Game 16: Border Pioneer

I follow Yogscast games on Bluesky, and they published this little number.

Border Pioneer "is a pixel art city-building game that combines survival and defense elements." So, build a city, defend a city. Sounds simple enough. Apparently I start with an Adjutant to help me out.

My classmate Steve will accompany me!

Looks like it's a card-based town builder game with exploration.

In the tutorial I have to 'explore' for six months.

The king's envoy brings you some initial resources and your starting card deck. The cards so far are buildings and they cost and generate the various resources - houses cost food and generate people for instance. The resources are gold, food, hammer (used to build buildings) and population. Interesting, cards have a limited total number of uses, so one card might only let you place 1-2 farms and then it disappears.

Building placement matters, your logging camps generate additional resources if they're next to trees.

Fields generate more food for being next to each other so I'll want fields in a big clump.

Between turns monsters appear so there's a tower defense thing going on, you also get military units to play around with and can buy more as cards.

The attacking slimes do about as well as you might expect Jello to.

I significantly mismanaged my food in the tutorial and have run out at the start of Month 4. Fortunately Steve the Adjutant's ability is to give me 200 food once if I run out, which saves me from, embarrassingly, failing at the tutorial.

 I had assumed that the +42 food above was a NET change rather than just my food gain - the people are eating 64 per turn.

I end up dismissing a couple soldiers to free up population to place more the fields, which slows food loss to the point where we can at least make it to month 6. That fixed, by the time month 6 rolls around we have a respectable little military that has no trouble with the tutorial boss.

Slimes! More slimes!

Time for the real thing!

Looks like the 'campaign' is a series of discrete levels in the same format. Level 1-1, explore for 9 months (you don't really 'explore', just survive it seems).

There's a skill tree for your character where you can unlock various benefits for future levels.

This level is a little more complicated than the tutorial, the enemies have two routes into town. I'm closing one route off with a wall which should 'encourage' enemies to go the other way and fight at the left chokepoint, but if the route is too long enemies will try to get through the wall instead.

I should have put the town hall a bit further left, it's actually got a very good ranged attack that can help in defending the town.

I got a nice upgrade for 'sniper' towers from the first monster chest so I'm going to focus on getting as many of those as I can. And this Orchard is very much going to help with the food supply!

I've been avoiding placing additional logging camps / mines because I don't have the food to sustain them.

Oh nice, your units can't actually die!

They just yell 'SOS' and run back to town for healing when they run out of HP.

I don't actually end up getting many sniper towers but it doesn't matter, I now have a barracks that spews out a ton of little guards and I'm capping off this level's military with this juggernaut of a Heavy Support unit.

At two months to go this should easily clear the level.

Just to go a little crazy on my first run, I got 'Militia Conscription' which spawns a bunch of farmers - but statistically the militia are better than higher level guards?!? A whole lot better, in fact - can we have them join the military full time?

Lv 12 Guard: 222 HP, 14 damage.

Lv 9 Farmer: 369 HP, 27 damage.

A mob of conscripts, backed up by professional infantry and mercenaries, with support from archers and fire and ice mages, led by a huge hulking bruiser in plate armor makes this a settlement the monsters will regret assaulting.

And this is without an additional 12 guards that the Barracks throws out when the battle starts.

I think the final enemy wave might outnumber us, but not by much!

Ok, I MAY have misread how conscripts work and they MAY have all gone home before the battle actually happened.

Glorious battle!

The foes are mostly killed within seconds of stepping out of their portals. The loss of the conscripts makes no difference - but of course this is the first level. I'm playing on the second highest difficulty so I expect this won't be as trivial as we move forward. Victory is achieved, and I unlocked another Adjutant option, Thaars.

Looks like he's a military unit, Steve was out there getting food but this guy will fight.

The second level sees us rebuilding a town formerly destroyed by Goblins. There's some pre-existing defenses here so I'll defend using them, forward of the town.

Thaars is a decent unit, probably worth about 3 regular guards even before you upgrade him.

The addition of a medical tent prompts a change in tactics - now the main force will initially defend the first wall closer to the portals, then when a couple solders get wounded they'll run back to the medical tent to heal up and form a second line of defense with the towers.

I start to plan my defenses around units recovering from their injuries.

I got an event to open a chest in exchange for adding a couple enemy mages to the next wave, how bad could they really be?

As it turns out, pretty bad!

They're Necromancers and they keep summoning skeletons! The first defense line quickly shatters and the horde rushes through before most of the front-line units are healed. Thaars barely saves the day when he's healed up and I run him around behind the enemies to attack the wizards. By the time they fall the enemies have smashed all the second line towers and only a few archers and holding the remaining enemies back, but thankfully I discover that walls / towers get repaired after a battle.

If you don't fully lose this game against a wave, you'll still be in decent shape - your defenses don't get worn down nor do your soldiers die. Food issues lead to some economic stagnation, which leads to a weaker military at the end of the scenario than the absurd strength we had for level 1.

It's still enough to hold out using the fallback defense and we clear level 2.

Level 3 - we must kill the Goblin King!

The layout is interesting, looks like the enemies split initially but I can probably funnel them to one area.

Also the mission is to kill the Goblin King 'By' month 12, so I might be able to take a crack at it early.

he King did not show up early but I managed to get a rip-roaring economy and have turned that into a mighty military. Thaars leads a mercenary group up front since while mercs cost money every turn, they also earn you money for kills they get so this gives them the chance to pay for themselves.

The stuff that gets past them gets munched by the regular army.

On the Eve of Battle, Adjutant Thaars gives a rousing speech to the troops, but goes into perhaps too much detail about what exactly they are going to do to the Goblin King's corpse and the men get a little weirded out. The high priest blesses the war-weary soldiers.

One battle remains.

The Goblin King appears in the morning leading a mighty host!

The battle rages for several seconds as the humans charge into their foes!

The Goblin King tries to flee as his troops are slaughtered, but to no avail - he is cut down where he stands and the mission is complete.

I unlocked a lot of additional Adjutant options!

For this next level we're going to try Adjutant Fulmarion, in part because it says the cards will now come from a [Nature] deck instead of [Kingdom], so I'm looking forward to see what that means.

Thaars was genuinely great but I have to at least try the others.

This level switches up the challenge to specifically reach a large amount of food.

I don't think I've ever cracked 300 food and usually don't have much of a food surplus, if any.

Oh my, this is an interesting level shape... kind of like a, uh....

It's a decent level design but it could be bigger.

Oh good, you also get a bonus of double food production so a surplus will be much easier.

And the nature cards have plentiful food production.

I just need to make sure I can defeat the monsters. Yeah, nature was a great choice - by the time the first monsters show up I'm already at +154 food production.

Double food production makes the goal much more attainable than I first thought.

I have a very small mobile force this time, the cages spawn some animals and I try to lure enemies into the center where Treants attack them.

We're up to almost 500 net food a turn so I just need to hold out for a couple more months. 

So animal cages and these druid-archer guys give me 'beast companions'. I cannot for the life of me determine what these animals are supposed to be.

Are they dogs? Pigs? Bears?

Food goal reached. One unexpected benefit of Nature is the presence of these magical wells, which both provide a lot of food AND give your units an instant healing effect after they run out of HP.

With a lot of the wells your forces are quickly back in the front lines after being hurt.

We'll give Adjutant Old Bob a shot for the next level.

He turns more units into pikemen.

Hopefully that's helpful against the Orcs we're going to face. Pikemen are excellent. They hit the enemies from further away AND push them back, meaning a big enough group of Pikemen generally doesn't get hit by melee enemies at all.

Keep them at bay!

Crushed it, onward! We've gotta kill an Orc Boss. Today's Adjutant will be Robin, who tells all the archers to shoot two arrows at once, which for some reason makes them hit their target less.

It's probably fine, the arrows may well just hit other targets in a horde.

This is an intensely forested level.

You get a logging card to clear out more space and I may actually use it a bunch, but the trees should slow down monsters.

My guys are having a bit of trouble holding back the enemy on their own, but we have a backstop of towers to help.

Robin's ability applies to towers as well, so when the enemy gets within range it's a lot of arrows raining down on them. Between the ice towers and druids and knockback from Ballista towers the slower enemies can't make forward progress, but it takes me a long time to kill them.

These battles in the woods are a slog for both sides.

These have been my toughest battles so far but I think this Vengeful Militia ability is my key to victory.

Even if the hordes do reach and destroy towers they'll turn into extra units.

Old Bob's 'pikes for everyone' is probably a better combat option,

but Robin's 'Throw Arrows Everywhere' is more fun to watch.

Done! New Adjutant is Hermi, who pulls from Magic cards.

I haven't been using spells much because they're 'one and done' cards.

We're exploring near the Hell Pit, because that's a good idea.

Now enemies can come from all sides.

I've probably handled the right side better than the left - on the right I was able to use walls to funnel both spawn areas into one zone. On the left I've got two groups independently fighting. That done, the next mission to get 3000 gold here is proving quite challenging! I almost lost to the last horde of skeleton-archers that ripped both my units and buildings to shreds as the combined force just rained concentrated arrows on my stuff.

This wave almost did me in.

The next wave has even more archers, and I'm thinking of mounting a forward defense right at the portals this time to try to gank as many archers as I can before they form this arrow-death-mob.

The forward defense is initially a complete disaster.

Big tough tanky skeletons come out of the portals that I'm set up to guard, and all the archer skeletons pour out of the portals that I didn't guard! My troops get stomped. Fortunately the big skeletons end up crowding out the archers near the defense buildings, so the defenses there slow down the tanks while the archers are stuck behind them. That buys enough time for the troops to heal and mount a second attack against the archers in the back before they can smash the buildings. Gold scenario is complete, easily the most challenging so far - I came close to losing it about three times. Time to kill a Litch! I think Thaars is my favorite adjutant so far, it's nice to have a beefy unit right from the start so you can focus on economy for an additional month or so up-front. The game is about striking the right balance between food, production, spare population for troops, and military power, so having an early edge in military power gives you more time to ramp up production early. The enemies also come from all directions this level but I've figured out that walls 'encourage' enemies to move around them and you can set up a traditional tower-defense path if you have enough of them.

Routing enemies is a bit tricky, if you overdo it they'll just attack your walls instead.

Another near-catastrophe - my wall shenanigans backfire when I make the northern route just a titch too hard and the AI decides that some of the southern portals will no longer traverse all the way to the north chokepoint, instead breaking through the south wall. I didn't notice until they were half done destroying the housing and nearly at the town hall!

This was too close for comfort.

Pulling my troops back from the North to stop this resulted in the Northern wall towers being overwhelmed.

Thankfully the troops were strong enough to pull it off in the end, barely.

My major mistake this map was putting the town hall close to the right edge of my build area, thinking it's arrow could get some damage on enemies as they traveled up towards the main towers. Unfortunately this just makes the enemies mad at it and they charge directly at it, forcing me to defend it with a part of my force even against fully land-based waves, and unfortunately I can't move it. Just a couple months to go and I have a powerful army, so all is not lost, but this is making the battles harder for sure.

Captain Jack, welcome to the resistance.

A motley crew stands ready to oppose the lich and its minions.

BRING IT YOU ASSH... oh, they got inside the west walls this time.

I quite like the battles in this game because it behooves you to maneuver your troops around to hit things like enemy summoners while leaving groups of troops back at the base to hold off the hordes. I wish it had more options for actually organizing your troops, giving them hotkeys would be a much appreciated extra degree of control. The Lich refuses to die several times, summoning additional monsters when it does, and the horde breaks inside the compound from two directions, but by now my army is strong enough to hold off the attacks effectively.

Eventually the Lich dies and stays that way.

The next snowy area introduces cold which halves production unless you use Bonfires to keep it at bay.

Warming all the buildings is necessary now.

This area also features these mushroom-giants which take forever to kill and smash soldiers with every attack, but I have enough forces that he can't chew his way through everyone and make forward progress before people get healed and come back.

My guys are still fighting him even as I post this.

Next mission involves getting 9K production.

There's a bunch of damaged mines that you can restore away from the main village.

I'm going to try walling them off so monsters hopefully just avoid them and fight the monsters down by the village instead.

Well this is a new problem - apparently your town can't get too big or the game starts to penalize you.

Is civilian number 201 a compulsive eater?

Ah well, we've got a great economy so we'll try to hold the population here to get to 9K production. That one took a long time, finished in month 16. All right, time to take on the Snowfield boss. At this point I'm finding the gameplay loop a bit repetitive, so if the end of the game weren't in sight I'd probably stop, but with only four levels to go we shall soldier onward!

I will see it through to the end!

An interesting map, with the opportunity to try something like a 'forward containment' of the monsters.

One of the different enemy types are 'ghosts' which both fly over walls / terrain and can only be attacked when they become visible some distance from the spawn portals, so I detached this little 'Ghost Patrol' force to handle those while the meatgrinder smashes corporeal foes. This proved unnecessary as the ghosts actually fixated on the barricades at the chokepoint and attacked the same area as normal foes did, so for this map I can just keep building up a Death Star of a defense area with both towers and troops.

A small wall keeps funneling all my foes to the left. I keep a small force north in case ghosts or something get past the main defenses.

The addition of a Fortress makes the chokepoint nigh-impregnable.

The Mush-Mother wreaks havoc with my impregnable fortress by carving a path through the terrain to the north! Gah! When I acknowledge that my plans were entirely dependent on the enemy voluntarily walking into the worst place for them it does feel like my own fault.

It's touch and go as the troops try to defeat her without the benefit of towers.

She almost smashes the town hall before she goes down.

Quit bitching Thaars, we won!

The Final Adjutant comes straight from Game of Thrones, the Mother of Dragons!

I know who's coming with me now!

Time to take on the 'Hell Pit'

The Dragon is cute and fun but he relies on directly-activated abilities, meaning to be effective you pretty much personally have to run him yourself while in combat. This is counterproductive when you need to be managing your overall force and be on the lookout for where enemies are breaking through a defense somewhere else.

I can easily see myself losing because I'm trying to focus on this guy while some monster group gets to the town hall.

As such we're going back to our boy Thaars to finish this out.

The final battle approaches!

The last level features 'multiple routes' for the enemies to approach from but aside from flying enemies it's pretty easy to route them to a single chokepoint.

You'll get the most out of towers if they can all defend one place together.

A group of Pikemen delay the hordes from one portal set while the rest of the army smashes the other.

This delaying tactic effectively concentrates my force against half the enemy horde at a time.

Demons file into the meatgrinder.

The battles are getting dense enough that they are slightly slowing the framerate.

This might be partially my fault, I upped the monster limit in game options.

The medical tents are very busy!

On the Eve of battle, the circle of magi debates on how best to seal the demon.

The battle starts off with a group of conscripts trying to hold off the demons around a Purification tower, delaying them as long as possible while in the Demon's influence. I hadn't noticed prior to this that unlike other units, conscripts don't go back to heal during the battle, but when they're slaughtered to a man it's pretty obvious.

Unlike my other immortal troops these poor farmers died to the last man. Sorry guys!

The final boss is here! The Demon... Eye!

It's... more of a mouth with an eye, really.

Most of the bosses do something when they die, and THIS one resets the entire final wave! I'd been pushing the monsters back when he showed up and this results in a mad scramble back to our original positions.

It's the boss plus everyone I just beat!

In the confusion Thaars decides to try to fight them by himself.

He's running to the hospital shortly after this.

But the chokepoint and the army are strong, and the enemy doesn't break through.

No close calls at the end, we got this.

Victory!

Wait, I'm now the Duke of Exploration and I can just claim ANY unclaimed lands? Guess I'll just claim every unclaimed land for myself then? Thank you, your Majesty!