Winning through Impressiveness

If you're playing as a Good god, then your ultimate goal is to convert all enemy cities to your own side by building a massively Impressive city. Doing so can be difficult, though, especially when it comes time to take over the last city on a map, which will require a large number of Impressive buildings. Here are a few tips to keep in mind.

Only One City Counts

If you happen to take over more cities with armies, then keep in mind that their Impressiveness doesn't count towards your overall total. Don't waste your resources on building Ampitheaters or Temples in secondary towns; just focus on their basic needs and save your ore for your primary town.

Multiple Copies Hurt Your Impressiveness

The more copies of a building you build, the less Impressiveness they'll be worth. You can build a dozen Siren Wonders, if you want, but eventually they'll stop being worth much Impressiveness. You're going to need to build multiple copies of buildings in order to win each map, but try not to exceed more than four copies if you can avoid it. Variety is key.

Connect Buildings to Roads

If you connect a building to a road, you'll earn an automatic 45 Impressiveness. This is a small bonus, but for a town with 50 or 60 buildings in it, it definitely adds up quite a bit.

Keep An Eye On Height

All locations that you can build on come with built-in Impressiveness bonuses or penalties, and taking advantage of these can help you maximize your land area. When you're holding a foundation up above the ground and are deciding where to place it, you should see a small stat window pop up; one of the stats that's listed within, next to the green star, will display both the Impressiveness of the building itself, as well as any applicable bonuses (indicated with a number after a plus sign) or penalties (indicated by a number after a minus sign).

These villas are worth much more than they would be at the bottom of the hill.

In general, Impressiveness bonuses seem to be reliant on height. If a building's near the top of a hill, then it should get a nice Impressiveness bonus, sometimes up to +200. If you find one of these hotspots, you're going to be best suited by building a bunch of smaller buildings on it, rather than one large, Impressive building. If you build five villas on a +200 Impressiveness hotspot, then each of them will get the bonus, for a net +1000 Impressiveness; if you build a single Temple up there, you'll only get the +200 bonus one time. Skyscrapers are especially good for this purpose, since it seems that each layer of the scraper gets some portion of the Impressiveness bonus, resulting in a building that takes up very little land area yet still has a huge Impressiveness bonus.

Most hotspots are going to be worth substantially less than 200 points, though, so you shouldn't have too many problems taking advantage of them. Keep in mind that some low-lying areas can indeed have negative Impressiveness. If you build a Villa worth 40 Impressiveness, but build it on an area with a -80 Impressiveness, then the final building will actually subtract Impressiveness from your town.

Defending Yourself

As a Good god, you might wish to sit back and turtle up inside your town to Impress all of the other cities, but you'll rarely be able to do so without fending off attackers. Thus, you'll probably need to avail yourself of the military structures and units available to you.

The first line of defense will be your walls. On most maps, you'll find that your section of the area is separated from the main enemy concentration by a chokepoint, or narrow band of land through which the enemy has to pass to get to you. If you can build your influence bubble out so that it takes over this chokepoint, building a wall across it will prevent the enemy from reaching you unless they bring in a creature or siege weapon to knock it down. You can also build a gatehouse in the wall to allow you to open and close the path into your city as you see fit.

Repelling Invaders

Although technically Evil, the Fire miracle will let you easily kill off enemy platoons.

When you have your walls up, try to build a couple of archer platoons and put them on top of the walls on either side. If you do so, they'll be able to take potshots at any enemy platoons or creatures that happen to approach your wall. If you want to, you can just leave the gates open to encourage enemies to approach; if you have archers on the wall and either a sword platoon or a soldier creature just inside the gate, you should be able to wipe out any individual platoons that come towards you, and earn experience for doing so. However, keep in mind that your platoons are considered to be moving while they're on top of walls, and will thus require twice their normal amount of food. Archers on the walls are also tremendously vulnerable to the effects of catapults or creatures that attack the walls.

Keep in mind, however, that engaging in warfare outside your influence border will sometimes earn you Evil points. You're not going to become the Devil just for a few skirmishes outside your borders, but if you make a habit of it you will start to shift a bit towards the dark side. To avoid this, try and build a highly Impressive building just inside your walls, to extend your influence ring well outside. This will generally let you attack units with your archers without taking Evil points, but will also let you do things like cast Miracles on enemy units or drop big rocks on an enemy creature that's coming after your wall.

The only threat to your walls are enemy creatures and enemy siege weapons. If you can extend your influence far enough outside the walls, then you might be able to throw rocks or a Fire Miracle at an enemy siege unit and destroy it without a problem, but they fire from extremely long range, so you'll need something like a Siren on the other side of your wall to give you the necessary range. Enemy creatures are easier to deal with; they'll have to come right up against your wall to hit it, so they'll definitely be inside your influence ring. Just pick up a huge rock and start dropping it on their head, and they'll eventually keel over and die.