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How to scale up your Ratropolis (aka how not to die)

By Tori

November Note: This guide was created several patches ago. A lot of things changed. While the general guidelines remain roughly the same, the exact viability of each strategies and combinations do not. I do not yet have the time to come around and edit the guide.

This guide will provide you with some example builds that can clear wave 30.

Award

Created by

Tori
Offline

Category: Gameplay Basics, Walkthroughs

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

5 Nov, 2019 @ 6:58pm

1 Dec, 2019 @ 12:15am

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Guide Index

Overview

Overview: wave 20+ and why you die

Economy Scaling

Army Scaling

Wall Scaling

Comments

Overview: wave 20+ and why you die

The enemy scaling in the game is non-linear. This makes it feel like you're crushing the game at wave 1-10, maybe struggling a bit in wave 11-20, but everything comes crushing down after 20.

At wave 20+, each normal enemy will have roughly the same health and attack as a rare unit like berserker or armored knight, not to mention special ability like AOE attack, fire attack, and projectile defense (for more info, look at Glossary in game).

This means if they class head-on with your army, most/all of your army will die. Even if you survive, you'll be stuck rebuilding your army only to be met with an even stronger enemy.

So, to survive, you need better tools to deal with enemies!

Also, sorry about badly-sized card images. Will fix soon.

Economy Scaling

Gold is everything.
Buying new cards? You need gold
Building units? You need gold
Building buildings? You need gold (pun intended)
Using skills? You need gold
Using level 2 cards? You need even MORE gold
Getting more gold? You need gold!

Did I mention you need gold? Yes, you will always need gold

So, one of the key requirements to survival is you need either a constant stream of gold or you need a huge sum of gold.

Here are a couple of ways to get good golds!

Play as merchant leader. Well, this isn't exactly helpful, isn't it? But this is literally the best way to get gold in the game. When you activate merchant ability, you get +3% per card per leader level. This means at level 3, you'll gain about half of your current gold with 5 cards. At level 6, you will double your total gold with 5 cards. Merchant leader works best when you have a large bank and high leader level early. You'll need to be aware of where and when you spend your gold relative to your ability cooldown. Card draw is your greatest allies. If you play your cards right, you can get up to 1k gold by the end of wave 3, 5k gold by the end of wave 10, and hit money cap by wave 20.
Mining. Mining looks good on paper but is, by itself, a horrible and slow card. You need to cycle your deck 12 times (or 8 if upgraded) to make it worth a potter (+37 net gold). However, the best part about Mining is that Mining increases not only its worth but also any other Mining card you have in your deck. This means the more Mining cards you have, the faster your scale.

# of cycles to reach net gold per use with 1/2/3/4 Mining
+ 37 gold (potter): 12/6/4/3
+80 gold (farm): 23/12/8/6
+450 gold (upgraded relic with 4 other upgraded): 116/58/39/29 or 77/38/26/19 if upgraded

Notice that 1) the there's a diminishing return on how fast your scale per additional card, and 2) this is the number of turns to make each Mining card reaches certain gold per card , and 3) Mining scales significantly faster if you have smaller decks.
farm and granary. Farm is a straightforward card, it nets you 80 gold/120 seconds (120 gold if upgraded). A granary will multiply the gold from farm by 3 (or 5 if upgraded), increasing it to 240 gold (or 600 gold, if both are upgraded). Additional granary increase the multiplier additively i.e. 2/3/4 granaries will together multiply the gold from farm by 6/9/12 (or 10/15/20). Upgraded farm with 4 upgraded granaries will allow you to gain 2400 golds every 120 seconds. This means you need a lot of base space and tavern, but it's the only way I've found so far to gain a good amount of gold without economy cards.

Fun note: 2 upgrade reuse + upgrade labor command will make farm goes 27 times faster, allowing you to harvest the farm twice in 10 seconds. These 3 cards cost about 400 together, so make sure you do some math before doing it.
Investment. This card can be both a run-saver and run-killer. It doubles or triples your current net worth after 90 seconds, but during that 90 seconds you're basically running on low gold. Running on low gold doesn't sound bad, but remember that you usually want to use investment when you have high gold (so you'd gain more gold), and those gold are supposed to go somewhere. So, you use investment, now that somewhere doesn't have gold, and you also don't have gold. So, before playing investment, you have to make sure you have some sizable amount of gold you can gain right away e.g. farm, low-cost economy cards, bounty multiplier currently in play, etc. Also, investment works best if you have festival!
Relic. Relic is another interesting card. Relic will only work if 1) you have multiple smithy running, or 2) you have multiple monasteries with cleric advisor (upgrade a random card when a card is removed). Research may work, but it's quite slow. If you decide to go with Relic, Relic is the first card you want to upgrade since Relic counts itself. This means even even if Relic is the only upgraded card in the deck, it'll net +30 gold, which is not the best card in the world, but it's definitely not bad. If all of your cards are upgraded, Relic is + 450 gold for a 5-card hand.

Army Scaling

If you can't win with current units, an obvious solution is "let's make our unit bigger!". In Ratropolis, there are a few way you can make that happen:

simply getting better units. There are two ultimate units in this game, which are Royal Guard (obtained from Squire and Bachelor) and Duck (obtained from egg). It's highly recommended to put the "baby" form of these ultimate units on inner walls since you won't get the ultimate units of they die. Also, since both of these units are single-used, it's highly recommended to combo with multiple Tavern so that you can deploy several of them, and with Aid Station or First Aid to keep them healthy. Upgraded them to level 2 whenever you can.
literally making your unit bigger! There's a single-use skill card called syringe, which increase the max HP of a single deployed unit by 100 (or 150 for syringe level 2). If you have multiple tavern running, you can make your unit huge and harder to kill.
arm your units to the teeth with Re-Use and Arm. Arm is a simple skill card that give temporary buff to military cards in your hand similar to military leader's ability. Re-Use is a skill card that makes the next skill card you used play 2 times (or 3 times if upgraded), including Re-Use. This means that if I played 2 Re-Use in a row, the next skill card will be played 4 times (and 9 if upgraded). 3 in a row will be 8 times/27 times, and so on. So, what you have to do is playing Re-Use a couple of time, play Arm, and, BOOM!, you get a couple of super solders on the fields!

Side note: if you don't have a second Re-Use, you can also do it with Specialize -> Re-Use -> temporary Re-Use you get from Specialize -> Arm
Barrack scaling. Barrack is a building that can permanently make your unit card stronger. You read that right, it make your unit card permanently stronger. However, due to its long cooldown, you will usually be able to use it only so many times, which might not be enough for the final waves.

There are a few cards like Visit that will allow you to use Barrack more often, but there's one card in particular that will make this combo ridiculously strong: Labor Command. Labor Command is basically a global Work card, which is not exactly the best card in the world. However, Labor Command stacks multiplicatively with itself i.e. 2 Labor Command will make all production goes 4 times as fast (or 9, if both are upgraded), 3 will get 8/27 times, and so on. This means... well you know what I'm about to say, you can quickly upgrade your units over and over again as long as you keep multiple Labor Command in effects.

And if you didn't skip reading the previous build, you'll realize that you don't need multiple Labor Command cards if you have Specialize or Re-Use. Yes, it works!

Wall Scaling

TODO

tl;dr:

1. reinforce + repair + longbowrat

2. reinforce + thorn fence

for both, ignite and bomb are also recommended

15 Comments

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eraemus 15 Apr, 2024 @ 11:09pm

The merchant card capitalism allows you to copy 1-2 cards which allows you to copy D.Rex(Duck) or the Royal Guard, but you'll have to do it with 0 gold, works fine with preparations.

The scientist card museum reduces card cost per unique card in the deck, two of these essentially makes the need for gold obsolete, which allows you to spam lasers and quick-redraws.

NisseDood 6 Nov, 2023 @ 11:13pm

Pick female merchant.
Pick investment.
Insta finish it with her leader skill.
Loadsamoney.

jojo_star 28 Mar, 2021 @ 6:51pm

good guide. Thanks!

Tori [author] 1 Jan, 2021 @ 9:38pm

@Craig I'm glad I could be of help. This guide was written so long ago that I'm surprised it's still useful at all due to all the major patch chances.

Craig 1 Jan, 2021 @ 5:56pm

Got my first win after reading this. Thanks

JohnBirthday 23 Dec, 2020 @ 1:03pm

Didn't read the whole title and thought it was a guide on how to upscale it to 4k resolution

Mened (she/her) 9 Mar, 2020 @ 12:06pm

How to win Ratropolis :

1) play navigator

2) win

Zed 30 Dec, 2019 @ 10:32pm

For economy scaling, I'd like to just throw the Breed card out there as a repeatable way to get more population, since I've found that it's a lot harder to get a lot of ratizens than a lot of gold.

Labor synergies have been key for a lot of my successful runs, and Breed is the card that makes them so strong by giving you additional population, without taking up building space, alongside things like Soul Flower, if I'm using Soul synergies, and Brewing, for the additional card draw. Restaurants are great, because they can make the labor cards profitable up front, as well as a long term investment. Grain is OK, but I'd ditch it once I got Brewing and Breed.

So far I have won runs without a Labor synergy package, mostly by duplicating upgraded D-Rexes with a tavern, but the only run I completed without Breed ever being in my deck was using the General leader and a big deck of military units, including 2 taverns to duplicate my ultimate unit cards with.

Kermode Bear 18 Nov, 2019 @ 1:39pm

Also note that the Rally card, combined with the General's special ability, can over time and with some luck create very strong units. Rally will pull a unit off of a wall in its current state, so if it has already been augmented with the General's ability then you can augment the unit again and drop it back onto the wall.

This is mostly limited by the General's ability cooldown but it does work quite well.

Reaper 11 Nov, 2019 @ 3:27pm

Gold is everything.... Until you get V advisor... then it free real estate.

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