Challenge: It's the Final Farm Down

The Helice Merchant, to left of the Palace, is the quest giver for the farm quests.

All of the three premium civs  offer a series of challenge quests which are often as much about improving your game play as anything else.  The Final Farm Down in the Greek civ is a good example of this.  In this series of challenge quests you have to build 10 farms in 10 minutes, and a minute is knocked off each subsequent quest, until finally you have a bare 5 minutes to build your 10 farms.

If you're anything like me, you were relieved to build your 10 farms in 6 minutes and were completely dismayed that you had to do it all again with one minute less.

I struggled a couple of times with the Final Farm down until I cottoned on to something really stupid which I
was doing.

Open the book to read more!




Before we get to that, let's remind ourselves of what you're faced with in the opening seconds.

You will start with your usual 5 villagers and a scout, along with 3 spearmen.  In this quest, they throw in the occasional wolf to try and slow you down.  Position your 3 spearmen in a triangle around your TC to keep them at bay, don't forget that within range, your TC is also effective at killing wolves (but you have to issue the command to do it).

Make sure you quickly send your scout around to grab the nearest pair of cows, this will help you in pumping out villagers early on.  Wolves killed close to your TC are also a good source of food.

Do not make the mistake of relying on the farms you're about to build to make your early food.  By the time you start building farms, you won't need the food, and you are only building them to get the numbers up - if you have a farmer on the farm - you're wasting a valuable building resource.

In short, that's the mistake I made early on - I actually left the farmers on the farm - little wonder I struggled to build my 10 farms!

Once you have that wood count ticking over, grab your food producers and start queuing farms.  As the farms are built, grab the farmers and keep queuing farms.  (Note:  if you don't yet know how to queue using the shift key - learn how to do it now!)

End game of Final Farmdown - note no villies are farming the farms

As you near the magic number, if you have sufficient wood, start putting the wood cutters to farm building.

There are a few Age I advisers which will help here:

• Apprentice Mason Philon (improves building times)
• Lumberjack Thutmose (improves wood gathering)
• Net Maker Aapep (improves food gathering)
• Survivalist Agathon (villagers cost less food to produce)

Whichever adviser you have to the highest level - throw it in, doesn't matter too much which one it is.

In Age II the adviser is an easy one to choose:  Seed-master Agape -reduces the cost of farms.  This adviser at any level will help a lot.  The epic version (shown right ) reduces the cost of farms by 50%.  It's a long shot you will have this adviser so early on, but even if you can get a 20% reduction (with the common version), that's certainly worth it.

Brawny Polecat