Welcome to Bronze Age!

Check out the official BronzeWiki!

After a few weeks, CommodoreShawn and I would like to announce the official wiki site for all tips, tricks, and game information.

Thank you everyone for all your support, questions, and suggestions. Please continue to do so on the new wiki! This guide is considered out of date as of version 1.3.1 of the game, I will leave the guide up until I'm sure all information is on the wiki before editing this guide to link directly to the wiki.

Wether you stumbled upon it through itch.io, a suggestion from a friend, or link from a YouTube Let's Play, welcome one and all. This game is great if you enjoy RTS, city building, or 2D simple art style games! This is a comprehensive guide to get you started if you are brand new to the game or looking for some helpful tips about how to play.

Remeber to read the Development logs from our lord and saviour, Commodore Shawn, to stay up to date on the shananigans below! Check out the Trello Page for planned changes. Keep posting in the Discussion Board, and you can report any bugs here.

What's all this UI? - The items on the right.

• Minimap & Current Season
• Name of Selected Group/Settlement
• Cycle Groups/Settlements  (, + .) Hotkeys now automatically created and displayed in the top left!
• Center Map
• Nanash Icon
• View Region Map
• Notifications - All game messages, such as resource requirements, Maskling attacks, and incoming migrants.

The lower section changes depending on the Migrant Group, Warrior Group, or Settlement selected (Move is self-explanatory):

• Settle - Migrants claims a large circle of land as a settlement.
• Join a Settlement - Migrants join an existing settlement (like, if you had more than one).
• Warband Info - Gives you the name, type, and status of your warriors
• Garrison - Have the warrior group enter the selected settlement and return to their barracks to heal and rest.
•  Settlement Info - Provides essential  information about the settlement such as, population, wealth, warriors, resource levels and surplus, active trade routes  etc.
• Military Info - Provides information on your selected settlement's military status such, current warrior groups and training status
• Construction - All buildings that can be constructed. Selecting one will toggle the construction overlay and provide information about the building's purpose and cost.  
• Work Settings - Lists worker limits, allows construction of roads, their removal, cutting trees, and clearing rocks (mining). Renamed from Worker Designation in 1.3

These remain the same regardless of the selected Group/Settlement:

•  Inspect - This will pause the game and your cursor provides information on the hovered object, such as current task, construction status, group type, and structure upgrades, etc.
• Overlays -  As expected, will show Tower Range, Pathing, and Settlement radius on the main screen, feel free to scroll the map around.

Your First Settlement - Lets Get Muddy.

You just founded your first settlement, time to get to work. Immeadiately begin Construction with the Mister Twister Double Brickwork™ start. Building two Brickworks will give you the mudbricks you'll need until you reach above 50-70 population, everything is currently built from mudbricks. Once you place the foundation(s) your villagers will do the rest, both gathering resources and the physcial construction. Next, place a Tower, give yourself some space as your settlement will grow eventually, but keep it nereby.

 After the tower, you'll want to place a Farm, Bakery, and Storehouse. Following this, build about 10 Houses, as you'll have atleast 7 pop and your first migrants likely won't be very large. Homelessness is an important statistic that effects wealth and migrant appeal.

Once you have all these buildings down, Open Work Settings to Place Roads connecting everything together. The brown X as you're placing the construction show where the entrance is. If you don't remember, they'll be a door when it's built. Roads are essential to helping your villagers get around as fast as possible.

You have a construction queue that your villagers carry out automatically, however to reduce bugs and confusion for the little folks try not to place too much down at once, or structure foundations blocking other foundations.

 At this point, start investing in towers. You'll want to start laying out the defendable edges of your settlement with towers. My rule of thumb - place one after placing your first brickworks, place a second once your farm and bakery are built, place a third as your houses are being constructed. I like to use the towers to define the early limits of a nice square which i'll grow my settlement in. Again, its a balance of having them close so you can defend fast but also leaving room for your settlement to grow.

Don't forget to build a Lumberyard to get logs and you may need a second Storage building at this point depending if there trees in the way. Don't worry about Barracks, Training Grounds, Trade Depot, and Trading Yard until you have over 20-30 pops. Trading won't be needed until you have more than one settlement. Mining will not be required until a bit later to upgrade your structures.

Masklings - They're like Shy-Guys but with Spears.

Masklings are they main antagonists you'll be dealing with as your people struggle for survival. Masklings are the tiny red people that  periodically scout and raid your settlement, check out this Development log for a breakdown of Maskling tactics. As you begin your settlement, within the first few minutes you'll most likely encounter the first raid. Don't worry, it will only be one or two masklings. Your villagers will automatically defend the tower and man your towers. Maskling attacks scale proportionally to your settlement status (wealth/population) and in game time. You'll know when you're under attack - as soon as a Maskling enters vision the Notification alarm will sound and show red exclamation marks alongside the blinking  section in the UI.

Masklings have their own camps and slowly build up an attacking forces together before raiding or seiging your nearby settlement(s). Masklings tend to attack from two or three overall directions, sometimes these line up due to pathing, other times you may be beseiged on three different sides. Attacks are coordinated between the camps, so it's unlikely you'll be hit with more than one attack at once. However, sometimes the raids can be very close together in succession later on. Larger forces of Masklings (~15+) will path differently than the smaller groups, such as following the coastline as opposed to going through the woods.

Military and Warriors - Lets get to killing.

You can train your own warriors to battle the Maskling aggressors. First,  Construct a Training Grounds and a Barracks. Barracks will hold 10 warriors and provide healing and rest to them while they are in the settlement. Each training grounds will teach two of your villagers to be Militia or Skirmisher warriors. Check Nanash's Icon next to the warrior type to view their combat stats. As expected, Militia are a melee warriors with a bit of armor, and Skirmishers are ranged javelin throwers. Militia are much faster to train in an emergency, but Skirmishers offer high ranged damage and decent melee damage at a higher resource and time cost. If you're looking to build a large force, you'll likely need a few barracks to keep them healthy. 

To being, check your Settlement Info for how many idle villagers you have, they will be the first ones to get training. To the right of the warrior type you can set how many warrior you would like to train. The available training ground openings are listed on the far right and warriors will wait their turn to be trained. Once a warrior is trained they will appear in a barracks and join a warband. A list of your warbands will appear in Military Info, feel free to merge multiple groups together to form a large force. I like to keep atleast two groups for fun flanking desctruction on the Masklings. Once you have your warband trained - however big - they will remain in the settlement, ready to defend.

If you're looking for some action, select your warband by toggling through your groups/settlements (with comma and period) or by using the Hotkeys in the top right of your display (1,2,3 etc.). The name of your warband will appear just like your settlement's name. Once selected you'll need Move your troops into the wilderness. Warriors seem to be just as fast as villagers, with roads being essential for a quick call to arms. Your warband will try to  form together as a group first, before executing any move or battle comands.

Combat itself is very straightforward. Masklings will prioritize your force as long as it's in range. You'll know exactly when this happens as your warband and the Maskling force get into battle formations, facing each other. Warbands will take a rectanglular  formation, while Masklings form a solid circle. For the best defense, use a combination of warbands and towers. or engage with a flanking group just as the Maskling hit your main force. The Maskling camps are also destructable, try surprising the enemy by ambushing them while as they group before a raid, or destroy their camps and force them to re-build.

Empire Expansion - "I think I'm getting the hang of this!"

Am I alone in the universe? Why not start another settlement to keep your villagers from existential crisis with those kind of questions. With your first settlement in good standing, or even if things are going poorly and you need to bail, you can send your villagers as migrants to settle a new area.

One way to attract migrants to your properous settlement is to build a Copper Statue, showing off your wealth and influence. 

First, open Settlement Info as you'll need some idle villagers.  If you need a larger migrant group, try reducing active constructions, reducing resource surplus (if not at your cap), and reducing worker designations, to create more idle villagers. From Settlement Info, select Form Migrants. Click Move to sort your idle villagers into a migrant group and when you're satisfied click Create Migrant Group. Your first settlement began with seven population and I would recommend creating migrant groups with about 10-20 villagers. This will help kick start the new settlement. Bring along a warband if you need protection. Masklings are a true evil and will show no mercy to your new settlement, they will raid with the same strength against all settlements.

The rest of this process will seem familiar. Select your new migrant group by cycling through with comma and period, you'll need to Move them to explore. You can't build settlements too close to each other, or too close to Maskling camps, so get some distance between your migrants and your home town.  Once you find a lush new valley to conquer, have your migrants Settle the area.  Again, I recommend the Mister Twister Double Brickwork™ start to help get the new town off the ground.

Trade Routes - These are some strong pigs. (This section is still growing!)

need pasture, pigs, tradeyard, depot, and available wagons at atleast one settlement involved in the route. trade routes are per settlement, meaning if you set a route from one, you can create a vice-versa route

.tradeyards hold up to 4 wagons. each wagon holds ten cargo.

settl in- creat trade route, destination, export outgoing import incoming, set frequency, send now[forces wagons to go, whether or not the cargo is in the tradeyard/ sends all wagons -

watch their pathing, cut trees, invest in external roads, they are open to attack, hard to keep warbands with them to defend (wagon speed).

Tips and Tricks - For that little extra 'oomph'.

Construction: Villagers stuck or not completing a particular structure? Sometimes they get confused if they can't find the door. Try Desconstructing them (in the Inspect view) and trying again. Otherwise make sure there's not another structure foundation in the way as that can sometimes cause problems, especially if it is completed first. Secondly, don't load too much in the construction queue, it can confuse the villagers and they wont build as efficiently, take your time with placements, especially with walls.

Farms: This might be obvious to most, but build your Farms close to your Storagehouses and Bakeries to cut down on villager travel time for resource production.

Gatehouses: Gates are towers too! They will automatically defend your settlement and close the gate at the first sign of an attack. Just like towers, you can also Keep them manned for a faster defense.  Don't forget you can build roads through the gate (two blocks wide), for example to connect and exterior road.

Mining: To mine resources such as Copper and Limestone, you will need to place a Mine and Smelter near resource veins in mountains rocks. Build a storehouse nearby too, and once complete, you'll need to open Work Settings and Clear Rocks.

Terrain: Don't think you're safe just because there's a huge mountain beside you, although pathing is slow, Masklings and Migrants will climb over those mountains, watch out! You cannot build on trees, mountains, or water (obv.), but coastline is valid ground. Terrain types are sandy ground, barren ground, grassy ground, rocks, fertile soil, shallow water, and deep water.

Upgrades: Structures can now be upgrade (1.3+) in the Inspect overlay, and requires mined resources.

Walls: Because Masklings will destroy the first structure they reach before moving to the next, an easy way to strengthen your defenses or delay a seige is to double your walls. Another example would be spacing 'barrier' walls with an open block between them as an effective way to slow an attacking force (think like barbed wire obstacle) and provides more time for your towers to rain arrows on the enemy.

Warbands: You don't need to wait for combat to finish to join the fray! Even if Masklings are engaged with another warband you can join the fight. Masklings will focus the first group that attacked them as your flank slowly tears them apart. I heavily recommend the bulk of your warbands being skirmishers if you can afford it - they destroy the Masklings with their range advantage.

Wealth: Wealth is the most important statstic to attracting new migrants and therefore, the most important staistic for growing your settlement. Almost everything contributes to wealth! Every bit of resource counts, and consuming it does the reverse. Right now, Barracks, Tradehouses give the most wealth per building, followed by gatehouses and towers. Everything else gives no more than two wealth,  domesticated pigs in your pasture count too!

Did I miss something? I'm always looking for new tips, suggestions, tactics, and spelling or formatting mistakes . Thanks for your time!