The goal of a run is to survive and eventually retire/pacify/free/ascend your champion. When the trophy pops up in the character screen, you can officially end a run.

The simple steps for this are:

• Train your champion
  
• Acquire items that grant +fame
  
• Turn fame into gold
  
• Buy anything you want
  
• Survive
  
• Win

It is important early in a run to train your champion. Healing takes priority, so put gold into that. There are diminishing returns on hp-to-gold, so usually one heal is good unless you are extremely low.

After that buy training items x6, and train Stamina and Movement, respectively. After week 7 or 8 it is wise to stop training. You want 70 to 80 stamina and movement.

Later on it can be beneficial to train with x3 items to increase your learning rate in battle. You won't suffer much stamina penalty, but you will learn weapons and skills faster than if you hadn't trained at all. Discretion here is informed by experience.

Most people learn the game with a sword and shield, or a shield and another 1H weapon. Shields make it easy to block, but the 1H weapons lack punch; that is why I recommend learning to play with the 2H weapons. 2H weapons are superior in damage, range, and (importantly) armor/shield breaking.

Polearms are extremely OP, and there are a lot of "Polearm" weapons, unintuitively. (Polearms can be expensive early, so I recommend the 2H maces for armor breaking, and the 2H short axe can be great, too.)

The giant hammer and giant axe are probably the best weapons in the game for reach, damage, and animation smoothness. You can see that both qualify as "Polearms."




The way to play with polearms is to mostly overhead swing.
Bring the weapon down on enemy heads to destroy their helmets or outright kill them.

Many polearms also have multi-hit capabilities, so swinging horizontally from right-to-left is also very strong. When you get better, you can angle left-to-right either above or below. Attacking from below can be useful when enemies have minimal leg armor.

Every weapon has unique range considerations for full damage swings. This is very important to learn. You need to be at the optimal distance for full damage. I recommend buying TWO of the exact same weapon and sticking to that single weapon until you get more proficient at the combat.

(There are a few other polearm weapons, notably the Bardiche and the Fererakka (sp+?), both are extremely good, but the Bardiche has awkward animations, but it has a cheesy poke attack that aims straight for the neck and is extremely fast, making it a potent weapon. The Fererakka can be used one handed, allowing for use of a shield, but limiting your attack arcs.)

Fame is OP in the current build. (0.1.3).

Fame is free gold. This means that your immediate goal after training your champion is to acquire items that grant +fame.

With item and crowd multipliers, you can turn a little bit of fame into a lot of fame by match's end. Here 5k fame is multiplied into 18k fame.



Then you turn that fame into free gold. 18k fame yields me 8k gold, just like that.

Most items have 0 or negative fame. DO NOT BUY THESE. The best items early on are:

Lion Helmet. Grants +40% fame, offers good armor, and is the only helmet that is Padded and Hardened. It is the best helmet in the game. (Usually affordable after a single 1vMany fight.)

Bronze Cuirass. Good fame, low stamina penalty, relatively affordable.
Bronze armguards and leggings. Again, good fame, low stam penalty, and affordable.

After fame and gold is no object, you will want to buy better armor for survivability. I recommend the Iron Masterwork line as it's better than bronze and offers plenty of protection without much stamina penalty. Below you can see my fully upgraded character in Iron. My fame rewards are lesser than with Bronze, but I have over 700k fame and no longer need the fame.

1vMany fights are extremely profitable. You can take these fights early while still x6 training if you have a good 2H weapon and you understand the attack distance.

I recommend NOT fighting 1vMany with 1H weapons unless you have a bunch of stamina, want the challenge, or your opponents are lightly armored.

In the mid-game, 1vMany can yield 20k gold and fame without any bonuses, making them the highest yielding fights. Even one of these fights can set you up to win the game.

DO NOT TAKE 1vMany fights in the end-game (more than 4+ opponents). Opponents move extremely quick and will swarm you like they are trying to extract your musk.


Your armor will get damaged and you will need to repair. I recommend buying the exact same items and just swapping out an entire set of armor after every couple of fights, then repairing.


You aren't the best because you're the best, you're the best because the audience loves you. Good luck Gladiator!