dotAGE – Starter Tips

Tips for Newbies

• Signposts expand build-able terrain (For some reason I assumed these were decorative at first, so I was building in tiny cramped areas and only using houses to spread terrain.).
• At the start of a game, look at which techs you have available to unlock. Make a note of which resources they take as inputs–you might assume your heating will take wood as an input, but it turns out this run it takes hemp. If you don’t notice this until you need the heating, you could end up in trouble.
  • Do you have wells (which use a water source) or mountain springs (which require a rock to place)?
  • Do you have pools (which take water as an input) or fans (which have no input but require hemp to build)?
• Some buildings have the requirement ‘path to dwelling.’ This means that there must be a nearby house and all tiles between the two buildings must be cleared.
• Some fancier buildings require cobblestone paths that lead to your town centre. Similar to the ‘path to dwelling’ these must have a path paved in cobblestone to be placed.
• Snow will not melt in the spring/summer. Every snowy tile will get a -1 penalty, so events that fill the whole map are tough to recover from. (On the plus side, snow is only created by random events or failing dooms.) You can dig up snow using tools, but if you don’t have any yet you can also clear snow by building ‘clearings’ or placing buildings that come with clearings underneath automatically.
• You can use a resource the same turn as it’s produced. This matters a lot more than you would think it does–it means you can move workers around to prevent a shortfall immediately.
  • Example: If you have zero hemp, but you have a forager producing hemp this turn, you can use the hemp in any building that takes it as an input.
• You can ‘store’ hope/health/etc for future events. For example, you can produce hope even when there are no negative events looming. This gives you a bit of a buffer against your next fear event (But it will reset to zero at the end of the event, so you can only store for the next event, not any after that).
• One of the domains is stronger than the others every run, so focus your initial efforts there.
• There is no way to stop omens, so you don’t need to focus production in preventing them unless there are other negative events that will follow. Instead, focus on buildings that let you cure negative conditions. (e.g. Sick)
• The season change always triggers a hot/cold countdown, even if you can’t see it on the prophesy. Changing to fall flips to ‘cold’ events and changing to spring changes back to ‘hot’ events.
• Because of how seasonal events work, you’ll need ‘cooling’ buildings for your first two seasons no matter which domain is dominant, You will also need to create some ‘heating’ buildings before fall. Knowing this allows you to plan ahead. For other domains, you may get lucky and not need counter them this season, but there will always be seasonal events.
• You can milk sheep.
• When researching techs, you may find a ‘!’ on some buildings: if you hover your mouse over the building, it will tell you what technology is missing to make that building work. The ! only appears if you missing requirements, so you don’t waste turns researching something that will be unusable.
• Tilled soil gives a bonus to many (though not all crops), but you do not need to till soil to plant. Your pips don’t need to starve early on while you research tilling and then crops. Instead, you can plant your carrots or tomatoes right in the ground, so you can research crops first.
• You can remove a Pip’s job from the ‘Pips Recap’ in the top right corner of the screen. Click the red X next to the pip’s job to remove it, allowing you to train them to do something else.
• If you have an injured/sick pip and you don’t have the tech to heal them right now, you can remove their job and train another pip rather than waiting for them to recover.