Новини
Survive the apocalypse with our Cataclismo guide
L
Len Hafer
Focus on wood first
Wood is the basis of everything else, including training basic units, and it will almost always end up being your main bottleneck early on. When you start a new map, get your wood gathering sorted out before everything else. You don't really want to build defenses with it, since it's much more fragile than stone, but anything that's not going to be under attack (hopefully) like stairs and bridges is better made from wood.
Having at least two wood-gathering structures up before the first day is over is a great way to get started, though you don't want to neglect your defenses either. Make sure each structure has the optimal number of workers (shown by a green worker icon in the tooltip) and access to Improved Hardware Supplies once you unlock those.
Also, try to never let any of your resources cap out. You'll be able to build silos for more storage later, but if you see you're close to max, pause and find something to build or train some more units. Otherwise, you're just losing materials for no reason.
Build smart fortifications
During the day, you will be shown which direction or directions the horrors will attack from that night. It's generally the case that if they're attacking from multiple directions, each attack will be smaller than if they're concentrating on one. They will try to get to your citadel by the shortest path possible, and will only stop to attack your defenses if they can't get any closer. This means it's not enough to just build a big tower in the middle of a plateau on the way to your base, since they can go around that. You'll need to completely wall off the path you expect them to take.
This means that if you want to be efficient with your resources, you'll have to find good choke points. Using the terrain, figure out where you can build the shortest possible section of wall to completely block it off. For the first few nights, a three-block-high wall with a mix of ten-or-so units on it should be enough.
Remember that the taller a wall is, the more durability it has, so it's generally more efficient to build up than to build out. Also, every block you place is affected by gravity, so you never want to build a column straight up—that would mean that losing the bottom block would cause all the ones above it to collapse. They should be in a staggered, offset pattern, like how real castles are built. And because bigger blocks have more health, your foundation should be made mostly with the largest blocks you have available.
Eventually, you'll want to use windows, ramparts, and merlons to create multi-level defensive structures, since some of your units fight better from high above and others are more effective closer to the ground. You'll also have some nights when you're being attacked in multiple places, and one battle concludes while another is still going on. Pull the units from the successfully defended wall and stick them on the one that's still being attacked! You're not paying them to stand around.
One more thing to be very careful of: low ground areas filled with mist. These pits actually cloak any horrors moving through them, almost like a reverse moat. I made the mistake of building a wall right next to one once, which allowed a large horde to approach my defenses in complete safety and start attacking before my units could do much damage.
Crusade against the darkness
It's not enough to simply hide behind your walls, though. In Cataclismo, it's very important to get out during the day when it's (relatively) safe to gather resources and destroy brood nests. The more aggressive you are, the easier it will be to defend that night. Just don't leave any walls empty, because you will get a few stragglers nibbling on them now and then. For the first several nights, one archer on each wall will probably do. The rest of your army should be on the march.
Just make sure you're not too far away from home to get back to your walls when night comes! By the time you get that final warning, it might be too late to run all the way back. This is where your leader Iris' Mistleap ability becomes extremely valuable. It costs four development points, which seems like a lot, but since it teleports her and all nearby units back to the citadel immediately, it lets you be a lot more bold and aggressive during the day without the risk of being caught outside the walls at dusk. Trust me—it pays for itself.
Control your army
While you're on the offensive, it will do you a lot of good to know some classic RTS micro (short for micromanagement) tricks that you might already be familiar with from games like Starcraft and Age of Empires.
One tactic that works really well in Cataclismo is the stutter step. When a group of horrors is approaching your army, you can run away and fight at the same time by issuing a retreat order for a couple seconds, then hitting H to hold position so your units will briefly stop to take a shot. Then immediately start running again, and repeat. It takes some practice to get the rhythm for this down, but if you watch a battle play out without microing, you will get a sense of how long the cooldown is between attacks on each unit. That's how long you should wait to press H.
This is especially effective once you unlock Captors, since they can slow down pursuing units, allowing you to basically kite them all the way back to your base (which is also very efficient for getting home before dark if you don't have Mistleap yet). Speaking of this, you want to bring a diverse army wherever you go, whether it's attacking or defending. The basic starting three of Bowmen, Lobbers, and Captors are designed to synergize really well with each other, and will be far more effective together than if you just built a bunch of a single type of unit.
You should also be careful of elevation changes, since you can walk up a hill directly into a legion of horrors. Cataclismo has a unique way to guard against this, though. Simply build a small wooden tower a few blocks high on some nearby elevated ground and send one unit up there to act as a scout. You can always recycle it to get your resources back when you don't need it anymore.
The night is long and dark, but study these tips well and your people can live to see another sunrise.
Cataclismo is available now on the Epic Games Store.