RIVRISLE.PUD "River Isle" Two player co-operative level with six computer opponents. Play with default resources. Quite difficult. This was my (fairly successful) attempt at making a sea level that was challenging. I had to make is so neither of the usual sea strategies work. Normally one either rushes to get to the sea, or gets mages and death knights as soon as possible. Neither of these strategies has been made particularly easy. Add to this the possibility of foundry/shipyard hopping and you have a difficult but fun pud. --- Josh Levenberg kali: JoshBuckler email: jlevenbe@math.berkeley.edu www: http://math.berkeley.edu/~jlevenbe/ Playtested with: --- Darin "Hoss" Goldstein kali: Daring email: daring@math.berkeley.edu Don't read any farther until you have played the level. I have put detailed spoilers and strategies for beating this level below. We tried several strategies with this PUD. We found we needed to worry about defending against air attacks right from the start. That meant a mill and three to four towers before a barracks. Make sure when you set up the mill near the trees in the lower left. You'll want to chop towards the corner as soon as possible. Build up a fair number of level 3-4 archers. I played the humans, so I was in charge of the archers. My partner (playing orcs) took care of land defense: that meant ogres with upgrades and then lust. We both made many many towers. I can not extol the virtues of towers enough. Anyway, we had no luck hopping to the north island. Although hopping meant we didn't have to deal with the sea guys (and their massive fleets), we never could come out ahead in the attack. By the time we got to the northwest island, each built our barracks and a mage tower, and churned out archers and towers to fend off air attacks, the land guy on the island was well established with large lumber and gold reserves. The only thing advantage we had was that he hardly had any units due to unit max limitations. It would go like this: we would scout his forces, muster what we could, attack, run into some opposition, and then towers. Our attack would slow down as we dealt with the towers and other buildings, and meanwhile he would no longer be at unit max. He'd start producing knights in two or three barracks, and fully upgraded mages would start appearing as well. Our meager forces are pushed back, and future attacks meet with heavy opposition. I'm sure there is a way of doing this and getting the nice juicy mine in the trees in the upper left -- tell me if and how you manage it. What did work for us was a defensive strategy. I got mages with slow and later blizzard. Slow is a great spell on this level. One mage can slow 5 griffins or dragons, multiplying the effectiveness of towers and archers. Blizzard can be good if they bunch up, and nothing beats polymorph in an emergency. I used all of these spells very often. Meanwhile, the sea guys land troops every once in a while -- make sure you get the ogres where they're needed fast or you'll take unnecessary losses. The human player should have several paladins whose main job is to heal. Of course, they can substitute for land defense in a pinch (especially lusted against slowed opponents), but I did not upgrade mine very much. Resources on the starting island are quite scarce, so we economized where we could. The orc player never built an altar to get death knights. Dragons and griffins were out of the question of course, especially with two fleets of destroyers roaming around. If you are careful, you can do a lot of damage to the opponents on the center island. You can blizzard their ships, blizzard an oil patch, blizzard a ship yard, and blizzard a barracks. Its a good idea to target their transports since that will take some of the heat off. Another thing to experiment with is making a stab at getting sea power. You have to build some towers in the area first, bring in a load of archers and mages, and then start the shipyard. This will attract a lot of attention, but you will be able to do tremendous damage blanketing the sea with blizzards. Done right, you will be able to make some oil tankers and start hauling oil. Often then air attacks becomes a problem, but you often can lure them close enough to land to be attacked by mages (who said fireball was useless? It has the longest range of any spell or indeed attack). One game I even produced a couple of transports and landed on the center island. This is great fun since they are only lightly defended, but make sure to take out the barracks quickly since you are unlikely to get reinforcements any time soon. Also, defending against air attacks is a real pain without all that tower support. If you play your cards right, eventually the air guys will run out of cash. Once this happens, focus all your efforts towards taking out the opponents navy for long enough to land troops on the center island. It helps if one of the two players got some oil earlier in the game since there's essentially only one oil spot which stays free throughout the game. Land on the center island and wipe out the two guys there. Leave at least one building of each, though, so unit max is not raised. Sapper or demo squad to the center mine and set up two halls. Drain the mine and build a force for taking out the remaining four opponents. There are two land guys, both of whom have lots of gold and lumber, so its important that you strike hard and fast so they don't get a chance to rebuild. Mostly, however, if your up to this point, you've won. We had thought we had no chance, but the air attacks stopped coming, and we had saved just enough to make it to the center island (be very careful about having enough for a shipyard, foundry, oil platform, at least one oil rig, a transport, a demo squad, and a hall) -- the center mine was enough to fund an army which can finish the level. It was quite satisfying. We had lost to this level several times, we had been fighting desperately the whole game and we were all out of gold mines and had hardly any money. We had lost most of our peons to air attacks in attempts to get wood, and our forces were not looking like they could survive much more onslaught let alone ever conquer anything. Then the air attacks abated and we had a glimmer of hope. So we risked it all in an attempt to take the center island. It felt great to claim the center mine and then finally victory.