I played through levels 14 and 15 a few days ago, but I didn’t get a chance to write about it, so here goes.

Attacked From All Sides

Level 14, Attacked From All Sides, had the theme of me being in an extremely bad position, with the three other tribes basically surrounding me. I started out on a small piece of low ground attached to a large plateau occupied by the Matak.

Suffice to say, I would not have lasted long without taking some early risks. I trained up a few preachers after quickly building a temple. As soon as I had a couple ready, I took the entire population of my village and attacked the Matak. They didn’t have a chance to train anything dangerous yet, so I killed their shaman and destroyed the village. In a few minutes, I went from a horrible position to probably my favorite position – being an a high plateau with no one nearby.

I wasn’t left alone for long, though. As soon as I started building up my village, the air raids from the other two tribes started. I built up a few towers on key locations and then started creating a flying fire warrior army and distributing balloons throughout my village. Soon enough, nothing could touch me. I kept expanding the plateau with spells and building more huts and defenses until I got tired of it.

I tried with a few actual assaults with my army, but it turns out I suck at  micromanagement in this game, so I resorted to my old methods. My defense was solid, so I put my shaman in a balloon and started obliterating everything with spells. As usual, it took me over an hour, but I won the level without much difficulty.

Incarcerated

Level 15, Incarcerated, is considered the most difficult level in Populous by a lot of the fans. Honestly, I don’t share this opinion, probably because of my playing style. I have no issues with figuring out the intended way of beating the level and I play patiently on the regular levels, but on the other hand, I’m bad at micromanagement in large battles.

In this case, I lost on my first attempt because I came up about 30 seconds to short, but on my second try, I beat it easily.

Basically, my shaman was imprisoned by the enemy tribe, so had to use what little of my people I had to free her and get my revenge. I trained a nice mix of preachers, warriors and fire warriors, built a total of three boats and started ferrying my army to the three guard towers protecting the beach where the prison was.

I actually increased the size of my army while destroying the towers thanks to my preachers and then I started landing on the beach, waiting for everyone to regroup on a single location. Once most of the army was there, I destroyed the few remaining enemy forces there and freed my shaman.

This canceled the timer, so I could freely pray at a nearby obelisk and get a shot of Volcano. All that was left was to climb on top of a nearby hill and cast Volcano in the middle of the enemy village. Level complete!

Now comes the hard part. The next four levels I can pick freely from, but all of them are much harder than anything I managed to beat up to now.

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 [10] – Head Hunter [18] and Unlikely Allies [19]
• Populous: The Beginning [9] – Levels 16 and 17