Villagers and Wood Collection
Page last updated on 2011 / 21 / 09Primarily at the start of the game, you need to ensure you are collecting enough food in order to continually create new villagers and get towards reaching a critical mass of them. You also need to start collecting wood, at the very least to age up you will require 200 wood.
Gathering wood is quite simple, click on your villager(s) and right click on some trees, but there are little nuances that can change the balance of the game, and here are some of them that come to mind:
- Right at the start of the game, just send your villagers to the nearby trees around your town center, there are usually around half a dozen of them that can keep your woodcutters busy for the first few minutes of the game. After accumulating some wood, you can build a storage pit near a more dense forest.
- Collecting wood is essential if you intend to fish. Sending the majority of your first villagers to collect wood can help you build a dock and let your boats take care of fishing and food collection, leaving your villagers to concentrate on wood for building more houses, boats and aging up.
- Use your scout to reveal the area. Some forests around your town center can act as a strategic barrier that you'll want to keep. Revealing them and the walking areas of the map allow you to plan where best to take wood from. Chopping down these strategic forests expose your villagers and buildings more to the enemy and make it less predictable for you to know where the enemy will come from.
- In light of the above tip, more often than not it is better to chop wood from behind the town center, i.e. on the side furthest away from your enemy, this will avoid any nasty ambushes and remove the temptation for the enemy to take out some of your villagers and deplete your wood collection capacity.
- Typically you will want to place a storage pit near the center of a strip of forest, so that villagers are as close as possible to the pit when the first few trees have been depleted, i.e. they are equidistant on either side of the pit and they continue to chop further and further away from it.
- Look for a dimple/indentation in the strip of the forest, or a clear patch 'inside' a forest as this means you can have more villagers chopping as close as possible to it.
- I always research wood related perks, as later in the game you'll be wanting to build siege weapons that take vasts amount of wood to make. Also, maps where you require a navy will also be a drain on your stock of wood, which you'll also need to conserve for buildings.
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