Combolands Tips: 10 Things Worth Knowing Early

Ten things that took the community a launch week to work out. Every one traces back to a patch note, a community guide or a named discussion thread — the sources page lists them all.

1. Placement value is not placement quality

The biggest preview number is not the best play, because it only shows this week. A building placed where a range effect can reach several future placements beats one placed where it scores highest right now. This is the point a launch-week guide video makes first, and it is the most common early mistake.

2. The colour of the targeting line is a rule, not decoration

Light blue means adjacent; orange means range. Two cards can have near-identical text and want completely different layouts. See the beginner guide.

3. Removing your own buildings is a tool

The entire Martial guild scores off removals — Guard Tower fires when something in range is removed, Banner fires when the Banner itself goes. Agricultural has its own version: one player names Composter plus farmland as their removal package. If you are treating demolition as damage control, you are missing a scoring engine.

4. Trade 3 gold for 5 with the Merchant

With the Merchant councillor seated, buying a vote costs 3 gold and the vote gives 5. That loop is how players clear the Spymaster’s 75-gold council request without building a run around it. Full economy on the gold page.

5. Multipliers on non-scoring buildings are usually wasted

Two documented exceptions, and only two: there is a relic that applies mult to gold gain — which makes mult on a Vineyard real — and adding the irrigator tag to a scoring building. Outside those, the launch-week thread’s own conclusion was that it “seems pointless”.

6. Learn one blowup and aim for it

The most-cited one: two Marketplaces joined with rainbow paint, which a player describes as triggering “x10 every turn for the rest of” the run. It needs gold to fish for the right paint, which is a large part of why several players rate Commercial the strongest opener. More combinations on the potions and paints page.

7. Paints run out

The launch-day patch reduced the durations of red, green, gold and blue paint. A paint is a timer, so set up a paint-dependent loop early enough in the milestone that the rest of it can ride the loop.

8. You can end a milestone early — once you unlock it

A neutral unlock lets you close a milestone the moment you hit its target instead of playing out the remaining weeks. It needs Neutral level 7 and a finished run. Knowing whether to bank early or keep building is one of the decisions a launch-week guide video lists as under-explained.

9. Terrain decides which guild is good on this island

Maritime builds only on sea and shallow water. Mine needs rock adjacency. A long coastline is worth more to one pair of guilds than a fat interior is, and maps have been procedurally generated since the second demo. Details on the walls and terrain page.

10. If an achievement did not pop, restart the game

Guild unlocks resolve when a run ends, so in endless mode they can sit pending. Patch v1.0.6 added a check on launch for exactly these, which makes closing and reopening the game the documented fix rather than folklore.

What is still unexplained

Two things nobody has answered, so do not lose time on them: what a railway connection actually does for range effects, and whether anything can genuinely be placed on scaffolding. Both were raised in launch week and neither got an authoritative answer. Version 1.0.5 added an in-game Compendium — the developers’ own acknowledgement that the card text was doing too much work alone.