Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods

a PC computer game by Lionhead Studios.

Walkthrough

Overall impression: more of the same.  If you love B&W2, you’ll probably like this one also.

Starting the game:

Basic tactics.

Defending your town:

Land 1: intro.

Land 2: Japanese country.

You start this land on a lone table mountain (mesa) with a completed wall north and south, and several incomplete walls on the east side.

1. Do not close the incomplete walls, but drag the nearest tower around the foot of the mesa to the other tower.
   This will temporary prevent access to the bottomless mine on the eastside of town, but you get extra tribute for enclosing the town.
   Once the wall is completed, put a gate in the wall, so your creature can go play with some enemy platoons.
    
2. Build a siren wonder right next to that wall on the north side.
   Once completed, its influence will reach across the existing north wall. That is where the enemies will start coming first.  
   If you just dump the supplies onto the foundation, the villagers will build it for you, or you can leash your creature to it to build it.
   That way you do not use so much wood and ore as with god-building.
    
3. Build an altar right next to it.
   If enemies do get into your town, they seem to concentrate on destroying that second altar, rather than other larger buildings.
    
4. Enemy attacks will come from the north-west first.
   You will have to deal with the catapults before they attack your walls.  If they do show up, just drop a big rock (plenty of those around) or a fire miracle on top of them. Thanks to your siren epic, your influence reaches far enough that you can easily do that.
   The platoons will not try to come closer as long as the walls are intact. They will even be so nice to all get together in one large group, so you can easily eliminate four or five platoons at once with a single fire or verdant miracle.
    
5. The enemy god can throw “dead” miracles into your town and create undead platoons within your walls.
   You can take care of those with fire or verdant miracles whenever it happens, or just ignore them and have your creature take care of them.
   If your creature is nearby, they will attack him rather than the town.
    
6.  By that time, your advisers will have reminded you that you need to look for the men of the village. Send your creature northward up the hill. There is a prison close to the enemy city. It is the building that is surrounded by a purple haze. Have creature attack the gates to free the men. Ugly is so nice to throw rocks at your creature. If you move creature around a little bit, he doesn't get hit, but it helps in destroying the gate.
    
7. When the men are halfway down the hill, Ugly will roll a few huge boulders down the hill.
   If you do nothing, they will probably roll over your escaping villagers and kill quite a few of them.
   Have your creature stand in the middle of the path and take a hit from the largest boulder. That should deflect the boulder sufficiently to miss the men, and with a little bit of luck even your town walls.
    
8. From here on, it is very simple: build and expand as fast you can.
   Place a second siren miracle to expand your influence over the south wall, and a third eastward towards the mine so you can cover those sides in case of attack.
    
9. When the first town converts, the attack from the west side will stop, but attackers will start coming more from the east side.
   Close the walls on that side, or just let them come and deal with them one at a time.
   
   When the second town converts, Ugly raises his undead gorilla.
   It’s a real doozy. Three fire miracles or a good sized rock on his head a few times takes care of him every time.
   Your own creature can beat him up every time too.
    
10. If you expand northward towards the enemy citadel, you can build a wall to close him in.
    If the enemy uses lava miracles on the hillside ( e.g. when you send soldiers there or park archers on that wall), just cool the lava down with water. Archers on the wall will prevent any platoons or the enemy creature from coming down the hill, so you can get busy building a nice town.
     
11. If you build impressively, it should not be very long before the citadel converts too.
     

12. Silver Scrolls
    1. Whack-a-skeleton: a fast-paced game. try to hit as many skeletons as possible, without hitting your villagers.
    2. The dancing skeletons: The missionaries are undead, and dance to your bidding. You need to make all of them dance at the same time.
       
       To solve this, make a grid, and write down the numbers that each skeleton switches. I listed the grid for my game.
       If you push a few coffins at random, it won’t be long before you see the complement of one of those switches:
       the ones that are NOT dancing, are the ones marked on a horizontal line in the grid.
       Then push the correct coffin to get them all going.
        

Land 3: Norse land.

Silver scrolls:

1. The sliding puzzle: makes the enemy creature nice for a little while.
2. The 2 torches: give one of the torches to your creature, swap the other one, and then take the first torch back.
3. curling: use one puck to push as many out of the circle as possible.
4. The cursed forest ?

You start this land in the very south, and it’s again all uphill from there. The ore supply is rather limited in the beginning, so do not waste it.  
There are many Norse villages to conquer. Every time you get one of his towns, Ugly will destroy it. It is easier to just convert them, rather than having to pick up the pieces afterwards. The newly converted will also bring enough ore for you to keep building whatever you need to build.

If you get upset by the messages of villagers being sacrificed, solve the sliding puzzle every time you hear Ugly announce that he wants someone.
That will make the wolf nice for a while.  The game goes faster if you just ignore them.

1. Close the walls, and make sure you can reach over them by either putting a siren wonder next to them, or building enough houses outside the walls that you have enough reach to drop a rock onto any catapult that comes near them.
    
2. Start building whatever your town center tells you to build. If you get short on ore, limit yourself for a while to altars, creature pens, villas, taverns and nurseries. That way you can expand your city quickly without needing any ore.
    
3. Again, whenever Ugly fires a “dead” miracle within your walls, either hit them with fire or verdant, or let your creature deal with them. The platoons that come down from the hill are few and far between, so most of the time you can just concentrate on building.
    
4. In only one of four games did the wolf come down the hill to visit my town. You can use the sliding puzzle to make him nice for a while, or you can just kill him off.
    
5. It does require a lot of building to convert all the enemy towns.
   Plunking down building after building does tend to get a wee bit boring at this point.

   

Land 4: Greek country.
 

Again we start this land at the bottom of the hill, surrounded by enemies.

This land has three enemy cities.
The Westside town has a hurricane wonder, which will be fired within minutes of the start of the game.
The Eastside town has an earthquake wonder.

We start with a beautiful city, which seems to be there only for the purpose of agonizing the players by making them watch it being destroyed by a hurricane miracle within minutes after the land starts. You can prevent this destruction by throwing fire or lava miracles at the hurricane wonder from the narrow land bridge between the 2 parts of your city.

1. Place a siren wonder as close to the Eastside wall as possible, and have your creature or villagers complete it.
    
2. Do the same on the Westside.
    
3. Once the Eastside wonder is completed, collect a few big rocks and block the passage at the narrow land bridge at the very edge of your influence. That will prevent catapults from getting close enough to damage your wall, and you can forget about that side of town for the rest of the game. The gorilla is so kind to wait there, together with the multitudes of platoons and catapults that Ugly keeps sending at you.
    
4. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to use the same tactic there as on the other side of town. The path is too steep and the boulders roll away, towards your own walls too! Possibly, you could succeed where I failed. I just didn’t want to spend very much time on that.  Even if you succeed in blocking the road, catapults can still reach your city from within the neighboring one up on the hill and from near the hurricane wonder. 
   There will be relatively few attacks from the Westside, so it isn't really that much of a problem.  
    
5. At regular intervals, Ugly will announce that "it is time for you to suffer."
   That means you need to get your shield miracle ready. Fire, lightning, meteor and dead miracles or just plain ol' rocks will be dropped into your town. These can do a lot of damage to your town and villagers if you don’t use shield miracles. 
   
   Ugly seems to target the new and impressive buildings that you may have built after the game started.
   I built a temple some distance away from the rest of the town, and that seemed to become his favorite target.
   The undead will go after your creature if he is nearby. If not, they’ll ransack the town, and eventually attack the town center.
   
   If you ever hear the bells ringing, and you do not see any platoons at the edge of your influence, better check near your town center. Ugly probably dropped off a new load of trouble there if you didn't use a shield miracle in time.
    
6. Apart from these annoyances, your main task is (again) to build as fast and furious as you can.
   Keep those mineworker disciples plentiful, that you have enough ore to build impressively.
    
7. After you convert the first town, Ugly will get ugly and will try to burn that town by firing lava miracles onto the hill above it.
   Since you did not conquer the town by force, you do not need to do anything, other than make sure that your migrants do not get burned up. Throw some water miracles to cool the lava stream if it would threaten your migrants.
    
8. After you convert the second town, Ugly gets ugly again, and destroys that town with an earthquake.
   Good thing you didn’t send any soldiers there.  The earthquake stays within the walls of that city, so no need to worry about it.
    
9. If you expand your influence far enough North that you can throw a few boulders into Ugly’s hometown, he may send all his platoons at once through the other city gate to attack your city. But because you have blocked the road, they’ll be so nice to wait outside.
   You can either wipe them from the face of the earth, or you can do nothing at all about them. Your choice. For some reason, they will not bother to come around to the Westside gates of your town.
   
   You can use lava or other more destructive miracles to destroy his city and town center. If you keep at it for a while, this may win you the game.
   
    
10. When you have built about 8 wonders and some other impressive buildings, the land is yours, and you get the option to start it all over again…

Enjoy the game.

Land 5: Bonus Land

there is a Maori statue in each of the previous 3 lands. If you can find them all three, you get access to the bonus land, a no-win game, i.e. a progression that keeps going until you are conquered. The goal is to build up your cities to earn tribute to buy additional buildings and miracles, and defend your towns against the successive ever-stronger waves of attackers until eventual certain defeat.

Page last modified: October 27, 2011

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