Dying is Not an Option Guide 2024 for new players on how to play out early days and consider what decisions need to be made.
This is intended to give some high-level guidance to players on how to ramp up and meet this game at the difficulty it presents.
I will be offering one path forward. I believe there are multiple ways to attack this game and some of them may be better than what I offer here. Nevertheless, the tips and methods below successfully navigated me through the 4th difficulty level. It was challenging, but doable.
First Couple of Days
In my opinion, there are a few things that you want to accomplish with the first couple of days:
- Ramp population quickly
- Explore immediate radius
- Assess early military needs
- Establish Food Plan
Ramp Population Quickly
Affording initial housing is going to be important, and to do that, you’ll need a good supply of wood. You’ll normally start with between 8-10 population. I usually build an additional builder’s house on the first day and put everything else into woodcutters. Your starting food will normally get you through the first 2 days without issue.
Throughout the first day, keep your builders busy building as many houses as possible.
There are different formats you can use to clump houses, but I usually prefer a “U” shape with a spot in the middle for a fountain later and I prefer districts of 3×3 houses similar to the image below.
It must be acknowledged, there are more efficient ways to design housing districts, I just prefer this simple model and it allows me to keep a good grid in my base for units to maneuver through.
You’ll want to take your excess wood and continue to expand houses as you have opportunity. Population is power, you just have to balance your other resource needs while you get there.
Explore Immediate Radius
You will want to take your initial starting group of units and start removing the fog of war around your base generally expanding out further in circles. You are looking for choke points and resources for exploitation (clumps of trees, stone, and iron).
You could divide your people and send them out in different directions to know your boundaries, but I generally prefer to keep them together and have them immediately start carving at the edges of enemy positions. With good positioning, your starting units can kill a lot of enemies and this can help quickly secure territory.
If you have the flexibility, I generally like to stake watch towers on key obstacles to expand my fog of war further while my scouting group continues its circuit.
Assess early military needs
In some of the later missions, you are going to be harassed by smaller harassing parties very early. You may need to decide to cut your economy and invest in some archers and walls depending on early threats.
You may also choose to expand your scouting party so it can more capably eliminate enemy groups. Many enemy groups anchor key locations and you’ll want to eliminate them eventually – it is a tactical call of when you want to invest in a larger group to effectively deal with them.
Finally – don’t be afraid to use your crystals to drop some death knights to handle harassment that your scouting party can’t reach, or to help your scouting party eliminate smaller enemy clumps. If you spend 2 crystals to destroy 2 enemy buildings, you’ve broken even on your crystal investment. If this helps you expand your economy faster, can definitely be worth it.
Establish Food Plan
I have another guide that gives top level information on food income – but no later than day 3 you’re going to need to have some good food production. For early game, fishing is very efficient and 2-3 fishing huts with adjacent granaries will cover you to around 150 population.
This other guide has some charts on food production if you want specifics on food outputs.
Early-Game
During the early-game, you want to be securing your resources, considering where you might need to build light fortifications, and bringing your standing army up to 20-40 strong. You’ll want to continue to scale all the key infrastructure you need to keep pace with your growing settlement. This includes unlocking technologies and upgrading your Town Hall to tier II.
- Continue to expand population to 200-400
- Establish enough builders
- Scale food production
- Secure stone
- Secure chokepoints
- Begin research
- Eliminate low-mid tier enemy clumps
- Upgrade Townhall and Buildings
Continue to expand population to 200-400
This may seem like a wide range, but the draw on your resources could make housing investments difficult depending on your situation. The more you have to invest in military, the harder it can be to invest in your population and keep it growing safely. No matter what though, if you want good winning chances you need to have more people every day and you need to have a plan to put those people to work either as soldiers or in your economy.
Establish enough builders
Builders are important to keeping up with your infrastructure needs. Generally, at the start of each day, I add a few more builders based on how stressed they seem to be with my demands. Maybe that is one hut, maybe that is six.
Scale food production
Goes without saying – more population takes more food, and you need to be aware that your early fishing buildings will run out. If available, exploit more fishing than you need. If not, you may have to invest in the space and people into farms to stabilize toward the end of the mid-game.
Secure Stone
Stone resources are critical to moving everything forward. No later than Day 4, you should really start ramping stone production with your new pops and trying to secure the 100 you need for the Town Hall upgrade. Ideally, you want to secure every stone resource that is within reach.
Secure Chokepoints
You don’t need to build anything in these chokepoints until you know where you are getting attacked from. As soon as you get the attack indicator, you’ll get around a 3 minute warning to prepare with. If you have enough builders, this is plenty of time to erect a simple wooden wall in a good choke to hold the early waves. A single wooden wall is more than sufficient with 10-20 archers to hold most early attacks.
The image below gives you more than you need, but the design can be used to make a small group of archers go really far. The enemies spend a lot of time chewing through the square towers and allows a thin defense to stretch on the HP of the walls. Even wood walls are surprisingly resilient, so don’t sleep on them in the early game.
The other bonus is you can evacuate your archers into the adjacent tower without them ever touching the ground. You could technically leapfrog these as far back as you need to. Buys a lot of time and saves lives.
Begin Research
Research is really easy to forget and overlook, but it really does help. Your people do a lot of traveling and all of the movement bonuses are affordable and impactful. Any military upgrades should be used for units that you plan to deploy at scale. It’s hard to remember, but trying to keep your research going is a good habit at the stage of the game. I generally do not start research until day 4 after I have done everything I can do ramp early population.
Eliminate Low to Mid-Tier Enemy Clumps
Generally the weaker enemies are going to reside closer to your settlement. They frequently stand between you and key resources, so you’ll want to ramp your military to 10-20 and start eliminating these clumps as soon as possible.
It is worth mentioning that your starting party of 4-8 guys can pick at the edges of these safely with some micro, it just gets easier and faster if you fortify your party. This same clearing party is going to eventually man the walls against the first assaults.
Upgrade Town Hall and Buildings
As soon as you get 100 stone, you should sink it into the Tier 2 townhall and begin immediately upgrading structures to Tier II when you can. Houses take up a lot of space and upgrading them to Tier II saves you a lot of critical space instead of going wide with housing. All structures benefit from Tier II upgrades and should be considered carefully.
Mid-Game
At this stage, you should have a Tier II Town Hall, you’ve probably weathered your first assault and have begun to enjoy some Tier II structures. Your goals from here are to clear the map (or significantly advance your main objective) and consider moving to Tier III if it is part of your strategy. You don’t need to go to Tier III every game, but you may have to (or simply want to, cause fun).
- Grow to 500+ Population
- Scale all the things
- Clear the Map or Advance Objective
- Pre-Fortify Long-Term Choke Points
- Consider End-Game Military
- Advance to Tier III – If You Want!
Grow to 500+ Population
Lot of ways to play the game, but I found 500 population to be a good sweet spot to end most of my games on. You can go higher if you want obviously, but I am normally finding this to be a good sweet spot for my style.
Scale All the Things
Make sure you have enough builders scattered to the corners of your settlement to support ongoing construction. Construction needs get higher as you build more walls and defenses. Food production must keep up with your population and unless you are blessed with bounties of fish, you are almost certainly going to need farms. Farms are huge, and you generally need to have one for every 50 population. The Tier II farm is good, but you may not be teched to it by the time you need it – so be prepared to spend a lot of space on farms. They benefit from clumping in the long run and using the space that your woodcutters have cleared is generally best.
Finally – once you have your Tier II Town Hall – you’ll finally be able to secure the iron nodes. Iron is critical to your Tier II economy, so harvest as much of it as you can.
Clear the Map or Advance Objective
Your death ball(s) should be large enough to take any direct threats on the map by this point. It should always be traveling and killing enemies between waves. If surviving to a certain point is the objective, than you should be working to clear the whole map before the last wave.
If you have a different objective, your death ball should be securing the long-term choke points and resources you need and you need to be dumping your resources into your win-condition. Win-conditions other than survival are generally harder because I have found the threats from the enemy to be more severe than your standard win condition. You can take the edge off by pressuring your win condition quickly.
Pre-Fortify Long-Term Choke Points
At this stage of the game, you should be able to see some very efficient choke points to hold your gains from. Consider pre-fortifying them whether an attack is coming or not and you should have the economy to do it in stone. You don’t need Stone II to do this, Stone II is really expensive and Stone I is generally enough with the correct defensive placements and enough men to hold the walls.
Consider End-Game Military
There are a lot of ways to setup your military. Do you build in siege engines? Are you just spamming archers? Do you serve the God of the chad footmen? A lot of things are very viable depending on how you play them, enjoy yourself in the process of seeing it through.
I will say – I have generally skipped siege engines on a lot of maps because they don’t build toward the win-condition or take a lot of resources that I would otherwise need for my win-condition. I’ve found Tier II Barracks units to be generally good enough in most situations.
Advance to Tier III – If You Want/Need
Going to Tier III is expensive. Really expensive. You have to trade resources to the market for gold, which takes time and resources (BTW: Market technology is very valuable!). Once you get there, most of the Tier III features take Gold and Iron. The benefits can be worth it and necessary, but you may not need it to get through some of your objectives.
Make the choice that is right for you, if your economy plan has gone really well, you can usually advance to Tier III no problem, but if you’ve had a complicated game, it may be challenging to reach.
Late-Game
Generally speaking, this game is won or lost in the mid-game and early-game. If you’ve reached late game, you are good to go and just need to finish up your strategy. You are either deploying Tier III units and technology to lock in your advantage or you are finishing up your objectives. Either way, there are no new principles here, it is just smoothing out the edges of what you’ve already been doing.
There are some edge cases (looking at you Ozzie) that will take a different kind of preparation and focus. You’ll need to be working that pause button and heavily micro-managing your military units to win engagements or some of the unique boss fights in the game.
The one tip I will give is that some units have some incredibly potent melee AOE. The only way I’ve found to deal with them is to have a critical mass of ranged units and then suicide/kite infantry into them one at a time to stall them. Some enemies are just too lethal for any group of melee units to engage and you could easily lose 30 guys to one hit if you try to mob them. Pay attention to scary looking enemies and use your head and be prepared to pause and micro.
Unless your Clem in Starcraft II – then you just Micro.
