Friday, June 20, 2008

Getting Started

I have a couple friends that are talking about starting Saga.

Here is my list of some of my lesssons learned:

Basically Saga is cheap if you don't feel like you have to collect all the troops day 1.

The best army to start is whatever you think looks cool. Luckly several of the neutral units are pretty nice for questing.

You don't have alot of need for big armies in the early game. You need about 150 CP of leveling troups.

Strangely enough the best cheap early leveling troops are neutral.

For just trying the game, do the following:

Get two full units of Heavy Cav, and two full units of Cav Archers. This plus a couple 7CP or 9CP units is all your need:
- Heavy Cav cost 1000 gold per card (you need 24 cards.) You can farm the gold from missions and buy these troops from the Market. Alternatively you can buy them from unit sites for $12 for 24. http://www.sagatraders.com/store/CS_Human_Heavy_Cavalry.html
- Cav Archers cost 1000 gold per card (you need 24 cards.) http://www.sagatraders.com/store/CS_Human_Cavalry_Archers.html - $2.88 for 24.

So for 15$ you can basically have an army that can make it to level 15 or higher. Or buy boosters and trade, although honestly the trading system has very few deals on commons.

If you continue using the same troops to quest you will get them ranked up quickly to rank 5 or so, and that makes farming resource missions easy.

The main resource mission you will farm to build your city is called Lumber Raid. It's pretty easy, just field two units of Heavy Cav. You can basically farm your entire town doing this mission, I personally have run it over 100 times.

Make sure you do finish 20 silver quests before you hit 17, as you will need them to get more land from the game. You don't have to finish the mission on gold, just silver. I tend to do the very low level missions to make this quick.

Co-op missions are actually pretty fun, but require talking someone into queuing with you repeatedly. Pick up groups are rare, you may spend 5 minutes with an open game before someone jumps in. However there are several special missions people love to do, as some give god-favor and good grind, so if you open a Co-op, then send a mission in chat to join, you might find quick Co-op.

The heroic (blue) low level missions are fun, but often the rewards aren't worth it until your troops are higher levels. You basically want to overlevel the heroics before attempting, even though you get your first heroic mission at 10, you probably will not be able to finish it.

As I stated earlier, based on the current state of the game, you probably don't want to make a territory wilderness unless you are ready for massive pvp raids by players with WAY better armies and levels. If getting kicked in the teeth is your love, feel free, but PVP is end-game, not mid-game.

In terms of mana-shards you can get 7-8 shards per game for doing 1v1 battles. You don't really need the shards for anything but enchanting if you have no wilderness territories, but you can build up a couple stacks, even if you lose every game.

One trick that has screwed me many times is having a couple units with only a couple guys in it. Sometimes I kill everything, but all is left is my flying troups. When it comes to pick up the loot, I don't have enough CP left to bring in a ground unit to pick up the chests. Make a couple cav units that you can summon even if you only have 7 CP left.

First Post:

So I've been playing Saga for three weeks.

Level 19, and still figuring out the units.

So far my favorites in Light and Nature:

Light:

Griphon Riders/Phoenix/Heavy Lancers/Human Charioteers

Nature:

Treants/Druids/Eagle Riders/Elven Longbowmen

Neutral:

Ballista/Catapult/Human Heavy Cavalry/Human Cavalry Archers

It seems you are limited to 4 total units of any one card type, but it seems like that these above units are all I find strong playing with.

There was a patch today http://www.playsaga.com/saga_index.php. It seems like the changes may change that.

In terms of PVE and PVP.

PVP seems to be the playground of a set of maybe six level 35 players that seem to have been playing for awhile.

From my perspective watching them chat in conflict, they seem to enjoy doing multiple raids on lower level players with Wilderness Territories.

This pretty much means, as I understand it, that you shouldn't make a territory wilderness unless you have lots of level 10 troops and a full level 35 nation.

PVE seems realitively slow but rewarding. As much as often I feel the missions are either too easy or too hard, I really don't mind grinding to add another wall unit or farm/house.

Unit leveling seems realitively slow after rank 6. I really wonder how someone can get a nice rank 10 army to fight pvp without months of work. I've been playing for 3 -4 weeks now and I rate myself as less then 1/2 way to getting a decent pvp army setup.