Another few days and another couple of levels I got the time to write about, even though I completed these levels of Populous: The Beginning a few days ago. I’m not sure if it’s laziness or just lack of time, but it’s probably laziness.

Head Hunter

Head Hunter was another level with the Armageddon spell available, though this time, it wasn’t as obvious as with Middle Ground. It wasn’t a very difficult level and the approach to it was mostly classic. The difference was that I had very little room next to my reincarnation site, so I had to build a guard tower to be able to build huts faster. Eventually, I crossed the narrow bay nearby to a higher area with more trees and this is where I built up the largest part of my village. That is, I did this after I got rid of a group of Chumara fire warriors who managed to dig in at the top of the hill.

I rushed to get some fire warriors ready and started building up my village as much as I could. About fifteen minutes later, I had a decent village and my shaman was in his balloon, starting to wreak havoc on the enemy villages. I’m probably boring you here, so I’ll keep it short. I did what I always do. I used my shaman to sink the enemy villages into the see, while producing more and more balloons and filling them with fire warriors for defense.

The Chumara kept trying to pray at the Armageddon stone head and their shaman was part of the prayer group, so that was a nice, constant source of extra mana. I didn’t even need to place Swamp at the head, since the praying always took long enough for me to get there myself and clear the area with Lightning.

Once I was fine with how week the tribes became, I prayed at the heady myself and cast Armageddon.

Unlikely Allies

Unlikely Allies was the first and only level where I had an ally in the form of an extremely weak Chumara tribe. Lucky for me, this meant I wasn’t attacked at all in the early game. Unlucky for me, the Chumara really was weak and useless, so I was forced to defend them.

 

After barely repelling some attacks with my shaman, mostly thanks to the three charges of Teleport I got by praying at a stone head, I managed to scrape enough mana together to place some swamps on the narrow path between the Dakini and the Chumara. This gave me enough time to form a balloon squad of fire warriors and place them at the edge of the plateau leading up to the Chumara village. This force was enough to repel most of the attacks from then on, so I was able to finally focus on my village.

At this point, the Dakini started using boats to attack me, so I had to build up defenses at home as well. After about an hour of light play, I transformed my entire continent into a single, large plateau and then started focusing on completely sinking the Dakini. In another fifteen minutes, the level was won.

I’m not sure if I said this, but Populous: The Beginning is an awesome game.

Related Posts:

• Populous: The Beginning [13] – Completed!
• Populous: The Beginning [12] – Solo [22] and Inferno [23]
• Populous: The Beginning [11] – Archipelago [20] and Fractured Earth [21]
• Populous: The Beginning [9] – Levels 16 and 17
• Populous: The Beginning [8] – Levels 14 and 15