Dice Legacy is a fairly easy game where completing the tutorial — especially if you’ve got some experience with other RTS games and roguelikes — will give you a firm enough grasp on the basics that you could probably win on the easier levels with no further knowledge of the game mechanics.
Just because the mechanics are fairly easy to grasp, doesn’t mean you’ll understand everything right off the bat. In this guide, I’ll be going over topics that aren’t covered in the tutorial or the game’s encyclopedia since you should be going through those as a new player. Some things stand out in particular, so let’s get to it.
Dice Legacy Tip: How to Survive the Winter
The game really wants you to build Steam Generators and power them with wood. This creates a radius around which your dice won’t freeze in the wintertime.
Steam Generators are the least efficient way to deal with winter. At higher difficulties and on maps with fewer resources, it’s a great way to end up with nowhere near enough wood for the lategame when you’re trying to wear down the enemy base.
Instead, what you’ll want to do is build your first District Hall, set it as a Peasant District, then put down in the six hexes surrounding the District Hall:
- Two farms
- A mill
- A brewery
- Two alehouses
For one thing, this puts your food and basic needs all in one place. But more importantly, it lets you take advantage of two council policies that are critical on any map at any difficulty.
Specifically, pass the policies that let farms work in the wintertime. Then pass the one that says that dice cannot freeze in peasant districts. Boom. You can now produce food and ale year-round, and with that ale, you can unfreeze any dice that freeze in the winter, effectively rendering the season a complete non-threat.
Dice Legacy Tip: Don’t Annoy the Encampments
When you come upon an encampment, you have three choices.
One, you can just leave them alone; they’ll ignore you unless provoked most of the time. They might get hostile at the highest difficulties — I haven’t actually tested this — but if you’re playing on those difficulty levels, you probably don’t need me to tell you how to play the game. At low to medium difficulties, they’ll ignore you until you engage with them.
Two, you can trade with them. The way you do this is first to ensure you have at least the level-4 maximum for a regular die in Exploration. You don’t need the level-8 maximum for Forge-combined dice but it won’t hurt if if you’ve got that. Send that explorer to the encampment and they’ll probably give you friendly relations to start. Build a trading tent, train up a merchant die (use the Economy buildings to convert a citizen die to a merchant), then go nuts.
And finally, you can obliterate them. The problem with this is that it creates a massive rash of enemy attacks that get more severe the more damage you do to the encampment until it is fully destroyed. There’s simply no good reason to do this on purpose unless you’re chasing the achievement for wiping out a camp or you’re imposing a challenge on yourself by not dealing peacefully with the camps.
And sure, if your explorer critically fails or you’re playing on harder difficulty settings, war might be imposed upon you, but if you’re at this skill level, you already know how to efficiently conduct combat on a scale beyond what the game normally throws at a player who’s not stirring hornets’ nests.
Point of the matter is be peaceful. You’ll be glad you did.
Dice Legacy Tip: Towers, Catapults, and Other Fun Implements of Death
One great way to keep enemy invasions at bay is to build towers as you advance up the map; if you put two of them two hexes either side of the centerline and take the techs that expand the towers’ range and power, you may never need another actual fighter die.
It’s still good to have an upgraded (to at least level 2) raider face on your soldier dice, because once you get to the Others’ base at the top of the scroll, the single easiest way to obliterate it is with a catapult flanked by towers. You’ll need that upgraded raider die (and some iron) to fire the catapult.
Of course, this strategy will chew up a ton of stone building the towers, but unless you had an especially bad stroke of luck when the game generated resource nodes, there will probably be enough stone on the map to give your advancing settlement full tower coverage while still having enough stone for actual buildings and research.
Dice Legacy Tip: How to Manage Happiness
The game doesn’t explain this, but here’s a bit of advice for managing dice class happiness. Build the Town Square.
When it’s built, put a die belonging to the class whose happiness you want to boost on the spot and add two ale. If you followed the advice about wheat and food/ale production mentioned earlier, you’ve officially solved the problem of class happiness for good. Enjoy the bonuses that happy dice provide.
Dice Legacy Tip: How to Use the Tech Tree
What you’ll want to do as soon as you can is to get the techs that increase knowledge production in the workshop.
You can find these at Tier 3 and 4 of the tech tree under Production, but there is no rule against unlocking those tiers without getting all the prior tier’s techs first. You just need enough wood, stone, and iron — the game provides a tooltip if you hover over the Roman numeral for each tier — to unlock them. That’s it. The sooner you beef up your tech production, the faster you’ll power through that tech tree, after which your citizens effectively become obsolete.
One other thing you’ll want to make sure you do sooner rather than later is get the research faces of your citizen dice upgraded to Level 3 so one die can conduct research by itself. At that point, you can even build multiple workshops and put them around a Citizens’ District to really power through the whole tech tree in a hurry.
That’s it for my tips on improving your gameplay in Dice Legacy. Do you have any other advice to share? Let us know in the comments below.
