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When I restarted Populous the Beginning this time I had a sense of foreboding over getting to Bloodlust, which I recall has caused me much anguish in the past. The level is constructed so that your settlement is at the centre of the other three, and as a result you are constantly being invaded. When I completed the level for the first time, I wrote on this blog how it was achieved. Rather than settling my village, I took a small army over to the green tribe and annihilated them first, before reinforcing my position and expanding onto the green plateau. I thought this sounded like a good strategy.

In fact, I didn’t follow it that closely. I concentrated my initial building efforts on a few huts, a firetraining building, and a balloon launching site. I trained seven firewarriors, and put them in four balloons – alongside my shaman – and sent them over the hill to the green base. I cast lightning at the shaman and hypnotise at some of their preachers, and their village was starting to be dismantled. I reinforced this with the destruction of their temple and firetraining.

But I didn’t completely destroy the greens.

Instead, I noted that the green shaman would reappear, and then walk over to a certain location in the middle of the village. And so I put down a few swamps along the path. This meant that I was getting a constant stream of mana each time the green shaman died, and my firewarrior balloons hovered overhead just in case the swamps ran out or she took a different route. This enabled me to go elsewhere with my shaman, and the greens were not building the village back up too quickly.

Which is a good thing, because by this point the yellows and reds had built up their armies and were starting to bother my settlement. They were fighting among each other as well, especially where the bloodlust stone head was located, but they were sending significant numbers of warriors to get me. Yellow, particularly, liked the balloons, and rather than building my own I was able to just steal those that were generously left in my village.

I travelled around the village by balloon, with my shaman casting spells to disperse the enemies as they arrived, but felt that the two enemies were getting more annoying. So I took a single balloon, with my shaman and one firewarrior, and went exploring. I found the red shaman was standing in the shadow of a cliff to the North of my base, again (like the green warrior) returning here whenever she wasn’t leading an assault on an opposing village. I hit her with lightning and killed her, then set a couple of earthquakes and fire rains on her village, and swamps on the path from reincarnation to beachside standing place. I was farming mana from two tribes.

Except green was starting to get too big for their boots, to I took an army over there and destroyed the village once and for all. It took some time, and my efforts had to be paused at one point to repel an invasion from the yellows back home, but they fell. Red was also starting to rebuild, and so I went North and destroyed their village as well. This just left me with the yellows, who were – by this point – absolutely huge. I put firewarriors in balloons at the top of cliffs either side of the passage between our settlements, and then I built huts like there was no tomorrow, even to the point where I wasn’t allowed to build any more. I trained preachers and warriors, and put more firewarriors in more balloons, and I prayed at the stone heads to get bloodlust for myself.

And then I attacked. The battle lasted ages but, again, I headed off the enemy shaman threat through use of swamps on the route she would take after each death (see the header image for this post). I sent increasingly large armies around the outside of the village to destroy everything, and my shaman was on hand to set off tornados in the centre.

Compared to my last effort, this took a lot less time and there was a lot less death and destruction. My shaman died several times, but this was often because I was sending her into a village to destroy buildings until she herself was overwhelmed – it was a sacrifice worth making. The main thing is that I beat the level first time of asking.

Level 12, An Easy Target, is the first level in which you have three opponents. This is paving the way for levels such as Bloodlust, where you are constantly attacked from all sides, but in reality the easy target here is the yellow tribe, who starts in the middle of the map with easy access from everyone else. You do need to occasionally intervene to prevent boat excursions from the reds and greens, but generally you can rely on them to fight the yellows and among themselves. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that the island you start on is tiny and hilly, with limited space for a village and training huts.

So I decided that the yellow base looked far too tempting. I cast raise spells around the edge of my settlement, creating a wall to prevent attacks from the South, and funneling any enemies into a single bay where I created my boat shed. I set up many guard towers, staffed by fire warriors, along the perimeter, and then built more on top of a hill facing the yellows. With my shaman in one of these guard towers I could cast lightning spells to kill the yellow shaman, over and over again, and I could destroy the temple and warrior huts as well. After building up a smallish army, I set off and quite quickly it was all over, with the yellow land now mine (although mostly unusable due to the smoking ruins of the buildings).

That meant, of course, that the greens and the reds were both heading for me. I made sure there was a landbridge connecting the two other tribes, then cast lots of swamp spells to block their access to me. There was already a natural ridge blocking access between me and the greens, so I built a ramp up to that and constructed a row of guard towers, to prevent access but also as a base from which my shaman could set fire to parts of their settlement.

Having reinforced against the greens, I turned my attention to the reds, but the swamps I had put down were a bit too effective for me to make an attack. In the end I had to build a land bridge around the swamps so I could access the vault of knowledge and overrun the red village from behind. Two down, one to go.

Finally, I launched an offensive with 40 warriors, 40 priests, and 40 fire warriors at the greens, and while the shaman there initially put up a fight, I used my hypnotise spell to convert the group of priests and warriors surround here to be blue-aligned, meaning a quick dispatch.

I may not be the fastest at this game, but that’s because I like reinforcing my village at all times.