A new player's first experience

Conan Exiles General Discussion
1

Hey, I wanted to share my initial experience playing CE. It’s not a positive one, hence I want to share it, but I’ll do my best to not make this a nonconstructive nerdrage rant.

So me and 3 buddies just started playing for the first time on official PvE. After a bit of learning the ropes we just about had a little sandstone 5x5 going on day 2. That’s already when the purge meter hit 75% and procced immediately after. Followers of Asura came. It was an intense but fun challenge. Some damage to our structures and pride but nothing we couldn’t fix.

By the time the purge was over and we patched the base, the meter was already at 40%. We work ourselves up to iron tools and medium armor, and get a few lvl 3 fighters for better defense. The rest of the time we spent decorating the base (which is to me one of the best aspects of this game within its genre). My friends focused on husbandry and soon we all had some horses and deer galloping around and we were drinking from our mugs at the big communal table in our kitchen. Super cozy and fun!

Then the second purge came. This time they were T4 Cultists and utterly steamrolled our house. All our followers were slaughtered, the house was torn down from the foundations up, and at some point we were literally just getting spawncamped by NPCs.

Sad about what happened we figured that the spot where we built (i5, on the rock bridge) might be in too high a zone for us. With a midweek of playtime lost to us but lot of knowledge wiser, we started anew on a different server.

We checked the wiki’s purge page and chose a spot with the lowest difficulty to make sure we wouldn’t have to deal with such a purge again. On day one we combined our efforts to get a small infrastructure going for T2 building materials, so we could make a more sturdier permanent base. A little 5x5 again with all the basic workshops was made, and we farmed some materials for T2 stuff.

On day 2 we found a spot on J5, the edge of noob river. T1-2 purge zone according to the wiki. We just built a little 3x3 shack to store the mats before starting our T2 house. That’s when the next purge came already.

Again T4 cultists, and again they steamrolled everything. We are in our lvl 20’s with an iron sword and a sandstone house on noob river. What are we to do against that level and quantity of enemies? And so this was the second time in 24 hours the four of us just got utterly obliterated by OP NPCs. We were literally not even given the chance to prepare a defense against such an assault. We’ve really tried, as we didn’t want the same thing to happen twice. But it did. And the worst is: there’s nothing to do to guarantee the same won’t happen again tomorrow.

I love the idea of purges, it adds a lot of dynamic and makes you think about how you want to build and defend. But if we’re gonna get a T4 purge every day while we’re barely level 20, wrecking our sandstone structure and basic workshops, and with the meter being at 40% again by the time we get to patch things up, we cannot overcome this. This can’t be intended gameplay, can it?

I’m really trying to enjoy the game, but this is super demotivational. Every time we build our proverbial castle in the kindergarten’s sand pit, there comes a bully who kicks it down.

Thanks for listening. Please, let me know how you’ve dealt with this when you first started out, maybe it can help us during our third rebuild. :slight_smile:

2

I can tell you i wish purges happened to me more often, but i don’t have that luck… but i can suggest a couple things:

  1. Usually thralls can take care of the purges easily, but depends on the thrall, if what you are capturing are darfari and exiles they have the lowest HP of all and they wont last too long.
  2. Purges are not really smart attacks, they are kind off random and they will follow certain path, build your base where there could be only 1 entrance and that would be way more easy to defend than being attack from every angle.
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3

Purges are based on location rather than level. If you build in a high level zone, you get high level purges. To counter high level purges, you need T2 or T3 structures and Thralls from that area. A T3 row 1 purge will have considerably less HP and damage capacity than a T1 row 8 thrall.

Your best bet is to build a starter base, level, grab thralls from 3 rows above your base, level them and wait until you are able to withstand high level purges before building in a high level purge area.

4

Problem one - You’re all busy working and building. That will generate a purge more often. On our server, active clans get a purge almost every day and sometimes twice.

If you’re level 20 you should be out of iron tools by then and on to at least steel. Upgrade your weapons and add buff kits to them. I would also suggest you go look for some legendary weapons. Noob river has at least tree locations but they won’t be an easy fight. (Giant Gator G4, Rot Branch on island I6, and the Demon Spider O6)

Next 5xt5 structure doesn’t change what attacks. If it’s a PVE server, purges are usually stronger since buildings can’t be destroyed by players. I think.

Thralls are no longer the defense for a base. They will require support to win fights. Thralls for the longest time where super OP and they would win every fight. Devs have fixed that so they will help but won’t necessarily win your fights.

Just keep practicing. It does take some practice to become really good at the game.

You could also try private servers. They have different settings and may be more tailored to your desires.

5

Aha, so you’re saying the difficulty of the purge is directly related to the rows on the map? I looked at the “purge difficulty image” of the wiki’s purge page, from which I gathered our new base location (J5) would’ve been within the ‘low level purge area’. Unfortunately I don’t have persmission to paste the image or a link to it. But that’s good to know, thanks.

6

Both i5 and j5 are not considered noob area, if you really need it to be noob area then select F3-H3 and possibly F4-H4, but the lower side in this area is definitely noob area and shouldn’t give hard purges.
It is not impossible to survive in harsh environment, but then you need to build in a way so that you know where they will come to attack you, I know this because I once went to the highlands up north being level 20-30 and surviving a purge of white wolves.
The base up there had a narrow entrance between to cliffs which I had walled of, so there was only one way for them to attack, they did break the wall pretty quickly and killed most of my thralls, but I survived in the end - It is all about how and where you build your base when being in a high risk area :slightly_smiling_face:

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7

i5 was considered moderate but j5 is considered noob by the wiki’s map, but evidently that’s out of date. I do understand the concept of the how and where to build to increase defenses, utilize chokepoints and the like. The trouble is that we don’t get the time to get there. E.g. it’s been 3 hours since the last purge, one of which was spent on participating in the purge, the other two to recuperate, and our meter’s already near half full. How am I to build a T2+ defendable base in 6-7 hours while having fun doing it? That’s what gets me.

8

But steel tools are unlockable at level 30, upgrades/kits are at 26. We were between level 16 to 20. How can we be on “at least steel” already?

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9

The answer is to build a starter base to gather the materials and make the blocks. My fist base was in H5, West of Scavengers’ Berth, so I had access to better thralls and bigger concentration of resources. Over time I gathered and made blocks for a T3 base. Traveled to G8, staged everything, and dropped the dodecahedron base, 8 blocks high, 3 floors, in 3 hours. But my H5 base was a fully functional, stiffly defended base, started in T1 but transitioned to T2 when 3 skull crocs decided to attack.

The thing to remember is that purges are area specific. J trips into the jungle biome, so it opens it up for anything jungle related. The game is different at level 60 than 20 or 30. At level 20 you have zero hopes of surviving a level 60 style purge and anything that is not T3 will be destroyed.

10

If you’re talking about the color-coded map that shows general difficulty zones, it was made before some of the newer purges like the Cultists. For a more accurate understanding of what purges can potentially strike an area, you’ll want to scroll a bit further down to the one with the red X’s on it.

When looking at it, pay particular attention to the purges with a difficulty of 1-6. IME, only the purges with a difficulty of 1-6 will spawn on servers where the difficulty threshold is set to 6 (as it is on Officials).

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Thanks for the constructive replies everyone, they’re appreciated. I realise now that the Cultist purge is new and some of the info we found is outdated. We’ll try to find some real estate around rows 3 to 4 next time.

I do feel the meter fills up waaay too fast when you’re playing together. It creates scenarios where you refrain from having harmless fun because there’s calamity looming over the shoulder if you do. E.g. Can’t have a clanmate enjoying herself building a little bedroom for all of us because that’s like 20% purge meter right there. Hell, even defending against a purge gives 10% or more on the next meter already, lol.

12

I dunno if this still works or not. But what you can do is when the purge meter gets close to full, disband the clan and reform. It will reset the meter. I haven’t tried this in over a year so I dunno if it still works or not.

13

Here’s something that may help you from having to start completely from scratch:

I thought I would be clever and build on water with a walkway to my base. This would allow only 2 paths to defend to my base. However, purge spawned inside my base.

After my first purge, Cimmerian Berserkers, destroyed almost the entirety of my base I came up with a plan for the next one. I built a little space under water (a foundation is enough for this) and put a couple of chests there.

Before my next purge I transferred almost all of my worker thralls into the chests for safe keeping, along with whatever materials, armor and weapons I didn’t want to lose. The purge fighters cannot damage the chests so long as they are placed in deep water. You can also pick up most of your work/crafting stations and stash them.

Fortunately by second purge I had upgraded my building to t3 and had enough thralls to defend and prevent the base from getting destroyed.

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14

Hey Webgremlin,

I suggest stop building and just push your characters to level 60. You can reach level 60 in just a few hours. Plenty of vids on the best way to power level just search youtube. Also grab a couple of horses. Once you hit 60 and are on horseback, you will find your survivability drasticly increases against purges.

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15

I had a similar issue when I first started. We had a 4 person clan and it felt like we just got purged every day and by the time we cleaned and patched up from one purge another one came. I have a learned quite a bit since then and would recommend setting up a small base on the noob river and get a handful of wheels going asap. Get a few levels on the thralls and go up north and hunt some higher level thralls.

Also, if your purge meter is full and you don’t want to fight it, just make sure no one logs on during that servers purge spawn time, which i believe is 6-10 on server time for officials. As long as no one is on the purge won’t come. Hope that helps! Good luck!

16

Hey, you long time playing on a single server, steel weapons only available to craft at level 30, legendary weapons only useable at level 60.

On the thread, what I usually do and it so far has aways bought some time to fight purges is build like a real castle, have walls to be attacked before your main base. But I get at such a initial level we normally have just a house. The problem is probably the strenght of the purge vs your T1 or T2 base, not much you can do really.
Maybe build less and level up, so you can craft steel weapons, T3 base. Also, why you switch servers, that is time lost with leveling again.

17

I would not recommend this. Since this is their first playthru, they’ll learn the game a lot more thoroughly by taking it slow and learning as they go rather than cheesing their way to 60 and having no clue how anything works, particularly since they are playing PvE and don’t need to worry about surviving vs other players.

As for purges, by the time you guys reach high levels, you’re going to want to be able to fight purges with some regularity, because (short of trading with other players) that’s the only way to get top-tier crafters.

My advice is, don’t fret too much over whether your first base gets wrecked, or if it’s perfect. What takes you ages to build at low levels, you’ll be able to accomplish many times faster at higher level by virtue of better tools farming materials faster, and better thralls crafting more quickly. Enjoy the discovery aspects of the game on your first couple play thrus – plenty of time to learn efficiency and how to power-level later on.

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18

Get used to it! The real fun of this game is it doesn’t baby you. All self discovery. No real tutorial, little guide. It’s brutal. One of the few games out there that doesn’t hold your hand from the beginning.

I hope funcom never changes this because it’s what makes the game unique.

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19

Is it that high? Lol. Been a while since I’ve started a new character on officials. On the serve I play on now I was level 30 in an hour. Lol.

Well, just keep trudging along. Kill all the wildlife you can find. Gators, lizards, Rocknose, shellbacks and you will level up pretty fast. Then raid all the villages of the river and you’ll be level 30 in no time.

Once you can fight and defend yourself, there are tons of chests in Sepermaru with steel bar, gold and more. Just start climbing buildings and looking around. You’ll find them.

20

Bugged purges are the real curse of CE. :laughing:

They never fixed it , or more it never worked right to begin with.

We did have 'm and ff’s lots of times we got really numb bout it beeing left with about nothing.
Bases filled with npcs to the rim, spawning inside leaving you no room to fight and… etc etc ect.

Our workaround, i play with my mates on 3 servers, for instance today we are at the limit of lets say server 1, now we go play on on server 2, and return in a few days. atm the purge meter goes down fast.

Note we duplicate the bases ans locations for like 60-80% so the general feel between servers is the same.

So, for avoiding the purge you need two servers and to escape toxic servers all the same we have 1 third server. Took some time and devotion to organise it but we agree thats its the only way to avoid purges and toxic severs. (servers do not stay toxic for long usually)

Note we are talking officials, we ( as all experienced players) dont play privates. Weve been there done that several times.

We maintian the decay of the servers.

2cts.