Hey! While most of the game's strategy discussion so far focuses on drafting cards, I want to talk about another aspect of the game which can make a huge difference: assigning damage. --- **Armor basics** Armor is a resource. You buy it when you draft cards, and then you use it to take hits. It stands to reason, then, that you want to make the most of the armor you have. As covered in the game's tutorial, you can assign attacks that are up to twice as powerful as the armor remaining on a card without splitting the damage. If you assign a 6 damage hit to a 3 armor card, for example, 3 of the damage goes away. It's important to recognize that hitting an exact multiple of 2 is one of the most efficient ways to use armor and can nullify strong attacks. The other basic aspect of damage assignment is splitting attacks. If you assign more than half of an attack's damage, it stays but gets halved, rounded down. Using a 1-armor card to take a high-damage attack is the single most efficient way to use armor, and it's also great for odd-numbered attacks that get rounded down. It's doubly true for odd-numbered high-damage attacks. As an example, it's round 4, you have out two ruins with 1 and 2 armor, and you're looking for the best way to take a 9 damage attack (e.g. War Elephants). If hit your 1-armor ruin first, the 9 damage attack is halved *and* rounded down, to 4. You can then drop the remaining 4 damage attack on your 2-armor ruin, removing it. --- **Knockouts** Knockouts are bad, but rarely avoidable. During war, though, you can use knockouts to your advantage. First, recognize that any knocked out card that *doesn't* get ruined is restored to full armor minus 1 at the end of the round. There's a minimum of 1 here. If a high-armor card (e.g. your Stone Wall) is KOed and it doesn't get ruined, it gets a significant chunk of armor back, for free. That's an incredibly efficient way to use your armor. Moreover, if a 1-armor card (e.g. your Heavy Catapults) is KOed and it doesn't get ruined, it gets *all* its armor back for, for free. In terms of efficiency, you can't do any better than that. There's another aspect to this, too. At the end of every round, if you have any cards that have been knocked out, one of them is going to be ruined. It stands to reason, then, that the worst possible outcome is when you have exactly one card knocked out; 100% of your KOed cards are ruined, and you get no benefits from the armor restoration. You want either zero knockouts, or several. And perhaps more importantly, there are a plethora of cards in the game that can screw you and kill your high-value cards. If you're in a situation where you've lost an important card, one of the things you can do is knock out as many other less important cards as possible, preferably 1-armor cards. Then, when the game randomly selects a card to ruin, there's a significant chance it'll pick one of the cards that are less important to you, and you can get your high-value card back in a later round. Of course, it's important to be careful with knocking out cards that have culture and/or permanent bonuses. The culture won't score at the end of the round, and the permanent bonuses will be lost. Generally speaking, you don't ever want to knock those out if you don't have to. And if you can avoid having to knock *anything* out, that's often a good idea, too, as you won't get a ruin for the round. --- **Planning for Round 4** Any armor on a card that you don't draft in round 4 is ultimately wasted. If you're trying to avoid knockouts, then it makes sense to bring the armor on as many of these cards as you can down to 1, preserving the armor for later. For example, the many 3-armor economic cards tend to be a great option for getting rid of 2-damage attacks, as you'll rarely play them in round 4 unless you have to. Civic cards you've picked up but aren't interested in playing later are another good example of this. Another thing to note is that sometimes you actually want ruins going into round 4. Ruins, particularly ruins with 2 armor, are quite useful defensively, and they don't cost anything. If a card isn't going to score you points at the end of round 3 and you know you don't want to play it in round 4, knock it out. You might end up needing to draft it in round 4 after all, and then it's great to have a 0-cost card you can use to take attacks. --- **Doing this quickly** You've only got a limited time in which to assign damage to your units, so here are some tips for doing it faster. First, you can start in the conquest phase. While the animation is going on, you can already be mentally sorting out where you're going to put the damage. Usually, I've already figured things out by the time that war starts, and the extra time can be nice when dealing with 6-8 attacks. Start by thinking about knockouts. Can you get away with zero KOs for the round and avoid getting a ruin? Do you have a valuable card KOed that you would like to save? Then, mentally sort your cards into functional groups. I group things according to value and armor: *Value*: Valuables are things I need to keep alive. Moderate valuables are things I'd like to have alive. Expendables are things I'm okay with knocking out. *Armor*: High-armor cards are things with 4+ armor. Medium-armor cards have 2 or 3. Low-armor cards have 1 armor and are perfect for splitting large attacks. Then, I run through the biggest couple of attacks first. There are generally two options: take the hit or split it. I mentally run through either scenario and pick the one that works out better, then move on to the next attack. If I can manage it, I like to have the entire attack sorted out before I start clicking on things. In rare cases where I'm looking to save a valuable card from being ruined, there won't be enough attacks coming my way to actually KO everything I *want* KOed for the round. When that happens, it's important to try and be as inefficient as possible, getting 1 damage per point of attack wherever I can. --- **Other tips** A lot of Fortified cards are made to have high armor. The worst thing you can do is leave them at 1 or 2 armor when the round ends. If possible, either KO them or keep their armor high enough to be usable in a later round. Some cards, like Shieldwall, Mounted Guard, and Cataphracts, grant temporary armor to your units. This is armor that goes away at the end of the round whether you use it or not. Use it if you can. Keep card effects in mind. Some of the ones I can think of: - Don't KO cards that affect the bonuses you get from others you have out. - If your opponent has Onagers out and it hasn't activated, try to keep a Fortified card alive. - If your opponent has Fort of Last Resort, every one of your attackers that dies reduces its effect. This can deprive them of a lot of culture and sometimes score surprise kills on the fort. - If you've got a Temple of Protection that hasn't activated, the first thing you kill is coming right back. - If you have an Unholy Practitioner that hasn't activated, KOing things is more or less free. - If you've got Lord of Decay out and no ruin, you'll want to KO at least one thing so it can activate at the end of the round with the ruin you get. - If you've got Ruiner of All Things or Dragoons, ruining them comes with perks. - If you have Shock Troops, they're getting ruined anyway so you can KO them freely. - If your opponent has Saboteur and you have exactly one Economy card out, you might as well KO it since it's getting ruined anyway. The same is true of Gleeful Destroyer and high-culture cards. - Never, ever let Great Council die; it drops to -6 points and all the money you spent on it is worse than wasted. --- And that's it! Let me know if you have any questions, and I'd appreciate any feedback on whether or not this is helpful and/or how to improve it.

Wow, this is excellent. I'm going to Pin it. Thanks!

One thing to add is that knocking out a card resets all of its otherwise permanent stat changes (other than transformations into other cards). So you can knock out a debuffed card to restore it to normal after (minus 1 armor) if it isn't ruined. And to clarify, the games seems to work that any positive culture on a knocked out card is not counted, but any negative culture on a knocked out card is still counted, so knocking them out to avoid their score is futile.

very nice : I would add the most important tip : try to put samage on cards that have a defense bonus for the turn (with a "has" effect, not a "gain" effect). That way, any damage done to it is ultimatly nullyfied since the card would lose it's armor anyway

This came up in the Q&A thread, but I thought I'd repost it here as well. When you're trying to figure out what effects on a card will survive a knockout and what won't: Cards that get knocked out and then restored revert both temporary and permanent stat changes. This includes both buffs and debuffs. So if you lost half your culture due to Pantheon, you can knock out that card and if it doesn't get Ruined, it will be restored with full culture. Similarly, if your Warrior Poets have grown to 6 culture but then get knocked out, they will be back at 0 culture following a restoration. However, there is a 3rd kind of change, which is a change that sets your base armor/culture/attack to a specific new value. This happens when you copy/swap a stat or set a stat to a specific number (as opposed to adding/subtracting). The cards that currently do this are The Oracle, Myrmidons, Gladiators, Jumbling Jester, Kingmaker, War Drums and Prescient Priestess. Those changes essentially become the card's new base value and they survive a restoration. These are not considered "buffs", they completely replace the card's original value.