Overview:
Estimated achievement difficulty:2/10
Offline: 20 (200
)
Online: 0
Approximate amount of time to 200: 20-30 hours
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 4
Missable achievements: None
Does difficulty affect achievements?: There is no difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: None
Extra equipment needed?: Windows Phone (7 or 8)
Introduction:
The Sims Medieval has you simulating the life of a character in the dark ages. As with other Sim games, you will spend a lot of time on mundane tasks such as sleeping, eating, chatting with other sims, and having fun. If you fail to keep your Sim sufficiently maintained in all of these areas, the Sim will start doing things on their own or possibly die (especially if you don't feed your Sim).
Character Maintenance:
There are four parts of your character's health that you have to maintain regularly. The icons (found in the lower left corner of the screen) don't all need to be green, but you want to immediately address any that turn red. Taking actions that turn any of these green in your status bar generally contributes toward the ability to obtain focus points (FP), up to a maximum of 30 FP. FP are required to start most quests in the game, with some taking as much as 10 FP to start. However, you have to spend so much time doing the maintenance activities that running out of FP is really not a concern. On the off chance you do, they can also be purchased in the marketplace.
Food: Eat snacks from food barrels or fix meals from cauldrons or cellars.
Rest: Sleep in your bed.
Social: Talk with other Sims. You can't repeat the same conversation over and over again, instead you have to choose different options or different Sims to talk to.
Fun: Playing darts increases this a little bit, fishing increases it a moderate amount, but the quickest way seems to be to chat with another Sim and choose "Be Funny" and then any of the options shown. Note that you don't have all of these options available early in the story. You also can purchase a telescope or sword-in-a-rock and use that, or if you are married you can choose Chat -> Be Romantic -> Woohoo!
House Maintenance:
You start with a small house, and over the course of the story you go through multiple upgrades to larger houses. Each time you move, you lose all of your furniture and get a small cash value for it instead. You can if you wish spend time decorating and arranging things each time to the smallest level of detail, but if you are looking for the most efficient house, especially early on, you can follow this approach:
First, sell everything that you don't need, such as the table, wardrobe, chairs, etc. Replace the single bed with a double because your friends will often be inside your house and if you only have one bed, it will delay your game while you wait for a place to sleep. In the larger houses, it can be more efficient to have two of them so you don't have to walk all the way across the house for a nap.
Purchase every item from the workshop that you can. These are how you increase your stats, so they are the important things to have in your house. When you first start a character, all you have access to is a dart game and armory, but if you level up your spirituality in the church, that will unlock the bookshelf as well. The mirror comes available when your charisma levels up through quests, or you progress far enough in the story. You also need a food barrel, but you don't need any other kitchen items. You can have multiple snacks from the barrel much faster than making meals, and a barrel takes up almost no space.
Even if you don't use the garden early on, start purchasing all of the seeds and fertilizer available in the marketplace. Many of the quests require them, and this way you are always prepared. Same with collecting the plants outside, if you see one that is mature, collect it right away even if you don't currently have a quest that requires that plant. Rare plants (mandrake and rosemary) should always be purchased when available as well.
Abbreviated Walkthrough:
There are four stories, each of which have to be completed on a different playthrough. You will repeat most of the quests on each playthrough. When creating your character, choose a history that goes well with the story you intend to play. For instance, if you are going to do the political commitment story, choose a history of being naughty. You also get to choose a personality trait, some of which provide bonuses. Read each one and decide what works best for you (see the story achievements for suggestions).
The stories don't become available until you have completed some quests, so spend your first few hours getting money using the dice table, purchasing things for your house such as an armory and dart game, and meeting everyone in town that you can. There are quite a few quests you can knock out early. As each part of the story unfolds, the map gets larger with new areas available, so remember to explore the kingdom as soon as that happens so you know where you can go for new quests and plants.
The order of the playthroughs is not relevant and has no bearing on achievements. The four stories are Charitable Guy, Political Commitment, Religious Commitment, and Way of the Brave. While you can hop between stories with the same character, you need to complete all pieces of all four stories for the achievements. As such, I recommend staying with the same story line all the way through for each playthrough to avoid confusion and having to do a fifth playthrough (or more!) The outline below uses the order in which I did the stories, so if you choose a slightly different order, adapt as necessary.
Playthrough 1: Play Political Commitment as an evil character (So Vicious), and aim to complete all of the quests where you must be evil or where your alignment does not matter (Ecological Disaster). You will also want to level up all of your abilities to level 10 (Role Player), buy all of the weapons (Weapon Master, Vampire Knight), recruit three guild members (Brothers in Arm) and use them to win a fight without taking damage (Ultimate Damage), decorate your house (Drakhan Knight, Chevron Knight), have 10,000 Simoleons (Rich-e Sim), get a response at the wishing well (Lucky!), make 5 friends (Friendly Sim), grow all the plants (Garden Keeper), make all the potions available to an evil character, and get married (King of the Ring). Once you have finished all of these tasks, get your alignment back to good by donating at the church and being nice to people. Complete the first quest available from Brother Jules to unlock the Faith potion. Craft that at the Wizard table (Smart Craft). You can also do the 4-5 remaining good-only quests at this point to ensure you haven't missed any quests other than story related ones. The game will give you a pop-up message when all the quests are completed, so you shouldn't have to manually track anything. Shortly after the story ends, you should have 15 achievements for 125 .
Playthrough 2: Play Charitable Guy as a good character (So Kind).
Playthrough 3: Play Way of the Brave as good or evil (So Brave).
Playthrough 4: Play Religious Commitment as a good character (So Religious, Quest Master). If Casino hasn't unlocked by now, grind through the last of the bets needed.
Conclusion:
Overall this version of the Sims franchise is simple with an enhanced combat routine added in for a unique flavor. As with all the other Sims games, you will spend a lot of time if you are aiming to unlock all 200 , but it is well done with no noticeable bugs other than the occasional crash to your home screen.
[x360a would like to thank Creech for this Roadmap]
