Black & White 2’s storyline culminates in your victory over the Aztecs (remember: it’s the journey, not the destination), but the Battle of the Gods expansion pack included with the game takes you back to Eden, where a small group of Aztec survivors has summoned a new god. He is a god of the undead, one who will tear Eden asunder, unless you can stop him.

Added features include a pair of new Creatures, the turtle and the tiger, and new miracles that allow you to raise the dead as animated warriors, cause a volcanic eruption, and more. You can also build a hospital, abattoir, or blacksmith shop, put up a flagpole that makes your villagers more patriotic, place signposts that guide wayward people, and add other little improvements to your towns.

You can also import your creature from Black & White 2 before you tackle the expansion pack’s new challenges and fight to keep Eden from being destroyed by the Aztecs’ god.

• Place buildings along the edge of your sphere of influence to extend it in that direction. The more impressive they are, the farther your green border will move. If you want to evenly extend your influence in all directions, place the building in the middle of your territory.
• Every time you construct new buildings, connect roads to them. Roads are free to create and they allow your villagers to get where they’re going faster, which helps you accumulate resources at a quicker rate. Roads also boost your impressiveness a little bit.
• Your villagers will follow the most efficient paths between destinations, so if you notice the grass worn down in a certain area, put a road there.
• You can add floors to a skyscraper after building it, but if you pile on too many, you run the risk of overcrowding it and creating slum conditions.
• If you’re playing as a good god, pay attention to the effects that buildings have on each other. For example, placing houses too close together will upset your villagers, as will putting granaries, armories, or other industrial buildings near their homes. Of course, if you’re an evil god, you won’t care if they’re happy, as long as they’re productive, so feel free to scare your villagers by sticking things like sacrifice pits near their homes.
• Buildings’ impressiveness decreases once you purchase more than four of the same one. That’s not a big deal with something like a house, which doesn’t come with a lot of impressiveness and which you need to accommodate a growing population, but when you’re talking about an amphitheater, you’re wasting tribute points and resources placing a fifth one in your village.
• Walls are your village’s best defense, unless the opposition brings a siege weapon to knock them down. You can keep archers on your walls to repel invaders, but they will require twice the normal amount of food while they’re pulling guard duty.

• Prisons not only make your people feel more secure about being safe from crime, but you can also use those buildings to process ore and convert enemies to your side.
• Shake the mouse left and right to undo an action you’re about to make, such as placing a building.
• The same miracle can have a profoundly different impact, depending on how you use it. For example, water can help grow crops or it can drown people. An evil god might want to use the latter to keep the populace in line, while a god of either alignment would find it useful if enemy soldiers entered their sphere of influence.
• Your Creature feels most comfortable in its pen, so place it there when it’s tired or injured to bring it up to full speed faster.
• To replenish a platoon’s dead soldiers, simply grab some villagers and drop them on it; they’ll convert into troops and join the army. You can even go beyond your platoon’s original enlistment when doing so.
• Your Creature needs to eat, which means it also needs to do its, um, dirty business. Sometimes it may relieve itself near buildings or on roads, which will upset your villagers. That’s a perfectly acceptable turn of events for evil gods, but good gods will want to fling those droppings away from populated areas. Just be glad this is all happening in the digital realm.
• Your Creature’s role overrides any training you’ve given it previously. If it stays in that role for too long, however, its free will may be affected.
• Battle of the Gods expands the game’s RTS element by making it much harder to fight while moving uphill. The army headed downhill always has a large advantage.