How do you survive the first Summer?

Solution 1:

Your strategy of a wall around your camp and having a training yard assigned to your guards at the entrance is a good start, but here's some other things you can do to survive the first summer:

• Enemy difficulty scales with your kingdom worth, so try and keep it low until you've geared your defense squad. I'd recommend staying around 2-3k if possible.

  At around 5k kingdom worth, you start getting goblin fighters who can be geared in copper weapons and armor, and are much more damaging to your tiny gnome village than regular unarmed goblins.

• Put all your worker gnomes into other non-attacking squads, and set them to Respond to Attack Orders. Then when a goblin shows up, use the Attack button to have your entire camp jump on them. This kills them much faster, and minimizes the damage they end up doing.

  I actually had all my workers responding to attack orders for quite a while (I think 20k kingdom wealth?), until I had my guards geared and found my unarmed gnomes were dying before my guards got there.

• Keep bandages in stock, ideally at the entrance to your camp. Gnomes will heal themselves with a bandage if they can, and immediately return to their duties at full health. If they can't heal themselves (no bandages or no arms), they'll sit around in the hospital and wait for a doctor to come heal them, which takes forever.

  I don't think the hospital zone provides any kind of healing capabilities on its own... I know I've had gnomes die from bleeding out in the hospital. They seem like just a place for injured gnomes to gather when they're wounded, or to get fed if they can't feed themselves. The zone also need beds to function.

• Try to get a Market Stall built by Day 5. If you have one, a merchant will appear at sunrise and you can buy many items that could help your early game depending on what you need. Copper, Cotton (for bandages), Animals, Seeds, etc.

  To make money to buy his items, I usually recommend Stone or Clay statues since they can be made of fairly common materials early on, are relatively quick to craft, and sell OK.

Solution 2:

The best option that worked for me so far is to put yac pasture in the entrance... I have found several ways to deal with early attacks.

There is "nature way" you need to get your farming asap - basicaly get farms, get pasture and groves as full as you can - when you know you can be self sustainig + some production close up your camp and operate within; save the game right before gnomads arrive (this might actualy need some alt+f4/load; every time gnomads arrive or you need to expand open one hole in your fence and be sure to close it before enemy gets in; the rest is pretty easy you should have some wild animal running around and they can easily deal with early raids after you some time you start getting notifications about goblins and animals bleeding to death so wait some time and take one or two gnomes to clean up survivors (if you feel like you cannot take them just wait, they die of thirst soon enough).

Second way to deal with early attacks is to make fence with one hole to go in and right next to the hole put yac pasture. Yacs deal a lot more dmg then your gnomes at the moment also they can take a lot more punishment before going down. So just let goblins attack yacs and have a squad nearby to support them. Usually this ends with killing goblins without any loses (sometime yac or gnome dies so again you might need to save game right before battle). If yac dies its up to you if you want to load game but actualy i found it quite helpful since i need that leather to process to armor so i usually kill first born yac anyway just check if it is the sex you have twice. Also you can easily invite merchant and buy some yucs from him.

Third way works only on small and medium sized maps. Take all gnomes and make them builder/miner. Then instead of making fence around your camp make wall around whole map. Separate it to segments so you dont have to deal with consistent load/save and just watch goblins staying where they came from. The actual problem with this method is that you get behind a lot in the start. It will take you the whole spring to build that wall and even when you are done you need to keep watch for gnomads they spawn randomly so there is a chance you get gnomads and goblins in one segment and that pretty much kills them before you can react properly.

Hope it helps. Enjoy.

Oh and btw. I play with customized settings with no goblin tunnelers. So the last tip might not work for long. It just seems to me that there is no real counter to this particular type of unit. I had most fun with these settings shallow and abundant metals, no tunnelers, enemy strength 0,8, 0,8 attack rate, 1,3 attack size and attack strength scaling with time. This setting actually gives me faster start and more challenging late game (since i get quickly a lot of worth + time scaling). But i have started playing with these settings after i checked these methods so it works on normal setting too.