Land Four: Nordic Paradise

Your town will begin fairly humble, but will quickly expand into a powerhouse.

Now that you've gotten the basics out of the way, you'll find that your advisors will thankfully be spending a lot less time yapping at you - you might want to make a real save game at this point, in case you want to start the game over again at some point, but don't want to sit through all the unskippable tutorial stuff. There's not going to be much handholding from this point on; you'll get a list of objectives and will be expected to fulfill them as best you can, with the ultimate objective being to take over all of the towns on the map, of course.

You begin with virtually nothing of consequence; a town center, a creature pen, and that's essentially it. You should immediately start building out a spider's web of roads, houses, and a storehouse in a convenient area, while setting the population that you began with to a variety of collection and building tasks. (Note that one of your objectives is to have your creature build 12 houses; if you plan on accomplishing this objective, try to keep your number of builders relatively low, or they'll get to the foundations and sometimes build the houses before you do.)

Your newfound power on this map will let you eavesdrop on the leader of the Norse city elsewhere on the island. This guy likes to think about how devastating his attacks on you will be, and how he's going to crush your city like a ripe grape, etc., but you don't have to worry about him for the most part. Although he will eventually get around to sending troops into your town, even a creature that's been going along with a Good orientation can easily handle the single platoons that come in at a time. You don't get Evil points for attacking units that come within your area of influence.

Objectives

Many of the following objectives are fairly trivial. For example, you're going to be hard pressed not to build a field on fertile land at some point during this map. We do have some specific notes below the table here, though.

Objective 6: Setting your creature to Entertainer and tasking him on a group of people, such as farmers, should complete this pretty easily. If you've rewarded him for Entertaining in the past, though, he'll probably do it autonomously at some point.

Objective 7: It's easiest to do this by keeping your Builder population low at first, laying a bunch of foundations, then dropping trees on them (not Godbuilding, just dropping the resource), and tasking your creature to build the house. If the resources aren't in place when the creature goes to build something, it'll often get distracted on its way to collect them unless you micromanage. Having the wood by the foundations ahead of time will make it easier to convince it to build.

Objective 9: This basically means to build buildings on areas with impressive views. The simplest way to fulfill this task is to wait until you've conquered the Norse city. Take a look at the two hills near your own town center; if you try and build a Villa on the peak of the second hill, you should notice that it'll get an Impressive bonus of almost 200 points, depending on where you position it. You'll need to build ten Villas up on the hill, making sure that they all have Impressiveness bonuses of at least 175 or so for them to fulfill the requirements of the task.

Objective 11: If you find it tedious to have your creature go all the way to a field and back to a storehouse over and over again, just pull up over 3,000 grain from a storehouse, drop it right next to the grain storage, and have your creature pick that up and put it back. It still counts as collecting, technically, and it'll be a lot quicker and easier than having it grab grain from a field.

Objective 12: This quest is apparently broken; clearing all of the trees off of the map doesn't get you the tribute bonus. If you're interested in trying, first you need to conquer the map, then you have to start multi-collecting as many trees as you can before chucking them into the ocean, or you can cast Fireballs on them, as well. Spread Foresters around the land and see if they make tracks for any trees that you missed. Many people are reporting scouring the entire island for trees and making upwards of three or four hundred foresters, without being able to complete this objective. Try it if you wish, though.

Objective 14: If you're playing as a Good god, then you can accomplish this goal without getting Evil points by keeping your town's gates open and letting a couple of squads inside. Your creature can easily defeat a single squad or two at a time without being wounded overmuch.