Dawn of Man Dawn of Man - Starting Tips

This short guide will hopefully give new players some idea (but not everything is explained, that would take away from a personal experience with the game) about what you should do in your very first steps to taking on the base part of Dawn of Man's gameplay. This guide assumes that the person reading it is starting a game for the very first time and should be taken as such.

Bare Bones Basics

So basically. Unless you have done the tutorial the game will straight away throw you into its contents and leave you to figure out the rest by yourself. Though the game does have a help menu that can be accessed in game should you have any questions. In this guide i hope to shed some minor light on what one should be striving to do in their very beginning steps. I wont go over what should be done each season or in what ages. That's for you to figure out and experiment with. But what you can assume is im giving helpful tips for when you just load into a brand new game and start off in the spring. Thats exactly what these tips will cover. This is a work in progress guide, so pictures and maybe more details will be edited in at various points. But for now ill start you off with the basics.

So when you first start out you should always press the space bar right away to pause the game while you look around and get a feel for your surroundings. If you start in hardcore mode you wont be able to pause and i would strongly recommend new players to start on normal. This guide will assume you have chosen the normal option.

After pausing the game, take some time to explore the UI and your surroundings. After youve done so and feel comfortable with moving on, now its time for your next steps which is searching for needed resources.

The big things any person just starting a new playthrough for the first time needs to be done are finding flint, sticks and fish. Dont worry about hunting just yet. That will come in later. For now we need just the basics to get us started. Once you've found these three things, now we need to assign people to work the resources.

To do this, look at the tool bar at the bottom of your screen. You should see a create work zone tab that looks like a banner standard. Click on that and now you should get a prompt to pick what type of work zone you intend to create. Take your time looking through these options.

Once you find the proper work zones for fishing, flint and stick gathering, place them in the spots you desire. Note you can increase and decrease workable zone sizes to suit your needs with the z and c keys.

Now that you have your basic work zones in order. go to each one and fiddle with how many people you feel should work each resource as well as how much of that resource is allowed to be harvested.

Note: if you wish, make work zones around berry bushes and tress and other flora in anticipation for fruit, vegitable and grain harvesting in later seasons.

Now that you've placed your basic work zones lets set one more. This is a nifty tip that works decently well early game. Make a work zone that encompasses either your home base or an open area near it for animal hunting. set the work force there from one to two people. This way, if an animal walks into or near your base and you have free workers, theyll automatically hunt whatever animal goes into that zone. cant beat easy meat and animal skins.

These are your very basic steps in what needs to be done at the beginning of your game. Now lets move onto another section to talk about buildings and what needs to be built in what order. See you in the next section...

Buildings And Stuff

When i first mentioned "drying racks" in the first few paragraphs, i meant skins dryers. The other drying racks and the end of this section i mentioned are the meat drying racks, which in the game are just called drying racks...

Don't mind the rather bland title of this section. Lets ignore that and talk about a decent build order. Again, i'm just covering what to do in the very beginning, not throughout the whole game. There are other guides that can teach you those things.

Anyway. Assume you have completed all of the steps i mentioned in the previous section. Now it's time to start building. You're getting resources coming in, now you need structures to use those resources on. Your group wont last with out the proper buildings.

In the beginning of a game, you start off with a fire pit, a wood storage area, 2 huts and a crafting hut. But we need more than this. But there's so many options. What should I build first you may ask. Well, in my opinion, its best you concentrate on two things at the start. at least one more hut and a storage tent. The storage tent being the most important of the two. But wait! Dont you dare plop down the foundation for those just yet. Both the Hut and the storage tent need sticks and dry skins in order to build them. with out those youll just have an empty foundation sitting there. So theres some other things we need to do before we can get those up.

So what is it we need to do? well, for starters, one wood storage pile is not going to be enough to hold all our sticks we'll need. You'll also notice you dont start of with a rock storage pile either. So its best to First place another wood pile somewhere. after youve placed that then construct two rock piles. the rock piles are where your flint, stone and other similar resources will be stored. An easy way to build two rock piles (and this can be done for any buildings) is to, while the building is selected to be built, while placing your first building (in this case your rock pile) hold left shift and then left click on an area to place one then while still holding left shift place down a second building (in this case a second rock pile). Note: you can do this any amount of times. Its useful when building multiples of the same thing so you dont have to go back and re-select it from the build tool.

So now you have 2 wood piles and two rock piles. Good! This is a great first step. But this is not all we need to do before building a storage tent and another hut. Remember we need dry skins in order to build these. So how do we get dry skins? well, we need to build drying racks. So our next step is to go under the build tool and you should place at least two drying racks. Preferably next to your already existing crafting tent. Note: You will need a second crafting tent, but not right away. Its not important to make a second one right away. At the start you only need one. But we will come back to the crafting hut later.

Now that you have your drying racks up. You can feel free to place the blueprints for a hut and a storage tent. You always start the game with 4 raw skins and the hut and the storage tent both require 2 dry skins to be built. so you'll have just enough to get started.

At this point, all you have to do is wait for your raw skins to turn into dry ones and your people will automatically start building your hut and storage tent. The reason you need these two buildings are because one, you start off with only two huts which only allow space for 6 people. you start off with 7 people. so you need another hut to hold the 7th person as well as additional space for new group members in the future. The storage tent is desperately needed ASAP because huts dont hold much items. And youll be collecting a lot early game. But one storage tent should do you just fine in your first month.

But thats not all your buildings. Now youll need a drying rack. or else your food will spoil a lot faster. and the last thing you need is for all your food to spoil when winter hits. You'll notice the drying rack is not available yet. this is because it needs to be researched first. So we'll come back to the drying rack later. Now lets to to the next section on technologies.

Starting Techs

By this point, you should know where the tech tab is. If not, its up in the top right corner of your screen. You'll find it there. Once you've found it, go ahead and open it. This will lead you to a tech screen where you will spend your accumulated points on new tech throught the game. and the more you progress the more expensive it will be to unlock a new tech. You can see the cost of a new tech by hovering over it or by looking in the techs respective icon box.

So remember in the last part i talked about needing a drying rack. Well this is where you unlock it. its the very first tech you should always unlock. followed by bone tools, and from there you unlock whatever you see fit.

You collect research ponts by doing various tasks like building certain ammounts of buildings, killing a new animal youve never hunted yet or by killing lots of the same animals. You can see your progress for this in the tool bar at the bottom of your screen. I do believe there is an option to look at its stats from there on how much more of any one thing you need to get another tech point. Tech points are fairly easy to accumulate in the very early game but become increasingly difficult to aquier the further you get down the tech tree.

Thats actually about it for the starting techs. Like i said, save up your first 5 points and get the drying racks ASAP. Followed by bone tools and then whatever you choose after that is up to you.

So lets assume that now youve accumulated points by doing tasks like building things and hunting animals. Now youve unlocked the drying racks. Lets get into your final next steps before i leave the rest of the game up to you to decide what to do...

Some Final Parting Steps

So by now youve got your start set up. Now its time to get that drying rack up. Get one or two to start with and id recommend building them right next to your storage tent.

Once that baby is up your people will take your raw meat and fish and hang them to dry on the racks and once dry will store them back in the storage tent. Dry foods last longer before going bad. So you always want drying racks asap.

So there you have it. You've got your base started and your basics all set and done. Now the rest of the game is up to you to experiement with. But ill leave you with some parting tips.

Tips:

Rotate buildings with the z and c keys. Press spcebar to pause/unpause the game.
Remember to shift click selected buildings to place multiples
You can also shift click multiple humans like you can to place buildings. this is good for creating hunting parties, or for other large tasks you may need more than one person for. This is also easier than trying to click drag a box around multiple people.
Until you have flint weapons, dont try to hunt anything thats not green. You'll just end up killing your people. I know its tempting but you really need the right tools and equipment and people for the big hunts.
As of now, when you hunt animals your people dont always pick up the max amount of items dropped from a butchered animal. Sometimes you'll have to micro your people to pick up the max items they can carry back to base. or else you'll take forever to bring anything back home from a simple hunt. its rather annoying that the AI isnt smart enough to pick up enough items and that you have to baby sit it but you'll have to do this to be time efficient.
Dont forget to check out the in game help menu should you have any questions. Its has great detail about all kinds of advanced stuff.

Source: https://gameplay.tips/guides/5447-dawn-of-man.html

Dawn of Man - Starting Tips

Bare Bones Basics

Buildings And Stuff

Starting Techs

Some Final Parting Steps

More Dawn of Man guilds