Wargroove beginner’s guide

The combat in Wargroove can be frustrating if you’re not familiar with the game’s unique style of turn-based combat. Even though the story mode does do a good job of introducing new concepts to ease you into mastery, some of the game’s early battles can still be tough.

If you keep these four tips in mind, you’ll be slaying enemy commanders and their troops with ease.

FOCUS ON GETTING CRITICAL HITS

Every unit in Wargroove has the ability to land a critical hit, which deals massive damage. If you use this ability, most units can defeat certain enemies in a single blow. Not all units are the same, though. Each has different requirements to perform a critical attack.

For instance, swordsmen can only do a critical attack if their commander is directly next to them. The long-range trebuchet has more difficult prerequisite: It needs to attack a target at max range to hit the hardest.

Chucklefish via Polygon

Our best advice for learning all of these conditions is going into the game’s codex and reading about each unit. Every member of your army has several pages of information explaining their key roles in battle, statistics for how they perform against other units, and more importantly, a written and visual representation for how to perform their critical attack.

Critical attacks are essential for making quick work of your enemies.

COUNTER PICK UNITS

While critical attacks are the strongest way to deal damage, you can perform one-hit kills if you attack the right kind of enemy.

Each unit in the game is both strong and weak against an array of other enemy types. The key to keeping your army alive and defeating your enemy quickly is to counter pick units. Choosing soldiers who have natural advantages against whatever you enemy has is essential for surviving in Wargroove.

It’s easy to figure out which units to pick at any given moment. When you access a unit’s info panel on the battlefield, you’ll see a full chart of information. On the bottom of each panel is a list of their advantages and disadvantages against all possible units. While this information isn’t spelled out in plain text, you can rely on the visuals to make your choices.

In each list, you’ll see a small icon that represents different units. The “effective” list will show you units that are weak against the unit you’re looking at while the “vulnerable” list shows units that have an advantage against that unit. Unfortunately, this list relies on small icons to display all of this useful information. A future update that makes this chart easier to understand may be coming soon, according to the game’s developer.

Chucklefish via Polygon

Use this information to choose which soldiers to bring into battle. Whenever your enemy summons new units, immediately check out their table of advantages and disadvantages so you can summon the best units on your next turn.

This is much easier to do in story mode where the enemy commander will always pick a certain selection of units. In arcade and competitive modes, this will be more challenging, but as long as you stack the odds in your favor by counter picking, your units will have a fighting chance. If you make the right picks and use their critical attacks well, you can defeat units in one attack.

USE YOUR COMMANDERS PROPERLY

In every battle you play in Wargroove, you control one of the game’s 12-plus commanders. Each hits harder than your average unit and has more health. But it’s their special talent — or Groove — that makes each unique.

After taking part in combat for a while, each commander can unleash their special ability. Some commanders have the ability to decimate their enemies, while others can heal their units or control the battlefield. Understanding how each skill can tip the scales is key for mastering each commander’s playstyle.

Chucklefish via Polygon

Mercia, the game’s main character, has a healing ability that covers a wide area. If you surround her with swordsmen who gain the ability to do critical attacks if they are next to her, she can heal a handful of them in a single turn when her special ability is ready. Her talent helps her stay in the thick of battle with her units, making her as essential to the frontline troops as the rest of her army. On the other hand, commanders like Greenfinger can drop several vines across the battlefield, making him an expert at keeping the enemy at bay and using long-range units.

Jumping into the codex will give you short strategies for each commander. In the various pages detailing their backstory and battle styles, you’ll get insight into how to use each of their special abilities with animated previews of them in action. Keep these in mind when you choose commanders for arcade and competitive modes. While each commander has access to the same units, albeit with different designs, their special talents make them feel unique.

CONTROLLING VILLAGES

Wargroove is as much about combat as it’s about resource management. In each battlefield, littered among the roads, rivers, and mountains are several villages.

Capturing a village has two benefits: Units can heal at your controlled villages, and every turn each village you control gives you 100 gold.

You’ll need gold to summon units, and controlling villages is the only way to earn it. Remember that the more of them you control, the more money you gain per turn. You can use that money to summon more units quickly or get access to more expensive units sooner than you would otherwise.

Chucklefish via Polygon

One of your main objectives to capture these villages quickly, but you should also be mindful that you can take control of any village that your enemy controls.

Captured villages sort of act like units, inasmuch as they can counterattack when a unit strikes them. However, once a village is defeated, it becomes neutral and you can capture it. Not only does this new village give you 100 more gold per turn, but your enemy will no longer gain resources from that village. Sucking all the resources from your enemy will put them at a severe disadvantage. You’ll soon be able to have more units on the battlefield than they can afford to make.

One of the most interesting aspects of Wargroove is that there are no clear advantages or disadvantages at the start of each fight. It’s up players to swing the scales in their favor using a mixture of critical attacks, unit disadvantages, and resource management. Implementing all these strategies in tandem — while taking advantage of each commander’s special ability — is important to succeed in Wargroove. If you’re ever feeling stuck in a campaign mission or struggling in an arcade battle, go back to these basics. Once you master these, there shouldn’t be a battle too difficult to win.