Continuing my tradition of two levels per submission, I’ve completed levels twelve and thirteen of Populous: The Beginning. There were no gimmicks to it this time. I just had to conquer everything.
An Easy Target
Level twelve, named “An Easy Target” was all about fighting all three of the tribes at the same time. It took me two attempts to beat this level.
On my first try, I though I might trick a game by defeating a tribe early. The yellow Chumara was just a Land Bridge away from me, so I converted all the wildlings I could, trained some warriors and crossed over before they could build anything up properly. I ended up nearly destroying them, but it turned out they were supposed to be the buffer between me and the other two tribes, so It didn’t really work out, once the Dakini and the Matak started sending boat raids over.
On my second attempt, I used the classical approach. I built up my village and prepared my defenses. One the mana from braves started pouring in, I ended up creating a strong perimeter around my island with Land Bridge and eventually turned it into a plateau. I then created a single, narrow passage to the top, which I covered with a bunch of towers.
In the meantime, the Dakini and the Matak destroyed the Chumare, after which they increased the amount of raids directed at me, but also started to attack each other. I decided to increase the hostilities between them by sneaking my shaman in and connecting their respective peninsulas with Land Bridge. This ended up being pure genius, because from that point on, they pretty much ignored me, sending only small squads of warriors which I could easily convert to my side.
Once I improved the connection between the two tribes, I pretty much got ignored by the both of them.
Eventually, I reached maximum population and just used my shaman and a group of fire warriors to whittle down the two tribes, piece by piece. This took me a long time, but it was also very fun to play god for a bit, so I enjoyed it, a lot.
This level granted me a useless building, the Spy Training Hut, and two very useful spells – Tornado and Erode.
Aerial Bombardment
Level thirteen, named “Aerial Bombardment” was finally the moment I got the Balloon Hut, which allows me to build, you guessed it, balloons. These are extremely useful for my shaman to navigate around, and will, combined with fire warriors, probably make up the core of my forces on future levels.
As usual, I started building up my defenses while converting wildlings to my side. Again, I used Land Bridge to create a high plateau and eventually created a huge area for my village. I made it a point to train fire warriors early, since all the raids I had to face were air raids, which can easily be deflected by well placed ranged attackers.
I can’t wait to learn Volcano permanently. It’s an awesome spell.
I used the balloons the enemy tribes delivered to me via their failed raids to bring my shaman to the two vaults of knowledge and soon learned both the Balloon Hut plans as well as the Earthquake spell without really having to fight anyone.
At this point, nothing could really hurt me, so I ended up doing the same thing I did on the last level. I built up my village to a huge size and just used my shaman and his spells to destroy the enemy. This time, it was even easier, since I had balloons at my disposal.
The level was done in about an hour.
By the way, I was playing the last several levels on my laptop, at home, which allowed me to play in Direct3D, meaning I could finally play in a higher resolution. There’s an issue, though. A lot of the screenshots look glitched because of Direct3D, so I can never be sure I got the right screen.
