Fruit and conversion

When a globule is hungry, it looks for the inn where it will be able to eat the widest variety of fruit. Teams that have made their inns visible to others can attract enemy globs by offering a wider variety of fruit.

Cherry, orange, and prune trees exist in some maps. Unlike other resources, forests of fruit don't expand, and picking fruit doesn't destroy the trees they grow on. Each tree can hold up to 5 pieces of fruit, which will gradually regrow when picked. Fruit trees and woods are totally different resources, despite having similar names.

Workers will only bring fruit to your inns if the fruit is currently in view of one of your units - trees in areas that have gone dark are ignored by workers.

Happiness

Each unit will take one fruit of each available type from an inn when it eats lunch there. The number of fruit the unit takes is its happiness score, which you can keep an eye on for your team in the statistics? menu. Your warriors will lose more armour the happier they are.

When a unit gets hungry, it will try to book lunch at the inn that will make it happiest. It will look at all the inns that its team can see, except the ones that are currently full. If it can see a free space at an inn belonging to its own team with at least as much fruit as the best opposing inn, it will book a place there. If it can see a free space in another team's inn which is offering more fruit than it can get from its own team, it will convert to the other team and book a place. Otherwise, it will sit and wait until a space becomes available.

Markets

You can exchange fruits with other teams using markets. Setting the market to export a fruit will make your workers fill the market with that fruit type. Setting the market to import will cause your workers to take the fruit out again. Other teams will attempt to trade fruit with you if you have allowed them to see your markets by checking the "mV" ("market vision") option in the alliance menu.

In the future, there should be about 10 types of fruit (to allow complex and interesting diplomacy), but for now markets serve only to test the basic gameplay principle.

As a side-effect, it's also possible to use markets for storage if you don't show them to other teams. Setting the market to export fruit will fill it up, then importing it will empty it again. This can give you some breathing room if you lose control of a fruit forest.

Fruit strategy

Checking the "fV" (food vision) and "mV" (market vision) options in the alliance menu will allow other teams to see where your inns and markets are. Although this lets opponents know a lot about where your globs are based, it also allows you to entice their globs into converting over to your side. If your inns advertise a wider variety of fruit than anyone else's, enemy globs will convert to your team in droves. The number of globs who have converted to and from your team is indicated by the last pair of numbers in the top line of the Globulation 2 screen. Even if you don't use a strategy of conversion, you may still need to defend yourself in case an enemy team tries to convert your globs.

Here are some tips if you choose to base your game strategy around fruit:

• You might want to station explorers near to trees, or construct defence towers near them. This will ensure that the trees are always visible, and perhaps provide a little defence.
• Globs can't live on fruit alone. Make sure you have enough workers assigned to each inn so that they remain well-stocked with wheat as well as fruit.
• Since warriors lose armour when they eat fruit, you can force your enemies to weaken their warriors. This can even things up if your enemies have better training, and can benefit allies who aren't forced to keep up.
• Alternatively, you can put a forbidden area around fruit forests once you've got enough variety, so your warriors aren't too badly overfed.

And if you choose a conversion strategy...

• Showing your inns to other teams tells them a lot about where your towns are, the size of your colony, and what level of development you've got to. Be ready to defend yourself against enemy attack.
• Remember that you need the widest variety of fruits at your inns, not the greatest quantity. Try to control as many different types of tree as possible.
• You can quickly run out of inns for your new globs, and they will stop converting - or worse, your globs will start to starve. Build inns whenever hunger levels start to rise, and keep building until they start to fall. You can keep an eye on hunger levels with the the hunger graph?.
• Although the most important thing is the range of fruit, you need to keep enough fruit in each of your inns to serve all of your globs, with some left over to convert new globs.
• Keep an eye on the type of units you're converting. You may need to change the number of workers or warriors you're producing (or stop producing them at all) to maintain balance in your colony