Pioneers of Pagonia tips and tricks beginner’s guide – 8 tips to build a thriving colony

A map begging to be explored and colonised, hundreds of citizens scuttling around the map, and bandits out to stunt your hard-earned progress; Pioneers of Pagonia wears its inspiration – The Settlers – on its sleeve. Though still in Early Access, it still offers a robust colony sim for players to sink their teeth into, but expanding into uncharted lands won’t come easy, which is where our Pioneers of Pagonia tips and tricks come in.

Below, we’ll walk you through a few pointers and practical nuggets we came across during our time playing Envision Entertainment’s new city builder, useful whether or not you’ve dabbled in The Settlers-style games before or not.

Play the Guidance map level first

The first of our tips is somewhat of a given, but because Pioneers of Pagonia lacks a campaign or story mode to teach you basic mechanics, it’s worth playing through the starter Guidance Map level. Though not a tutorial per se, it provides a list of all the buildings and the order in which you need to construct them to create a successful colony along with milestone objectives to guide you. As the map is free of any hostile thieves and bandits, you can adopt a slower pace and take the time to understand what each building does. It’s the perfect way to ease into Pioneers of Pagonia’s many systems.

Expand your borders

Like any colony sim worth its salt, success in Pioneers of Pagonia relies heavily on expanding your borders to claim new land for production buildings and farms, but also to access fresh resources, especially those linked to mining like copper, coal, and silver. You’ll want to establish a Guard Tower or two at the start of each map and put a team of guards to work laying down fresh border stones. For a deeper dive into how it’s done, check out our guide explaining how to extend your territory in Pioneers of Pagonia.

Use explorer’s to clear the fog of war

Other than concealing unexplored areas of the map, the fog of war in Pioneers of Pagonia also acts as a hard barrier, beyond which your border-expanding guards and soldiers won’t venture. To counter this, you’ll need to set up an Explorer’s Hut, which will send out explorers to chart and map unexplored areas of the map. Once the fog of war is gone, your guards can then go in and expand your borders.

Curb your building

Though the natural instinct is to build, build, build, and expand your settlement as far and wide as possible, curb that urge. Expanding too quickly often results in resource shortages that then transform into production bottlenecks, creating a domino effect that can lead to your economy collapsing. With this in mind, expand slowly and methodically, only constructing production and resource gathering buildings when you know you’ll make use of what they produce. 

This is especially important in the tougher maps where you’ll need to train soldiers to clear out enemy camps, which are often positioned next to mining resources that are in short supply in the rest of the map. Focus on producing the weapons and armour needed to fuel the steady recruitment of fighters until the camps are destroyed. After that, you can expand into more sophisticated goods and resources using those freshly claimed resources.

Avoid traffic jams with a robust road network

Though Pioneers of Pagonia automates the majority of unit movements, carriers, constructions workers, and guards using one road to traverse your settlement can lead to traffic jams and long queues that stunt economic production. To avoid this, build a robust road network with multiple routes to different parts of your colony to ease flow. A grid based network works well as do bypasses that circumvent particularly busy parts of your city.

✓ Tip

Choose what you see

Click on any on the categories in the bar at the top of the screen and you can select what information is displayed.

Build production buildings close to one another

Similar to the tip above, you can further optimise movement through your settlement by putting down buildings in the same production chain close to one another. For example, a smelter, weaponsmith, armorsmith, coal mine, and iron ore mine all built close to one another limits how far carriers need to travel to ferry resources between them, which will speed up production times. Building two buildings that rely on one another to produce goods on opposing sides of your settlement will create congestion and lengthen production times, which over the course of a map can mount quite high.

Store excess resources

Each building has a cap on the number of units of a particular resource, product, or weapon it can store at any given time. This is typically capped at 16 units for most buildings, which is a pretty meagre amount given how much you’ll gather and produce. To avoid stunting production due to capping out output capacity, build a few storage tents in close proximity to each production building, then manually assign what resources or items they’ll accept. Doing so should keep production going while giving carriers access to resources as and when they are needed.

Assign soldiers to patrol an area

As mentioned above, much of Pioneers of Pagonia’s unit movement is automated, but you can assign patrol areas for guards and soldiers from a Guard Tower, Garrison, or Military Camp. This is especially useful, when you want to take out an enemy camp or prevent bandits from ransacking your city. Click on the Guard Tower, Garrison, or Military Camp, then next to orders, select the set patrol point icon then click where you want them to patrol on the map.

With these tips and tricks, you should be equipped to take on everything Pioneers of Pagonia will throw your way. We also have a guide explaining how to increase your population if you’re wondering about that.