FoEhints: Feudal Japan Part 1/2 in Forge of Empires

Feudal Japan Part 1/2 in Forge of Empires

The second cultural settlement has arrived to the beta server: Feudal Japan. Click on that Viking boat in that lake near your city and you see the dialog to start a new settlement. Now you can decide between Vikings and Feudal Japan. With another click we find our embassy in the middle of a green valley with terrace farms on the sides. The first thing I noticed was that the available building ground does not have a square shape. It is more an L. This will not make the task much easier. Again there are these randomly located impediments which can neither be moved nor removed. Sometimes they can make the task much more difficult.

The start is just as usual. You have to complete the quest in the given deadline and you start with residential buildings for the population of that little outpost. The look and feel is inspired from the Sengoku period, e g the Gassho-Zukuri farmer houses. As usual 3 houses complete the first quest.

The second quest requires to build 5 Toros, a building that possibly is inspired by an old Japanese excavation site. The requirement to have diplomacy beside population is already well known from the Vikings.

Once we have enough population, we can construct the first production building, a soy bean field. We have to let it produce soy beans before we can proceed.

In our capital we can also recognize a change since we started the Japanese settlement. The previous Viking boat changed into a Yakatabune, a Japanese boat with an interior similar to Japanese homes. The name also means something like 'at home'.
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The further development continues as known from the Vikings. With the first soy beans we can buy an extension and release a new building type, the Shinto Shrine. Such shrines we still can find everywhere in Japan.

As the residential buildings only provide very few Koban coins, the Shinto Shrines will be the main source of that new currency, which we need to produce goods. New names, but the well known concept of the Viking settlement. It remains to be difficult regarding the building space and the settlement has to be regrouped again and again. The first shrine completes the 4th quest.

The next goal is to release the gallery, the second production building. Japanese also have 4 different goods. After soy the second good that is produced in the gallery, is named paintings.

As building space is very limited in the beginning, we only make very slow progress. It seems to be much slower than with the Vikings. The only real reason I could identify are the higher prices for extensions. I am always short on Koban coins, goods and building space.

I had to destroy a soy beans field to be able to construct the gallery which then completes the 6th quest. This is a very important milestone in the development of our settlement! This milestone enables us to use the merchant, which is located near our embassy. This merchant has 3 different offers every day. These offers often include advanced goods that we still cannot produce in our buildings, especially armor and instruments.

We already know these negotiations from the guild expedition and daily challenges. Each of these 5 contacts wants one of 5 different goods. We have 3 attempts to find out which contact prefers which good. And the tavern boost will not help in our outpost. As you know this puzzle can be solved most of the time, but not always. But you can try again if one attempt fails.

I highly believe that the Japanese settlement cannot be completed in the deadline without using the merchant. Therefore market is not just a nice addon that makes your life much easier. Instead it is necessary to use it every day. As a result I again give some hints for negotiation, although we already know the concept since long.

With the negotiation shown here in the video, some might notice that I did not offer steel on position 3 in the second move although I knew already that this position requires steel. Instead I also used the 3rd position to identify the last missing good. This additional wrong response helped to make this a guaranteed success instead of a 50:50 chance. In my third turn I then can offer steel, and I already know what is required on position 2.

These 3 negotiations fill my stock with plenty of goods. The instruments allow me to trade them for another expansion. This accelerates the further development significantly. This is the reason why reaching that milestone is so very important.

I demonstrate the remaining part of the Japanese settlement in the second video about Feudal Japan.