A Beginner's Guide to Playing War Selection

## Introduction

This is a Beginner's guide designed to run through the basics of War Selection on Steam. This guide does not cover more advanced topics and is designed to a be a primer and introduction to the game for new players.

There are four active game modes, Armageddon, Free-For-All (FFA), Team Match, and Survival. Each of these has different characteristics corresponding distinct individual strategies. This guide will focus on general principles that are broadly applicable to all modes, but is specifically designed for the early game in Team Match/FFA. For more general information on these game modes please see the Game Modes page. Eventually I'll get around to writing specific guides for these other game modes, but I'm not there yet :D.

## The Stone Age: The Earliest of the Early Game

Upon entering the Stone Age all players start with the same technology and access to buildings and units as all other players. You are an undifferentiated civilization that will gain unique buildings, units and mechanics as you progress through the game.

Starting Position:

Players start with 10 stone age workers, an Altar and a Bulwark. The workers are divided automatically with five to go to collect berries for food and five to collect wood for building materials. Berries are ***only*** found by other players spawn (thus if you see berries on the map that aren't yours, you know you are very close to a base. May seem irrelevant, but it has come into play for me on some very close quarters maps). booty

Workers move out from the Altar your path begins to diverge from other players; however, your purpose should always be the same. Build workers uninterrupted.

Initial Build Order:

So immediately queue up workers by right clicking on the worker button at the altar. Right click queues five units at a time. Do this several times for a minimum of forty workers. Set the altar to rally to the nearest forest and select *one* of your original 10 workers to build a Hut. You start out with a pop cap of 12. Each Hut creates 3 additional pop cap to a maximum of 60 in the Stone Age. This pop cap can grow in later ages, after appropriate upgrades are researched (Stone Age-60. Bronze Age-90. Early Medieval Age-150. Early Industrial-250)

Because of the rng, every single starting position will be different every single time. Starting positions give significant advantages and disadvantages, but your job is to make the best of wherever you are. Simply keep in mind your goal is to minimize interruptions in building workers which you should continue to build until a minimum of 55/60. Five of the initial pop cap is left for military. Early game military is costly (relative to economy) and weak. Early rushes are almost non-existent before Bronze Age and can be handled by workers. (Stone Age Special Situations for exceptions). This goal gives us our three things you have to stay on top of, you need food to build them (50 each), pop cap to house them (3 increased pop cap per Hut up to our Stone Age max of 60) and building materials to build houses (100 wood per house). Notice I call wood ***building materials.*** This is because wood and stone are the same thing. Ironically, in the Stone Age, your worker cannot mine stone for building materials. Stone mining for building materials can only be done by Bronze Age workers.

So far I've managed to write a ridiculous number of words but have only told you to build workers and a Hut. Almost always, the next building to build is a warehouse. The warehouse is a resource drop off point for your workers you want it to be close to minimize the amount your workers have to walk before dropping off resources. You need to find a good clump of trees and plop one down as close as possible to them. If workers are walking they are not gathering berries, chopping lumber or building. Thus you need to build it practically right on top of the resource you are mining with as little space for your worker to squeeze in and mine next to the resource as possible. Ideally, I scout around my berries with my first produced worker a little and try to find a spot that is very, very close to both berries and wood. Usually, there isn't a very very close spot to both thus I build the first warehouse close to wood. If you start constructing it in a bad spot, select it and press backspace to demolish a building.

Due to being able to place warehouses anywhere I do not research the fur shoes upgrade. If you are placing your warehouses correctly your workers aren't walking hardly at all to drop off resources and if your workers aren't walking then you don't need a movement speed upgrade for a Stone Age Worker that will quickly become out modded. Some people think this upgrade is essential. I think it takes from time/resources to build workers.

The biggest two mistakes I frequently see are people not building enough workers and not dropping 120 building materials to build a warehouse super close to resources. These are both huge mistakes as you are greatly impacting your economy by not building workers and your worker efficiency by not building warehouses. Build a lot of workers and build warehouses early and often. The way the economy works currently, your economy (and therefore your ability to build army/navy) is constrained by your ability to produce workers, which can only currently be produced one at a time from your Town Center. **Due to this constraint keeping your Town Center constantly actively doing things is of the utmost importance** (It should not be constrained by resource nor supply limitation).

So a very brief Recap: Build workers constantly, build a hut then a warehouse on top of lumber, then probably another house because you'll be sitting on extra food, then I usually build a second warehouse as close to berries as possible.

**Burn into your mind your workers should be walking as little as is possible**.

After you have a couple warehouses down and your workers are barely moving to collect resources you should be throwing down huts at a pretty constant rate. You can just have one worker queue up several huts to keep them rolling. As your population hits the upper teens to twenties you should have enough extra resources to research berry comb and firewood ropes at your warehouse to increase your rate of berry collection and lumber mining respectively, these are worth getting since in no way should it impact your rate of worker production and should only serve to make them more efficient. Intermittently as you build workers pull a few to go increase your food production. The number you put on isn't as important as making sure the number is constantly above zero (not constraining worker production) and starting to get above 100 when you are around 30 population. Why 100 food around 30 population? Because this is around when your economy is becoming robust enough to build a stone Temple, which requires 100 food before it can be placed. Eventually the stone Temple requires 500 buildable materials/wood too, but that is not needed for upfront placement.

The stone Temple is going to be your eventual new town center. Ideally, I like to place it next to an open spot of buildable land AND a resource node (stone or copper/iron metal node). In the open space, if I go Europe I'll eventually place a farm, which requires a lot of buildable area for fields or if I go Asia I'll eventually build a poultry yard (more compact and efficient over the European farm).

*Note: The Stone Temple is going to eventually be upgraded to progress your empire to the Bronze Age. where all of your workers will eventually be produced upon researching bronze age, also if destroyed in Bronze Age or after you will lose the game.*

By the time you have your Temple constructed you should also have upper 30s to 40s population. Your workers are primarily harvesting lumber (3/4s-ish). You should have MULTIPLE warehouses, not just the one for wood, one for berries I told you about, but additional ones that you add in as you notice your workers are using their legs for more than a couple seconds to drop off resources (wasting two seconds X40 + workers adds up very quickly). Upon finishing construction of the Temple, you should immediately begin research of the Bronze Age of Europe or Asia. This research costs 500 building materials, so briefly look at your pop cap, look at your resources and make sure you aren't totally out of Building materials/wood and then if all is well start the research. Remember the prime rule, do not slow down worker production.

### ***How to Choose: Bronze Age of Asia or Europe?***

*'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,*

*And sorry I could not travel both*

*And be one traveler, long I stood*

*And looked down one as far as I could*

*To where it bent in the undergrowth;'*

-*Robert Frost*

Finishing the stone Temple creates one of the biggest choices currently in the game. Should you take the European or Asian Path to the Bronze Age? I cannot answer this question for you dear reader. I can only give you guidance. By the Industrial Revolution the paths converge and are exactly the same (this will change at some point), so by the end game it doesn't matter, but it has huge impacts on the mid-game.

#### Europe:

##### General Mechanics and Army

The European Path offers the unit *quality path*. Their units are composed of heavily armored infantry that pack a big punch in the Bronze Age. In the Medieval age are composed of Knights and infantry with flanged Maces or Morning stars. In general Europe features land units that are very strong, with high damage resistance and pack a punch. The trade offs being the units are much more expensive, and take longer to build. The buildings required to produce units are also much more expensive and require multiple upgrades to produce Late Middle Age units. Upgrading workers, which has to be done 3x following the transitions to Bronze Age, Middle Age and Industrial Revolution is also much more expensive than Asia.

##### Siege and Navy:

Siege units of the European army generally are built at workshops, not in the field via workers as many Asian siege units are such as the East Asian Rocket Cannon and the West Asian Ballista (exception being the non-mobile western European Trebuchet.) The European Navy is also generally considered to be superior in quality over its Asian counterparts, but honestly I have had few naval experiences other than being shelled to death once from a screen and a half away from late Middle Age bombadier ships.

#### Asia:

##### General Mechanics and Army

In general, the Asian Path offers *quantity*.The armies of China and India were vast. The Imperial Chinese army had a troop strength of 1 million soldiers before the end of the 11th century AD. The Asian play style reflects that. Units and upgrades are cheaper than Europe. Asia offers different unit production mechanics as after you produce Asian Barracks and Stables they accumulate 'reserve' troops. These are troops that can be extremely quickly produced on command (on the order of a few seconds). Thus a player can almost immediately re-max an army up to their supply cap after losing it. Production facilities do have limits on how many reserve troops they can store, and the cost of these troops is paid once the player decides to actively produce them.

##### Siege Units and Navy:

The Asian path also offers strong mobile siege units that can be built on the battlefield firing rockets and other ordinance with devastating effects. I know little about the Asian Navy in its current iteration and don't feel comfortable to comment yet on its efficacy advantages and disadvantages (better go play some more games yo).

Currently, it is unclear whether Europe or Asia is unbalanced, although that stop players from claiming so. I have seen high quality players of both cultures use their mechanics to devastating effect. This may become more clear once Ranked/Ladder play is developed (see Wiki page: Planned Features).

### ***Stone Age Special Situations and Challenges***

Things I intend to talk about further.

Feral Animals. Cows. Fishing. Water connection. Close player spawns. Stone age military and towers.