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I found an old strategy guide to B&W which I wrote, ages ago, pretty much a guide to breaking the game :P. I had an awful lot of fun playing B&W wrong, usually at the same time as doing raids in WoW 
.
I post it here just for ****s and giggles.
"Breaking Black and White"
.I post it here just for ****s and giggles.
"Breaking Black and White"
Why write this guide? Why not. Anyway, standard disclaimer, ***SPOILERS***, recommend you play the game once or twice before trying these strategies, the time you spent reading it is NOT refundable yadeda.
So the point is to win the game in a way that doesn't require or even really benefit from any investment in the creature, I find this fun. Also this play style very much results in you being a good god, even with some modest human sacrifices to power miracles.
Land 1: Not much to do here, skip it mostly.
Preparation for Land 2: Throw in some villagers if you want. The important thing to do is throw in 3 to 3 dozen signing stones, the non-duds respawn after you throw them in, so just bookmark the portal and a few of the stones and keep throwing them in until bored.
Land 2: You will be greeted by a barrage of signing stones and Captain Oblivious. Once control is returned to you go and bookmark both of kazaar's workshops (one wont be completed yet), you'll be thieving scaffolds from them, feel free to throw in trees. Do that boring tutorial stuff while thieving scaffolds and building housing & a Norse wonder, if you can get the villagers to dance around a signing stone to make it a kind of pre-artifact, it can be used to increase the size of wonders... Get the 2 nearby Indian Villages by tossing around a singing stone a couple of times, build a workshop at the nearest one. Invest in some moderate housing for these villages.
TACTIC: Tossing Stones/Artifacts. To impress villages toss a large stone or artifact then immediately recatch it (to work you need to do this near a large concentration of villagers, the crèche is good), for some reason this really impresses them, you can do it 3-5 times before the belief gain begins to diminish, then drop the artifact to get the artifact belief bonus, take the artifact away and come back in 5 minutes and repeat....
The PRIMARY objective on Land 2 is to charge up atleast 3 artifacts (I charged 12), you may otherwise occupy your time any way you please, I reccomend building wonders. Once you have 3 artifacts use them to make a super charged Norse and Indian wonder.
TACTIC: Charging Artifacts. Villagers will charge artifacts for you when they are idle and their only needs are "Housing" and/or "Children". So feed em and wood em and they'll dance all day and night. (less pampered villagers will dance in the evenings, sometimes... if they can be bothered. And the moons of Jupiter are aligned.)
Preparation for Land 3: Empty the last 3 (or is it 2?) Villages into the vortex, you know how do to that right? Set a teleport at the vortex, another at your temple, set the totem to 100%, watch the fools run to the teleport, right into the vortex... hahahah. To pass time I built a (greek?) village around Lethys's temple and populated it from his worshipers (after losing his pet Lethys gets really passive... he doesn't bother me at all). If you want to do this remember that the vortex to land 3 actually opens on the ramp quite a bit below the temple, not under the temple... anyway once I was done this village had about 200 villagers to send through.
Of course send through all your artifacts, including un-charged singing stones, but really if you build an Indian wonder your villagers will have so much spare time that all the stones will be charged.
You can send through some size 7 scaffolds and wood miracles if you wish, these are more for Land 4 than land 3 tho - it never hurts to plan ahead.
Something else handy is some winged creatures miracles from the tree puzzle, again these are for Land 4/5 rather than land 3.
Land 3:
You will be greeted by screaming. A lot of screaming, the screaming of 300+ villagers getting flung from the vortex. I find it soothing.
Anyway, go hunt down throwing guy (you know him, portable influence guy? tells you not to throw him?) and use him to gain influence at each village, tossing artifacts to impress.
TATIC: Land 3 Throwing Guy. Use him to gain temporary influence in distant villages. Don't throw him, just pick him up and put him back down further outside your influence, rinse and repeat. It is recommended to bookmark him. Also pausing while moving around to locate and pick up artifacts is helpful.
Build a Japanese wonder and an artifact-charged Indian wonder, since you wont be building anything else the wood will be easy to come by, just throw in a few forests. Technically you can do this level JUST with throwing guy & tossing artifacts around, but may as well build some wonders to help town growth and create more idlers for charging up those ugly crying stones, make great artifacts those!
Burning Villagers Encounter: You can just drop them all in the sea. Slow down time (alt-1) or abuse pause to make it easier.
Wolves Encounter: Toss them in the village store, again manipulate time to make it easier.
Preparation for land 4:
The main thing you need is warm bodies, lots of them, because in land 4 they tend to become slightly too warm then slightly too dead.. so you need lots of spares. Simply dumping all the suitable villages into the vortex using the teleport trick will provide enough bodies.
Also try to throw in a size 7 scaffold and any wood miracles and any other bubbles you can find.
It surely doesn't need to be said that you throw in all your artifacts too...
Land 4:
Amazingly the first thing on the agenda will be building a... Wonder. If the size 7 scaffold made it out then you can start right away, otherwise you need to get the workshop finished... actually you might want to complete the village store first too, not that there will be any shortage of warm bodies to build both at once. The first Norse Wonder doesn't have to be artifact-charged, just a modest one to boost influence. I recommend placing it between your temple and the hills, where no fireballs go and lightning doesn't hit.
Set about 10-30% of your villagers to worshiping, everytime the fireballs come erect 2 modest shields over the "front" of your town, placed right these will deflect 100% of the incoming fireballs. Also move all your artifacts in under the shielded area, and try to move/destroy the trees too, you don't want villagers going out into the burning rain, because then they die, and then more villagers go out to mourn the dead, and then you may as well set your totem to 100% or you'll have a villager death cascade. But hey, we bought along 300+ villagers for just such a scenario...
The first guardian stone: Your wonder will provide the influence to allow you to impress the Japanese village, then do the puzzle. Slow downtime or pause to make it easier.
The second guardian stone: You'll have to use midget for the ogre fight, I actually just wait until he wanders off and picks the fight... it will help if midget has learned miracle heal by now, you can't lose if you just have midget heal himself every time he gets low on health.
The third guardian stone: If you have got into the spirit of this play style you'll have built an artifact-charged Norse and Japanese wonder by now, and your influence will allow you to simply pick up the chick and drop her on the guy.
Preparation for Land 5:
I like to build up the Japanese village to 500+ population, and also build a 2nd Japanese wonder somewhere else with 300+ population, and siphon off all the children from the crèches a couple of times using a variation on the teleport trick (place teleport at vortex and victim-village, set totem to 100%, after a few seconds most the children will have gone through, set totem to 0%), allowing the crèche to repopulate in between "purges". This is a pretty effective way to send a very large number of villagers through - they will help! But be aware, sending through 1000+ villagers tends to make the game veerrrrrry unstable come land 5, it'd be saner to just send through ~500, but I like to test the limits and go for 2000+... mainly I get carried away building huge cities in Land4, it's a good land for it.
Bottle up a dozen or more wood miracles and toss them in, then cast miracle wood into the vortex a few times, you can try sending in scaffolds but the vortex usually eats them when I try. All you can count on is your villagers, artifacts and miracle bubbles going through.
Land 5:
You will be greeted by screaming villagers, shards of wood and giant glowing rocks raining from the sky. Funnily enough this isn't Nemesis's doing but the vortex regurgitating all that junk... I've had it spewing out stuff for well over 5 minutes, if only Nemesis were cool enough to make a wisecrack about kitchen sinks...
Basically all you do for this land is build a giant sprawling metropolis, the first thing you should do is gather your artifacts and slap down a Norse wonder in the middle, making the ultimate super-charged wonder. With each wood miracle producing 200K wood you can easily build a giant city. Do so. Build heaps of houses and a Japanese wonder, then heaps more houses.
Eventually your influence (from your starting village!) will cover most the map and include all of Nemesis's towns, don't get cheeky though, if you take them over in the "wrong" order the game will/might crash, so take them over in the same order you would if you were a newbie. One thing to note is to build up the Japanese village a bit so you have plenty of worshipers to power physical shield to protect the central village from the meteor shower.
So the point is to win the game in a way that doesn't require or even really benefit from any investment in the creature, I find this fun. Also this play style very much results in you being a good god, even with some modest human sacrifices to power miracles.
Land 1: Not much to do here, skip it mostly.
Preparation for Land 2: Throw in some villagers if you want. The important thing to do is throw in 3 to 3 dozen signing stones, the non-duds respawn after you throw them in, so just bookmark the portal and a few of the stones and keep throwing them in until bored.
Land 2: You will be greeted by a barrage of signing stones and Captain Oblivious. Once control is returned to you go and bookmark both of kazaar's workshops (one wont be completed yet), you'll be thieving scaffolds from them, feel free to throw in trees. Do that boring tutorial stuff while thieving scaffolds and building housing & a Norse wonder, if you can get the villagers to dance around a signing stone to make it a kind of pre-artifact, it can be used to increase the size of wonders... Get the 2 nearby Indian Villages by tossing around a singing stone a couple of times, build a workshop at the nearest one. Invest in some moderate housing for these villages.
TACTIC: Tossing Stones/Artifacts. To impress villages toss a large stone or artifact then immediately recatch it (to work you need to do this near a large concentration of villagers, the crèche is good), for some reason this really impresses them, you can do it 3-5 times before the belief gain begins to diminish, then drop the artifact to get the artifact belief bonus, take the artifact away and come back in 5 minutes and repeat....
The PRIMARY objective on Land 2 is to charge up atleast 3 artifacts (I charged 12), you may otherwise occupy your time any way you please, I reccomend building wonders. Once you have 3 artifacts use them to make a super charged Norse and Indian wonder.
TACTIC: Charging Artifacts. Villagers will charge artifacts for you when they are idle and their only needs are "Housing" and/or "Children". So feed em and wood em and they'll dance all day and night. (less pampered villagers will dance in the evenings, sometimes... if they can be bothered. And the moons of Jupiter are aligned.)
Preparation for Land 3: Empty the last 3 (or is it 2?) Villages into the vortex, you know how do to that right? Set a teleport at the vortex, another at your temple, set the totem to 100%, watch the fools run to the teleport, right into the vortex... hahahah. To pass time I built a (greek?) village around Lethys's temple and populated it from his worshipers (after losing his pet Lethys gets really passive... he doesn't bother me at all). If you want to do this remember that the vortex to land 3 actually opens on the ramp quite a bit below the temple, not under the temple... anyway once I was done this village had about 200 villagers to send through.
Of course send through all your artifacts, including un-charged singing stones, but really if you build an Indian wonder your villagers will have so much spare time that all the stones will be charged.
You can send through some size 7 scaffolds and wood miracles if you wish, these are more for Land 4 than land 3 tho - it never hurts to plan ahead.
Something else handy is some winged creatures miracles from the tree puzzle, again these are for Land 4/5 rather than land 3.
Land 3:
You will be greeted by screaming. A lot of screaming, the screaming of 300+ villagers getting flung from the vortex. I find it soothing.
Anyway, go hunt down throwing guy (you know him, portable influence guy? tells you not to throw him?) and use him to gain influence at each village, tossing artifacts to impress.
TATIC: Land 3 Throwing Guy. Use him to gain temporary influence in distant villages. Don't throw him, just pick him up and put him back down further outside your influence, rinse and repeat. It is recommended to bookmark him. Also pausing while moving around to locate and pick up artifacts is helpful.
Build a Japanese wonder and an artifact-charged Indian wonder, since you wont be building anything else the wood will be easy to come by, just throw in a few forests. Technically you can do this level JUST with throwing guy & tossing artifacts around, but may as well build some wonders to help town growth and create more idlers for charging up those ugly crying stones, make great artifacts those!
Burning Villagers Encounter: You can just drop them all in the sea. Slow down time (alt-1) or abuse pause to make it easier.
Wolves Encounter: Toss them in the village store, again manipulate time to make it easier.
Preparation for land 4:
The main thing you need is warm bodies, lots of them, because in land 4 they tend to become slightly too warm then slightly too dead.. so you need lots of spares. Simply dumping all the suitable villages into the vortex using the teleport trick will provide enough bodies.
Also try to throw in a size 7 scaffold and any wood miracles and any other bubbles you can find.
It surely doesn't need to be said that you throw in all your artifacts too...
Land 4:
Amazingly the first thing on the agenda will be building a... Wonder. If the size 7 scaffold made it out then you can start right away, otherwise you need to get the workshop finished... actually you might want to complete the village store first too, not that there will be any shortage of warm bodies to build both at once. The first Norse Wonder doesn't have to be artifact-charged, just a modest one to boost influence. I recommend placing it between your temple and the hills, where no fireballs go and lightning doesn't hit.
Set about 10-30% of your villagers to worshiping, everytime the fireballs come erect 2 modest shields over the "front" of your town, placed right these will deflect 100% of the incoming fireballs. Also move all your artifacts in under the shielded area, and try to move/destroy the trees too, you don't want villagers going out into the burning rain, because then they die, and then more villagers go out to mourn the dead, and then you may as well set your totem to 100% or you'll have a villager death cascade. But hey, we bought along 300+ villagers for just such a scenario...
The first guardian stone: Your wonder will provide the influence to allow you to impress the Japanese village, then do the puzzle. Slow downtime or pause to make it easier.
The second guardian stone: You'll have to use midget for the ogre fight, I actually just wait until he wanders off and picks the fight... it will help if midget has learned miracle heal by now, you can't lose if you just have midget heal himself every time he gets low on health.
The third guardian stone: If you have got into the spirit of this play style you'll have built an artifact-charged Norse and Japanese wonder by now, and your influence will allow you to simply pick up the chick and drop her on the guy.
Preparation for Land 5:
I like to build up the Japanese village to 500+ population, and also build a 2nd Japanese wonder somewhere else with 300+ population, and siphon off all the children from the crèches a couple of times using a variation on the teleport trick (place teleport at vortex and victim-village, set totem to 100%, after a few seconds most the children will have gone through, set totem to 0%), allowing the crèche to repopulate in between "purges". This is a pretty effective way to send a very large number of villagers through - they will help! But be aware, sending through 1000+ villagers tends to make the game veerrrrrry unstable come land 5, it'd be saner to just send through ~500, but I like to test the limits and go for 2000+... mainly I get carried away building huge cities in Land4, it's a good land for it.
Bottle up a dozen or more wood miracles and toss them in, then cast miracle wood into the vortex a few times, you can try sending in scaffolds but the vortex usually eats them when I try. All you can count on is your villagers, artifacts and miracle bubbles going through.
Land 5:
You will be greeted by screaming villagers, shards of wood and giant glowing rocks raining from the sky. Funnily enough this isn't Nemesis's doing but the vortex regurgitating all that junk... I've had it spewing out stuff for well over 5 minutes, if only Nemesis were cool enough to make a wisecrack about kitchen sinks...
Basically all you do for this land is build a giant sprawling metropolis, the first thing you should do is gather your artifacts and slap down a Norse wonder in the middle, making the ultimate super-charged wonder. With each wood miracle producing 200K wood you can easily build a giant city. Do so. Build heaps of houses and a Japanese wonder, then heaps more houses.
Eventually your influence (from your starting village!) will cover most the map and include all of Nemesis's towns, don't get cheeky though, if you take them over in the "wrong" order the game will/might crash, so take them over in the same order you would if you were a newbie. One thing to note is to build up the Japanese village a bit so you have plenty of worshipers to power physical shield to protect the central village from the meteor shower.
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