I think Regions of Ruin is a fantastic game. And one of the fun aspects is learning all of the systems in the game that make you crazy overpowered. So here is a collection of all I learned while playing. I finished the game in 20 hours and unlocked all achievements except the bunny killing one (no idea how many I have left and don't know that I have the patience to do that.

This guide will pretty much break the game and make you near unstoppable on normal difficulty. One of the tricks I share is a straight up cheat. So use sparingly. However most of this is just general info to streamline your experience.

Check out the guides other people have made. In particular if you have trouble with some of the puzzles.

Creating your village is central to the game's plot and progression. Understanding what each building offers you and what to prioritize upgrading will help you a lot.

Order and placement of Buildings
You will find yourself visiting some buildings more than others, so it's helpful to place them in a way to minimize foot travel when you visit. I'm listing these from the center (most visited) out wards (least visited) for optimal pathing.

Campfire: I believe this was placed in the center for you (I can't remember) if not, placing it in the center of the map is a good idea as this is where you spawn and you will likely visit it every time to heal and repair equipment.

Storage: Dropping off any loot you don't want to sell right away is a pretty common activity, so I'd place this directly next to your campfire (left).

Tavern: I would place this to the other side of your campfire (right) as you will want to collect the gold from the chest in front once it is upgraded.

Market: is handy to sell loot every visit, so you want that close. Ideally next to the tavern so all merchants are next to each other.

Smithy: At some point you will start scrapping loot for resources (especially metals). I generally scrap Armors and sell weapons as weapons tend to have a higher value.

Smelter: Used to craft and convert metal types. You will likely use this frequently mid-game to craft metals for upgrading village buildings.

Apothecary: You will visit here to craft healing items. But depending on you play style (and difficulty level) you may not visit it often.

Rune Forge: If you decide to use it, you'll get in the habit of disenchanting loot, then breaking it down in the Smithy or selling it at a vendor. I'll explain later why this building is not important/recommended.

Trade Depot: For buying/selling resources. You might use this mid/late game, but only once in a while.

Library: You will definitely use this but only once in a great while.

Training Grounds: You will only ever visit this to upgrade the building, so place it on a far edge.


Tavern Clicker Game
This deserves a mention of it's own. Build the Tavern and talk to the barkeep inside. Play the clicker minigame. Every time you build a new building in the town you unlock a new resource to mine in the game, which unlocks more upgrades. To the left of the minigame screen you will see a trophy. Click on it to see the upgrades they unlock. These affect the rest of the game and are very powerful. You want to unlock them ASAP, so prioritize visiting map locations to get resources to build new buildings, then after each building play the minigame until you've hit the new cap. Also note the mask on the right of the minigame screen (opposite the trophy) purchase those upgrades when you can to speed up the process.

Library Upgrades
Collect book pages in the world (activate book cases and books on pedestals when you see them) then spend money to put the book together for an in game bonus (similar to bonuses from the tavern minigame). These will take time (and a lot of money) to unlock. One of the tavern minigame bonuses will increase the rate of finding pages and speed this up quite a bit. I had all the pages before I had enough money to unlock all the books.

Storage Space
The storage building increases your personal storage as well as the cap on resources, so upgrading that early is worth while.

Now that you have a good idea of how you want to build up your village, it's time to start doing the hard work. You will need to spend food to "explore" the map and remove the fog of war. Then travel to and clear the discovered map locations.

Each location has a finite amount of resources which you can collect once that location is cleared. You don't know what resource each location has until you visit it, but you don't have to clear the location. Once you visit it the resources should show up when you click on the map location in the map. Also, traveling from location to location doesn't seem to consume food, just exploring the map.

Transporting Resources
Once you've unlocked a map location with available resources, you need to transport them to your village. On the bottom left of your map screen is an icon that opens up the menu for designating workers to move goods to your village. Assign them as you see fit. Remember to check this every once in a while.

Workers
You gain workers by doing quests to clear map locations and by freeing dwarfs from cages in various map locations. I'm going to give you some counter intuitive advice. Don't free every dwarf you see in a cage! By mid game you will have plenty of resources and your village unlocks maxed out. Any idle dwarfs will just hang out in you village map and make it hard to see merchants and other NPCs you want to interact with. I recommend freeing dwarfs until you have maybe 10 available workers, then getting the rest from quests. You should have plenty.

The leveling system is pretty straight forward so I won't go into a lot of detail here. I'd say split your base stats evenly as they benefit all play styles.

Perks
Perks are very playstyle dependent, however some branches benefit everyone. I would rate their importance from Quick Attacks, Defense, Power Attacks and finally Thrown.

• Prioritize unlocking the Unblockable Quick attack ASAP (never get blocked by enemy shields).
  
• Get the Defensive (shield) passive ability that halves your chance of getting an injury. It will save you a lot of visits to the doctor or first aid uses.
  
• Unlock the ground slam Power Attack
  
• Unlock all of the passive Quick Attack abilities that don't require another special attack type (large square).

I personally found ranged combat underwelming but some find it useful. For me, it's main advantage is allowing you to break barriers out of range of enemy archers.

Combat Styles
My combat tactic was generally to just get close to enemies and repeatedly jump and attack in no particular order. It required very little finesse and avoided a great deal of damage. Thus I never really worried about blocking. Dashing is very useful in combat to get out of the way of enemy attacks so use it often.

Upgrading the equipment you wear is a big part of the game's progression system and will make you incredibly powerful.

Basically loot all of the chests as you go along and equip anything that is better than what you are wearing, then sell anything not as good. I will usually adventure until I am injured or my inventory is near full, then head to the village to heal/sell and repeat. You should make enough profit doing this to be able to afford items merchants carry if they have anything good.

Item Rarity: Items are color coded White, Blue, Green, Orange and Purple. Purple items are unique quest rewards with fixed stats (an unique looks) and worth keeping in your village storage chest. The rest are randomly generated. Orange being the best you can find.

Item Type: Weapon type should match your combat style, while armor type is just a straight upgrade as far as I can tell (Adamantium being the best).

Item Stats
Damage Resistances: I'd say this is one of the most important. You want to aim for as broad a range as possible on each piece to get each resistance as high as possible (total). This will greatly improve survivability and make your near invincible by late game.

Base Stat Buffs: Buffs to STR, DEX, CON are probably secondary, but still very powerful. For example a weapon that boosts Strength by a lot may ultimately do more damage than a weapon with a higher base damage stat.

Crafting & Enchanting
You can craft your own items at the Smithy in your village. However I found the base stats of these not that impressive. Even with a fully upgraded building. You also have no control over the stats, so it feels like you spend resources to spawn a random gen unenchanted item. This is somewhat subjective as I'm just not good at timing the blacksmith minigame so I can't reliably get the best possible outcome.

You can enchant items (either ones you have crafted or loot you have disenchanted) at the Mana Forge. However you can only craft items up to 5,000 mana. As a comparison, you can find Orange quality items with enchantments exceeding 16,000 mana. Hypothetically perhaps you can craft very specific equipment builds with enchantments that fit a particular play technique, but I didn't see it being worth the effort.

Save Scumming Chests
You will find gold lined chests as rewards at some map locations. These generally reward you with higher quality and quantity loot. If you don't mind cheating, you can save your game next to the chest and repeatedly quick load (default F8) until you get an item you want. You can do this and quickly get a full set of very powerful Orange quality equipment from just a few map locations.

Companions are a fun addition to the game and can be extremely overpowered. Fully upgraded they are pretty unstoppable.

You can hire companions at your village tavern as soon as you build it. You can hire up to 10 at one time and they will all follow you. Early game they are quite weak, however as you level up the village training yard they will become incredibly strong.

In the options menu go to keybindings and find the Rally command (it is unbound by default) set it up and when you press it your companions will teleport to you. This makes using them in caves and other trickier to navigate locations a lot easier.

Ranged Companions are the most useful and will attack enemies before you can get within melee range.
Rogues are also powerful as they sneak up and do a lot of damage.

A full party of companions can make it difficult to do any fighting yourself. This is comical for a while, but not very fun. You can always dismiss some or all if you want to.

I'm not sure if you continue to gain experience for kills your companions do, but there is a chance using them will slow or halt your ability to level up.

If you have the siege DLC, you can take a party of 10 fully upgraded companions and let them do all/most of the fighting for easy resource collection.