Housing is one of the most vital aspects of building a city in Black & White 2; all of your villagers need places to live and sleep. However, they like to do so with a modicum of comfort, so if you're playing as a Good god, you'll need to carefully consider the placement of various buildings around your houses, as well as the types of buildings that you build. If you are a Good god, try not to place homes extremely close together if you can avoid it. The presence of a house will have an oh-so-slightly negative effect on the happiness of nearby buildings. In point of fact, though, it's all but impossible to avoid clustering houses together; just try to break up the monotony with happiness-increasing structures such as wells, lamps, and stores, and you should be able to counteract the unhappiness that comes from being crammed into a Levittown.

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If you're Evil, and you don't necessarily care about the comfort and well-being of your citizens, you can stow them in hovels or just force them to sleep on the streets, but that's not nice!

Overall, the best way to avoid unhappiness in your homes is to build them around structures with large happiness bonuses, such as temples or baths. Keep in mind that skyscrapers, although they're efficient at saving your village space, will eventually grow into slum conditions if you build too many of them atop one another. You can still safely get away with skyscrapers of five or six stories, though, especially if you build them near extremely happy-making buildings, such as amphitheaters.


On the opposite side of the coin, make sure that you avoid building structures that your citizens find unpleasant near their homes. Armories are the prime culprit here for Good players, as they have a markedly bad effect on the morale of people who live in nearby homes, but so do industrial buildings such as the granary or the smelter. Try to build them in a separate section of town, if possible, to mitigate their negative impact on your town. You can tell whether a building will have a positive or negative impact on the happiness of another building by just holding the mouse in place over where you're going to lay the foundation.

Of course, if you're playing as an Evil god, you don't have to worry very much about the happiness of your citizens; you need to focus on their productivity, which can often actually be boosted by scaring the crap out of the townspeople. Putting up sacrifice pits in the middle of a residential block will remind your peons what fate awaits them if they don't shut up and work, as will erecting a bunch of spikes with decapitated heads on them. You can be a lot more practical in your city designs than the goody-two-shoes city planners, if only because your only real concern is to ensure that your citizens don't starve to death. Beyond that, you don't really have to care about them!

Lastly, keep in mind that different kinds of homes will get you either Good or Evil bonuses, depending on what you're building. Building the worst kind of home, a hovel, is an automatically Evil act, while building a mansion or a manor will usually earn you Good points.

There's a secret minigame hidden away on the fourth land of Black & White 2--the land where you finally conquer your Norse opponents. If you look down the beach near your city, you should notice a small cave with a man standing outside of it, poking at a fire with a stick. Although he's outside your area of influence, you can indeed pick him up, leading to an amusing way to earn some tribute. The goal here is to pick the man up and throw him as far as possible. Don't worry if you're playing as a Good god; the man is unkillable, even though he complains loudly about his bad back. You'll also be treated to a nice little slo-mo treatment of the old man's inevitable collapse back to the Earth. If you manage to toss the man more than 100 units of distance, you should be able to earn an easy 15,000 tribute!

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If you don't manage to earn any tribute on your first throw, just pick the guy up and try again. Heck, even if you do get your tribute, you can keep throwing the guy around all you like, just for amusement's sake.

The Seven Samurai quest is found on the sixth land of the game, during your war with the two Japanese brothers. If you can free these samurai from their stony bonds, they'll join your cause and be a mighty fighting force for you. If you follow our advice, though, you'll be able to turn the seven samurai into as many samurai as you like. To begin with, find the silver scroll that leads to the quest on one of the peninsulas leading off the main island. After doing so, you'll be able to look around the island and find the seven statues scattered around, mostly in mountainous areas. When you click one, it's teleported back to the altar. Finding all seven can be tricky, but one thing to remember about the statues is that they glow, so if you're not zoomed out all the way, you can spot them from above by their auras. This is made easier if you tilt the camera all the way up and look straight down at the ground.

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When all of the statues have been returned to the altar, you need to place them all on the pedestals in the correct order to revert the samurai back to human form. They're all color-coded, and each of them matches one color of the rainbow. Thus, you need to place them on the altar in this order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. If you're looking toward the altar, the red statue goes on the right-most pedestal, and so on.


After you have the seven samurai at your disposal, you'll find that they're a dominating force on the battlefield; they can usually take out a 20-man platoon without losing a single soldier. For the moment, you can park them on the narrow land bridge that leads to your area and let them guard against any incoming foes. When you build up your town a bit, though, you can actually strengthen the squad well beyond its intended power.

If you intentionally let a member of the squad die, so that there are fewer than seven members of the platoon, you'll be able to pick up as many civilians as you like and drop them on the squad, making a huge squad of almost unkillable samurai. Just make sure that the last civilian you pick up is a valid male target (that is, not an old man or a child), and you should be able to convert all of them into samurai, even the women. If you hover over the platoon and find that you can make only breeders, then drop your civilians one at a time until you get the prompt to turn them into soldiers; at this point you can hold down the drop button, and everyone remaining in your hand will turn into a samurai.

If you want to intentionally kill off one of the samurai, doing so is relatively easy. Just move them into your area of influence and drop a big rock on one of the samurai. Doing so is Evil, though, so if you want to avoid picking up Evil points (albeit a very minor amount), you can run your platoon out to a group of enemy archers, let them get wounded, then return to town.