Populous

Difficult SNES levels/worlds 70 to 73

While playing through Conquest mode you might run into some difficult worlds that might seem impossible to beat.

These worlds usually have the following rules:

Silly World

The only god power you can use is Knight

He can use Knight and Volcano

Due to your peeps being placed on a mountain at the start of the world and the world being Silly World means that your starting group of peeps are quite weak and die easily, be careful.

Trying to build all the way up to avoid Vulcano might save you from Vulcano but being so high will kill your peeps quickly unless you build castles. Having castles introduces new problems in the form of slow reproduction. Letting your peeps build normal buildings on the top will not work either, the buildings will be too weak to shield them from the terrain and your peeps will die.

Your only option for building high is castle, this makes forming a Knight hard and slow. If you try to build normally on normal ground levels, he will eventually build quicker and fill up his mana enough to start throwing Vulcanos at you and cripple you enough that the game might as well already be lost.

Since the environment is so harsh and we cannot use any powers to hurt him our best option is going to be to ignore the Knight power and build normally but making sure that we start building in the direction of him.

We will build our back line making sure we have a steady mana flow and concentrate on making our way towards his location with buildings and terrain deformation. Make sure you try and build green/blue buildings at the start since the tents will be too weak and will die out. Also remember that you can turn down the game speed in the options menu. This will help a lot, giving us enough time to build out our civilization for mana and our advance towards him.

If you do not reach him before he starts using Vulcano and Knight, you can try your best to deal with the powers or you can just try and ignore them and carry on. Our main goal is to keep advancing towards him and make sure nothing stops us from doing so.

Once you reach him, try and spread out your peeps so they start infesting his land and building near him. This will allow us to raise and lower land within his borders. By the time you reach him you should have enough mana reserves to start causing havoc. Since we do not have any powers, we will just have to make Vulcano manually. With one of your peeps or buildings within view try and move the screen/view as much as possible within his territory while keeping your peeps or buildings within view. If you are having issues with this, remember you can always pause and position your view and then un-pause.

Now with your cursor as deep within his borders as possible, hold down the raise land button until a huge mountain forms and you cannot raise any further. This should have the same effect on him as two Vulcanos, crippling him. Now keep repeating this strategy while building out your own civilization. Soon enough you will have totally decimated his flat land and turned it into deadly mountainous regions.

With him fully crippled and out of mana you can try and end it quickly by making Knights or just enjoy the show and command your people to attack before settling while you relax with a nice glass of wine or a hot cup of coffee.