Gord: 5 Best Tips for Beginners

Building a civilization deep in a pitch-dark forest filled with demonic monsters is not your usual walk in the park. With hostility knocking at every corner, your intellect is your best weapon. Gord, the new RTS game by Covenant.dev abides by this principle. It's not a pick-and-play game; it calls for great mastery and patience. 

Thankfully, the game holds your hand with tutorial after tutorial. While building and fortifying your palisade gord is the primary objective, you must balance it with ensuring your subjects brave the Slavic horrors. To help you get a head start on the game's complexity, we've raked up tips to help you weather this storm. Without much further ado, here are the five best tips for beginners to conquer Gord.

5. Get a Lay of the Land

Your first objective in the game is to set up a gord. As a primary rule, you need to be familiar with your surroundings. Certainly, as a new inhabitant of the forest, other creatures lay claim to the territory. You should know the terror that awaits you and aptly prepare for it. That being said, after building your gord, sending an Axe Wielder to scout around your base is essential. 

Creating your gord is one thing. Expanding it is another, since enemy tribes constantly have a knack for attacking you. You'll spend more of your time outside the gord than in. Since you can't use formidable defense strategies such as having archers on towers or digging pit traps, your best hope is to attack first. Occasionally, the game lets you cast spells, but they feel like a last-minute addition to the gameplay. 

Moreover, you may need to send in a troop of your best men when one becomes overwhelmed. Thankfully, the game provides a healing regimen. If you've already set up a Meadery, your injured subject can retreat to receive healing. For instance, you'll encounter a pack of aggressive wolves that requires more than three people to fight them down. 

4. Set up a Meadery and Temple

Your greatest resource in any RTS game is your people. Since the game knows this, you'll only get a handful of them at intervals. So, it's essential to keep them alive. This is where a Meadery comes in. While your subjects may be temporarily safe in the gord, occasionally you must send troops for resources where attacks are imminent. Moreover, your people can fall ill, and it's essential to nurse them back to health.

One of the critical buildings to set up is the Meadery, which manages your subject's sanity meter. The center also increases their resilience to darkness and other situations. On the other hand, a Temple gives you access to spells. The incantations are crucial in chipping off your enemy's health, increasing your subject's skills, and clearing the Frostpunk fog. 

Having these buildings in your gord early helps increase your subject's survivability. Let's face it: You have no reason to keep playing the game without them. 

3. Import Your Veterans

It's customary in battle to have your best men in the line-up. The same applies to this Slavic-inspired dark fantasy. Your subjects are hard to come by and, more so, expensive to maintain. While playing campaign mode, you'll constantly encounter different maps, which calls for setting up new gords. To unlock a new map, you must complete a set of objectives. But before you do, you should choose suitable subjects to tag along with.

In the game, subjects are randomly born. You'll occasionally find yourself out of enough labor force to fortify the gord or fight the horrors. Plus, the creatures are not the only threat your small-scale settlement faces. The pitch-black darkness can cause your subjects to go insane. Therefore, it is ideal to constantly switch between roles to maintain a balance and ensure the settlement is functional.

That being said, sticking with older subjects is advisable when moving to a new territory. Not only do they have more experience, but they also wear better armor that takes more damage before they are knocked out. Notably, the game has an aging system. If the subjects get any older, they are likely to die. So it is imperative to stick with younger subjects when this happens. 

2. Keep an Eye on Your Subjects

Maintaining a colony is such hard work. You must ensure your subjects have the right resources, are well protected, and, most importantly, are out of harm's way. But this is challenging considering that much of the action is out of the gord, as are the resources you desperately need.

During the first levels, your subject will gather resources close to home. However, soon enough, these collection points will dry up. This forces your subjects to wander deeper into the forest to locate other resource points. 

Keeping tabs on your subjects helps maintain their sanity or protect them from attacks. For instance, their sanity levels drop if they wander into pitch darkness. Also, if your subjects face hostility, they will likely fight back instead of retreating to the fortified settlement. You can set up fireflies or send out a troop to keep watch to prevent this.

1. Upgrade Your Way to the Top

In any RTS game, upgrading is a catalyst for evolution and a key to unlocking new realms of power. Imagine it as the alchemical process that transmutes your forces from mere foot soldiers into formidable titans and your civilization from a humble village into a grand empire.

The best tip for making it in Gord is upgrading your gord and fortifying it against enemy raids. Upgrades improve resource distribution and unlock better spells. You can also increase your subject's attack speed. Moreover, a formidable gord allows you to explore without the fear of losing your settlement. 

You'll become familiar with Gord's mechanics and uncover additional strategies as you progress. However, for a head start, these essential tips will make your beginner's journey much more effortless. 

So, what's your take on these essential beginner tips for Gord? Have you found any of them particularly useful? Is there any other tip we should include? Let us know your thoughts on our socials here.