Hunting Ground
The Happy Hunting Ground is the place where hunting is easy; the spirits of the hunters go here after their death, if their life was deemed worthy. You did not qualify though, so you will never be able to find your way to the places where the hunter spirits and game are.. and their hunting dogs will hunt you instead!
The Hunting Ground is a starter land, unlocked at the start of the game. It's treasure is Turquoise (* in ASCII), its orb is the Orb of Ferocity and it is home to Hunting Dogs.
Hunters believe that wearing a Turquoise amulet will improve their accuracy. This one has been lost, but the hunting dogs are guarding it until the owner returns.
Hunting dogs are the native enemy of the Hunting Ground. Before the player collects their 10th turquoise hunting dogs will spawn in pairs of two one tile away from a turquoise. These dogs will be in the guarding state, as indicated by their orange eyes, and will not pursue the player, but will attack the player if they move adjacent. However once the player picks up a turquoise any guarding dogs within 2 tiles of the picked up treasure will begin chasing the player. It's eyes will become red to indicate that it is in pursuit.
Hunting dogs will also spawn whenever the player picks up a treasure or orb within the Hunting Ground, other than the first turquoise. These dogs will spawn evenly spaced 7 tiles away from the player. Once the player has collects their 10 turquoise all guarding dogs will become regrouping dogs and guarding dogs will no longer spawn. Turquoises, as well as the newly appearing Orbs of Ferocity, will be left unguarded.
How many dogs will spawn when picking up a turquoise is based on how many turquoise the player already possesses. Until you collect your 17th turquoise the number of dogs that spawn will be equal to the number of turquoise you had before you picked up the most recent (for example the first turquoise spawns no dogs; the second spawns 1 etc.). For you 17th, 18th and 19th turquoise 15 dogs will spawn. From the 20th to the 29th turquoise each will spawn one dog less than the last (for example the 20th spawns 14; the 21st spawns 13 etc.). From the 29th turquoise onward 6 dogs will spawn every time a turquoise is picked up.
After the player has collected 6 turquoise hunting dogs will begin to "regroup". Regrouping dogs will have yellow eyes and will flee the player as best as they can. Regrouping dogs do not actually "regroup" and will not return.
Once the player has collected 18 turquoise hunting dogs will begin spawning in the pursuit state without the player having to pick up any items. This coincides with the turquoises spawning fewer and fewer dogs.
The Hunting Grounds is a rather dynamic land. Where other many other lands just get more difficult as you collect more treasures, requiring only more care, thought or just plain luck, there is no one size fits all strategy for the Hunting Grounds. If you want to make it to 50 treasures it is imperative that you employ different strategies depending on how many treasures you have. However there are a few general tips that can be made.
- Do not pick up orbs. Orbs will summon a lot of hunting dogs and unless you have a trick to get out they will kill you.
In this section of the game the turquoise are guarded by hunting dogs. There are two general strategies that can be used here
When you pick up a turquoise just run for the gap in between two of the spawned dogs. Once you have broken through the ring all the dogs will be behind you and you can employ general tactics to kill them off. This strategy is pretty easy to pull off but tends to have a problem with the 10th turquoise when the gap is smallest. Often times the gaps end up just being too small to fit through and you get checkmated. That is why it is recommended that you use the next strategy at least for the 10th turquoise.
For this strategy you need to be careful what turquoise you pick up. You want to only pick up turquoise that are on a heptagon (the heptagons are the darker tiles in the hunting grounds) such that the two dogs guarding it are adjacent. These will not appear until you have already collected a turquoise so you must use a different strategy to pick up that one.
Once you pick up the turquoise the two dogs guarding it will move adjacent to you. At this point step off the heptagon onto the hexagon furthest from the two dogs. If you step onto a different hexagon that is closer to one than the other this will not work. Since there is only one tile adjacent to both this furthest hexagon and the positions of the two dogs (that tile being the heptagon) only one of the dogs can can follow you and the other is forced to lag behind. Now you can and should kill both the dogs. Once those dogs have been killed run directly towards the closest hunting dog. In the other strategy you run towards the gaps because if you ran towards a dog you would be pinned between the dogs that were guarding the turquoise and the dogs in the ring. But since you killed the dogs guarding the turquoise you can kill the dog in the ring making a large enough gap for you to escape.
This section is all about escaping rings with a lot of dogs. The very basic strategy here is pick a dog, run towards that dog, kill that dog. You want to run towards a dog rather than a gap because killing a dog essentially makes a gap that is twice as large as otherwise at the cost of 1 turn. However there is a bit of fiddling we can do to improve the strategy.
The first thing we want to do is improve the way we choose a dog to pursue. A good strategy is to pick a dog such that the dog to its left and the dog to its right are standing on different polygons. This will introduce a source of asymmetry between the dogs and make it so that one dog reaches us first preventing a pinch. You can also introduce asymmetry by curving or wiggling your path a little bit however choosing the correct dog is easier.
The next thing we can do is pick up our turquoise from a hexagon tile. When picking up off of a hexagonal tile there are a greater number of heptagons available for dogs to stand on and thus doing so decreases the chances of the spawned dogs standing only on hexagons.
At this point Hunting dogs will begin to spawn without the player picking up items. However dogs will not spawn if the player remains still. This can be used to your advantage. So long as you are not actively fleeing other dogs simply stop moving any time a new dog spawns allowing it to walk to you so you can kill it. Since no new dogs will spawn while you are waiting this prevents a build-up of hunting dogs and means that until you pick up a turquoise there is at most one or two dogs chasing you.
When you do pick up turquoise you should apply a similar strategy to the Early-Mid Game with one slight modification. Since you cannot pick up a turquoise and stand still at the same time it is possible that an additional hunting dog will spawn. This dog will be notably out of place since all the other dogs are evenly spaced. If this does happen you should select a dog to pursue that is far away from the extra dog. The extra dog can help checkmate you if you get to close.
Unlike before once you escape the ring of dogs you must try and kill the dogs following while taking as few steps as possible. This is because with new dogs spawning you can easily get in a tight spot where new dogs are spawning faster than you can kill the existing dogs. This gets to be an increasingly prevalent problem the more turquoise you have. The main tool you can use to prevent this is a Great Wall. By standing in the gap in a great wall you can funnel the hunting dogs into a single hexagon allowing you to kill them without making steps. This will prevent new dogs from spawning and can help you clear the map of dogs. You do not want to be approached from behind while you are doing this so it is a good idea to use the great wall of a land such as crossroads.
In the late game escaping from the rings of dogs is much less challenging as from the 30th turquoise onward only six dogs will spawn in a ring. However this is more than made up for in very aggressive spawning. This makes it a very good idea to stop and kill dogs as the spawn. If you do not things can get out of hand very easily. Other than the tricks from above one new trick can be used. As soon as you pick up a turquoise stand still for 2 turns. Six dogs is few enough that you can still escape the circle if you allow it to close in by 2 steps (3 sometimes works in some circumstances but 2 steps always works), but by standing still for two turns you have likely prevented several hunting dogs from spawning making it easier to get rid of the dogs without reaching a critical mass. Once you have allowed two steps simply charge at any dog in the ring. As before, there may be extra dogs that spawned on the step you took to pick up the turquoise. As before it is a good idea to not run towards the extra dogs.