The Settlement Phase - An Overview and Primer (Patreon)

I'm now working my way through a few different patron requests, and one of the areas that I've not been into in a lot of detail yet is the Settlement Phase. Considering this is a whole third of the game's phases, it is something I've always intended to address, but kept putting it off because of my preferences for positional strategy and card control. 

However, we are now going to address that with a look at the Settlement Phase in general,  your goals, its mechanics and the experience of handling the intense randomness that can pervade this phase.

The Overview

So, the settlement phase is a distinct part of Monster; with very different mechanics from the 'miniatures battle vs. a complex AI' (🥬) showdown and the 'move on a track, random stuff happens' (🐍 & Ladders) experience that the other two phases are created around. 

This phase is an ameritrash take on the worker placement style of euro. It is decorated with a lot of theme, and there are no real 'points' to score, but at its heart you gain a set number of 'meeples' (endeavors) to spend each 'turn' (lantern year) at a bunch of different locations (locations). These meeples can generate more resources (points), more meeples, more locations or even unlock new abilities (innovations) at the cost of your points. 

All of this is done with the ultimate goal of providing as many points (resources, people) as possible to be spent in future hunts, showdowns or a later lantern year. Of course, it is far more complex than that. As we have discussed in the past, there is a deck drafting mini-game located in the innovation deck and I will point you to those articles for information on that portion.

1. Do not innovate every year, have a purpose when you do it. 

2. The Music Tree is insanely strong, better than anything other than Symposium.

3. A guide on innovating and how to navigate the deck to maximise rewards. 

That should cover a lot of the common pitfalls, the largest one, which I will stress again - is that it is not an automatic decision to innovate in lantern years 1 to 3. Gear is stronger than innovations against the early game monsters, massively so. Even the tutorial guides you to unlock locations and craft gear over innovating. Yes it is fun to see what is in the box, but the box could contain anything. Anything at all; except for useful things to hit the monster with and protect you when the monster has its turn to hit you back. I will not stress further on this except to say - You know you've met a smart survivor when they spend their bone, organ, hide and endeavor on Bone Darts, Monster Grease, a Rawhide Headband/Vest and some Stone Noses (or making a baby).

The ultimate goals of the Settlement Phase are in order:

• Improve Gear (Crafting) by spending multiple resources
• Increase Population (Intimacy) by spending one resource at a time
• Improve Technology (Innovate) by spending four different resources
• Improve Survivors by spending endeavors

So you might have noticed from this, but I am listing endeavors as a resource, functionally they are almost the same thing. They have a few different properties, but it helps a lot to thing of them as simultaneously being your workers for placement and resources to spend. Endeavors are one of two limiting factors for how much progress you can make each lantern year (resources being the other, population is a resource btw) and they are very hard to come by.

Managing your Endeavors

The first base to how many endeavors you are gaining each lantern year is set by your returning survivors. The more survivors who return, the more endeavors you gain. Up to 4 (unless you are playing with more players, where you'll have to figure out how you are going to handle it, I recommend giving everyone their own personal endeavors and encouraging selfish 'capitalist' plays).

However, that is not the only place where you can gain endeavors. Tinkers give extra endeavors when they return, Cooking provides an extra endeavor and most importantly of all, your Principle choices can help a lot. For newer players, Graves and Collective Toil are of immense help as they mitigate deaths and help boost population and I cannot recommend them enough. While Accept Darkness is a fine substitute for Collective Toil; players who wish to explore Cannibalize as a mechanic will need to be very careful with their play. Cannibalize is weak in the early game and unless you want to do some very clever abusive plays in the late game it falls off in power even further. Cannibalize should always be matched with Collective Toil and Cooking is high priority for a cannibal society.

We've covered gaining 'em, now how does one spend Endeavors? Well outside of unlocking priority locations, the most important thing you can do with your endeavors is gaining additional population. While there is such a thing as 'too few survivors' with zero being rather problematic; there is no such thing as too many. In fact with the help of clever use of game mechanics (because Kingdom Death: Monster is a Perfectly Balanced Game) I've pushed the population of a settlement up into metropolis numbers and in one particular game I had a whole country's worth of people (7 digits, lost count when I realised I needed something to automate the process and gave up tracking anyone who wasn't a hunter). 

There is only one point in the game at the moment where you are punished for having high population, and that is when the King's Man visits during Armored Strangers. However, the punishment there is essentially either suffer some penalty or -4 population when you resist (no the next King's Man is NOT Level 2, it is still Level 1). 

This means the question you should be asking yourself every phase is how many of these endeavors can I afford to not spend on growing population? That's a complex question and a whole bunch of factors play into it, so there is no right answer. But the things you should consider are:

• Collective Toil - How close are we to the next threshold (every 10 survivors is +1 future endeavor)
• Matchmaker - Can we get those automatic intimacy rolls? (You should use these if you can, directly converting 1 endeavor into 1 population is amazing)
• Viable Hunters - Do we have enough?
• Super Babies - Is Saga or Clan of Death online?

And more besides. It's a constantly shifting set of variables and that is what makes it so interesting. 

As for how/when to spend them on the various Innovation actions, we'll look at that in the future. It's now time to investigate how one can simplify the process by designating and stereotyping survivors.

Know your Role

Just like on the showdown board, It is very helpful to designate survivors into one of a few different categories. You will work out your own exact groupings as time passes, but the ones I typically use are:

• Hunt Team Alpha
• Hunt Team Beta
• Nemesis Team Omega
• The Irregulars 
• The Potentials
• The Retirees
• The Plebs
• The Janitor

I will break down each of these below, but the use of these roles and organizing survivors into these various slots helps a great deal in simplifying choices when going out on hunts or deciding who is going to do what. I'll explain each of these categories below and then you can decide what categories (if any) you would use and also if there are any additional ones you would prefer to include.

Hunt Team Alpha & Beta

These gals (yes they're almost exclusively female because of how the game slants towards female hunters, the only males I use are Harvestman types) are eight hunters who are in regular rotation. I prefer to use eight because I am not in a rush to complete weapon masteries early on, I instead prefer a slow burning strategy where I complete multiple weapon masteries in the early 'teen lantern years. If one is looking to rush a particular fighting art then 

Nemesis Team Omega

The Nemesis Team is a bunch of unlucky souls who are the backbone of the fights against nemesis monsters, they may not all be present in every fight, sometimes stars from Alpha and Beta are put in because they have the skills required (or benefit from some element of the nemesis fight), but most of the time it's the Omegas who are getting slapped around in settlement defense. In particular, these guys are the ones who have to deal with monsters like the King's Man (mmm cursed).  Now they tend to be less skilled and proficient when compared to the Hunters; but the changes in 1.5 for the Butcher, King's Man and the Hand mean that they can get promoted out of the Nemesis team because they have improved that much. 

This is the pool that tends to provide my Axe master.

The Irregulars

These are a bunch of seat warmers who work as reserves, they might be hunters who have some injuries that cause them to have drawbacks, but also good abilities. It is a small pool a lot of the time and it tends to blend with the next category. But it is helpful to have when your settlements have grown quite large.

The Potentials

Fresh-faced newbies who have never been on a hunt, but they are here because Settlement Events, Timeline Events or bonuses from circumstances of birth (Family, Saga, Bloodline, Clan of Death/Empire etc) mean they have a strong baseline to work from. This is the group that the later hunt parties tend to be drawn from when the originals reach their peak usefulness and give up their duties.

The most valuable non-hunting survivors are always kept in this category.

The Retirees

Not always survivors who are forced to retire, but these are survivors who are either permanently or semi-retired. Survivors who have completed their weapon mastery and being used for breeding, or those with terrible injuries that cannot be fixed. 

Most of the time, retirees do not return from this pool, but we'll look at the flow of them next time and see the rare circumstances that this can change.

The Plebs

Everyone else, they have nothing special to note, they're just like every other normal plebeian in the settlement and they are little more than a +1 on the population track. Often these guys even lack a name, especially in the larger settlements (they're all Susan). Depending on circumstances, they can get promoted up to Potentials or demoted to The Janitor.

The Janitor

Every settlement needs a wretched pleb to handle the worst jobs, a Victor, a Lee, a Karen or an Alexandra. Someone who is exists to have the worst possible life you can imagine (hence the names). These survivors have the most special and important (I guess), of jobs in the settlement. They make all the rolls on the worst tables.

The Janitor's express purpose in life is to roll on tables that have exceedingly negative results, results such as death or permanent injury. The Phoenix Feather turns up? The Janitor collects it? Endless Screams, the Janitor is the one who listens to them. 

Even if you are playing blind and not checking the tables in advance, the Janitor remains important. Perhaps even more so, as it becomes their sole purpose in life to roll on every single table that doesn't force a specific survivor to toll. 

While they are absolutely the lowest of the low, the least important member of the community and they are absolutely disposable (hence the names), the job they do is absolutely indispensable. There are enough ways that you lose important, valuable hunting survivors in this game during the hunt and showdown - plus there are returning survivor events that harm or cripple them as well. There is nothing that can be done to mitigate that portion of the game, but what you can do is make sure that valuable survivors don't make the optional rolls that could cripple them.

That's the lot in life for the Janitor, they are simultaneously the least and most valuable member of the settlement, right up until the moment where they die. Then they are turned into a nice shiny resource/endeavor and a new Janitor is promoted.  

Sometimes, just sometimes this doesn't happen, the Janitor overcomes all odds and manages to end up becoming valuable. In this case they become a Rupert, so named after the People of the Sun Janitor who managed to max out every nasty roll he made and ended up leaving the settlement as a slayer of phoenixes and a true Katana master.

Next time we're going to look at some diagrams demonstrating the various cycles and flows in the settlement phase, this will help you understand the mechanics and the various failure states that can start to land if you are haphazard with how you poke the machinery of your settlement's structure and society.