Building The Great City: Population Spiking via Innovations and Principles (Patreon)

Today we're going to be talking about one of the more abusive things you can do in Kingdom Death (apart from the Counterweight Axe), and that is abuse a combination of principles and innovations in order to generate an effectively unlimited number of survivors that exponentially grow.

Original post is here.

For some reason the poster of this combo called it 'The Golden City' which is absolutely the wrong city to name this after, the Golden City is a monsterous realm of inhuman, corrupted creatures ruled by the Golden Entity.  It's the Great City that has all the (relatively) uncorrupted survivors in it, so we've renamed the combo correctly for this article.

To start with, here are the 4 core elements of this combo:

Not having Hovel innovated when you start helps out, but for reasons I'll explain, it doesn't really matter in the long run.

As you can see, two of these elements are the most popular combination of Birth/Death principle people use and the other two are relatively common picks also (If you're not following the Music tree to get to Saga, you're missing out on the power of Drums/Forbidden Dance now, it's ridiculous).

Then there is the nice optional extra of the Heart Flute.

If you're not aware, this item is already one of the most broken new innovations out there (except in People of the Sun, for obvious reasons).  With Protect the Young + Graves it already became a -4 population to gain 8 endeavours mechanic which I utilised quite often anyway. But you do not need this, you can 'throw' an undesirable encounter such as the L2 King's Man and jumpstart your combo that way.  

You will also want to select the Principle: Collective Toil when you hit 15 Population, as that is when the combo starts to feed itself. You will hit this population threshold almost immediately.

So what happens is this.  You now have about 10-11 endeavors at your disposal and you should have some rerolls from your Survival of the Fittest Plebs sitting around.  You are now going to max out Face Painting by stacking Founder's Eye multiple times (Seriously Face Painting should have been once per year). Until all your intimacy rolls are automatically a 10.  You will then use your remaining endeavors to start breeding via Augury with a 3+ Understanding survivor (using rerolls as appropriate) - Love Juices help also.  

They will trigger the birth of twins, who will be born with 3 understanding (Graves + Saga) and immediately roll on the table. Generating new endeavors on the roll of a 4-7; which can be used, along with their rerolls, to continue the process round and around.  This can result in potentially hundreds of survivors being born in a single year.  Horribly inbred, twisted abominations, but they provide masses of rerolls and with Collective Toil, endeavors.

In later years Collective Toil will generate you 1 endeavor per 10 survivors and this means that the combo is self sufficient and will fuel an ever increasing population that provides more and more survivors/endeavors.

Now, what the OP failed to do was look at exactly what happens when you push on and take this to it's logical conclusion.  We already know now that we have an effectively unbound number of X survivors and X/10 endeavors. That's a huge resource we can spend. But how would you do it?

Well let's look at some innovations and locations shall we?

Here's the Lion Knight's Black Mask, which can give us either Skulls + Endeavors, ??? + Endeavors or Legendary Lungs.

Now you might be looking at that and saying; "OK Fen, but it's limited by the number of the cards available in the Basic Resource deck." Sure, except that ???s can be spent and returned to the deck very easily to pull them out again.  (Plus there is neat stuff from visiting the retinue).

For example:

That's as much Leather as you want in Storage, so you too can build your own Devil's Kinky Playground in your growing city.

Not that into leather? Well we can brew you up a huge bunch of potions for you if you want!

With enough Gormchymy innovations this means unlimited access to Gormite.  I don't know if you realise this, but Gormite is also scrap and iron.

So there are 2 Scrap in the Basic Resource deck, + Gormite becomes Scrap or Iron.  

Scrap Smelting then comes online:

And now we have an effectively unlimited way of turning people into Iron as well as leather.  Those Blacksmith items aren't looking so expensive now are they? 

We don't just have to stop at making weapons/armor out of people.  We can also train our survivors non-stop in the settlement and make might warriors with no need to hunt.  If you take the savior which you have inevitably generated and put them at a very high hunt exp level after a couple of hunt (easily done and use the Blue one for their ability), then you can use Shared experience to train up survivors as much as you want.  Plus the savior can get murdered if you draw that card, win-win!

How about getting maximum Weapon Proficiency though Nightmare training mills?

Or if you want to be safe, we can go with Endless Sword Masters:

How about some top tier fighting arts?

Or maybe, post Watcher you can gather every single last resource inside the lantern horde in one year.

And there are loads more when you consider settlement events: For example, if you get the Gaping Maw then you can gather all the vermin resources and some Lantern Swords.  When the Bone Witch turns up you can construct a hunting party of scarred CW-Axe survivors so you can kill the Gold Smoke Knight in the first turn.

Your people now truly are a resource to be spent and you can experience all of the death that Poots wants us to embrace.  Let's all build civilisations from the bodies of our people!

All of this happens because we have loops caused by unlimited activations of things like Face Painting and intimacy. The entire thing requires the optimal principle choices for birth and death and two normally beneficial innovations anyway.  So it's something that's not hard to set up and once it's running you get a load of benefits.

It's honestly a brilliant combination, but it's also very strikingly obvious once you put the given principles and innovations together.  This was not possible in 1.5 because Saga did not give the extra understanding required, and it's yet another mark against 1.5's more and more clearly rushed playtesting.  

Interestingly; when you look at the expansions, you can see some innovations have been set as 'once per lantern year' and the real question is. Why was this not done for face painting?  It's thematically stupid that painting faces on top of faces, with yet more faces painted on top of those would have any extra benefit. But it does, and it's mechanically bankrupt as a result. 

Once you've done this and you have roffle-stomped every single monster in the world into the dirt, you can sit there and just wonder how the Gold Smoke Knight's stupid 'red belly fog' can cause the sleepless death of over 10 billion survivors once they have carved him up.

Green Armor has gotten a LOT easier to make now and the Ivory Dragon is going to need to be significantly more powerful, because this strategy is a core game one and it will steamroll most monsters.

(I'll do a demonstration video on this a bit later on, it's easier to see it when it's in action.)