Castles (DOS) - guide, strategy, and tips ========================================= v1.0 by Jeremy Morton (jez9999 on GameFAQs) INTRODUCTION ------------ You'll need to click away with both buttons (and often tap spacebar, enter, and ESC for good measure) at the beginning to get it to go to the 'welcome / start game' screen. Yeah, I know, it's flaky, but the rest of the game isn't. Don't ask me why. STOP!!!!! If you're thinking, "oh yeah I remember enjoying playing Castles 1 but it's got all these quirks and you have to balance out the labour force just right and it's a PITA because of battles etc." - these things are EASY TO FIX with the help of some QUICK pointers in this concise guide, and you'll have an excellent quick labour force building some awesome castles in no time! You do need to read the Quick Tips below though because without them the game's quirky nature will make it rather more annoying to play. I've put them in order of importance. So without further ado... QUICK TIPS ---------- When the level starts, immediately set the game speed to 'Laboured', which is the slowest speed. You can't design a castle with the game paused, but this slows it down a reasonable amount, and you CAN afford to take some time designing the castle at the start, which you should do, but not before you've set up your military, speaking of which... Ideally you'd just hire troops right away. However, the number of troops you can have is linked to the number of castle pieces you have in your design, and you have none so far. Go to the design screen and build the first 20 or so pieces of your castle. You'll want enough to have about 100 archers and 100 infantry, to deal with early attacks. Then, go straight to the military screen. If you lose ONE battle in this game it's game over, so you need a big strong military from the start. Hire at least 100 archers and 100 infantry. Split the archers up into 10 units. I think this is nicer than only a small number of units because as the enemy approaches you'll get the maximum number of arrows raining down on the enemy from all 10 units, so the arrows can hit as many enemy soldiers at the same time as possible. Split the infantry up into 4 units. See, you CAN control the infantry units' movement in combat (not the archers; they're rooted to the spot), but it's a bit fiddly to do so. During battle, you click on the unit to command (on the main view, not the design view), then click where you want to move it. The unit will then move there, and then immediately continue heading straight toward the enemy units again. Thing is, this is a bit fiddly because if the unit is moving you have to try and click on a moving target, and you might miss. It's much easier to move them when they're stuck, having walked into the moat or a castle wall (the AI is braindead), and so it's probably best to mostly just use the ability to move units for this. Still, keeping it down to only 4 infantry units means you get some flexibility in unit placement, but also there aren't too many units to have to worry about moving around. On later levels, where the enemy can come from "the unknown" and you need to be able to hedge your bets about where you place your units, you may need to increase the number of infantry units back up to 10 again. By that point in the game, of course, you should be able to afford a much larger army. With the speed and military taken care of, you should then go back to the design screen and finish designing the entire castle. I'd do this before hiring any labour because the game has an annoying habit of assigning free workers to castle tiles as you place them in the design view, and you're gonna want to assign labourers manually when deciding in what order to build the castle pieces. Design now, THEN hire the workers (and try not to change your mind about the design half way through; get it right at the beginning!) With castle design, you don't HAVE to have a really traditional square-shaped Tower-Wall-Wall-Wall-Tower-Wall-Wall-Wall-Tower style design, like the example one you get when you're playing on beginner difficulty. That is a sound design, but rather boring. There are, however, some important design tips that will net you a much better castle for kicking ass and not getting knocked down in battles (particularly the final battle). See 'castle design' in the Detailed Info section on how to design good castles. You can also see some nice castle design ideas in this tips directory. Once your castle design is finished you'll have plenty of castle pieces in the design to support far more military units so you can go back to the military screen and increase your army size more up to 500 archers and 500 infantry, depending on which level you're playing and how difficult it is. Obviously you need a military strong enough to defeat the waves of attackers that will come, which start off small and get bigger over time. Finally, you can get on with the job of actually building the castle (and having the odd fun side-story scene where you answer a question, or pick a course of action). Although you can just hire the same number of each type of worker by clicking "Hire" on the "Labour" screen, this will just get you a "Satisfactory" rating (shown at the bottom of the "Labour" screen). You'll want to get up to "Excellent" rating by hiring a mix of different types of workers in the right proportions, which will cause the workers to build your castle much faster. This is a win-win because it also means that you'll need a smaller workforce (meaning lower wages). See 'labour mix' in the Detailed Info section for lookup tables that tell you what workforce mix you need to hire. I find that hiring the 360 worker mix early on, allowing you to assign 90 labourers to 4 castle pieces at a time, provides a lean, mean, castle-building machine that can build a castle relatively quickly without costing too much in wages (although financially it's a pretty close call in the first couple of levels, before you have decent income coming in from previously-built castles). Remember to dig a moat. This is just a free win, as it makes it significantly harder for the enemy to get to your actual castle and costs nothing. Also remember each time the enemy attacks, and manages to dig up some of your moat, to re-dig it after the battle is over. You'll just need a few diggers for the moat to get dug, which you should have if you've just started hiring labourers, and moats can't be dug for castles too far away from water, so make sure some water is near enough to your castle. If possible, however, a moat should always be dug - and it is possible on all but a couple of levels. By this point you'll be nicely up and running, and can start assigning workers to castle pieces (I like to ideally assign the maximum 90 workers per piece unless I need to spread the workers a bit more thinly on a longer stretch of wall I'm building). Here's a checklist of what to get done at the start of each level: 1. Set game speed to 'Laboured'. 2. Add roughly the first 20 pieces of your castle on the design screen. 3. Hire 100 archers and 100 infantry on the military screen. 4. Split archers into 10 units, and infantry into 4 units. 5. Go back and finish designing the castle on the design screen. 6. Increase your hired archers/infantry to the required number (depending on the level difficulty) on the military screen. 7. Hire workers on the labour screen in the right proportions for an 'Excellent' rating (once they've all finally been hired). 8. Dig a moat, if possible on this level. 9. Assign workers to castle pieces to get them building the castle. Told you it wasn't too painful. Enjoy playing Castles! DETAILED INFO ------------- The Quick Tips section will let you play this slightly quirky (though awesomely fun) game without making any basic slip-ups at the beginning and set you on a good track. This section goes into more detail on various aspects of the game to make you a real master at building castles in those cold, unforgiving Celtic lands with waves of soldiers running at you, as well as providing handy reference material. - Main display - The main display shows your castle building area, and the menu on the left (right-click to show/hide the menu, but you'll usually want it on). The initial menu displayed shows the date, then "King [name]", then your castle name. Note that "King" doesn't denote the difficulty level; it's just telling you that you're the king. :-) Finally there will be the money you have in the bank, and then Pieces and Resources. Pieces tells you how many pieces the castle is made up of so far (you can add or remove pieces in the castle design), and Resources gives you some idea of how many more pieces you can add to the castle design - see 'castle design' for more information on pieces and resources. At the top of the initial menu are 6 headings: Design is where you design your castle. Labour is where you hire and fire the workers building your castle. Taxes is where you see information on and set the taxes for your kingdom. Military is where you hire and fire archers and infantry for your castle (interestingly it's also where you can choose to dig a moat for the castle). Food is where you manage your castle's food stocks. Options is where you can save/load your game, quit to DOS, get some handy advice from a foremost knight of the realm, and change the game speed. - Celtic lands - There are three campaigns you can play through in the game; a 1 castle, 3 castle, or 8 castle campaign. These castles will each be built in different Celtic lands each of which has its different pros and cons, generally getting more difficult as you go along. The castle you build will also need to consist of more pieces in each new land in order to gather the most taxes from that land when building your future castles. The eight Celtic lands are: Rhos Arfon Penllyn Arwystli * Aberffraw Gwerthyrnion Dunoding Powys * * Can't built a moat on this level as there's no water Which Celtic lands you build your castles in depends on which campaign you're playing and on which difficulty level. The following table indicates the details: /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | * | P1 | P3 | P8 | D1 | D3 | D8 | R1 | R3 | R8 | K1 | K3 | K8 | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Rhos | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | | 1 | | | 1 | | Arfon | | | | | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | | | 2 | | Penllyn | | | | | 3 | 3 | | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | | Arwystli | | | | | | 4 | | 3 | 4 | | 2 | 4 | | Aberffraw | | | | | | 5 | | | 5 | | 3 | 5 | | Gwerthyrnion | | | | | | 6 | | | 6 | | | 6 | | Dunoding | | | | | | 7 | | | 7 | | | 7 | | Powys | | | | | | 8 | | | 8 | | | 8 | \--------------------------------------------------------------------------/ * Indicates difficulty level (Peasant, Duke, pRince, King) and 1, 3, or 8 castle campaign. Numbers in table indicate in which order you play the given levels on the given campaign. Yes, Peasant difficulty does mean you only ever play one level no matter what campaign you choose. - Quickly determine difficulty level - It's pretty easy to find out what Celtic land you're currently playing on, but there's nowhere in the game that explicitly tells you what difficulty level you're playing on, in case you've forgotten that. However, you can derive the difficulty level from the Taxes section. Go into Taxes and set tax all the way up to Tyrannical. The income level will tell you what difficulty level you're playing on: £2500 - King £3000 - Prince £3500 - Duke and Peasant (you should know when you're on Peasant difficulty though, considering it's basically just one-level tutorial where you already start out with a half-built castle! Also, you'll always be called King Beginner. - Money - There are two resources that can cause you possibly game-ending devastation if you run out of them. The first is money. The game year starts in March and ends at the end of November, meaning that you'll pay expenses at the end of 9 months each year. If you go into the "Taxes | Treasurer" screen, you'll see your monthly outgoings (Labor Force, Military Force, and Supplies) and your yearly incomings (taxes from This Castle and Other Castles), which will be collected at the end of November. Basically, you'll want your yearly income to match, or more than match, your combined monthly outgoings multiplied by 9. So, if you had: Labor Force: £100 Military Force: £100 Supplies: £50 ... then your yearly taxes would need to be £250 * 9 (£2,250) to stay afloat. If your yearly taxes are higher than this, your treasury balance will increase, all other things being equal. Note that November's wages will be taken from the money in your account BEFORE collecting taxes that year, so if you have £200 in the account and wages of £300 to pay, you'll lose workers even if you're at the end of November and collecting taxes of £2000. You have to have enough money in your account for workers' wages before the month ends to avoid losing workers. If they are lower, the balance will decrease. Aside from the regular monthly expenses, the other major cost consideration is food. You'll need to add the cost of the food you need to buy onto your yearly calculations, which is usually something like £200 (if you buy 200 food when food price is 1 per year) for an average sized labour force. Your income comes from 2 sources; your taxes from this castle, the level of which is determined by your "Taxation level" on the "Taxes" menu area. You can and should start out by raising the taxation level to Oppressive. This just about keeps the people's opinion of you the same, or slightly negative, but not into the realms of rebellions or anything. This taxation level is required on the first few levels, especially on King difficulty, just to get by. Once you've gotten a few castles under your belt you can start to ease off on the taxation level because money coming in from your other castles will mean you don't need such a high main taxation level. Because of this, the people's opinion of you will start out pretty negative at the beginning of an 8 castle campaign, but can rise to them loving you by the end because you've been able to ease off on taxes, possibly even getting them down to Generous level. Keeping taxation level at Oppressive seems to just about keep the people's opinion of you the same; it will get neither better nor worse. Lower taxation levels mean the people will start to like you more, and the Tyrannical taxation level makes them dislike you more and more. You may also opt to levy taxes each month, but this is best avoided if at all possible since it makes the people's view of you as a monarch go south VERY quickly! However, if your choice is between levying taxes and running out of money (thereby losing workers and military), levying taxes is almost always the lesser of the evils. As stated previously, you also receive income at the end of the year from previous castles you have completed. Each previously-completed castle will net you additional cash at the end of the year in taxes, which is VERY useful as you can then keep your regular tax rate down and stop the people from hating you. When you build a castle, it has to consist of a certain number of pieces in order to gather the maximum taxes for the land in which it was built. You should always aim to do this as money is tight in this game (particularly on the hardest difficulty level) and this extra money really eases pressure on the treasury. You will occasionally receive a random message along the lines of "Castle Flint needs all your archers now!" You should always, with no exceptions, respond Yes to this message. If you don't, you'll permanently lose the end-of-year income from that castle. You have to quickly build your army back up when you answer Yes (maxing out the army's wages works well for that), but at least you don't lose the precious income. If your castle doesn't consist of enough pieces to net its maximum income (given to you when you click the Options -> Counsel), the amount earned from it will drop off quite quickly depending on how many pieces fewer the castle is (it can halve when the castle is 10 or 20 pieces too small), so you should probably over-build the castle by at least 5 pieces in case some are destroyed in the final battle of the level. The full amount each completed castle nets starts out at £400 for Rhos, then increases by £50 per year (£450 for Arfon, £500 for Penllyn, etc.) - a tidy sum considering it's paid annually rather than as a one-off. - Food - As stated previously, there are two resources that can cause devastation if you run out of them. The second is food. You'll notice that the food cost starts out high at the beginning of the year and decreases as the year goes on (from 3 through to 1). You should try to only buy food when the food cost is 1. You can buy enough food this way (at least at the beginning of the game; on later levels you may need to build up very large food stocks for long sieges, at which point you may also need to start buying food in months where food cost is 2), and it'll obviously reduce your costs. The two occasions on which having enough food is crucial are over winter, and during a siege. Over winter, the amount of food needed per employee (worker or member of your army) is 0.25. So, if you have 360 workers, 150 archers, and 150 infantry, that adds up to 660 employees @ 0.25 food each. That means you'll need to have at least 165 food in stock or you'll have lost a bunch of employees at the beginning of the next year, depending on your food shortfall - very bad news indeed. Note that food bought at the end of November IS used during winter, so even if you have zero food at the beginning of November, it's definitely worth buying 150 food in November to get your stocks up as much as possible. Also note, however, that the food cost for buying at the end of November will be 3, even if it says the food cost for November will be 1. You'll need to build up even more food for a siege. Sieges happen on two occasions; usually before the final battle at the end of every level, and occasionally during the level a particularly big attack will start with a siege. You can't usually predict when the latter will happen, but the former will happen just after you've finished building the castle, so unless you've got a lot of money sitting around, you should probably aim to finish building the castle towards the end of a year so you have several months where you can buy food at its lowest price; that way you can build up a decent amount of food before the siege preceding the final battle. Slow down completion of the castle as necessary to achieve this. As soon as you've said "Yes" that you've finished the castle, you should immediately go into the "Labour" menu section and fire all your workers. You'll only need military units for the final battle, and no workers. This will reduce the amount of food needed for any upcoming siege (remember that both military units and workers have to be fed during a siege). During a siege, each employee will use roughly 0.015 food per day. This means that if you have, say, 600 employees (300 archers and 300 infantry), you'll use up 9 food per day of the siege. The length of a siege varies from relatively short (20 days) to very long (60 days, or even longer for the siege before the last battle in the game). The sieges will generally get longer as the game goes on, so you should plan to have enough food for a 20 day siege at the beginning and 60 or more days towards the end. In this example, here's how much food you'd need for a short, medium, and long siege: 600 employees * 0.015 = 9 food per day 9 food * 20 days short siege = 180 food required 9 food * 40 days medium siege = 360 food required 9 food * 60 days long siege = 540 food required Certain events outside your control can affect your food stocks for the worse (the "hungry rats eat your food reserve" is always a fun one), but nevertheless you MUST keep enough food stocked to feed your people over the winter or during the siege before the final battle on a level, or the loss of workers and military will probably be catastrophic. It should probably go without saying that if an event takes out your food reserve, you should immediately set to buying large quantities of food each month to ensure you'll have enough for the next winter (although you should be monitoring the food situation regularly). If you're lucky and your food stocks are depleted early in the year, you should be able to wait until near the end of the year when the food price reduces to start buying food. - Military & battles - Your military is one of the most crucial aspects of your castle management that you'll be in charge of. You have to win every single battle that happens in this game, so you'd better have a bunch of archers and infantry ready to deal with ANY wave of attackers that comes along. You can afford to spend some time designing your castle at the beginning of the level - the military doesn't need a built castle to deal with attacks, least of all small ones early on in the level - but you sure as heck need a bunch of soldiers. So, get 'em hired very early on and be increasing their numbers throughout the level as the waves of attackers increase in number. I usually go for having an equal number of archers and infantry, but as you have the odd random event (or storyline arc) that cleans out your infantry, it may be better to have even more archers to make up for this in the event that you're attacked shortly after losing your infantry and need massive numbers of arrows taking out the enemy. Speaking of your infantry being cleaned out, as mentioned, there are numerous random events that cause this, or at least its reduction in number, during the course of the game. These are sometimes unavoidable. However, there are also some avoidable ways that your military will be depleted which should ALWAYS be avoided (did I mention how important it was to have a military?) Running out of money means workers and military will leave, so don't do that. Not having enough food over the winter means workers and military will die, so don't do that. And not having enough food stocks to last the siege of your castle before the final battle means your military will start starving fast, so make sure you have enough food. Check out 'food' in this section to see how much food (roughly) you'll need to have stocked up based on your number of workers and military. Also bear in mind that the more pieces a castle has in its design, the larger a military you can have. The number of archers and infantry you're able to hire is purely based on the number of pieces in the castle design, and raises in stages as thresholds are passed (eg. 1 castle piece allows 10 of each, 6 pieces allow 25 of each, 11 pieces allow 50 of each, etc.) Battles usually happen without notice, and if you don't keep a decent-sized military around constantly you'll lose the battle and it'll be game over immediately, so maintaining a decent-sized military is a crucial thing to be keeping an eye on all the time. Battles on each level will start out with smallish armies attacking you and grow over time to larger armies attacking you, eventually reaching huge hordes attacking with siege engines towards the end (on harder difficulty levels at least). Towards the beginning of a level, you can probably get away with keeping a garrison of 150 archers and 150 infantry around, but you'll want to increase that over time. Maintaining a large army is expensive, so I recommend that (at least until you're filthy rich) you keep the wages for archers and infantry at 3, only temporarily increasing the wage to 5 when you need to quickly recruit troops. In battles, you start out by placing your archers and infantry. I find that placing the archers on towers and walls is best. The infantry will run straight for the enemy when the battle starts, so you'll want to place them some way back such that they will meet the enemy forces roughly at the point when they come into range of your archers. That way you'll have the enemy being taken out by your archers and infantry at the same time, killing them as efficiently as possible. When you can build a moat, always do so. The extra time it takes for the enemy to dig up the moat gives a nice long time for the archers to do them a lot of damage. Also make sure you build cauldrons on all your walls so that when the enemy reaches a wall, one of their units gets taken out by a cauldron. This is crucial in later levels when large numbers of enemies attack; they WILL get through your moat and infantry defences and start attacking your castle walls, so adding cauldrons to the walls will give you a huge advantage in finishing them off. Remember that if you've built your castle relatively quickly, the enemy attacks you'll be getting on a regular basis will still probably be relatively small. When you finish building the castle, you'll face the final level battle, and that will be a big full-size attack, no matter how quickly you build the castle. That means that if your army is relatively small you'll need to quickly scale it up for the final level battle... and maybe have a savegame for if you didn't scale it up enough. :-) - Castle design - It's pretty flexible as to how you can design your castle. You can simply extend outer walls to make the castle larger, or maybe add an inner keep. To some degree it's purely down to aesthetics because at the end of the day what matters is that enough pieces of the castle stay standing at the end of the final battle of the level, after the game has asked whether you've finished building the castle and you say yes. However, some things will really improve your chances in that battle. For one, ALWAYS build a moat if the level allows it. A moat will really slow down the enemy from getting to your castle walls, allowing your archers to take a lot of them out first. Moats can be built on any level that has water on the map, although the game can be quite picky about where you have to place your castle pieces in order to allow a moat. At least part of your castle has to be near water, or you'll get the message "Moats not possible for this castle" when you try to dig the moat. It may seem like you've built the castle near enough to some water and you're still getting this message, but trust me, unless you're in one of the Celtic lands that don't allow for a moat to be built (see 'Celtic lands'), you CAN build a moat around your castle and you should keep re-positioning the castle (or extending it further towards some water) until the game lets you do so. It's a good idea to save the game immediately when the level starts so you can load it and reposition the castle if you've designed a big castle away from water and aren't able to build a moat. As far as I can tell, being near enough to water is the only requirement for a moat; the castle walls being built on rocky terrain or next to trees doesn't stop moat building. Walls should be built to maximum thickness (or 'width', as the game calls it). Height doesn't seem to matter so much, but thicker walls last longer when they're attacked. The game's manual says that square towers are quicker to build than round towers, but hold up less well to attack; however, I find that there's not much in it really. The difference is mainly aesthetic. Do you want chunky square towers for your castle, or the more sleek round model? Obviously, one major tip is not to leave the drawbridge down when the battle starts! Your doors should always be set to closed once they've been completed. Another tip is always to build cauldrons in the walls because they will tip oil on the enemy soldiers when they approach the wall, taking a lot of them out. If every wall piece has cauldrons you will take out a large number of enemy soldiers for free once they've made it through to your castle. It's possible to build diagonal walls, but I'd advise against building many, simply because they don't allow you to build cauldrons on them, so you lose the free advantage that that provides. As for what size castle you're able to build, that's down to the Resources available on the level. Remember that you'll want to build the castle at least as many pieces as are necessary to get full taxes from that castle in subsequent levels, and overbuild it a bit in case some of the pieces of the castle are knocked down in the final battle of the level. On the main display, you'll see Pieces and Resources; pieces tells you exactly how many pieces your castle design consists of, so it's pretty straightforward. Resources is a little more vague... Resources indicates how many resources you have left to build your castle and therefore how big your castle can be. The remaining resources are indicated with a number (we'll call this "resource points"). When your resource points hit zero you won't be able to add any more castle pieces. Here's a rough idea of how many castle pieces of each type can be built with one resource point: Square tower: 2 Round tower: 2 Wall piece: 3 Door/drawbridge: 1 Moat: moats are free and take up no resource points! Oddly, the game suggests unique castle names for your first 2 castles ('Flint' and 'Galahad'), but then continues to suggest 'Galahad' for all your remaining castles! So here's a suggestion for names to give your 8 castles, continuing with the 'Arthurian legend' motif, along with the number of pieces they have to be to net the maximum taxes from that land, and the amount of taxes taken: Castle 1 name: Flint (in Celtic land 'Rhos') ^ Gathers £400/yr when >=50 pieces big. Cumulative: £400. Castle 2 name: Galahad (in Celtic land 'Arfon') ^ Gathers £450/yr when >=60 pieces big. Cumulative: £850. Castle 3 name: Tristan (in Celtic land 'Penllyn') ^ Gathers £500/yr when >=70 pieces big. Cumulative: £1,350. Castle 4 name: Percival (in Celtic land 'Arwystli') ^ Gathers £550/yr when >=80 pieces big. Cumulative: £1,900. Castle 5 name: Lancelot (in Celtic land 'Aberffraw') ^ Gathers £600/yr when >=85 pieces big. Cumulative: £2,500. Castle 6 name: Arthur (in Celtic land 'Gwerthyrnion') ^ Gathers £650/yr when >=90 pieces big. Cumulative: £3,150. Castle 7 name: Merlin (in Celtic land 'Dunoding') ^ Gathers £700/yr when >=95 pieces big. Cumulative: £3,850. Castle 8 name: Excalibur (in Celtic land 'Powys') - Labour mix - Without a doubt, the labour mix is the most tedious aspect of Castles. The wages workers should be paid can probably just be kept to their initial levels suggested by the game: Digr £1.5 Carp £5 Masn £6 Quar £1.5 Cart £1.5 Smth £5 Labr £0.5 When you're initially hiring workers at the beginning of a level, getting them up to the right numbers can be a slow process; one way of speeding this up is temporarily raising the wages of workers to attract them more quickly - particularly workers you need a lot of, such as diggers. However, be sure to lower their wages back to their original values once you've recruited those workers or you'll be wasting a lot of money on them. I tend to raise the wage of diggers up to £3 until I've attracted as many as I need, and then back down to £1.5 again. Once you've attracted these workers, you'll obviously want to try and avoid losing any. You can lose them through the odd random event (not much can be done about this but you won't lose too many through events), and you can lose huge numbers of workers by running out of money or food. Don't run out of money or food. In order to build your castle as quickly and efficiently as possible, you need to hire workers in the right proportions, until you receive an "Excellent" rating at the bottom of the Labour screen. This pretty much involves trial-and-error until you hit on the right mix of workers, based on vague notions like "you need more diggers on this level" or "masons are the backbone of your labour force". Because this is probably not something you want to waste your time on (unless you really love this aspect of the game in which case you can ignore the rest of this section), below are the precise mixes of workers that will get you an "Excellent" rating on the various different Celtic lands. Technically, the required worker mix is different for every Celtic land, and changes halfway through your castle building (the mix required pre- and post-castle half built is different), but luckily you can get away with just using 3 different mixes that continue to produce an "Excellent" rating even with these ongoing changes, so not too much tinkering is required. With the mixes below, you'll never need to change your labour mix halfway through the level, but you do need different mixes on different levels. The table heading shows you what Celtic land(s) to use the mixes on, and the table contains the mixes of workers you can use to get various totals of workers. They're in multiples of 90 as this is the most useful unit of workers: you can assign 90 labourers to building each castle piece. 1.Rhos / 2.Arfon / 3.Penllyn / 4.Arwystli / 5.Aberffraw / 7.Dunoding /-------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Worker | Number (90) | Number (180) | Number (360) | Number (540) | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| | Digr | 30 | 60 | 120 | 180 | | Carp | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Masn | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Quar | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Cart | 10 | 20 | 40 | 60 | | Smth | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | | Labr | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | \-------------------------------------------------------------------/ 6.Gwerthyrnion /-----------------------------------------------------\ | Worker | Number (180) | Number (360) | Number (540) | |-----------------------------------------------------| | Digr | 65 | 130 | 195 | | Carp | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Masn | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Quar | 20 | 40 | 60 | | Cart | 20 | 40 | 60 | | Smth | 15 | 30 | 45 | | Labr | 0 | 0 | 0 | \-----------------------------------------------------/ 8. Powys /-------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Worker | Number (90) | Number (180) | Number (360) | Number (540) | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| | Digr | 25 | 50 | 100 | 150 | | Carp | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Masn | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Quar | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Cart | 15 | 30 | 60 | 90 | | Smth | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | | Labr | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | \-------------------------------------------------------------------/