MachiaVillain – Beginner’s Guide

MachiaVillain - Beginner's Guide
MachiaVillain - Beginner's Guide

In the Beginning

Having escaped your exploitative ♥♥♥ of a boss and set out to be the most powerful Villain ever your very first challenge will be to select 3 minions of your very own.

Minions come in many shapes and sizes and have many confusing factors about them that may influence your choices. But, I would advise you to ignore what jobs they’re good at and focus on traits that mean they will eat less and be more loyal. You may have to shuffle through the prospective list of minions as you keep this in mind…but it will be well worth it I assure you.

You see, traits you can’t improve, but job skills increase as your minions whittle away at assigned tasks. And given you have limited supplies and an evil mansion to build…you want to take all the advantages you can get.

So, what sort of minions do you want to start out with?

Well, a mummy, a psychopath and a skeleton are my sage advice. Why? You make your future supply of victims go further and avoid starvation. Every victim (when butchered) only provides so much meat, blood, brains and bones…so a minion that eats less of your food and more varieties goes a long way to helping you out in the beginning.

Building Your Mansion

So, here you are on your plot of evil land with some food, a couple of small healing potions and some gold. Time to get building, ‘cos you’ll soon need to lure victims in to replenish your supply of food.

Now, you may have an idea of how you’d like to build your evil mansion…but you must get started fast. And what I’ll advise you on here in a quick starting sort of ramshackle of rooms to get started and practically live in whilst you get to work on your evil mansion that victims nightmares are made of.

So, right where they bunged all your gold, food and potions I want you to build 5 outside floor tiles in a straight line back from the road. In the future this will be your footpath to your evil mansion. In the meantime, it should speed your minions access to any awkward resources in the way of that ideal mansion.

Right, the outside path in place I want you to build a 3×3 floor tile space back one floor tile from the outside path and one floor tile in from the road…either to the left or right. Now, place a single floor tile to the left and right and build walls around and the 3×3 floor tile room. Over the single floor tile gaps in the wall I want you to build a pretty, red door next to the outside path, and a normal door at the “back” of the room.

At the “back” of your newly built room make a 2 wide x 3 deep floor tile space with another single and central floor tile to the “back” of that room. Enclose with doors and walls. Repeat one more time…and you have practical starting home. In the “front” room place a writing deck, place a lab research board in the middle room and a butcher table in the “back” room. Now you have a Home Office, Laboratory and Kitchen that should suffice to get you going whilst you build that evil mansion you may well have in mind.

And if you don’t have one in mind, save the game, take out your evil deed stolen toilet paper and start sketching out a few ideas. Below you’ll find a few practical floor tile room size suggestions…

  • Hallways: 3×3
  • Bedrooms: 3×3
  • Kitchen/Dinner: 7×9 with food storage at the back.
  • Storage: 5×2
  • Home Office: 5×3 with storage at the back for gold, logs of normal wood and letters. You’ll need 2 Home Offices; 1 with a writing desk and computer in it and one for the printing press. The room with the printing press may or may not need storage behind it.
  • Laboratory: 5×3 with storage at the back. You’ll need 2 Laboratory’s; 1 with a research board and chemistry bench in it and one for the advanced research station. The room with the advanced research station may or may not need storage behind it.
  • Factory: 5×3 with storage at the back.
  • Healing Pod Room: 3×3
  • Victim/Trap rooms: 3×3

Kitchen

In the Kitchen you’ll really need a Butcher Table and Smoker ASAP. The butcher table will be automatically used by any minion assigned to the job of cooking in the Jobs Tab at the bottom of the HUD. When you have dead Victims any minions tasked with this job will set too and…well, butcher the remains. This in turn nets you some meat, blood, brains and bones.

However, meat, blood and brains don’t last forever…so set to and research the smoker ASAP in the Laboratory!

Once you’ve researched the Smoker and built it you’ll have to click on the smoker and choose how much of what you want just crafted once or levels of maintained. I highly recommend you set a maintenance level of 50 of blood, brains and meat…meaning a level of 400 will always be maintained for your minions. You can cancel and change such things if you need to at any time…

Home Office

In your Home Office you will craft letters and the likes to lure unsuspecting Victims to their doom. And it serves them right after that evil murder of Bob the Cow. I liked Bob the Cow…his speeches were both simple, insightful and MOOving!

Ermmm, yeahhh. MOOving on…

The Writing Desk is your first means of luring prospective Victims to their doom. You’ll have to assign a minion to the job via the Jobs tab at the bottom of the HUD, and then click on the Writing Desk to set the letter writing in progress.

The best way to do this is to choose 5 letters to be maintained in the beginning.

Later, research will unlock the printing press and the computer which you can broach in the same manner, as suits your tastes…

Laboratory

The Laboratory is where you conduct your research, and later maybe make potions and heal your minions in a Healing Pod. However, you’ll begin with a simple Fundamental Research Bench…AKA the Research Board. Like the Writing Desk in the Home Office you can set a minion to the research job in the Jobs Tab at the bottom of the HUD, and then click the Research Board to set the research in progress.

Research comes in two varieties, basic and advanced. Needless to say the advanced research comes from the Advanced Research Bench…but you will need 1000 stone bricks crafted in the factory before you can do this, and these things take time.

Now, with your minions set to the task you’ll need to choose what they research with the research they produce. Select the Research tab at the bottom of the HUD…

Factory

In the Factory you’ll be able to set up two types of crafting stations to make all the metal plates, planks, cogs and stone…and so-on and so-forth. You must click on each station and select the amounts of what you wanted crafted once or levels of maintained…but it’s simple enough to do.

Once you have, don’t forget to assign a minion to the job…

Minions

Minions are essential to your success. Loose them all and you’ll die in turn…game over!

So, make sure they have all their needs provided for; food, health (either with potions or Healing Pod use), sleep (ideally a bed in a room of their own in the end…we can share rooms in the beginning), and other factors like how evil the rooms are.

Click on the minion and then look at their Loyalty tab to see more info for how they feel and their needs you can provide for as time goes on…

Now then, as minions do stuff…they learn. No, really! Weather it’s whittling away at a job or fighting Victims, Spiders, random Tree Monsters or Heroes your minions will learn. Little screen pop-ups let you know when this is happening. HOWEVER, if you want to level up your minions fighting abilities…you must click on their tab at the top of the HUD and go to the Fight tab bit.

In the Fighting tab you can increase the strength, endurance, health, mind or special minion powers…

Right, when your Victims come calling…clicky-click on the tiny sword button bit (when the timer is almost counted down) to set your minions into attack mode and gather them into a room ready to pounce on those happy meals on legs…AKA, Victims!

When they enter your mansion…ATTACK, MURDER, KILL…make them very, very “sleepy” until they lie down and don’t get back up. And then our cooks nefarious work can proceed if you clicky-click the little blue button at the top of the HUD right next to the tiny red sword button so your minions can resume their evil little ways on your behalf.

Don’t forget you’ll need a cleaner about the place. Making dinner can be such a messy affair. You also need to increase the cleaning area if stuff happens outside the mansion. If so, use the Area tab at the bottom of the HUD and adjust or add for you bloody needs.

NOW, you maybe wondering about each minions inventory. Every minion has a limited type and amount of inventory space you can customise once you have items…which by default go in an equipment storage if you built one and set a minion to gather resources.

If you click on the actual item in the game, when you have a minion selected, and choose equip…well, they equip it. TADA! There are many types of items out there but you can’t make them as far as I’m aware. So buy mystery boxes and the likes when that bit pops up via a Ouija Board do-dat at the top of the HUD periodically…

…and if you have a Psychopath who’s learnt to nick Heroes weapon…give it a bash!

Into the Crypt

At the bottom of your HUD you’ll find a button called the Crypt. Here you can unlock new types of minions, expand your maximum number of minions and hire new minions. This entire domain is run on evilium which you can gain in one of two ways…

Killing Victims is the most assured way of this and working within the rules of the League of Machiavellian Villains earns you bonus evilium atop of that. The other option is when you find yourself listening to a mysterious tape. If you respond correctly (which I have often found means gold, at least the first time) can net you 1000 evilium.

So here you are in the crypt, no doubt confused was to what the best minions are to have…am I right? Well, be afraid, be very afraid…’cos I’m going to give you my two cents worth here for whatever that’s worth.

My sage advice for a, let’s say 5 minions max, is 3 Vampires and 2 Psychopaths. Why? Psychopaths can nick Hero weapons and use them. Did you know a Psychopath wielding a hammer can dish out 90 damage? And given what he wants for dinner, even more so with intestinal fortitude, that’s surely one crazy minion you want on hand. As for the Vampires, it’s a matter of researching broom of doom that leaves you swimming in blood. Hello blood jacuzzi! Combine that with hypnosis and you can have Victims and Heroes fighting each other and doing your dirty work for you.

Right, off you go you despicable little creature…I have things to do and more toilet paper to get. Where did all that toilet paper go anyway? GARHHHH!

Eapers, It’s All Gone a Bit Wibbly

Oh not you again. Didn’t you leave already?

Oh well, welcome to the game bug solutions domain…I trust you’re here ‘cos somebody stole your toilet paper too huh? Well, it may feel like one of those moments anyhow.

Now, the biggest woe of late is the “Save Bug”. Now, what happens here is that walls vanish, it becomes eerily silent and your can’t see pictures of your revolting minions on the HUD. Well, such has been my unfortunate experience. Now, whilst I may not be able fix a game once it’s gone this manner of wibbly on you I do have some advice to share. My advice thus far is to go and manually delete the game save files via Steam.

How?

  • Right click on MachiaVillain in your library and select Properties. 
  • Now click Browse Local Files. 
  • Open up MachiaVillain Data and then Saves. 
  • Delete all the Saves and empty the Recycle Bin so you can start anew. 

It maybe possible to delete all but your last game save and have it play nicely again with you. However, I haven’t tested this myself. Solutions on this issue seem to be hit and miss for your fellow Villains at the moment sadly but rest assured a patch is in the works.

Before you resort to such a dire approach you may also care to try and restart or load an older save and see if that works for you…

Regardless, my advice from here on out is to keep the Saves as cleared out as possible. You’ll notice many an auto save has a kind of session number like 16, 17, 18, 19 or 20 if you play long enough. So, if you notice the auto save numbers have gone up a digit…clear the old number ones out by following this trick. It may help until the patch comes. We can but hope, and it may mean you won’t loose all your hard work again.

Originally posted by Vosoros

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