use the extra funds to build a Siege Factory.
The Factory requires a whopping 40 workers, so you’ll likely need even more Houses before it can be built.
Ideally, you want the Siege Factory to be ready and producing weapons well before the third Death Night, because that’s when Crushers start spawning. These huge Nightmares can pretty much walk through your walls if you let them, and there will be more of them with each wave, so Impalers and Grand Ballista Towers will be necessary to have any hope of bringing them down before they reach the Keep.
Once you can produce Siege Weapons, keep growing and expanding as much as you can, even if you don’t think you need to. The Nightmare hordes will keep getting bigger, so you’ll need a bigger army and stronger defenses to match them.
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