Puzzle Quest - Part 4 - Your Citadel

The Citadel

So, let's go back to the beginning. If we head to our original Kingdom (Bartonia) and click on it, we'll see the option to visit our Citadel. 

When you first visit here you can use your gold to improve it and add buildings that will help you learn new skills, improve stats and train mounts, among other things. The full list of buildings you can build are:

• Dungeon - By building this you can get the option to capture enemies you've beaten at least three times. I've already gone through capturing in an older update. Capturing certain enemies also allows you to have a 'mount', allowing you to traverse the map quicker as well as adding another spell to your repertoire.
• Mage Tower - (available after building the Dungeon) This allows you to learn spells off of your captured enemies.
• Stable - (available after building the Dungeon) This allows you to train your mounts.
• Forge - Building this gives us the option to make new items with the runes we have found. 
• Siege Workshop - (available after building the Forge) Allows us to capture cities that will earn us gold.
• Temple - The Temple allows us to increase our character's stats with our gold.
• Towers - Every city that we capture has a chance of "rebelling". Building the towers will decrease the chance of that happening by 50%.
• Vault - Increases the gold that we get from captured cities by 50%.
• Statues - Increases our Morale by 5 points.

Each one from the Dungeon to the Siege Workshop has it's own mini-game attached to it. I've already talked about capturing enemies for the Dungeon, so let's move on to...

Mage Tower

So, every enemy that you capture gives you one or two spells that you can learn. However, in order to learn it you must complete a mini-game. For this example let's learn....oh, I don't know...

Wake the Dead! Why not? It's a spell that changes two random Skulls into +5 Skulls. Useful, but I probably won't be using it at all once I learn it. Once you've selected the spell you wish to learn you get taken to this screen...

It's a simple case of matching enough symbols to fill the meters at the side. However you may notice the Scroll. Yeah, that's a new one for this mode. In order to get it you must get at least a 4-of-a-kind. In order to get rid of scrolls you have to either match three of them, or the easier way...

By using the +5 Skulls to blow it the hell up! The chances of being able to get 3 scrolls in the same place are pretty slim, though not so much on the harder spells since you could end up with a heap on them.

Once you complete a category, all the matching gems on the board will wipe themselves out. This pretty much always creates a chain reaction of three of more gems matching each other. However, I got something a little bit perfect when I was playing this...

Completing one caused a hell of a chain reaction and in one fell swoop I got two others complete at the same time. The last scroll was matched not long after and the result was...

Stable

Now we're going to train one of our mounts. I use the Griffon because it's faster than the rest. It's time to level it up to level 3. To do this is a rather simple mini-game...

FIFTEEN SECONDS? They must be mad, I hear you say in my head. Well, I wouldn't worry too much about that. All it really does it make you think "OH NO, I MUST HURRY!" but from what I can tell it pretty much resets itself after each move. Just don't panic and hit as many skulls as possible and it's a cakewalk. Maybe at higher levels it gets harder, but I'm not worried enough about my mount to train much more. 

Note: Got friends? They will help you in these fights also. In this fight I was aided by one that helped against flyers and one that has a 25% chance of dealing 20 damage at the start of the fight.

Forge

Certain places on the map give you the chance to "look for runes". These are harder battles against enemies, but once you win you get a rune. I used to do this a lot early on, but as soon as I hit Act 3 I sort of stopped. The runes are for making new items, but I've found that the items I get via quests are better anyway (some are so good I pretty much haven't changed by inventory since the start of Act 2). So, for this example let's just choose random runes. You have to choose three of them, each one has a different effect.

The better runes you choose, the harder it will be to complete. Though there is no punishment for losing apart from wasting your time, you can repeat it as much as you want until you win. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the first rune affects the Character's stats when worn, the second rune can increase the effectiveness of the item and the third rune helps you in battle. I could be wrong in saying though. However, this combination will give us...

A pretty damn good item actually. This is pretty much the same as learning a new spell, except instead of scrolls, you have to destroy Hammer & Anvils. There is a slight gimmick to the Hammer & Anvils though...

Destroying at least one will completely wipe the board. Unlike Scrolls, H&As are random just like any other gem, so in a way this is easier, though I think they're a rarer drop than the rest. The best way to destroy them is to set them up to be in the same row or column as a potential 4-of-a-kind, which will complete destroy the row (if it's vertical) or column (if it's horizontal). After finally getting all eight H&As we get our item!

(I would have put the Victory! screen here...but apparently I decided that it was unimportant...)

Siege Workshop

It's almost over, I swear! The last mini-game attached to the Citadel is the Siege Workshop. However, once we build it we have to go to the city we want to attack, click on it and choose "Siege!"...

If you are to attack other Kingdoms, be sure to have Khalkus as a companion, he'll give you a boost to your Battle skill. Citadels can be tricky to fight, but Enmouth is one of the starter cities, so it shouldn't offer too much of a challenge. After this the battle carries on as normal until you win or lose. If you win...

Excellent. However, gold at this point is only useful to me for one thing...

Temple

Okay, this is the last one I have to talk about! Gods help those who help themselves...but even Gods and Goddesses can be bribed with money (as anyone who has played Half-Minute Hero would know).

Pay gold and increase your skills. By this point you don't need to buy items (in fact, you NEVER do) and as you can see I have seriously neglected some of my skills. I also neglected to show you the look of my skills after I did this, but I'm sure it doesn't matter that much to you.

Phew, that was a long 'un, sorry about that. Luckily I'm pretty sure I'm approaching the end of the game, meaning that the next update will be the "Conclusion" update. Hooray!