A Few Tips About Levelling Up

Dear friends,

We start playing a game and, surely, part of the fun is to level up quickly, to reap rewards, to grow stronger to to speak. Right?

It is usually so - but TSO (The Settlers Online) is a game about consequences. Everything is tied in to pretty much everything.

What does this mean?

It means that it is important to be careful when leveling up. My aim here is to examine the two main consequences:

1 - Leveling up your Player Level.
Usually when you level up you don't feel so much difference between the tasks you were given in the previous level and the current one. This is because there are "marker" levels so to speak that herald a new phase (a more costly one) in your gaming.

When you reach level 36 your Guild Quests and Daily Quests and even some Event Quests (the special events that occur a couple of times of year, typically) become a bit harder. You start having to do adventures regularly for GQ and they show up on your DQ as well. In order for you to do this with some ease your economy needs to be somewhat balanced and efficient (even if you are buffing it to keep it going ;) ).

The next step is level 46, and level 46 is really a game changer. Your GQ's and DQ's become quite hard, having to do adventures like Black Knights, Dark Brotherhood, The Nords and so on. You may even have the troops to do them - but they are costly to buy, lootspots are costly to buy and even if you're sending your explorers in medium or long searches, they are not easily found. Your economy needs to be solid at this point for you to be able to tackle them. At this level perhaps the best strategy is if guildies team up to tackle these 2 and 3 player adventures as a combo. Perhaps one guildie has found one through explorer searches and can give the lootspot to someone else. Otherwise you will be stuck with an adventure whose lootspot may cost around 1k or 1.5k coins to purchase. So level 46 is a tough one to get into and, as soon as you do, you're there for keeps...


2 - Leveling up your Production Buildings.
This is something we all do regularly because, after all, we all want those shiny level 5 buildings, right? The problem with this is that our leveling up may be something like: "hey, I need more bread to build settlers and adventures... I know what I will do, I will level up my bakeries." And then you level up your bakeries and suddenly they stop working because they have run out of flour. And then you realize you need to level up the flour mills as well. The problem is you haven't got the resources to do it since you've used them all on the bakeries. So, you find your way around this: you start buffing the mills. The problem with that is that you start running out of buffs as well - that you need to buff other stuff... So you level up a Butcher - only to find out your meat production is now in the red and you need to buff the Hunters too...

You see where this is going. If you level up buildings without looking at your economy overview, without planning it a bit... you may be heading for trouble. After all the aim of leveling up a building is making things more efficient and easy, right? But, as it turns out, it should also make you need to be a bit more careful.

A good thumb rule is to level up production buildings from the bottom of the chain up. The problem with this strategy is that you know it's gonna take a lot of time. But, my friends, this is TSO: time is the name of the game...

Another thing you can do is to level up things in clusters. So you level 4 farms, 2 mills and 1 bakery (and keep things balanced) - rather than leveling ALL the farms, then ALL the mills, then ALL the bakeries.

Have a think about what you have, what you want to have and what is required to make that jump - both in terms of the initial investment (the resources needed to push those level up buttons...) and the long term commitment (the input resources needed to keep those buildings actually operating smoothly at their new level).

So, we can sum all this up into two tips really:

1. At level 36 and level 46 GQ's and DQ's become substantially harder. Perhaps speak with other players  before you collect all that loot and XP to evaluate if your economy is ready for it.

2. Use the Economy Overview to plan ahead your leveling up of production buildings, so that you don't get stuck with missing resources to keep them working!

I hope this helps!