Diplomacy is Not an Option: Staunch Technophobe Achievement Guide

Take the kings mission path and once you get to the Sarranga capital choose to go to the heffalumps. Once there earn the Greenpeace achievement by letting the first heffalump almost kill your townhall. The mission ends and now you have a heffalump friend during Abberlore who will heal units standing near it. This is not entirely necessary but makes taking over the first few easy forts much less dangerous.

Start by building a builders house, 4 lumberjacks, and a stone mine. Immediately research faster gatherers. Get as many houses built in the first day as you can while the units you came with and the heffalump take out the nearby forts for resources and gold. Try not to lose any. Research builder and building speed.

Day two focus on getting up to 6 lumberjacks, 3 stone mines. some berry pickers, and more resource storage. Keep your lumberjacks somewhat near each other so in the late game you can spam foresters cabins to grow more trees right nearby. Upgrade to townhall II asap.

Day three your first housing build push should be full so build up to three iron mines, another stone mine or two, your market, a barracks II, and more houses before the day ends. You may also be at risk of the population starving at this point so throw in a fisherman hut or three. More builders houses (up to 5, for now) with any extra population.

Upgrade your lumberjacks and stone mines ASAP. Research crossbowmen speed and range. Upgrade your houses and build an oasis + tavern. Pump out some crossbowmen to help taking forts quicker and for the eventual first wave of attack. Research gatherers and builders again for townhall II.

Once your wood supply is above 400 start selling it for gold. Research exchange rates and blimp speed. Don’t sell too much so you can upgrade townhall III ASAP. Now the real game starts.

Your lumberjack forest is probably getting slim now. Get yourself some foresters cabins to keep them going. Put a workshop nearby to increase production for both them and the lumberjacks. By the end of the game you’re going to want to have 9-10 lumberjack III’s and 8-10 foresters cabins. Sooner you build them the better. Remember to just keep selling off your wood for gold. We’re going to need a lot of it.

Build a university and research the alchemy tower for more stones if you have found the place to build it already otherwise get unlimited stone and iron going first. You’ll need 2x stone and 3x unlimited mines going sooner rather than later. I was able to put my forester lumberjack workshop setup right near the iron fields so one workshop boosted them all.

At some point after townhall III build 2x stables II and 3x barracks III. Start producing horse knights and foot soldiers. Research their upgrades.

Use your growing army to keep toppling the exposed single forts.

During all this you are of course continuing to build houses and do research and by now all of your fish are gone. Now we need Farm II’s with workshops nearby. Keep the farmhouses next to each other and build the granary’s right next to them. No one needs to actually go out into the fields. Keep your population and food income as balanced as you can but by the end you’ll need about 6 farm II’s and whatever berry pickers you already had going for just under 1,000 population.

When an attack wave is announced, save your game. Once saved, fast forward the play clock and just ignore your units and making any progress on buildings. Let the attack happen and watch where the enemies go. They will usually end up at a good choke point. Re-load your save and build the 25 person guard towers in a row with a defense wall in front of them. Also build a few lines of walls that stick straight out too so your defense wall looks like a fork or a comb. The enemies can’t help but attack the sticky out parts while your crossbowmen melt them from the towers. Spawn your undead army with 2 gems on the enemy siege equipment. Having these upgraded to spawn 30 mobs per 2 gems is good to have by day 30 or so. Make sure to get the upgrades for wall strength and the one that makes defensive walls hurt enemies.

Once you have 50-75 foot knight / horse knight each you can “safely” start eating away at the outermost edge of the main city. All of the tiny forts should be gone by now. You can use your crossbowmen army here to help with dps if you’re good at micromanaging and keeping them from getting hit at all. We need them for attack waves don’t forget. Do not attempt to send them across the first drawbridge there’s too much collateral damage flying around.

To begin, send your whole army at the outermost corner tower. Split it into two groups and move down the wall edges in each direction. Keep focusing on taking down the towers and the barracks once they’re in range along the way. Keeping your units active is the most important thing here. Don’t let 50 people blob up on a tiny tower when there’s only enough room for 12 to attack. Slice off the back half of the blob and have them attack other units or buildings for more gems.

If you notice a large chunk of your units are almost dead, use a mass heal on them. But use this sparingly until you’re at least almost done with the part of the city just outside of the kings townhall. If you need a meteor to clear out a hoard produced by two barracks at the same time, just be careful not to kill your own army. Also use very sparingly because you’re going to want at least 120+ gems for the final push.

Build a line of sentry towers between your townhall and where you are going to be doing the most fighting and load them with crossbowmen. You won’t be able to rescue your corpses and they will turn into zombies eventually. When they do this they immediately start heading to your town so be prepared.

While all this is going on you are still producing more units. You’ll need about 200-225 crossbowmen to line your defense walls by day 37 attack. Keep pumping foot knights and horse knights with spare gold.

If everything went well by day 37 you should have a good foothold across the first drawbridge already established. Finish clearing up any buildings or towers in the middle section that could potentially harm you on the final push to the gate on the last island.

Last push I did with about 160+180 horse + foot knights. Send them all to attack the gate. Once they’re in range of attack, spawn a bunch of undead army in and around the first two big clusters of towers to distract every other siege weapon. Bonus they start hitting the towers. Get the gate down and get your army inside to the left and right to start bringing down the tower clusters + the first few buildings. Remember to keep everyone active and not blobbed. Spawn more undead as a shield between your army and the legions of spawning enemies who aren’t happy about you being inside the last defense wall.

Once you have the 2x 6 tower clusters down on each side and maybe a tower or two past that it should be safe to surround the town hall with your army while spamming the rest of your gems on undead army spawns around them and near the remaining towers. Give it a moment and BOOM, you’re done!