The Universim: City Building Guide

At the risk of this guide being obsolete in an update, I present this guide to discuss the optimal order of builds/research, city planning, and other tips/suggestions. The goal of this guide is to minimize the use of creator powers and the time it takes to build your first spaceship.

Please feel free to provide comments, corrections, and other feedback, and thanks for reading this guide!

The first thing you’ll need to do is place the epicenter. Avoid placing it directly on stones and other resources because it will destroy them rather than make them available for use. Before throwing down the epicenter, there are a few considerations:

• Mountains and Water. Most importantly, You should place the epicenter near water and mountains to ensure you have easy access to water supply, stone, and iron. I prefer a large body of water because it’s easier to refill from one ocean rather than multiple bodies of water.
• Defensible Territory. Another consideration is how easy it is to defend the city when attacked, especially by wolves. If you place your city in a large open area, there’s the risk of you being attacked from such open areas unless you defend all borders. If you’re surrounded by impassible mountains or water with a limited access point, then you’ll need to spend less resources for watch towers and garrisons which would help facilitate development of your city. Ideally, you’d want to start off in a large peninsula but make sure there is sufficient space and access to mountains.
• Access to Oil and Gas. Deserts usually have a high amount of gas and oil, so you ideally want to make sure that there is a desert in a reasonably close proximity after your civilization gets past the medieval age.
• Trees and Rocks. The last consideration, and particularly important when fine tuning where you’ll put the epicenter, is to ensure the epicenter is near an adequate supply of rocks and, usually less a concern, trees.

General Tips

• Until you hit around 20 population, avoid throwing down a structure until the resources for the prior structure is at the site. Otherwise, the nuggets will divide their priorities and your buildings won’t be constructed promptly. As of the current patch, prioritization isn’t a complete solution because nuggets still place resources on other structures rather than focusing on completing the prioritized structure.
• Avoid overbuilding early game. The goal is to tech up as quickly as possible while addressing your nuggets’ needs and protecting them from wolves.
• Try to complete each quest because they’re usually easy to do and provide helpful benefits.
• For the first four or five couples, use Le Cupidon to help grow the population faster.
• Use telekinesis to pick up and kill a mammoth for easy food.
• Use telekinesis to help build structures to help facilitate progress.
• Early on in the game, use bolt of joy to help get the benefits from a very happy happiness level. Keep building parks to keep your very happy happiness level.
• Aim to have enough CP to change seasons if necessary. If you max out on CP, plant trees or refill the bodies of water.

Research
Research Set 1: Primitive Tools > Dug Well > Water Storage > Water Wheel > Fire > Primitive Cooking > Oldowan Toolkit > Shamanism > Town Hall > Hunting > Ancient Burial
The goal for the initial round of research is to satisfy your nuggets’ needs while being prepared for wolves attacking your nuggets.

Research Set 2: Material Refinement > Education > Geology > Mining > Quarries
The goal of the next set of research should be to get quarries up and running. You could do other research instead of focusing straight to quarries, but I prefer this order so I know where the location of stones once you obtain the option to make quarries. If the game allows view this without the research, then this should be reordered so that it focuses on other research instead.

Building up the industry for the planks/bricks will take some time, so take this opportunity to focus on other research. I would recommend researching the following until your plank/brick industry has finally caught up:
Research Set 3a: Footwear > Endurance > Watchtowers > A Dash of Lightning > Heauge Mahscles > Culture > Boiled Water > Group Meals
Research Set 3b: Caissioning > Waterflow Study > Water Dowsing > Leather Buckets > Well Shaft Formwork
Research Set 3c: Storage Areas > Grass Weaving > Mortar and Pestle > Medical Diagnosis > Divine Punishment
Research Set 3d: Antiseptics > Wood-lined Reservoirs > Biology > Antiseptics
Research Set 3e: Mathematics > Agriculture

Once you have two brick and wood refineries at around 50 population, research the following:
Glassblowing > Oil Jack > Electricity> Tudor Architecture > Wind Power

Year 1 Buildings
Build: [Archive] > Well > Reservoir > Eatery > Engineer’s Hut
When you save games, assign a nugget temporarily to the archive, save, then unassign the nugget.

Wells are critically important to ensure productive workers and avoid having to use healing powers, so make them early on. Water wheels stop during winter, so you’ll need an adequate supply of water before winter arrives. Make sure these three buildings are completely built before making anything else.

Next, build an engineer’s hut and an eatery and assign both buildings. Eateries are also important because they reduces the food and water consumption per nugget. Engineer’s hut helps repair broken buildings. You can manually repair the buildings with rejuvenate, but this uses CP.

Quest Tips: For the Lost My Nugget quest, click on the portrait of the nugget in the home to automatically center on the missing nugget. Place down the nugget child gently to avoid accidentally killing the child nugget.

Year 2 Buildings
Build: Water Mill x 3 > Well x2 > Reservoir x2 > Hospital > Garrison > Cemetery > Town Hall
You’ll need additional water mills, wells, and reservoir to supply the growing village for this year and the following year. Hospitals are important to support the constant source of injuries from the garrison. A garrison is necessary to ward off wolf attacks in Year 2 and for food. Nuggets may start to die starting Year 2, so have a cemetery ready.

Build but don’t assign anyone to the town hall yet until your population hits around 25.

Year 3 Buildings

Build: Stone Refinery > Wood refinery > Parks (build as needed to keep happiness at very happy) > Engineer’s Hut > Iron Mine > Quarries > School

Year 3 should be focused on stone, brick, and plank production. The Stone and Wood refineries generate unhappiness, so you will need to place parks to increase happiness. As of this version of the patch, simply placing the parks generate happiness, so place them down when you place to refineries. Before placing them, consider where you will place the quarry. The stone refinery should be located near the quarry to optimize brick production. Also, consider dropping stone/wood do the refineries to jump start production. Assign nuggets to these refineries, but make sure you have enough available laborers to build additional structures.

Building the iron mine and assign nuggets to the mine. After mining the necessary iron, turn off the mine and remove all nuggets. Restart the production later in the game when you need more iron.

When placing the second engineer’s hut, be sure to consider where you’ll be expanding and make sure the buildings fall under the area of coverage.

Once your population hits around 25, assign a nugget to the town hall.

Year 4+ Buildings
Build: Garrison > Engineer’s Hut > Warehouse
When placing the second garrison, consider the fact that you’ll need to protect your village from open borders. You should place the garrison to protect as much of the openings to your village as possible. Set the hunting priority to medium animals so that you have better experience built against wolves.

From here, upgrade and create new water pumps, reservoirs, wells, engineer’s huts, and parks for your village as necessary to satisfy your nuggets’ needs. The goal is to have two fully staffed wood and stone refineries each before building a gas mine and a glass factory. Be sure to restart the iron mine production before dropping the gas mine.

After you research electricity, complete the quest for a free battery. You will then have three options for power: wind, kinetic, and combustion. I recommend getting wind power because of the sustainability, the amount of electricity generated, and the ease of setting them in otherwise unusuable areas in the mountains. Next, research Tudor Architecture to get access to medieval tech.

If you followed the guide up to this far, you should have around 100 nuggets, have very happy happiness levels, low crime, and about 30+ laborer nuggets with adequate protection against wolves. Rather than lay out the building order in specific detail, this portion of the guide will address how to keep your city very happy while optimizing your research towards space tech.

Below are some pointers:

• Focus on research that enable new resources/products before researching other types of research. You’ll find yourself spending a lot of time waiting for nuggets to build factories, the factories to get the necessary resources, the factories producing sufficient quantities of resources for upgrades and buildings that enable new goods/services. The other research may be done while you’re waiting on all of this to be up and running.
• Avoid expanding/upgrading too fast or too much. The more nuggets you have, the more infrastructure you need to keep them happy. Also, having too many buildings strains the resources you need for upgrades. You’ll need to expand just enough so that you have enough nuggets to keep the factories and mines operational.
• Be careful when researching tech that enable upgrades. Sometimes this requires a higher-tier resource that may not be readily available. Try to have at least two of each factory that produces such resource before researching such tech.
• Plan ahead when building factories and mines so that you have enough resources or products when building the next building that requires such resources or products. This helps avoid overbuilding mines and factories. You should generally need only about 2-4 of each mine or factory until late game.
• This may be patched again so that it’s more manageable, but due to the situation with numerous waves of wolves attacking your city, consider building lots of garrisons instead of farms or fisheries until later in the game. Around three garrisons, as long as they’re upgraded in time, should fend off most wolf attacks.
• Keep your happiness level at very happy and crime level to very low by making enough parks.
• Shut down industries as necessary to avoid overstocking resources.

By Water