Strategy Guide for the New and Intermediate Player

This guide is intended for the beginner player who has learned how to play but has no idea what to do next; when to attack, where to move, what pitfalls to watch out for etc. since I’ve played this game quite a lot now, I feel ready to share what I think are the most important things to consider. 

First, it’s important to understand that sitting in your castle and playing defensively is hardly ever an option. The focus in Dragon Soul is to conquer the map. This is done both with the position of your battalions (similar to chess), and with more castles. From a macro perspective, the game is played similarly to medieval historical conquest; battles were rarely fought over a castle (contrary to Hollywood), starving them out through a siege was always the preferred approach. This is also how Dragon Soul is designed, victory through attrition, the larger kingdom and military will almost always win. 

~~Aim for your Opponent’s Economy~~

If you have played Starcraft, this concept is already familiar to you. But for those unfamiliar with RTS games in general, you can think of Dragon Soul like a fencing dual. Your battalion(s) is your sword, and your castle is your body. In a dual, your objective is to inflict bodily harm on your opponent, not to merely hit their sword with your sword. It might be tempting to attack their battalions whenever you are in range, but it’s usually better to go around and focus on advancing towards their castles. By gunning for their castles, you put the impetus on your opponent to stop you. Going back to the fencing analogy, this would mean stabbing at their body, and forcing them to parry your attack. The closer you can march your battalion to their castle, the more easily you can harm them. Once you are contesting their castle, you are already delivering devastating damage to your opponent. Not only do they lose income, lose use of a battalion, and lose deployment capability to that castle, but they are also forced to deal with this threat, which effectively occupies another battalion of theirs to accomplish this.

Marching your battalions to contest their castles is the most destructive damage you can do to your opponent. I would go so far as to say usually the game is drawing to a close once one player is able to do this in a 1 on 1, this is because when you do this your opponent will not only suffer one less card each turn, but perhaps more detrimentally, one fewer battalion as well. So, I will reiterate once more, your primary focus is to move your battalion towards their castles, not to attack their battalion. 

Once a castle is contested, they will not be able to deploy any more soldier cards; this is similar to a Starcraft “supply block” move. For example, if you have three castles, and two battalions on the map, once your opponent contests one of your castles, you will not be able to deploy a third battalion. The cards in your current battalions are likely the only soldiers you will have on the map for the rest of the game, and you will likely lose. So if your opponent is about to contest one of your castles, you better make sure that all of your soldier cards are safely deployed so that you can easily eliminate their battalion.

~~Map Control~~

This brings me to the next point. If you want to retreat to a castle to bolster your forces, make sure you do so when your opponent’s battalion is at least two spaces away from yours before you begin your retreat. This is because you need two extra turns to bring your battalion back to your castle, and then deploy more soldier cards your following turn to the battalion before your opponent’s battalion is contesting your castle. I played many games where I didn’t count the two spaces between my battalion and my opponent, only to find that I was not able to deploy more soldiers once I returned back to my castle because of the one turn delay between moving and deploying.

All of the information above is the most important concepts to playing dragon soul at an advanced level. Most of the difficulty of the game is actually maneuvering your battalions on the map properly. However, I’d like to now review some strategies regarding the actual battles themselves, which in their own right contribute greatly to the outcome of a game.

~~Attack with the Swordsman~~

First off, the most powerful and important soldier is the swordsman. The standard play is to only use a swordsman on offense because it wins 75% of the time. In addition to this high win rate, the highest win rate soldier a defensive player has is an archer. But here’s the kicker: an archer loses to a swordsman, so this now the swordsman wins even when the defensive player plays their best card. This is what the meta of the battles is all about: deciding if your opponent is going to play a swordsman or not on their offensive attack, and either playing a knight to kill it, or even a spearman to absorb the blow since spearmen are the least valuable soldier. So how can you tell if your opponent will play a swordsman? 

~~Reading your opponent~~

A lot of it comes down to psychology, feel, observing how your opponent plays, and luck, but there are a couple other tricks to consider that may get you thinking in the right way. Suppose you are in the early part of a game, and you have just one soldier in your battalion. You have a swordsman in your battalion, so you are hoping to be able to attack your opponent’s battalion with that 75% win-rate, rather than to be attacked and only have a 50% win-rate. Because of this, you will want to make sure you are the one attacking your opponent, not move to a spot where it is convenient for them to attack you. Similarly, if you hold a spearman, you might want to put your battalion in a spot where your opponent will likely choose to attack you. To paraphrase, use spearmen and archer on defense and knight swordsmen on offense. Of course, you can’t make this too obvious as your opponent will catch on.

If you find that your opponent is too greedy playing swordsman on the offense, begin mixing in knights on defense. At this point, your opponent might catch onto you and play a knight on offense. Of course, this is when it’s wise to play an archer or a spearman. 

Quickly it becomes a game of “you know that I know that you know” etc. The most important thing to remember, is that the starting point meta is the swordsman. The swordsman is the strongest attacker, and your goal is to secure a kill every time you play the swordsman. If they start countering you with knights, it becomes wise to throw in an archer attack from time to time.

The battles in Dragon Soul are not too complicated, as stated above, but any poker player knows the psychology of reading your opponent can be a skill that you develop. (In advanced Dragon Soul which is coming out soon, there are also formation attacks) I could go on, but this is not supposed to be an in-depth analysis of the game and strategy, but rather a helpful guide to starting players who don’t know where to begin. So before I finish here, I’d like to just tell you my overall thoughts on how the dragon versus battalion battles generally plays out. 

~~Use Dragons to Block Battalion’s Path~~

First of all, the goal of the dragon is to eliminate as many enemy soldiers as possible. This can often be done by using the dragon to block important points they will need to pass. Blocking with a dragon is very effective since battalions have no ability to attack them. You could block your enemy’s battalion from contesting one of your castles, or even deter the battalion from going that direction at all. Figure out where your opponent is trying to go and land a dragon there so that as your opponent passes by you can get at least one attack on the battalion, if not two. Let’s briefly review some of the principles in the dragon versus battalion battle.

From the dragon’s perspective, there is a high-risk, high-reward attack and a low-risk, low-reward attack. The flame breath is the high-risk since you are risking your dragon to kill their entire battalion, and the claw attack is the low-risk, (not zero-risk since you risk the enemy battalion doing harm). Your dragon can’t die using that attack, but you also might do zero damage. What most players initially seem to overlook is that the battalion coin has a similar layout. The ballista defense is the low-risk choice because you only risk losing potentially half of your battalion, and the shield wall is the high-risk choice, because you might lose the entire battalion. Just players get confused by associating the shield icon with safety, it is the riskier option here. Another way to see the shield is that it is a greedy play. If you think your dragon opponent is playing it too safe, then you might want to capitalize on that by playing the shield. For example, if you are one step away from conquering an enemy castle but a dragon attacks you once before you do, it is much safer to play the ballista defense, lose half of your army, but still conquer the castle. 

Because of this dichotomy, the meta becomes such that the standard safest play is to use the claw attack with the dragon and play the ballista defense with your battalion, letting your forces be whittled down. If you feel that your opponent is getting too comfortable with that meta, then you can look for the right moment when they are unsuspecting and go for a greedy play either with the fire breath, or with the shield. 

I will end this summary of a strategy guide here, I hope you find it helpful, and perhaps at a later date, I will work on a more in-depth analysis of the strategy behind dragon soul. Again, this is for Dragon Soul “Original”, or “basic”, a more advanced set of rules is coming out soon! Thank you for reading, and go get ‘em!