Tutorial Walkthrough
So you've decided to try out the game Ludopolis! That's just swell. Ludopolis is a city building game composed of various sub-games.
A good place to start is a tutorial game. This guide will walk you through all the challenges in the tutorial, as well as give you more background information for each challenge. If you've already started the tutorial game, we're ready to start with the first challenge below. If not, see Playing for the first time.
Click any square (preferably surrounded by lots of grassland and forest, and perhaps near a coast) and click one of the two "found city" buttons. The "yellow found city" button costs more action points but doesn't use up any of your starting city's population, while the "green found city" button uses existing population, but uses less action points.
For more information about founding cities, see City placement.
This challenge is pretty straightforward. Just click on your starting city's name and you'll move there.
To unclaim a land, click the land you want to unclaim, and click the "unclaim" button in the lower-right-hand corner of the popup.
To claim a land, click the land you want to claim and click the "claim" button. The "claim" button is near the lower left corner. Like the unclaim button, the claim button uses a purple action point gem.
Select one of your city's lands, and click on it. In the lower-left-hand corner of the popup will be the "build" button, with a blue action point gem next to it. This will bring up the build menu. Under the "Industry" headline the first button says "building materials". Click this. The last button will show a grayish rock terrain. Click this. If your city has enough spare work, the rock field will finish immediately; otherwise, unless you have seriously overextended yourself, the rock field should only take a turn or two to build.
On the land you want to forest, click the "build" button (see Challenge 5 for the location of the "build" button). The build menu will pop up. Under the "Food" headline, click the top button, "Natural Terrains". Then, in the new popup, click "Forest", the 4th button down from the top, on the left side of the page.
Click the terrain you want to build the cairn on (preferably steppe or rock) and click the "build" button. Under the "Housing/Community" section of the popup, click the second button, "Public Space". Click the "Cairn" to build it. Your citizens will work on building the cairn.
See Challenge 5 (above) on how to plan a building. In the build menu, the second button under the "Food" selection of the popup is "Pasture". Click that. The Leatherworker is the middle building.
Cottages are a special type of housing. They can only be built on fertile land: grassland or forests. Unlike other buildings, you can later build farms over them.
To complete this Challenge, however, you need only plan the highest level of cottages, and you can technically do that on any land tile.
Click the tile you want and click "build". The first button under the "Housing/Community" section of the popup is "Housing". Click this. At the bottom of the screen (you may have to scroll down) are the cottages. Click on the rightmost cottage. You need only plan the cottage to complete the challenge, not finish building it.
Congratulations on completing Stage I of the tutorial!
Here you have a choice. You may build land or sea trade capacity. Sea trade capacity is usually more effective, so unless you are not located near the coast, just build that.
Building on water: Choose an "open" water square, which is one which is surrounded by water on all four sides (but not necessarily the corners). Click "build". If you have not chosen an open water square, the only option available to you will be "move city centre", which we don't want to do. If you have chosen an open water square, click the first button, "Trade", and choose any of the trading ships.
Building on land: If you don't have any water near you, choose a land square, and click "build", go to the "Trade" button under the "Trade" header, and click one of the trader's houses (the smaller will build first in either case)
Once you have a trade square of some sort, you will complete the Challenge in the first turn after trading capacity has been built.
For more information, see the "trade" section of City Mechanics or Trade.
Click on your "city centre", which is the main building around which your city is based, and what centres the map. One of the buttons at the bottom is the "goods report" (there is a picture of it in the text of the Challenge). Click it to open it. Once you're finished looking, close it using the button in the upper-right corner of the screen (there is also a button in the lower left which also closes it).
For more information, see The Goods Report.
Click on your "city centre" again, and click the button directly to the right of the "goods report". This will take some items from your city that you can use to trade. (Don't worry about trading for now — we will use them in Challenge 5.)
On your city overview panel, right below the name of the city is the word Happiness, with a number next to it. This number is a percent, and you want higher numbers, because happier cities are more productive and draw more people away from other, unhappy cities. Click on "Happiness" and a popup will appear which shows what is increasing or decreasing the happiness of your city. There is also a button at the bottom to raise the happiness of your city. Click this button to complete the Challenge.
Now we're using the items you got when you taxed a city to trade for other items. If you lost them, first tax a city again to get some more. Now click the "trade" button, which is directly left of the "goods report". Trade any item for any other item to complete the Challenge. You can also access this button by clicking on the word "actions" below the "goods list" or in the "goods report" which you opened in Challenge 2.
Click the "actions" button below the list of the city's goods (to the right of the city overview panel) and click "give". In the popup, click whatever you want to give (anything will do for the Challenge) and type however much of it you want to give (by default you give all your items, but any nonzero amount you give will complete the Challenge).
Congratulations on completing Stage II of the tutorial!
To complete this Challenge you need four cities. Go back to Challenge 1 of Stage I for a reminder on how to add cities to the game board. You may need to wait a while to get the necessary action points. Be careful not to use the "Green Found City" button off of a tiny city, because it will not have the necessary population to found another city of its own. You can found cities wherever you like, but note that some upcoming challenges will require you to jump between your cities a lot, so it is best to have your cities close together.
To complete this Challenge you need to raise the value of work. We can attack this problem form either of two angles: either we can reduce the supply or increase the demand of work.
Raising demand requires you to tell your cities to do things which take a lot of work — building buildings, claiming land far away from the city centre, the like.
Reducing the supply of work can comes most easily by from shortening its work day. Click on "work day" (right on your city overview panel, under the amount of spare work). You can shorten the work day by an hour using the yellow "shorten work day" button or by a quarter hour by using the blue "-" button.
This Challenge requires you to have two cities which each have all of the following: 90% food, 100% housing, 100% public space, and 40 thousand population.
Food: Unless your cities have grown quite large, you should have no problem having 90% food just by claiming the lands around your city. If the city you are trying to build up is located on unfertile steppes, however, it might be necessary to make a root farm or two. Click "build" on a steppe (you can on grassland or forest, as well, but it is usually better to leave them as is) and choose the "agriculture" button under the "Food" header. Click the root farm, which is the second to last line down. Choose the one on the far right.
Housing: 100% housing can be tough, especially if your cities are large. If you're on a wide expanse of grassland, you can build a large number of cottages to satisfy this requirement. Otherwise, make sure you upgrade your city centre to the highest level you can (click "build" on your city centre, the third one should do nicely) and build wooden houses if you still need housing (found in the "Housing/Community" section of the build menu). Claiming forests around your cities to will get more wood for building.
100% public space isn't hard. Just build a cairn in each city, like you did for Stage I Challenge 7. If public space still isn't at 100%, upgrade it to a park, which is directly to the right of the cairn on the build screen. You need a bit of rock, but that shouldn't be a problem at this point.
40k population shouldn't be hard as well. By the time you've gotten to this Challenge you should have at least two cities with over 40k people. Just focus on meeting the other requirements at those cities.
To finish this challenge, you need at least 15 trade capacity in 1 city, and at least 1 in all your other cities. Getting 1 trade capacity isn't hard, just follow the same strategy you used in Stage II Challenge 1. You can go about getting 15 trade capacity in two ways. Either build 3 sloops or small traders houses (or any combination thereof) in one of your cities, or upgrade either a traders house or a dory (into a large trader's house or a sloop, respectively).
The sloop requires you to have 15 culture and wool, while the large traders house requires you to have 20 culture.
In order to get wool, go into the "Pasture" section of food (where you went for the leatherworker) and build a sheep pasture. Note that the sheep pasture requires a little wheat to function, so make sure you have a steppe claimed in the city you build the sheep pasture as well. Almost all steppes provide wheat (all except the one which looks like it has trees on it).
If you need more culture to build the sloop or trader's house, you can just wait: culture increases slowly every turn up to the maximum culture level. You can also click on "culture" in your city overview panel and raise the culture of your city a half point per sunstone. Once culture is at the level you require, and you've planned the upgraded building (you can plan it right over the existing one) this challenge will be completed.
Congratulations on completing Stage III of the tutorial!
Changing the family size is part of a city's cultural properties, along with work day. Founding a new city using the "Green Found City" button will result in a new city with the same cultural properties. That is, if you raise the birthrate in one city, every city you found from that city will have an increased birthrate. This is not the only thing which affects birthrate: if a city is experiencing problems with homelessness or hunger, the birthrate will decline, for instance.
To change family size in your city, click "population" in the city overview (right below happiness), and then click "Born" at the top of the popup. Increase or decrease the birthrate as you choose.
Work day is another cultural property, like family size. Changing the work day was mentioned in Stage III Challenge 2. Raise the work day to 9 hours, click "Work day" in the city overview panel and increase the work day until it reaches 9 hours. It is probably at 8 hours in most cities, so clicking "lengthen work day" should suffice.
Go to the same place you went to increase the work day, only this time decrease it until it reaches 7 hours. That's it.
Defence is, not surprisingly, used when a city is attacking your city. Offence is prohibited in the tutorial, so you don't actually need defence here, but you should know where it is. Click "build" on a square you don't need and scroll to the bottom of the popup and click "Military", under the "Military" header. Either of the two top structures will serve to complete the challenge.
This is your final challenge. To obtain bricks, you need a source of clay and a "brickmaker". The terrain which looks like a reddish mound on grass is a clay deposit. You have probably seen these around your cities, though they are somewhat rare, so you might not have encountered them. They require 17 work, plus the claim cost from the distance to your city centre, so you will need a fairly large city near one to claim it. If you can't find one, or can't find one near enough to a population centre to claim, you can build your own "mud pit" which provides clay. For the mud pit you will need a grassland next to a water square. Click "build" on this, go to the "Natural Terrains" section, and click the mud pit (looks like a dark grey section on grass).
Once you have clay from one source or another, build the brickmaker. Choose a square where you'd like to build, then go into the "building materials" section of the build menu, under "Industry". Choose a brickmaker. The smaller one will work well enough for this challenge. One turn after you obtain bricks, this challenge is completed. Note that you can also trade for bricks, if someone else is already producing them.
Congratulations on completing all of the tutorial challenges!
A good place to start is a tutorial game. This guide will walk you through all the challenges in the tutorial, as well as give you more background information for each challenge. If you've already started the tutorial game, we're ready to start with the first challenge below. If not, see Playing for the first time.
Stage I: City Basics
In the first stage of the tutorial, we will learn how to build cities.Challenge 1: Add another city to the game board
Click any square (preferably surrounded by lots of grassland and forest, and perhaps near a coast) and click one of the two "found city" buttons. The "yellow found city" button costs more action points but doesn't use up any of your starting city's population, while the "green found city" button uses existing population, but uses less action points.
For more information about founding cities, see City placement.
Challenge 2: Move back to your starting city
This challenge is pretty straightforward. Just click on your starting city's name and you'll move there.
Challenge 3: Unclaim a land
To unclaim a land, click the land you want to unclaim, and click the "unclaim" button in the lower-right-hand corner of the popup.
Challenge 4: Claim a land
To claim a land, click the land you want to claim and click the "claim" button. The "claim" button is near the lower left corner. Like the unclaim button, the claim button uses a purple action point gem.
Challenge 5: Build a rock field
Select one of your city's lands, and click on it. In the lower-left-hand corner of the popup will be the "build" button, with a blue action point gem next to it. This will bring up the build menu. Under the "Industry" headline the first button says "building materials". Click this. The last button will show a grayish rock terrain. Click this. If your city has enough spare work, the rock field will finish immediately; otherwise, unless you have seriously overextended yourself, the rock field should only take a turn or two to build.
- Tip: Work is produced by citizens and used by the city to build and, well, work terrains and buildings. The amount you have is the number next to the hand icon at the top of the third section of your city info panel. Numbers in red with a black background indicate a deficit of work, while otherwise the number indicates spare work.
- Tip: It is generally not good practice to build a rock field over fertile land like grassland or forest.
Challenge 6: Plan a forest
On the land you want to forest, click the "build" button (see Challenge 5 for the location of the "build" button). The build menu will pop up. Under the "Food" headline, click the top button, "Natural Terrains". Then, in the new popup, click "Forest", the 4th button down from the top, on the left side of the page.
- Tip: Creating a forest is an example of landwork, a special type of terrain that may randomly change into another type of terrain. If landwork is unclaimed (see Challenge 3) it reverts to the terrain it was before the most recent landwork.
- Tip: It is faster to turn grassland into forest than steppe or rock into forest.
Challenge 7: Build a cairn
Click the terrain you want to build the cairn on (preferably steppe or rock) and click the "build" button. Under the "Housing/Community" section of the popup, click the second button, "Public Space". Click the "Cairn" to build it. Your citizens will work on building the cairn.
- Tip: You can hasten construction by clicking on the cairn and using your action points to help your citizens build it, but in most games you will have better things to do with your action points.
- Tip: Actually, any button on the Public Space screen will build the cairn, because the cairn is the first step toward all the other buildings.
- Tip: The cairn is one of the public space terrains, each of which provide "hangout". A city has a certain demand for "hangout" based on its population.
- Tip: To save your fertile grasslands and forests, you can build this on steppe or rock.
Challenge 8: Build a leatherworker
See Challenge 5 (above) on how to plan a building. In the build menu, the second button under the "Food" selection of the popup is "Pasture". Click that. The Leatherworker is the middle building.
- Tip: The leatherworker makes clothes, which are a type of durable good. Durable goods keep your citizens happy.
Challenge 9: Plan the highest level of cottages
Cottages are a special type of housing. They can only be built on fertile land: grassland or forests. Unlike other buildings, you can later build farms over them.
To complete this Challenge, however, you need only plan the highest level of cottages, and you can technically do that on any land tile.
Click the tile you want and click "build". The first button under the "Housing/Community" section of the popup is "Housing". Click this. At the bottom of the screen (you may have to scroll down) are the cottages. Click on the rightmost cottage. You need only plan the cottage to complete the challenge, not finish building it.
Congratulations on completing Stage I of the tutorial!
Stage II
In this stage, we'll learn about trade Capacity and your pawn's actions.Challenge 1: Build Trade Capacity
Here you have a choice. You may build land or sea trade capacity. Sea trade capacity is usually more effective, so unless you are not located near the coast, just build that.
Building on water: Choose an "open" water square, which is one which is surrounded by water on all four sides (but not necessarily the corners). Click "build". If you have not chosen an open water square, the only option available to you will be "move city centre", which we don't want to do. If you have chosen an open water square, click the first button, "Trade", and choose any of the trading ships.
Building on land: If you don't have any water near you, choose a land square, and click "build", go to the "Trade" button under the "Trade" header, and click one of the trader's houses (the smaller will build first in either case)
Once you have a trade square of some sort, you will complete the Challenge in the first turn after trading capacity has been built.
For more information, see the "trade" section of City Mechanics or Trade.
Challenge 2: Open the Goods Report
Click on your "city centre", which is the main building around which your city is based, and what centres the map. One of the buttons at the bottom is the "goods report" (there is a picture of it in the text of the Challenge). Click it to open it. Once you're finished looking, close it using the button in the upper-right corner of the screen (there is also a button in the lower left which also closes it).
For more information, see The Goods Report.
Challenge 3: Tax a city
Click on your "city centre" again, and click the button directly to the right of the "goods report". This will take some items from your city that you can use to trade. (Don't worry about trading for now — we will use them in Challenge 5.)
Challenge 4: Raise the morale of a city
On your city overview panel, right below the name of the city is the word Happiness, with a number next to it. This number is a percent, and you want higher numbers, because happier cities are more productive and draw more people away from other, unhappy cities. Click on "Happiness" and a popup will appear which shows what is increasing or decreasing the happiness of your city. There is also a button at the bottom to raise the happiness of your city. Click this button to complete the Challenge.
Challenge 5: Trade with a city
Now we're using the items you got when you taxed a city to trade for other items. If you lost them, first tax a city again to get some more. Now click the "trade" button, which is directly left of the "goods report". Trade any item for any other item to complete the Challenge. You can also access this button by clicking on the word "actions" below the "goods list" or in the "goods report" which you opened in Challenge 2.
- Tip: Note that you don't trade items 1 for 1, you trade based on the relative value of the item (see the "city goods and price section of City Mechanics) at that particular city. Cities near forests often have cheap wood, while cities which need a lot of wood for building will have a high demand for wood. If you like, you can move around buying low and selling high, therefore gaining a lot of items.
Challenge 6: Give goods to a city
Click the "actions" button below the list of the city's goods (to the right of the city overview panel) and click "give". In the popup, click whatever you want to give (anything will do for the Challenge) and type however much of it you want to give (by default you give all your items, but any nonzero amount you give will complete the Challenge).
Congratulations on completing Stage II of the tutorial!
Stage III: Advanced tutorial challenges
These challenges will help you grow your country.Challenge 1: Four cities total
To complete this Challenge you need four cities. Go back to Challenge 1 of Stage I for a reminder on how to add cities to the game board. You may need to wait a while to get the necessary action points. Be careful not to use the "Green Found City" button off of a tiny city, because it will not have the necessary population to found another city of its own. You can found cities wherever you like, but note that some upcoming challenges will require you to jump between your cities a lot, so it is best to have your cities close together.
Challenge 2: Raise the value of work
To complete this Challenge you need to raise the value of work. We can attack this problem form either of two angles: either we can reduce the supply or increase the demand of work.
Raising demand requires you to tell your cities to do things which take a lot of work — building buildings, claiming land far away from the city centre, the like.
Reducing the supply of work can comes most easily by from shortening its work day. Click on "work day" (right on your city overview panel, under the amount of spare work). You can shorten the work day by an hour using the yellow "shorten work day" button or by a quarter hour by using the blue "-" button.
- Tip: Although it's normally a bad idea, you can also reduce supply of work by decreasing happiness or reducing population (some ways to do this are destroying housing).
Challenge 3: Two large cities
This Challenge requires you to have two cities which each have all of the following: 90% food, 100% housing, 100% public space, and 40 thousand population.
Food: Unless your cities have grown quite large, you should have no problem having 90% food just by claiming the lands around your city. If the city you are trying to build up is located on unfertile steppes, however, it might be necessary to make a root farm or two. Click "build" on a steppe (you can on grassland or forest, as well, but it is usually better to leave them as is) and choose the "agriculture" button under the "Food" header. Click the root farm, which is the second to last line down. Choose the one on the far right.
Housing: 100% housing can be tough, especially if your cities are large. If you're on a wide expanse of grassland, you can build a large number of cottages to satisfy this requirement. Otherwise, make sure you upgrade your city centre to the highest level you can (click "build" on your city centre, the third one should do nicely) and build wooden houses if you still need housing (found in the "Housing/Community" section of the build menu). Claiming forests around your cities to will get more wood for building.
100% public space isn't hard. Just build a cairn in each city, like you did for Stage I Challenge 7. If public space still isn't at 100%, upgrade it to a park, which is directly to the right of the cairn on the build screen. You need a bit of rock, but that shouldn't be a problem at this point.
40k population shouldn't be hard as well. By the time you've gotten to this Challenge you should have at least two cities with over 40k people. Just focus on meeting the other requirements at those cities.
Challenge 4: Increase trade capacity
To finish this challenge, you need at least 15 trade capacity in 1 city, and at least 1 in all your other cities. Getting 1 trade capacity isn't hard, just follow the same strategy you used in Stage II Challenge 1. You can go about getting 15 trade capacity in two ways. Either build 3 sloops or small traders houses (or any combination thereof) in one of your cities, or upgrade either a traders house or a dory (into a large trader's house or a sloop, respectively).
The sloop requires you to have 15 culture and wool, while the large traders house requires you to have 20 culture.
In order to get wool, go into the "Pasture" section of food (where you went for the leatherworker) and build a sheep pasture. Note that the sheep pasture requires a little wheat to function, so make sure you have a steppe claimed in the city you build the sheep pasture as well. Almost all steppes provide wheat (all except the one which looks like it has trees on it).
If you need more culture to build the sloop or trader's house, you can just wait: culture increases slowly every turn up to the maximum culture level. You can also click on "culture" in your city overview panel and raise the culture of your city a half point per sunstone. Once culture is at the level you require, and you've planned the upgraded building (you can plan it right over the existing one) this challenge will be completed.
Congratulations on completing Stage III of the tutorial!
Stage IV: City cultural properties
Here you will learn how to change some aspects of your city's culture, as well as how to build defence and make bricks.Challenge 1: Change family size
Changing the family size is part of a city's cultural properties, along with work day. Founding a new city using the "Green Found City" button will result in a new city with the same cultural properties. That is, if you raise the birthrate in one city, every city you found from that city will have an increased birthrate. This is not the only thing which affects birthrate: if a city is experiencing problems with homelessness or hunger, the birthrate will decline, for instance.
To change family size in your city, click "population" in the city overview (right below happiness), and then click "Born" at the top of the popup. Increase or decrease the birthrate as you choose.
Challenge 2: Increase the work day to 9 hours
Work day is another cultural property, like family size. Changing the work day was mentioned in Stage III Challenge 2. Raise the work day to 9 hours, click "Work day" in the city overview panel and increase the work day until it reaches 9 hours. It is probably at 8 hours in most cities, so clicking "lengthen work day" should suffice.
Challenge 3: Shorten work day to 7 hours
Go to the same place you went to increase the work day, only this time decrease it until it reaches 7 hours. That's it.
Challenge 4: Build defence
Defence is, not surprisingly, used when a city is attacking your city. Offence is prohibited in the tutorial, so you don't actually need defence here, but you should know where it is. Click "build" on a square you don't need and scroll to the bottom of the popup and click "Military", under the "Military" header. Either of the two top structures will serve to complete the challenge.
Challenge 5: Obtain bricks
This is your final challenge. To obtain bricks, you need a source of clay and a "brickmaker". The terrain which looks like a reddish mound on grass is a clay deposit. You have probably seen these around your cities, though they are somewhat rare, so you might not have encountered them. They require 17 work, plus the claim cost from the distance to your city centre, so you will need a fairly large city near one to claim it. If you can't find one, or can't find one near enough to a population centre to claim, you can build your own "mud pit" which provides clay. For the mud pit you will need a grassland next to a water square. Click "build" on this, go to the "Natural Terrains" section, and click the mud pit (looks like a dark grey section on grass).
Once you have clay from one source or another, build the brickmaker. Choose a square where you'd like to build, then go into the "building materials" section of the build menu, under "Industry". Choose a brickmaker. The smaller one will work well enough for this challenge. One turn after you obtain bricks, this challenge is completed. Note that you can also trade for bricks, if someone else is already producing them.
Congratulations on completing all of the tutorial challenges!