Pioneers of Pagonia: Pagonia guide by Heptalante (early build for hard difficulty, fighting) [2]

In this section, you’ll find what i deem the best fighting strategies against each type of ennemy

Each type of ennemy will present different challenge to overcome. The best overall fighting strategy is indeed to produce a lot of the right unit to counter an ennemy and attack them with a full force. You can do this in late game, but in early game it is not possible.

You have to prioritize wich enemy to fight and where to expand. The biggest difficulties of early game are the following:

• A lack of available pionneers, and a slow growth rate.
• A lack of tools, and their slow production.
• A lack of leather/cloth production, and therefore, a lack of leather armor.
• A lack of fortune to boost your overall army power
• A lack of Tier2 or Tier3 industry/items to produce Tier2 or Tier3 units.

This will hinder your growth and can make ou lose a lot of time trying to recover from raids after raids. Solutions to these problems are the following:

• The quick setup of a small tavern-food chain very early. Not a lot is needed here, just a pumpkin farm, 1 or 2 fishermen, 1 hunter or gatherer, a tavern 5 or so lunch tables.
• The protection of workers to avoid the loss of tools, with 1 or 2 toolmaker to make up for te additional demand.
• Set up 1 or 2 linen farms with a clothwork production chain.
• Use the new OP treasure search building and look for treasure in areas with ruins. You’ll find gems and valuable thing to stash to enhance your army power
• Same, use the new OP treasure search building to find armors and weapons.

Every type of ennemy poses a different challenge. Some can entirely block your growth while others are mild inconvenience. Here we will talk about how to fight them, in a early game situation, with early game ressources.

It means you should have a huge pool of T1 guards, and you are expanding your territory. You may have a few T2 or T3 units, but not enough to wipe out whole enemy camps. An important thing to remember is that T1 guards are replacable. They cost 1 pop and 1 wooden plank transformed into a spear.

The heart of the following strategies is to use T1 guards as canonfodder to tank the ennemies raids and slowly expand to reach their camp and outnumber them. Use garrison fort (25 units) for best results

Thiefs are amongst the least dangerous ennemies in the game. The only problem they can cause is to steal valuable ressources.

Most of the time, the best way to manage a thief raid is to do nothing. Try to guess which building they are targeting. If it’s a lumbercamp or something unimportant, just let them steal things and get away. It’s not worth the time to use and manage troops to counter them. Moreover, once a ranger unveil their disguise, they may diruspt your whole production chain by frightening your carriers.

If they are targetting an important building like one of your treasury full of gem, jewelry and such things, you might want to protect those. You have to plan in advance early game and allocate an area where you’ll build these treasuries and a garrison tower to protect this particular area. Fill this tower with T1 rangers (or T2 rangers if you can). Since T1 rangers are quite weak, put a few T2 or T3 units with them.

Tip: Only produce rangers to defend this area, don’t use them to attack ennemy camps, defend unimportant part of your territory, or anything else. Their best use is in defense of important places you don’t want ressources stolen. Thanks to the new treasure search building, try to get your hands on magic torchs and reinforced armors to train a few T2 ranger.

Just expand normally. Once your territory grows close to a thief camp, order your guards to focus their territory expansion directly on the camp. Thiefs are mostly weak and after some time, your guards will naturally get rid of the whole camp. You’ll lose T1 guards but who cares. If you want this to be quicker, throw a few T2 guards or T2 soldiers along to clear the camp.

Scoundrels can be the most dangerous ennemies in the game. Their individual power is quite high and they can disrupt your whole production chain for several minutes, preventing you from training new units. They are way more problematic than thiefs.

Most of the time, the bets way to manage a scoundrel raid is to fight it. Keep an eye on your border and as soon as you see them coming, deactivate the territory expansion to gather your guards, and tell them to attack the incoming raid. Be sure to wait for all your guards to reunite before attacking, as multiple units can band together to attack 1 ennemy. Then prey, because most of the time, scoundrels will win these fights. If you have a few T2 or T3 units, feel free to use them.

Same as thiefs, expand normally. Once you’re close enough, pinpoint the expansion focus on the camp.

Scav are a really mild inconvenience. The only problem they pose is they might claim some part of territory that you wish you had, for ores, ruins, soil fertility or just for the additional room.

They don’t raid. They expand their territory tho, so try to keep units away from the border so you won’t lose any for nothing.

Since they expand their territory quite a lot, they might contain another type of ennemy within their border, which can be a problem since you’ll need two type of counter-unit. A difficulty of attacking a scav camp is that they respawn quickly and they spread around their territory. it can take a lot of time to get rid of a scav camp and you can lose a lot of unit, especially if there’s another type of ennemy.

You should try to destroy them only if you have an actual need of the territory. If they are keeping some iron or silver ore from you and you can’t find any elsewhere for exemple. To take care of a camp of scav, just use T2 or T3 unit and attack their position. You can do so by using 2 garrison tower or 2 garrison fort to spread your troops and kill them quickly. Using only 1 will force you to make your unit run around a lot.

The most dangerous ennemy in the game. They can bite your pioneer and turn them into other ww, growing their number. The main problem here is that you lose valuable tools if, for exemple, a wwbites a miner. If you spot a ww camp, the best thing to do is to expand a bit in this direction so you have a bit of room to move around your troops. If the ww camp is very close to your starting position, you might want to restart with another map. Or take on the challenge, as you see fit.

During a raid, there is two types of ww, feral and regular. Once a regular ww bite 1 pioneer, they go back to their camp, but a feral ww will need to bite 2 pioneers to go back. What you absolutly want is for them to not bite pioneer carrying tools (miners, farmers, etc). When you spot a ww raid, send a lot of T1 guard to take the blow. You’ll lose a lot of pop, but no tools.

Tip: the bestterest way to counter ww raid is to attack them from the side with T1 guards, this way, your troops will spread evenly and attack all ww simultaneously. They will all get a contamination and turn back to their camp. If you attack them from the front, there’s a chance that 6 T1 guards band together and attack the same ww, and that they all lose, resulting in 6 contamination per 1 ww, while the other ww following behind are still able to bite your pioneers.

The only way is to stack very good units and launch a full force assault. Try to stack 10 or 20 T2 fearnaughts. Don’t use them to defend your territory against other type of ennemy. You’ll need them fully on fighting ww.

Ghosts can scare your pioneers and make them lose tools. They can slow down your whole game. They are less a problem than werewolves, since they are easier to counter. But they can scare some very good T2 or T3 units if you don’t give attention.

During a raid, regular ghost can scare a maximum of 1 pioneer with weapon/tool, advanced ghost 2, and elite ghosts 3. Once they scared their maximum number, they go back to their camp, and don’t scare pioneers anymore.

Keep an area empty between you and the ghost camp. Build a garrison tower and stack it with 10 T1 guards with territory expansion deactivated. Just make them guard this area. When ghosts will raid you, they will scare these T1 guards and won’t scare pioneer with valuable tools. Early on, 10 T1 guards are enough, late game you’ll need 20 (ennemies get stronger).

Be sure to only allow T1 guards in this garrison tower !!

Stack on counter-unit, attack. Destroy them as soon as you can.

The main problem is they cna disrupt your whole production, like scoundrels. They can also hinder your territory growth by spawning their “roots” which acts as a defense tower and shoots your troops.

Thorns don’t raid often, but when they do, they attack with a full force. You’ll need to kill them because they can stay around for a long time (not as long as scoundrel), scare your pioneers and slow down your production. Use a lot of T1 guards or counter-units.

You don’t need to destroy every “roots” they spawned in order to clean a camp. You just need to kill their main units which stand around the big tree. Since they are a bit strong, T1 guards won’t suffice here. When attacking thorns or expanding your territory, build two garrison tower, so you can stuff one with sorcerer and another one witch witches.

The roots they spawn can slow you down. They attack your troops and after 10 or so hits, they kill your unit. What i found is that you can mostly not care about them… If you use T1 guards to expand your territory, they’ll just claim things around faster than the roots can kill them. You can then get rid of the roots with sorcerers.

As explained earlier, one strategy to take on hard difficulty games is to mass produce T1 guards. They will tanks the incoming raids and will make you expand just enough so you’ll be able to get your hands on some valuable armor/weapon to train top tier unit. We’ll use this starting area as an exemple:

The things to check right at the begining are the following:

• Types of food available (fish/meat/gathering) and soil (pumpkin/cabbage)
• Presence of ruins. In this exemple there’s one to the right. This is very important and helps a lot to transition mid-game into attacking ennemy camps, not so much for early.
• Type of ennemy really close to you.

Here I describe every step to an early build for hard difficulty games. You don’t have to complete 100% of the building of a step to start the next one.

First, you have to set up a wood/stone and other basic production to get things going.
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Then, build a guild hall/ a recruiting center. Don’t forget to put a few houses near.
Build a explorer’s hut/ treasure search hut.
Do not put recruitment of T1 guards on infinite ! you have to manage yourself the right amount so you’ll keep enough carriers for your whole production chain.
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Next step is to grow your number of pioneer. Place a tavern and available food production.
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Build a toolwork and 2 or 3 carpenter. Set all carpenter to produce infinite wooden spear. build them close to the recruiting center.

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Expand your territory, diversify your food production to increase your pop growth, build 1 or 2 treasury to stash your gems, coins etc… and train a few T2 and T3 unit. Tank the raids the best you can, and destroy ennemy camps.

Friendly Pagonian village can be of great help sometimes, when the deal they offer suits you, like for example 6 wooden plank traded for 1 magic torch.

Don’t be afraid to lose your T1 guards, it’s always better than to lose a tool.
Now you have all the keys to take on the challenge on playing with hard difficulty settings.