A house is pointless without someone to live in it. A sawmill cuts no wood without someone to operate it. A wall is useless if it does not have anyone to defend. Your town only exists because of the people who live in it - your workers.
Workers move around your settlement doing available jobs and fulfilling their basic needs - food, water and sleep.
Keeping workers fed is a simple concept - farms grow food, workers eat it. But farms require watering and harvesting by workers, and quickly start taking up large amounts of space as your town grows.
Workers will happily drink from a nearby lake, so you’d best make sure they are never too far from the shore. As your settlement and knowledge grows, you might build magical aqueducts to carry water to far-off workers and farms to alleviate this problem.
Workers tend to become unproductive and unhappy if they have to sleep outside on the ground, so you’ll need to provide adequate housing if you want productive workers and want migrants to arrive - see below.
Workers are happy when they are housed, fed and have work to do. Keeping your existing population happy will cause new workers to migrate to your settlement. Be careful, your new workers may hasten the development of your town but you will need to continue building farms and housing to accommodate your expanding workforce!
Every Wednesday we’re taking a look at a different aspect of the game - next week we’ll be looking at the horrors of the night - Monsters.
The game will be released later this year, with the exact release date to be announced in the coming weeks.
A settler’s guide to defending your town - Towers (Blog #1)
As the sun sets, monsters arrive from all directions, their gaze fixed upon the source of magic at the heart of your new civilisation - the crystal nexus. How can you stop these aberrations?
Towers are the magical constructs that form the core of your defensive strategy. Standing silent amongst your settlement, they spring to life when enemies draw near, channelling powerful offensive magics to ward off your foes.
Towers come in 5 varieties, and 3 technology levels (the basic tower comes in 4). These allow for a wide range of defence strategies - so let’s take a look at them!
Basic
Every tower starts life in this straightforward form. The exciting new magic your people have discovered, harnessed atop a tower of wood or stone. Enemies within range are struck with potent magical beams, dealing significant damage.
Slowdown
Where monster begin to arrive in stronger forms or greater numbers, you might find your defences can’t take them down before they reach your crystal nexus. In these cases, slowing enemies may be more effective than simply throwing more damage at them. The Slowdown Tower can bind monsters with magical chains, causing them to spend more time in range of your other towers.
Lightning
Weaker monsters often appear in groups, meaning that at least some of them may make it past your temporarily overwhelmed defences. But your researchers have an answer - the power to call down bolts of lightning upon your enemies. Build a Lightning Tower and watch as the electricity jumps between monsters in close proximity, dealing with tight groups with ease.
Sniper
Single monsters powerful enough to walk through your defences unscathed are so-far-inconceivable danger, as are enemies that could bring down your range if they got close. But should such enemies come, you must be ready to fight back. The sniper tower can deliver huge amounts of damage over long ranges, leaving your other towers free to deal with smaller and closer enemies.
Thumper
Your defences likely have choke points, where large numbers of enemies flow through tight gaps in your walls as they are decimated by your towers. It would be a shame not to capitalise on such high volumes of enemies passing through such a small area. Every time the Thumper Tower releases its stored energy, every monster unlucky enough to be nearby will regret choosing your settlement to attack.
Every Wednesday we’re taking a look at a different aspect of the game - next week we’ll be looking at the beating heart of your settlement - Workers.
The game will be released later this year, with the exact release date to be announced in the coming weeks.
Will your walls crumble and your people flee, or will your towers stand tall as your settlement prospers?
Every Wednesday we're going to be taking a look at a different aspect of the game, starting next week with an in-depth look at your main line of defence - Towers.
The game will be released later this year, with the exact release date to be announced in the coming weeks.
The basic premise of Stonetowers is simple - You control a growing population of workers, meeting their needs by having them grow food, gather resources and build a settlement. But as you try to establish your town, you will be threatened - strange monsters appear from the wilderness at night and attack the large magical crystal that you have founded yourself around.
You must have your workers research the magical energies that cover this land and forge them into towers capable of holding back the monsters. As your research progresses, you can create new and improved town infrastructure as well as more advanced defences. But the attacks at night will continue to grow, unless you can find a way to hold them off for good…
