A Pacifist Approach to 'Goodgame Empire' Quiz

Answer: Iron ore

You will need to use your limited resource supply to start constructing the buildings that will increase resource production, as well as those for supporting troops and providing income. Initially, wood and stone are all you need, but it takes a bit of planning. You will need 12 units of wood to build your first woodcutter, and 13 units of stone to build your first stone quarry, while a farmhouse to produce food will cost 13 units of wood.

At the very start, you will find that wood is the resource you run out of, which puts a halt on construction, before the others; increasing wood production, therefore, is a good focus in the early stages of the game. Over time, these balances change.

When your castle reaches a fixed level, you are given access to three other kingdoms, one at a time, where you can build castles and have access to a new range of resources.

In the Great Empire, where you started, you gain access to iron mines; Everwinter Glacier produces charcoal, Burning Sands olive oil, and Fire Peaks glass. Once you have access to these new resources, you will find that you need to use them for further construction.

Answer: Send out the tax collector

You can also, if you're lucky, collect small amounts of coins from the heads of townspeople who wander around carrying coins from place to place. (Some also carry stone, wood or food - not much, but hey, it all helps.) The tax collector can be sent out for varying amounts of time, and the amount collected depends on your castle's population. A ten-minute collection is the most economically efficient, but you have to be there pretty constantly to keep collecting. Longer trips collect more slowly, but are useful if you plan to be away from the game -say, to get some sleep, or go to work. Thirty-minute collection nets about twice as much as ten minutes; longer collections reduce in similar fashion.

Why do you need coins? They are primarily used to purchase soldiers, and to pay for their hospitalisation if they are injured. Coins are also required to forge armour and weapons for the castellan (and for your commanders, but they will be sitting idle). This is valuable for making the men defending the walls of your castle stronger. Also, having your castellans and commanders well equipped earns you might points, which help others see you as a strong player to be treated with respect - and therefore makes it less likely that you will log in tomorrow to see the castle enveloped in flames.

Answer: Build decorative items

Remember, we are going for positivity here! Increased population creates increased stress, which you can counteract by decorating the place. There is a meter that shows how content the people are, and keeping it in the green means that all of your buildings operate more efficiently. Every time you build or upgrade a dwelling, you need to also add one of the many decorative items available. These start off small, but as you progress you get access to more efficient decorations, that increase public order (or happiness, my preferred term) more efficiently while occupying the same space in the castle. Moving old items into storage and replacing them with better ones will increase your castle's production.

Another way of increasing public order is providing a good defence, by increasing your wall strength and placing as many as possible of the strongest defenders you can obtain on guard. Good news - defenders eat less than attackers, so you can afford more of them than you could if you were planning on a strategy of aggression.

Answer: Moat

A watchtower will give you earlier and more detailed warning of an incoming attack, but if you aren't online to utilise the information, it is no help. Taverns give you agents, who can be sent to spy on others - useful if you plan to attack a target, but otherwise they spend their time drinking and recounting tales of past exploits in the tavern. Stables mean you can place your troops on horseback, allowing them to move from place to place more rapidly than on foot. As a pacifist, you will use this mostly for moving men to support the defence of a castle where they are not based, rather than in staging lightning attacks.

When you reach a player level that gives you access to a moat, build one! Its mere presence adds to the strength of your walls, and you can place defensive tools there to increase the effect. Sharpened stakes can be (slowly) built from wood and stone, but stronger defence comes from using rubies to purchase a fire moat or (my personal favourite, even though they are not as strong as a fire moat) swamp snappers, which resemble grinning round-snouted crocodiles.

Answer: Looting them from a laboratory

Laboratories produce the kingdom resources, not rubies - and you can't loot them, anyway, just capture them and use them to augment your output of that resource. Rubies can be purchased by the thousands, and use to purchase stronger weapons, much more powerful soldiers, a range of buildings that enhance your potential, as well as paying for instant repair if your castle is damaged in an attack, and instant healing for injured soldiers. And probably more, but I only accumulate them the slow way, and spend them very cautiously on improvements of immediate benefit.

The wheel of fortune appears from time to time, and stays for several days on each visit. It offers a variety of rewards, ranging from free tickets for another spin (whoopee!) to tools to coins to troops, and including the occasional 50 rubies. Every day, on your first login for the day, you can collect a gift, and sometimes that can be a handful of rubies. And every day you are set ten daily tasks; the completion of each one gives a small reward, and the completion of all ten gives you 100 rubies. The catch, of course, is that one of the tasks is to spend rubies. If you are in an alliance, this can be done by donating a single ruby to the alliance funds; if you are on your own, you can purchase one of the cheapest items, such as the pot kettle to defend your walls.

Answer: A castle in ruins which still has some buildings standing

Sabotage can only be carried out against castles associated with real players, not computer-generated ones. When a player leaves the game, their unattended castles and outposts quickly draw attention, and get raided. Since the player is no longer active, they will not be adversely affected if you sabotage them. To keep the castle available for as long as possible, it is advisable to set the sabotage to be as light as possible (10% damage to a single building), as the ruins disappear when all buildings have been demolished. Of course, sometimes it can be hard to find ruins. On those days, you may be able to use plan B - a friendly neighbour. If you can find a neighbour who is happy for you and them to sabotage each other as necessary, and then send resources to help with the repairs, you can proceed with a clear conscience.

If you want to be truly a pacifist, you will need accept that on some days you cannot complete all ten tasks, so will not be able to collect your rubies.

Answer: Invite a friend

As well as being able to gain advancement by inviting a friend (catch: they have to set up an account after you invite them), many of the quests relate to construction in your castles. At early levels, these provide a guide as to the logical sequence in which you can best get your castle up and running - expansions, appropriate buildings and their upgrades, purchase of decorative items, adding outposts for extra resources, etc. Completing quests is the fastest way to increase your player level - and advancement through the levels is the way to access new options in the game. After a while, there aren't many quests that do not involve attacking someone or something, so it becomes a much slower process to accumulate experience through building upgrades.

Some players who are committed to avoiding attacks on other players do allow themselves to attack non-player targets, such as the robber barons, which yield small amounts of experience points, along with resources. And you can gain glory if you are attacked by another player (which is where mine came from), but it could be a long wait, and that quest is most easily completed by attacking other players.

Answer: Send each other coins

You can also send gifts such as tools, and make donations to the alliance funds that allow the leader to upgrade the alliance benefits - faster movement when sending support troops, faster movement when transporting goods, etc. There will be times in the game when one or more of your castles is producing resources faster than you can use them, unbelievable as that seems at the start, and this excess can usefully be donated to the alliance.

The alliance chatboard is a good way to both keep in touch and share advice about the game.

Answer: Create a donation bonus

As mentioned previously, the alliance funds can also be used to increase travel speed when sending support to each other, and when transporting resources between castles. If you are so inclined, your alliance can also increase loot capacity and attack travel speed for all members.

It is also possible to increase the membership capacity - and the larger the alliance, the stronger it will be. It also gets access to a larger range of benefits - with at least 45 members, you can increase attack and/or defence strength for a specified period of time when it will be useful, for example. Creating a donation bonus means that every resource donation (except coins and rubies) is increased by the system, so that the alliance gains more than the donor loses.

The maximum effect is 160%, so 10,000 wood donated becomes 26,000 wood in the alliance coffers. This allows the alliance to get access to the more tangible benefits more quickly than if the size of the donation is the amount stored.

Answer: Discharge them

You can just keep them in your main castle (where they get delivered), but they eat more than the defenders that are more appropriate for security purposes. And since they keep arriving, their numbers will eventually mean you will have trouble feeding everyone. Until I realised that they could simply be discharged (by sending them to the trash bin on the recruitment page), I used to periodically decree that their innate aggressiveness justified sending them to their doom by sending a hopeless attack against some target. I now regret those incidents.

Another option is to select a spot (an outpost or a resource village, for example) that does not require a serious defence, and send them to man the walls there, instead of using defenders for the purpose. Since most players do not attack outposts or resource villages, even the half-baked defence offered by attackers can be sufficient, especially if the walls have strong tools.