This is the second of a series of guides I am writing for Dawn of Discovery: Venice. This one focuses on the path to the nobleman and how you have to get there as efficiently as possible.
This part of the game focuses around Ascension rights. Ascension rights are the number of available building upgrades available. Each of these has different requirements that must be met. Some of them are unique and have varieties of options. We’ll be starting first with the ascension of the peasant to the citizen.
Peasant to Citizen
This is the simplest ascension that you will have to deal with. For this you simply must meet the demands of your people. This essentially means that in a given civilization you should have 0 peasants. Every single building is going to grant you 10 citizens total. You need XYZ peasant to get all of the peasant buildings. Peasant buildings are pretty damned simple, it’s a chapel.
When designing your little city leave space for the following:
A chapel
A pub
A church
A carpenter (if fires are turned on)
A fire station (if fires are turned on)
A head of XYZ (if you are playing against volatile enemies)
Alms house
All of these buildings have a radius of influence of varying sizes. You will need all your homes to be within the influence of all these buildings
So when you’re building your first few peasant buildings try and spread them out a little bit because you are going to need to have some decently sized buildings linking them in order to get all future ascensions. For now all you will require is fish, cider, a chapel, and a need for company. Company in this game is simply having all your homes connected to a Market Place. Resources in this game are pretty minimal to tax income. You will require approximately one of each to make the jump from peasant to citizen and than that will probably last you again in the jump from citizen to patrician.
Once you have an adequate supply of all of these and your tax rate is set to minimal your peasants will advance. Tax rate is important. If you are are set higher than the minimum they will not advance. But if they do not have adequate resources to advance you should put the tax rate at “Happy” so to allow peasants to move in. The extreme adequate is for when they are all moved in and you are going to stop expansion for a little bit.
For every singe building to expand from peasant to citizen you will require 1 tn of wood and 1 tn of tools. Yes it means that in expanding to a new level you are going to be burning out your resources to get to the next level. So I would suggest unless you are willing to buy tools and wood from the neutrals (which I do) don’t go beyond XYZ buildings. Otherwise you won’t have enough resources to build tools.
In modes without a flag ship this is absolutely essential as you will either have to trade in tools or make them yourself.
Okay so we are going to the minimal and bam you have citizens! NEXT!
Citizen to Patrician
This is the most complicated growth stage in the game, this is because you have a complete lack of tools… and ascension rights for patricians come in many forms.
First off there are four ways to gain ascension rights for Patricians:
Building an extra citizen building
Beggars: they come to your town randomly when you hit the citizen level.
Envoys: Oriental citizens
Equip items for warehouses
The first option is simply increasing the number of houses you support, this is something you will have to do anyway. You will require 21 homes minimum to support the Patricians for all your buildings. You will need 28 homes to support the Patricians you need to unlock all of their buildings. This is a pretty useful option early on as you are just going to be building things you need in the future.
The second option beggars is a pretty low investment one. In easy difficulty you require one alms house total. Alms house appears after the first set of beggar ship settlers show up. Beggars take up fairly minimal resouces (those of a peasant). This means you will need fish, religion and it connected to a street. In difficult and up modes these alms houses become a little more expensive as you need to have one in range of every single home.
Third option is envoys, this is the least expensive option but the most time investing. For every one envoy you create you get one patrician building. This option is not only going to cost you less gold than the others but it will also make you gold. In order to get to envoy status a nomad is going to need to be fully satisfied. To start this go to Lord Richard Northburgh. If you have a ship you should be sending it to find him right away. From him purchase a single honor equip item. You deliver these to the Grand Vizier. As a point of reference Richard is always in the north and the Grand Vizier is always in the south. You will need to deliver 450 honor total to the Vizier to unlock all of the nomad buildings.
You need around 150 nomads to unlock all of the nomad buildings, that’s roughly 10 nomad homes. Nomads need all of their needs met just like peasants to become envoys. For this transformation you will need:
Dates
Milk
Carpet
Temple access
Carpet is going to be the hardest thing to get. You will be settling your ship on an island with fertility for dates and preferably spice because dates is the food of the nomads and spice is the food of citizens. So in order to make envoys you will need to go settle another island. The island will need silk and indigo, the main components of carpet. So you will also need a ship yard and a single ship to transport these carpets to your new island.
Okay here’s the harder part, you will need to build a temple. Temples require mosaic. Mosaic is produced by infusing quartz and clay. An island requires specific clay fertility and access to a quartz mine. Mosiac is a fairly constant resource for you so you will probably want to include dropping mosiac off on this grand carpet trade route.
Once your temple is built people will begin ascending to envoy status similar to how your peasants became citizens. However you will need one nomad home for every envoy home, so sorry no total envoy civilizations. You will require wood, tools and mosiac (4 mosaic is a lot) to advance one home of nomads to a home of envoys. This may seem expensive but remember that every envoy you advance is a patrician building, so one envoy home is going to be 15 patrician buildings…. yeah it’s pretty easy.
If you want to continue to fulfill and expand your envoy base you should know that they are going to be very high tax value (slightly higher than Patricians slightly lower than Nobleman) and are quite well worth the investment if tax income is what you need. However quartz and spice are the only things you need to get nobleman. The only benefit of going any higher in reputation and population with the oriental world is to gain access to oriental ground armies and the emperor’s palace (gives you access to emperor quests). As you expand your envoys you will gain access to pearl necklaces, marzipan, and coffee… all of which will earn you nice tax dollars.
Okay the last option is not too worth while, you gain it after you become a patrician and have invested honor into Lord Richard Northbourgh’s citizen item attainments. You need to get lucky and strike either a Patrician to Nobleman or Citizen to Patrician item. These items are use items and if you have homes ready to go you can advance more people to these statuses in the short time the item is available. This means theoretically that you can have an entirely Patrician society. So this item becomes useful once later on. Basically you need to increase your level of Patrician supporting structures for this to be useful.
Okay so now you know how you get Patrician rights. Now, your needs to satisfy are actually quite simple, spice and linen garments.
You will also require a pub to be built within range of any home you want to advance (so all of them).
Once you have an adequate supply of these, your patrician trade rights (ascension name) will start getting used up as you ascend to Patrician level society.
Patrician to Nobleman
I consider this to be less complicated than Citizen to Patrician because it works more like Peasant to Citizen… you simply need to have a certain number of Patricians to support a certain number of Noblemen. The part that gets a little complicated is the need for unique resources. Your island may have access to one of these but that is all you will get. If it doesn’t it will be to your advantage to buy seeds to plant one of these resources on your island. Keep in mind that this will take up one of your three warehouse slots (OH NO!). If you remove it you will lose that item and you will lose that fertility, even worse
So you are going to need a wide complicated network of ships and resources. It is always best to try and produce the end result item at the place where you get the supply for it. This is to say that if you want bread you build the bread facilities on the island you are cultivating wheat from. The same is said for:
beer made from wheat/hops
glass made from quartz and a unique resource requiring trees
leather jerkins which require animal farms (plantable anywhere) salt (requires brine mine) and a river.
and books requiring paper (requires a river and wood) and indigo
These will all be required in adequate supply on your island. On top of that you will need a church to be built in influence of any area you want to ascend to noble status.
At this point you are dealing with a lot of resources, fish, cider, linen cloth, spice, bread, beer, leather jerkins, and books. If one of these falls out of supply then your newly gained noblemen will devolve into Patricians and subsequently fall down to the ranks where that resource is not required for ascension. Think of all of these ascension requiring resources as the minimum for each standing.
I should note at this point if you gain too many patricians you will gain access to a new resource candlesticks. Candlesticks require a new resource brass. You will require the largest most complicated production chain possible:
Bee’s wax (comes from bee hives which require fertility) + hemp (used in your linen cloth) will be used to make candles
Copper (mined from oriental south) and charcoal (produced from trees or efficiently mined from the north) will be used to make brass
Brass and candles will make candlesticks
If you do not quickly gain an adequate supply of these far too many of your noblemen will devolve into Patricians. Just as a note once you get access to these they are your top priority to make and advance.
And Nobleman
Well you’re at nobleman. You will gain access to a large number of resources: meat, wine, fur coats, brocade robes, and glasses. These will all give you exceptionally high tax income but without them will cost you an arm and a leg, so make sure to quickly get an adequate supply of everything. By this point you will have control of nearly every island so use your routes efficiently.
This is my first tutorial and I’m covering in it the combat systems. If you want to find any of my other Dawn of Discovery game guides hit the category on the left side of the page for guides or click on the dawn of discovery tag at the bottom of the page.
I think combat in this game is mostly overlooked because the game’s emphasis is on production and system balancing. But let’s not forget that this is a multiplayer game and that 2/3 of the modes in the continuous play will require you to beat multiple computer players. You can be a pansy and do it diplomatically or you can bring the fight to them. First thing I’m going to go over is the unit types in the game.
Unit Types
I tried to get at least one of every ship type in this shot
Small Warship: Your small warship is your basic sea unit. It has one cargo space and one equip slot. It doesn’t take much of a beating and have a short life expectancy in any battle.
Large Oriental Trade Ship: This is a mid-ranged ship. Oriental trade ships do not have that much more fire power than a small warship. What it offers is a slightly stronger hull and the fastest warship in the game. Oriental warships have two equip slots so they can do significantly more damage than small warships if they are socketed to that effect. The downside is you have to build the specialized oriental shipyard which means advancing your oriental side to a village.
Large Oriental Warship: There is no small size of this. But like the trade ship it has two slots and does a little less fire power than the large warship. Very fast ship though.
Corsair Ship: These are the corsair trading ships which have two trade slots and a weak attack (weaker than your small warship). These are only available via purchase from the Corsair’s Lair and are not worth your time. Only one equip slot.
Large Warship: This is going to be your end game warship. This ship has the highest fire power and the highest health pool. It has a higher rate of fire (firing speed) than any other ship. One large warship is going to beat three small warships… but at a great cost. It is nearly 4x as expensive initially to make these bad boys with double the maintenance cost. If you are running a full fleet of these guys its going to run 10% of your total budget meaning war is no longer cheap.
It's an oriental war building unfortunately it takes forever to build
Small Military Camp: This is your basic ground unit. They have the weakest attacks, weakest defense but move the fastest from point to point and have faster setup time. This makes them excellent for taking market places and other strategic points. All ground units are produced in Keeps and have the ability to form offensive keeps. You position them in their boat form in the water next to the spot you want to form your siege and build a keep. Because small military camps are so cheap and so fast they are the best to form this role.
Large Military Camp: This is the strongest offensive ground unit. These are the guys you want to send at enemy towers. They have moderately strong defense but have fairly long setup times. Keep in mind it costs triple the resources to buy one of these bad boys.
Trebuchet. The ancient trebuchet is still the greatest piece of siege equipment in the game. It takes a long time to setup and does very little damage. However the trebuchet does take a lot of damage meaning that against Keeps these are the best people to throw in first.
Oriental Encampment: This unit (and all oriental ground units) become available once you have a four-star relationship with the Grand Vizier. I’d never build an oriental encampment. The up sell is they capture buildings faster, however the expense is not worth getting a wimpy unit.
Cannon position: These are superb at knocking down walls, towers and keeps if you have the option to grab one of these definitely go for it. They have negative defense values against enemy units though and because of this they will need support if they get attacked.
Miner position: These go under walls when they start tunneling and cannot be seen by the enemy until they make their attack first. Obviously there is a cooldown on tunneling once you come up so make sure you use them strategically.
Keep: Keeps can be captured just like market places and represent a mighty force. It takes roughly two large camps or five small camps to take out a keep. You’re just hoping you have a trebuchet around so you don’t wipe half your army out on one of these things. But once you have this bad boy you can build units on their ground. On top of that it still attacks and starts wiping out surrounding enemy structures and ground units.
Battle keep: The battle keep can be launched on any island by any player. These keeps do not create units, they are simply fortified positions for your force to start off at. In order to invade an island with your army you will need to erect one battle keep or one harbor on their island, battle keeps although more expensive are way cooler and help in your first push a little better as they defend the harbor and attack surrounding buildings.
Oriental Towers: These are really weak towers and can be soloed by large camps or two small camps.
Towers/Gates: These are a little tougher as they benefit from provisions (which regenerate hit points for soldiers). This means you have to either burn out their provisions or do more damage than they can heal.
Bandits: Bandits come in many forms in the game with various make up. Sometimes they are thieves. Sometimes they are rogues, fallen soldiers, etc. To buy them you need a road to some gimmick building on an island you may or may not control. They require food and weapons usually (but not always) in order to go to war on your behalf. They show up against you a lot of the time when you deny beggars in your community. The beggars hire bandits to fight you. Bandits can bypass walls and move faster but do as much damage as a small camp. However they do take over market places far faster than all other units.
Preparing for War
Diplomacy in this game is broken down into four levels ALLIANCE, TRADE AGREEMENT, PEACE and WAR. Alliance will force you into war if a hostile ground invasion is launched on your allies territory. Trade merely allows you to trade which just nets higher profits than trading with the neutrals. Peace is skidding the line. But every now and then you’ll get to war. In this game you cannot just declare war on a person. You have to break each agreement indivudally over time until the war button appears.
In the picture above you click on the person you want to interact with and their graphic with options shows up in the middle. On the left you can see a dead opponent. In the possible options you have demand tribute (trading your honor points for gold), anger them (chance), make them happy (chance), and demand gold (trading your gold for honor). Two options that are hard to see are in the left and right sides of the circle, two crossed swords and a yellow banner. The yellow banner is trade agreement and the two swords is war… yes I’m at the border line of peace. In this instance I declared war and brought this opponent down to her knees.
The whole thing is chance but you need to anger them enough so that they will declare war on you making it so that the other players don’t lower their views on you as well. So you’ll have to do one of three things, chance it and try and insult them, get caught (on purpose) as espionage or start building your own settlements on islands where they have them.
While you are doing this you are strategically placing armies to invade territories quick and do some fast damage as well as warships along common trade paths to knock out supplies to their main hub. The key here is to look good while trying to force a war to happen. Keep in mind you will want tones of gold before you declare war and if possible a nice +gold incoming into your city. Wars become very expensive once you start capturing new colonies and need to pay all their bills.
It is also a good time to figure out where your fast forward and slow buttons are for single player because you will want these considering how long and arduous movement is in this game. Hit F9 and the bar will come up. You can also find it along the bar that brings up your game menu as well.
Defense
You’re going to need to be able to defend your colonies in case you are attacked. Think of yourself as a Veimar German Chancelor pre-emptively preparing moves in case someone declares war on you.
Computer players are typically going to send their warships at your trade routes and send their ground troops in unprotected. Ground troops can deploy in boats and are increasingly weakened to ship attack. Your priority for your defense is going to be to build a fleet. You will want 2-3 small warships early on. Even one ship if you are smart can do well.
You will want to go to the Grand Vizeere right off the bat and purchase some kind of self-repairing ship equip. Until you get repair cranes this is going to be the best thing for you. Your tactic for fighting ships early on is going to be hit and run. You float in you lay in a few attacks until your health is around 75% and then you run away and regenerate your hit points. All the while he’s not because he is using a different equip and also does not have repair cranes. If you do this you will beat their warships every time.
Another interesting note about this tactic, while you are running away you are repairing, he is not. This means that when he gives up chase he will be snared and easier for you to catch back up to.
If you have to choose between war ships nuking down your trade ships and getting to his army though get his army first. His army will knock out your civilization and without proper towers to stop him or an army of your own it will go nowhere. Computer players generally show favoritism to getting a keep up first.
Truthfully all battles are won in the sea, if you control the sea you will always win the day. Mood of your opponent tells you how likely they are to declare war. If they are constantly harking about how weak you are they are going to be attacking soon. Similarly if they are responding very negatively to how you play the game outside of war they are also likely to declare war. Make sure to have your boats positioned along the waters leading to their base. This way when they send their armies in you can pick them off as they come. It might suck losing some trade ships but once you get rid of his army and his war ships you are free to do with him what you please and go on the offensive!
Let’s say you have to defend with just units though. Just imagine that any spot on your map a person can go to at any given time. You have to pick strategic spots they might want to choose and stick your guys there. When I’m designing my societies I make sure to stack up all of my buildings into huge blocks so that it’s impossible to take over important buildings right off the bat. This way I don’t need to create land based defenses other than a standing army. I’ll usually put a market place off by itself somewhere for them to take and I’ll have my army ready for them. When a person is invading you the onus is on them to hit you. In order to take over a node you have to be the only army on that node meaning that if you place your armies around the node you are defending they’ll need to destroy them before they can move on. The game has numerical power systems but consider that you will gain a +2 from playing defensive in a system that starts at power 4 and ends at power 10.
My little army is capturing this building it will be done in 35 minutes
Buildings take a very long time to capture. In the picture above you can see a little timer over the building I’m capturing. This timer reads of roughly 30 minutes. For one small unit it takes one hour to capture a node. The more units you have on a node that faster it goes. So use this information a little bit strategically. You will not want to rush in and defend that node right away. You want his army to be sitting there doing nothing for quite some time. Once the counter is down to 25% rush in your armies and set up camp to defend. If they win this will buy you more time to rouse more armies because the building take over is going back up to 100%. The mini-map shows spheres of influence via color coding. If they do in fact take over your building that part of the map will transform to their color(white).
But the defense does not stop there. While you are being sieged you can lay a siege on them to try and put pressure on a peace treaty. Early on in the game you will want to purchase a Base of Operations and place it within the residential area of your settlement. You will always want to make this building look like the surrounding buildings via design toggling. An odd looking building will surely signal that your Base is there. Always update it as your citizens advance. If you want to drop it and have the appropriate one click on your Base of Operations build button and scroll through various designs with C.
Your base of operations looks like any other building save the small pyramid over it
You are going to want to burn down their civilization. Just look through parts of his/her city without adequate fire protection and that is where you will strike. Doing this is going to burn not only their city but a source of income. When you have less tax payers your incoming cash is pretty bad. This distracts the computer player as well. Now they are going to be building tones of fire houses and carpenter’s houses to combat the fires you are letting go. How to get a spy into a building and doing this isn’t so obvious. Most things in the game you click on the building and a menu pops up. With this building it only allows you to toggle where your spies are. To spy on a building click on the building you want to drop a spy in and click Insert. A pyramid will erect over that building.
I should also note that the computer can unleash their own network of spies on you. The game will warn you there is a spy in a territory (if you have a Base of Operations on that island). They will be clickable and when you click on them you can catch them. Unlike all other things in the game these will not eradiate blue you just have to catch them and what they look like. I tried to find a vid on YouTube of what one might look like but instead I got this:
Anyway they look like sinister nobleman. They wear a cape have black hair and when you zoom in you can see they have retardedly huge noses. Don’t let a single one get through or you will have to deal with a revolt, a fire, or a disease.
The Offense
If you’re good you’ve already won the war before the war even begins. You’ve successfully defended against the enemy but now it’s time to attack. Remember when you are attacking that your trading partners will lose respect for you the longer you keep a war on once you are invading so you will have to try and keep their opinions of you high. You can do this by going into the diplomacy menu and hitting the button that looks like a happy speech balloon. This gives you your chance of being successful, if it’s not 75% or higher don’t waste your time, it’ll do more harm than good.
So on to the war! In a sea campaign when it is ship vs. ship you are best to stack all of your ships up and attack. This game does not have any rock, scissors, and paper mechanics to make it so certain ships attack certain ships better. Get all of your ships into one giant group by hitting Ctrl+1 and then send them out to destroy your enemies war ships. Make sure they are always targeting the same ship and use that fast forward and slow button (F9) to help in micro managing this battle. As far as building ships bigger is always better. Oriental warships are pretty easily accessible and are a good choice early on but you will want to eventually get big bad Large Warships out there.
There are a few things that are going to help you in this sea battle if you are on the losing end of it. First off you can transform your trading ships into little bombs of destruction if you have Hassan ben Sahid (the Muslim pirate) at peace. He has these flaming barrels that you can put in a trade ships equip slot. What this will do is reign destruction on enemy ships in an area of effect. Basically these are best used if your enemy is also grouping their ship together. You send your little trade ship in and slow down the game, once you are on top of them you blow it up. This won’t kill the ships but it will leave them crippled. This means they are moving slower and are on the run, send your fleet in to finish them off.
As I said in defense use Equip items with self-repair built into them. Once you get repair cranes though you want speed and cannons. Try and get a crew mate from the Grand Vizier with some combination of hit points, speed, and damage in them as well as one cannon from Giacomo Garibaldi (the Italian bureaucrat). You will probably not get many good war items from Lord Richard Northburgh (the representative of the Emperor of Rome) because his items focus mainly on settlement development. Early on you will want to get basic self-repairing items but by the end of the game items are going to be less important to Attainments.
Attainments are like specializations in the game. Each transforms honor into some new ability (new ship options) or some enhancement to your current fleet/civilization. Early on you will want most of the damage and hull health point related ones. Hassan ben Sahid (the Muslim pirate) has probably the best ones for you as a tier 3 talent increases the firing power of all warships and your flag ship. Hassan also has access to the boarding party which is useful in war. Basically if you are at the Patrician stage chances are your enemy is going to have a single large warship. So what you do is you send your boarding party after that one ship. All the while the remainder of your fleet is going to nuke down the rest of the ships around it. If you get the warship that’s great, if you don’t, don’t worry. The purpose of the boarding party was merely to keep the large warship from destroying your fleet and exposing the remainder of his fleet. The whole battle will be over before you successfully board his ship so the tactic will work.
Okay so you have your attainments, you have your items and you are sinking their ships, now what? GROUND WAR!
After successfully taking this node my little army is barely noticeable on the screen moving on look just under the paper mill and you will see my units
Ground war is simple but arduous. As you saw there seven different unit types available in this game with four of them being the ones you will probably use. I say this because you need to become a four-star ally of the Grand Vizier and have 1,000 envoys before you can access his ground military options. You will want some small encampments but not a lot. Mostly what you are looking for is one trebuchet and a lot of large encampments. If for whatever reason enemies are still alive by the time you get access to the oriental types one cannon position and two miner positions will be a helpful addition to this army.
So you send in your small military encampment in to make the big ole battle fort. Generally you will want to take a harbor if they only have their main harbor than don’t sweat it. But yeah if you can get a harbor do it up. Make sure your battle fort doesn’t kill the harbor obviously or this would ruin all your future power plays. Gaining a harbor means you will be able to move Provisions into the area. Provisions are gained at Patrician level through a Provision house. These have to be manually created and cost different types of food, water and clothes. Provisions are going to keep your war effort moving on the island, but if you’re not a Patrician, don’t sweat it he’s probably not either.
Generally you do not want to assault his main island first. You are going to want to go after his territories… target ones that have resource you want or will want. Islands with fertility to grapes, silk, indigo, hops, and wheat are going to do you very well by the end of the game. Knock out towers first then take over harbors. If the enemy player loses control of all their harbors they can no longer send in new supplies to this island. New supplies would mean that they are going to construct more stuff for you to take over. You just place your troops next to what you want to take over and fast forward through the timer. Colonies are usually poorly defended, but if they are defended send in your trebuchet first. Do not sent in any troops until your trebuchet is in position, if anything move your troops just out of range of the tower you are trying to destroy. Once the trebuchet is being attacked move in the rest of your army and invade.
Okay so you are knocking out his colonies and have everything he has that you want for now, time to attack his main land. Fighting on his main soil will only be harder because he has a keep on that island. Keeps are heavily fortified and require 4-5 encampments to take over or add in a trebuchet or a cannon to destroy them. As long as the keep is up the enemy will be producing new troops to defend with so taking this thing over is a huge priority. Once the keep is taken you have won, he cannot defend himself. Just go about taking over MARKET buildings after that. I stress market buildings because if you take over his production and he declares peace his population will not have any resources to survive on. This means either entering a trade agreement with you or withdrawing from the region. By doing this you will make sure your reputation with other hostile leaders is secured.
I'm sending in two encampments at a time because this keep is in the middle of her damned settlement
That is in a nut shell the game’s war. Yes there are other ways of winning the game, just war is the funnest. Look towards other guides I’ll be writing on other parts of the game.
TheGameGuru.Me 