Guide is underway. I'll be updating it regularly throughout the day.
This guide will help you through your first couple of games of Pioneers of Pagonia, providing a broad overview of the game's mechanics. As the game itself recommends, you should probably start off on the Guidance Map. It's set up for beginners, and the objectives laid out will familiarize you with everything we plan to discuss in this guide. Once you're more familiar with the game you can choose 'Customize Map', at the top of the screen, to refine your experience.
Ready to go? Then let's crack in!
Establishing your Settlement
When you begin a new game of Pioneers of Pagonia you'll be faced with a bare landmass, a ship, and... that's about it. The ship contains your Pioneers, as well as all the supplies you'll need to get started on your new settlement. You can check both tallies along the top of the screen, and in a more collected manner by clicking on the ship.
Your first task is to create some buildings. If you check the upper-right corner of the screen you'll see a list of your current Objectives. These are guideposts that show you which direction you should be headed in creating your settlement. The Objectives outline everything you need to build to get started, so you'll want to follow them to start.
Constructing a building is pretty straightforward. Look along the bottom of the screen. You'll see a series of icons, each denoting a submenu that will take you to various construction options. They're grouped together by function, so you'll find everything related to Exploration and Expansion under the tab with the flag, whereas buildings related to the processing of Wood and Stone would be found under the Wood & Stone menu.
Have a look at the Objectives pane. You'll see that building an Explorer's Hut is right at the top. Choose that building (under the Exploration and Expansion submenu - it looks like a flag) and place it somewhere on the banks of your new home. Hold down the right mouse button and you can rotate the building, if you'd like a different orientation.
As soon as there's a building to create, Pioneers (specifically Builders) will exit the ship and walk over to build it, though they need time to complete construction. If you look closely at your new building you'll see a little rounded nub sticking out of the entrance, indicating a spot where you can connect a road. Click on the Roads submenu (far-left on the bottom) and you can connect the ship to your new Explorer's Hut. Double-click once you're happy with how a road looks to construct it. You can use this menu to create more roads to other buildings, or to demolish roads you no longer want. Pioneers don't have to use roads to get around, but they won't work on a building that isn't connected to a road.
Eventually your Pioneers will finish their work, and, voila! You've taken your first step to building a settlement. There are several other structures you're advised to construct, as well:
- Guard Towers - Place these along the border of your settlement (the dotted line of stones a ways inland) to protect from invaders, and to expand your territory
- A Woodcutting Hut - Put this beside any forests
- A Quarry - Put this near any lumps of rocks or mountain ranges
- A Sawmill - Can go anywhere, though closer to trees to start can't hurt
- Masons - Probably nearer to Stone deposits
All of these buildings are associated with different types of Pioneers. If you click your ship you'll see a breakdown of your Pioneers, and their various jobs. As soon as the Pioneers can do their jobs, based on the buildings in your settlement, they will immediately go to work. A building won't function if you don't have Pioneers who can cover its associated tasks.
Occasionally you'll want to get rid of a building, either because you accidentally put it in the wrong spot or it's no longer useful where it is. Click on the building you want to demolish, then click the red 'Demolish building' button in the bottom-right corner of the building's menu.
Resources
Constructing new buildings requires the expenditure of resources. Resources are divided into three broad categories, each with sub-types:
- Wood, harvested from forests
- Stone, harvested from rock piles
- Mining, harvested from mines
Resources are broken down into raw materials, taken from nature, and refined products, constructed by your Pioneers at their respective jobs. If you click the resource panes at the top of the screen you'll see all of the sub-types that you can acquire / refine, and you can make their totals visible by checking them off up here. (Or, if you want your screen to look less cluttered, you can turn them off. Some of these resources won't become important for a while.)
As mentioned above, Pioneers each have their own jobs, and will start doing them the moment there's an associated building. You don't need to micromanage their progress. As soon as you set up a Woodcutting Hut, for example, your Woodcutters will go looking for trees to fell. The closer you put the building to its resource, the faster it will be gathered.
As you collect resources your buildings will fill up. Once this happens your Pioneers will stop collecting that resource until there's more room for storage. You can alleviate this problem by creating Storage units, under the Storage & Trade tab (far right of the bottom menu). Your Pioneers will stow excess materials here until they're needed. Storage takes up very little space, so you should build them often, and in various places throughout your settlement.
One final note: Pioneers will only gather resources inside your territory, which is to say, inside the border of stones that serves as the boundaries of your settlement. You'll need to expand those boundaries before your Pioneers will gather anything. Which brings us to our next topic...
As mentioned above, your Pioneers won't leave the dotted territory line of your settlement under most circumstances. The major exception are Explorers, stationed in Explorer's Huts. These brave men and women actively leave your territory and poke around uncharted lands. If they find anything of interest they will let you know. Problem is, you can't get at the things they find until you've expanded your borders.
Your Pioneers will expand the borders of your territory automatically, so long as fulfill three prerequisites:
- You have Guards
- You set up Guard Towers
- You have Border Stones
You'll begin the game with plenty of Guards to go around, and you'll have the resources to build several Guard Towers. Place your new Guard Towers on the very edges of your territory. Once they're in place your Guards will head out and establish wider borders for your settlement, as long as you're producing Border Stones at a Stone Mason. With strategic placement of Guard Towers you can quickly seize control of nearby areas, giving your various workers the space they need to gather resources.
Guards will go waaaaaaay beyond the confines of their Guard Towers to grow the boundaries of your settlement, so you don't need to worry too much about destroying and relocating Guard Towers. That said, you'll speed things up if you periodically re-establish Guard Towers on the edges of your territory. You can employ more Guards at a Military Academy.
Your settlers start off with Rations that will keep them going for a while. Eventually, however, you're going to need to set up food and water supplies so your Pioneers don't die of hunger or thirst. In both cases you'll want to look under the Food Products tab, at the bottom of the screen.
Setting up a Water supply is fairly simple: Make some Wells. These small locations should ideally be placed in the center of your settlement, as many different buildings require Water to function properly. Plop down two or three and your small settlement should be good to go for a while. You can easily set up more as you expand your borders, as long as your Pioneers are collecting Stone and making Rope.
Food is ever-so-slightly more complex than Water. Right off the bat there are three ways you can gather Food, and you should use all three early on:
- Build a Forager's Hut. Foragers will explore your territory and grab any wild Food resources, such as Raspberries. This is the quickest way early on to gather Food.
- Build a Hunting Lodge. There's plenty of small game roaming the land, and the Hunters from these areas will track them down and bring back meat.
- Building a Vegetable Farm and / or a Crop Farm, and set up Farmland for the workers to plant on. These options take a while, so you'll want to set up farmland early so your crops have time to grow.
As your settlement grows you'll want to add more food processing methods for your Pioneers, such as a Provisioner, a Tavern (complete with nearby Tavern Tables), and all of the buildings associated with a Marketplace. Speaking of which...
You'll eventually notice that your settlement isn't getting any bigger on its own. You're stuck with your starting population... though they can reproduce, so long as you provide them with some creature comforts. That's where housing comes into play.
Under the Population & Meals tab you'll find Cottages and Residences. Both are places where your Pioneers can settle down and live in peace. You need either a Cottage or a Residence in order for Pioneers to reproduce and expand your population. Before this happens, however, you need to furnish your families with Comfort Meals. This has a few requirements:
- First, you need a Tavern. Taverns can produce Comfort Meals. Tavern Tables will give people a place to eat, as well.
- Second, you need a Marketplace, which requires some Market Stalls and a Market Fountain. Place them all near the Tavern.
- And, third, you need Food to process into Comfort Meals. We went into that above.
Get all three things going and eventually your Tavern will put some Comfort Foods on order for your Pioneers. Click your Cottages / Residences to see how close you are to 'producing' a newborn, which will, eventually, turn into a full-fledged Pioneer.
One more thing about housing. Whenever your Pioneers complete a task they will go back to their homes, or, lacking that, to the ship. If you want to keep them relatively close to their tasks you can set up specified housing for workers. Construction Workers, for example, will go to a Construction Camp when they're done building, while any military units will head to a Military Camp. Strategic placement of these structures will make your settlement more efficient, and you can dismantle and rebuild them as your settlement grows.
Defense
As their name implies, Guards aren't just around to expand the borders of your settlement. You also need them to defend your settlement, as some maps are populated by two types of brigands:
- First are Bandits. These guys live in Bandit Camps, and will occasionally encroach on your territory and attack your Pioneers. They will kill Guards, if possible, and scare your other Pioneers into forgetting their tasks.
- Second are Thieves. These guys live in Thief Camps, and disguise themselves as Carriers. If they aren't caught they will slip into your settlement, steal something, and flee.
In both cases you need Guards to defend your borders, though more advanced enemies may kill and / or simply slip past ordinary Guards. For this purpose you'll need to build a Military Academy, so you can train Guards, Veteran Guards, a variety of Soldiers, and other martial units. You'll also need to equip these folks with weapons and armor, so don't forget to build an Armorsmith, a Weaponsmith, and a Wood Workshop to gear them up.
For the most part you can let Guards do their thing on their own. They're okay at defending your borders. If you know the specific location of a Bandit or Thief Camp, however, you may want to set up a Garrison on the border nearest the camp, so your Pioneers will stand guard in the correct spot. You can also set them to patrol specific areas by clicking on their assigned Guard Tower / Garrison.