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From: exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee)
Newsgroups: rec.games.misc,comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Populus Question
Message-ID: <1990Sep13.092439.15684@gdr.bath.ac.uk>
Date: 13 Sep 90 09:24:39 GMT
References: <1990Sep12.063220.16021@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu>
Reply-To: P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol c/o University of Bath
Lines: 43

In article <1990Sep12.063220.16021@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> paulg@frith.uucp (Gregory R Paul) writes:
>
>  I've been fooling around with Populous for a while, and have gotten
>stumped at a point.  I have some friend who've made it past level 500
>without too much trouble, so I'm wondering if maybe I just missed 
>something.

Two possible ideas which you might not have considered.  In the really
hostile worlds (rock and ice) the starting terrain is often bad enough
that you lose some of your initial people before they can settle at
all.  It is often handy to use 'join together' mode for the first few
minutes, until you can stabilize some land, to preserve all your
initial strength.  (This is the little man icon, NOT 'go to leader'.)

Second, if you can get anyone relatively near to the baddies, the
hand-knit volcano is often a powerful ploy.  That's where you get your
settlement (or person, if land built on people) in one corner of the
screen, and then raise some point on the opposite edge to max.  The
resulting pyramid is cheaper, and often more effective, than a real
volcano, and you can do it earlier.  (Of course, you have to be near
enough to his settlements that it will effect them -- the damage
'diameter' is two screen-widths minus 2 squares, centered on the point
you raise.)

Failing all that, my experience is that the levels do NOT get uniformly
more difficult as you go up.  Maybe your friend had an easier track.  I
hit 500, but there was one level in the middle which I never did manage
to beat.  Eventually, I skipped around it by going back one or two
worlds (of the ones I'd played, you do keep a record I hope).  Replayed
_that_ until I got a different enough score to be sent onto a different
next world.  (Someday I'll go back to the unbeatable one.)

Oh, and having a castle destroyed by a knight costs you LOTS.  It saves
you lots of mana if you can arrange to keep an eye on his knight, and
destroy your castle yourself (raise its center) just before the knight
attacks it.  I put the shield ('watcher') on his knight in that
situation, so that I can skip back everytime the shield display shows
the knight walking, to nobble whatever settlement is about to be
attacked.

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!ukc!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132