I’m getting close to the end here! Another two levels of Populous: The Beginning, I finally managed to write about.
Archipelago
Archipelago is the perfect name for this level. The Dakinia were the only tribe I had to face here, but they had a huge advantage compared to how and where I started. I had a tiny island, surrounded by other tiny islands, while they had a fully built up village on a large continent.
After converting the few wildmen on my own island, I managed to get another few on a nearby island, so I started building up two smaller villages at the same time. I also immediately began charging Land Bridge, so I can connect a few of the islands together.
I’m getting close to that awesome final level!
Pretty soon, the Dakini started attacking via boats, so I had to repel the first couple attacks with the blast spell alone. As soon as I had the room, I built a Fire Warriors training hut and trained a couple of fire warriors to place on the hill next to my reincarnation site. This made the attacks easier to handle, but I wasn’t completely safe until I built six guard towers and placed the fire warriors inside.
By that point, my plateau was starting to get formed and I finally had a good enough mana income to keep growing my land mass at a decent rate. Once I was ready, I couldn’t do my usual thing, sadly, since I didn’t have access to the balloon hut on this level. Instead, I first sneaked my shaman into the knowledge vault to learn the Angel of Death spell and then started sneakily flattening and lowering the closest part of the enemy island. Once I got rid of all the high grounds I could, I started expanding my plateau towards the enemy and placed a large amount of fire warriors on this strip of high ground.
From this location, I could easily target most of the village with my spells, so after another ten minutes, the level was won.
Fractured Earth
Fractured Earth was a fun, but somewhat difficult level, which I had to repeat several times, mostly due to not completely realizing what was going on and what I needed to do on my first couple of tries. The level was volcanic, with oceans replaced with lava. It was also covered in fissures which periodically erupted, basically causing Volcanoes and Earthquakes to be cast on the location of the eruption. The only way to stop this from happening was to cast Flatten on the spot and seal the fissure.
The amount of red makes the level seem really dark and scary.
This was also the level where I was finally able to learn the Volcano spell, which is awesome, but doesn’t really agree with my usual strategy of sinking the enemy, since it leaves behind a huge land mass after the volcano is done. It also casts a lot of mana, so I only used it once on the level, as close to the middle of the enemy village as I could.
I got the Volcano early and after that, I started focusing on defense, until I was finally able to start wrecking havoc with my shaman. As usual, I had my defense of fire warriors at my village and a trigger happy shaman with a charged Erode spell do their thing and in about 30 minutes, the level was cleared.
Did I mention Populous: The Beginning is a great game? Because it is!
