Elven Curse Tips
How to access Elven Curse?
I’ve seen there’s a been a bit of confusion accessing the DLC, I actually started up the main game and got confused the first time lol. The easiest way is to open your steam library, right click on Grim Nights and (assuming you have it installed). You’ll see 2 options, one says Play Grim Nights, the other say Play Elven Curse DLC.
Villagers – Gatherers, a Quick Overview
Villagers can (and usually should) be insta-killed. The Devs have heard the cries of our aching index fingers and added hotkeys. Press I to select a single idle villager, and press delete to murder him if you so choose. He had a family, you monster! Does not work on buildings. In addition to this, all villagers have an auto-work option on by default where if the job they were doing is completed, either a building is finished being built or a resource is depleted, they will go to the next one if there’s another nearby. Yay! Less Micromanaging.
- No Buff (Just a normal guy/gal) These are placeholders if you need someone in your mines or fields. Keep if absolutely necessary and replace as soon as possible. There’s enough villagers with good buffs that keeping these is next to pointless.
- +1/+2 When Gathering Food / Seeds / Both
Very useful. Food seems to be harder to get than it was in Grim Nights. If you need more food/seeds, look for more of these and replace the worst Villagers or build more fruit vines/seed trees respectively.
(+2 to one) is better than (+1 to both) is better than (+1 to one) - +1/+2 when Mining Moon Shards / Cobalt / Both
Pretty self explanatory, they mine Moon Shards, Cobalt, or both. Some better than others. Adjust according to your need. Both can be found above ground, but are mostly below ground.
(+2 to one) is better than (+1 to both) is better than (+1 to one) - +1/+2 When Extracting Mana
Mana is important, used in almost everything. You have 2 permanent mana wells by your starting Mother Tree, place your best villagers there. There’s also plenty underground, you shouldn’t run out unless you allow Mana Leeches to do their thing. - Builds two/three times as fast
I know a builder isn’t a gatherer but I wasn’t gonna create a whole section just for him. I never needed more than 1 of these. Get a x2 or x3 and keep track of him (He can be easy to lose) Kill the rest.
Villagers – Combat Ready
These are the villagers you should use in your army.
- Any villager with +100% Damage
Some will have a health debuf (-50% health), but that doesn’t matter. Make these your ranged units. They’re somewhat rare so always keep them whenever you find one. - Any villager with +50% Damage
Again, if they have a health debuf it doesn’t matter. Make these your ranged units. Eventually you may want to change them out for 100%ers. You’ll get around 3x as many of these as you will the +100%ers, by the end of the game I was killing them off in favor of trying to get more +100%ers. - +50% / +100% Health VS +1/2 Armor
To be honest I’m not sure if health or armor is more important in this game. In the original health was, so I always went with health over armor on my mele units. But because they don’t get much action anyway… Don’t split hairs over it. If they have the “Eats 2x or 3x as much” debuff, just get rid of them. It’s not worth it in my opinion. - +20% / +40% Faster
I’m not sure why you’d want one that’s fast to be completely honest. I killed them off, but if you want to use them go for it.
Soldiers
“The best defense is a good defense” -Yours truly.
The goal here is to keep the enemy from getting close enough to do any damage, and that’s actually not that hard to do. Here’s how.
(I’ll go into which buildings you need in the buildings section)
- Druids
These are your basic ranged unit, and they’re a bit interesting. They don’t do much damage and their projectiles are slower than something that’s really slow, and they don’t arc so they have trouble hitting flying enemies (of which there are many) AND they only have a medium range. HOWEVER. Every time they hit an enemy they reduce it’s armor by -1, which for larger enemies and bosses can be important. I would have about 25% of your army made of Druids. The terrace/tree they’re on can be upgraded to give them homing projectiles, which is a must for these guys.
Druids also have access to 3 magic spells for 10 earth mana each. A meteor that does 100 damage and has a short delay, a root that grabs enemies and holds them still, and a mushroom you can plant underground and use for food.
- Duskblade
A bit faster than normal, they have a short ranged attack and a melee attack. Not much to say, I only had a couple for emergencies. - Moonspear
These guys will be your bread and butter early game, but replace them when you have access to BloodHunters. They throw spears and they have the 3rd longest range in the game. The terrace/tree they’re on can be upgraded to give them exploding spears. Neat. - Glaiveblade
Pure Melee unit, and honestly they seem like just glorified spearmen. I was able to get one up to 235 HP though so there’s that. - BloodHunter
These are the archers from Grim Nights, but new and improved WITH HOODS! Seriously though, they’re pretty good. Second longest range, and second best unit IMO. The terrace/tree they’re on can be upgraded to give them homing arrows. Which… you know… makes them hit better. I would say make 25-50% of your army into these guys. - Archdruid
These are the badass MFers of Elven Curse. They’re expensive, but very powerful. You can get their damage up to 28-33. Their projectiles don’t curve or follow enemies, but they’re fast and can usually hit what they’re aiming at. You get 20-25+ of these guys all made from +100% Damage villagers and they’ll wreck almost anything. There is a terrace upgrade that makes their projectiles go through enemies. They also have the ability to grow a Treant (think Treebeard from Lord of the Rings), or summon 8 meteorites that do 75-100 damage each. For a price. I made 50% of my army out of these dudes.
Potions
Potions, unfortunately are harder to get in Elven Curse. There’s only 1 way I know of to get them, and that is to kill enemies. Yep, that’s it. Sorry. The mine chests are gone and there’s no more Mogha to sacrifice villagers to for potions.
- +25% HP
This red potion will give your unit more health.
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Put these on your mele units, and when your mele units are super healthy put them on whatever else you want. - +25% Damage
Gives More damage. Prioritize putting these on your +100% Damage ranged units whenever possible to maximize damage. - +15% health +15% damage +1 armor
Not as great as the +25% damage potion but still really good. Again put these on your best ranged units. - +2 armor
Meh. Gives you more armor. Put it on mele units or whatever. +2 armor doesn’t help that much.
Buildings
I won’t be covering how much each building costs because it says so in-game and I’m too lazy to do so. Without further adieu here we goooo!
- Mother Tree
This is how you get villagers. They spawn, 1 by 1 at your mother tree. You can grow more if you want, I had 16 at one point. The more you have the more villagers you can murder, and the more rare villagers you have a chance of getting. Upgrade this to get access to better buildings. You need elven energy to upgrade it which you probably won’t have before day 4 or 5. - Living Tree
This is the house from Grim Nights. It upgrades twice and holds up to 6 villagers. You can have a maximum of 12 Living Trees, and 72 villagers. - Fruit Vines
These are your primary food source. Build more if you need them. Holds 2 villagers I’m not sure what more you want me to say 😛 - Seed Trees
These are how you gather Seeds, which are used to build more buildings. Holds 2 villagers. - Terrace Tree
Now these are interesting. The Terrace Tree is an improvement upon the wall sections in Grim Nights. It’s a tree you can build on top of. Each section connects to the next section, each section has it’s own ladder to make it easy for units to move around, and each section can be upgraded 2 more times to create 4 different levels you can build on! The ground level, and 3 more terrace levels. Double click a terrace to upgrade it. They also have unit-specific upgrades you can add. If you’re careful, you can put 4 upgrades on 1 terrace level, 2 on each side of the ladder. - Root Tree
This is, quite simply, how you get into the mines. - Druids Den
Trains Druids - Warrior Glade
Trains Duskblades and Moonspears at level 1, at level 2 you can also train Glaiveblades and Bloodhunters. - Ancient’s Dwelling
Allows you to train Archdruids. Requires level 3 - Wishing Well
Allows you to trade. - Energy Flowers
These kill Mana Leeches and Winged Imps, though to be honest I haven’t seen them in action. I built 3 terraces, filled them with Energy Flowers to see what they’d do and put some archdruids behind them. The Archdruids killed everything lol sooooo… Let me know if they’re useful.
The Mine
There’s not much to say about the mine. A lot of it has been removed, though I’m not too sad to see it go. There’s only 3 levels instead of 5, there’s no more treasure chests, no more underground springs, and only 3 things to mine. The enemies don’t even stay IN the mine.
Level 1 and 2 are identical. You occasionally run into a group of Mana Leeches that immediately fly through the ground and start “attacking” the village. They only do damage if you have no mana left.
Level 3 is the same except there’s a lot more mana leaches. Like, almost every section has them.
Also, there’s no villager that mines sections faster than normal, and now that there’s a auto-work option for villagers, you hardly have to do anything in the mine except dig new sections.
That’s all you need to know about the mine. Pretty anti-climactic.
Bosses -SPOILER ALERT-
I’m not going to cover the basic enemies, they’re pretty simple, and you can read about them in-game. I will say however, that there are a LOT more flying enemies in this DLC, which makes melee units even more obsolete. Elven Curse only has 3 bosses (2 of them fly lol), down from 4 so that’s a bummer.
- Frankie
Frankie isn’t a boss at all, but I’m throwing him in here anyway because reasons. He’s a giant deer thing that appears in the middle of the map. If you “sacrafice” a villager to him he will either turn that villager into a mana spirit… in the middle of the map… that you have to send someone out to gather if you want it (lame), or you’ll get 2 Elven Energies for it. At least those you don’t have to gather. - The Stayer
This dude is pretty simple. He throws flying imps at you, and he also has a melee attack. Kill him with ranged dudes. - Belial
This guy flies around shooting Mana Leeches at everybody. What a jerk. Also has a nasty melee attack. Kill him with ranged dudes. I sense a pattern. He has 8 armor which might be a problem, make sure you have some druids to take that beautiful armor away from him. - Chaosyn
Big Mama Queen of the Damned. Flies around shooting lots of fireballs and melee attacks your dudes. Shoot her with…. you guessed it, ranged dudes. Also she’s got 40 armor so until your druids get rid of that, you’re barely gonna scratch her. One of the only things you absolutely need druids for.
