Hi guys. I am HeliosAflame, current rank 1 on the ladder, and this is my guide to the fundamentals of Callasia. I will be going through how to play the various stages of the game and how to fight ,as well as some common errors to avoid.

Most games of Callasia are multiplayer free for all. In a free for all with multiple opponents, weakening every opponent by 50% is equivalent to doubling your own strength, but the latter is much easier to achieve. Thus, for the majority of the game your focus should be on increasing your own power rather than harming your opponents. It is never worth destroying an opponent and being destroyed in return by a third party.

Once you or your alliance is the most powerful force on the map it is time to start wiping out opponents; no matter how much territory you control, you can only field 4 heroes, making it hard to stop aggression from multiple fronts. The best time to switch from strengthening yourself to actively taking out opponents is just before they realise they must all unite or die separately.

When the game begins, gold is a scarce resource. Your primary method of self-improvement is to increase your gold flow as fast as possible.
There are two ways of doing this, and you want to do both of them: controlling territory and building hamlets. The single most important lesson of this guide is capture your starting kingdom. Controlling every territory in a kingdom gives you a huge gold boost every turn, normally the equivalent of capturing 4 or more unupgraded territories. In order to do this, you need to make heroes as quickly as you can. The more heroes you have, the more actions you can take per turn, and the more units you have access to.

When capturing your kingdom, unupgraded lands and ruins can usually be taken with one hero worth of units. Villages and watchtowers need two heroes worth of units, and towns or forts 3.
Your army is a resource, so make sure it's always active! Before you have a hero go off to build up your lands, transfer its units onto a different hero.

The second important thing I mentioned is building hamlets. Hamlets cost 50 gold and grant you 10 gold per turn and 8 population. Comparing this to villages and towns, villages cost 75 gold for 5 gold per turn and 8 population. Towns are even worse at 100 gold for the same effect as villages. This makes building hamlets by far the best investment in your economy (after buying heroes to conquer lands). They take 5 turns to pay themselves back, compared to 15 for villages and 20 for towns. Don’t buy villages or towns unless you need extra population (in a 1 vs 1 you almost never want to go beyond hamlets, since fights happen sooner and are more likely to snowball).

While conquering your starting territory, you should build hamlets on every square that you don’t want to build a fort on (if you are unsure, just build the hamlets anyway, as it only takes one turn to raze it later if it’s a mistake). Often you can weave hamlet building into your territory conquering as you wait for your heroes’ movements to sync up. If there are spaces you didn’t manage to build on, then separating a hero off as a builder is a good idea (after transferring its units to one of your combat heroes).


Do:
Capture your starting kingdom
Get to 4 heroes
Build hamlets everywhere
Don’t:
Attack forts or castles with one hero worth of units
Build villages, towns, watchtowers, or castle upgrades
Seriously, don’t spend gold on anything that isn’t a hamlet or a hero until you have 4 heroes

Once you have your starter kingdom, you can start thinking about making villages, towns, and production facilities. At the beginning of the game, getting to 4 heroes will put you far above your population limit, so there is no point having citadels or watchtowers, but as you take attrition and get more hamlets and villages, you can finally get use out of them. Money is still an issue in the mid game, so it is generally better to stick to just villages rather than going all the way up to towns. You also want to be careful about making too many citadels, as each one is 22 fewer troops you can afford to buy. Now is a good time to start reaching agreements with those around you, as fighting two players at once is almost impossible if they are both fully committed. Neither do you want to split your army. At this stage, everyone has almost the same pop cap, so splitting your army just ensures you lose on both fronts.

Do’s
Start increasing your population cap
Make production facilities in areas you intend to fight
Make friends <3

Don’ts
Make citadels everywhere
Get into a full blown war on two fronts
Blow all your money when someone is looking for a fight. If you have no money to reinforce, you will lose

If you captured territory effectively in the midgame, gold stops being as important and it's all about population cap. The name of the game is controlling as many cities as possible. Fully upgraded cities give you over 60 pop cap, reinforce with tier 3 units and let you portal. The fact they act as portals mean they are one of the few things you can defend in the late game. If your opponent tries to capture them, you can appear directly on top of the city with a superior army. You can also defend them against small enemy forces by buying units directly onto the cities.

The most important cities upgrades are tier 3 troop recruitment, portal (Donjon), and pop cap increases. Having multiple cities with these upgrades means that if an opponent steps on one of your portals/cities, you can teleport in from the other with a tier 3 army before they finish capturing.

When attacking an enemy in the late game, your biggest objective is to take their city. Taking their city means you can defend any counterattacks by building a portal and returning home. Additionally, this prevents them from spawning new heroes as well as denying them a large portion of their pop cap and hitting their economy (losing both the high gold from a city and the kingdom bonus). If you know your army is far stronger than theirs, you should walk in a straight line up to their city, attack it, and then start capturing (preferably with multiple heroes at once). If you are closer in strength, then walking next to their castle and capturing a square to turn into a portal is advisable. This is a good balance between speed (3 turns to make a portal compared to 5 to make a citadel) and effectiveness (2 turn reinforce if you portal back to one of your castles with a hero to pick up troops). If you are weaker than them, then their army better be out of position, or you shouldn’t be attacking their city.

If you have a hero idling on a castle, walls are a good buy; they give you longer to get in position for a portal defence. Only buy battlements and moat if you intend to constantly have an army on the castle. Battlements and Moats help whoever is defending not just the player who controls the castle, so portal bombing a castle with a moat and battlements is often suicidal.

Unsurprisingly, winning every fight is a good way to do well in Callasia.
There are two ways to get a leg up on your opponent: having a good unit composition and controlling reinforcements.
Every unit in a stack attacks the same target. This means if I have 10 phoenixes on one hero they will all attack the same target. This leads to two golden rules. First, your tank units should be as spread out as possible. Every hero and every garrison where you are fighting should have exactly one frontline unit on it (deathknights, guards, and golems) to maximise how much of the enemy damage is wasted on overkills. Similarly, every slot on every hero and garrison should have something in it. Having a lot of single units like 1 skeleton and 1 wraith increases the chance they get randomly attacked and waste the turn of a far larger stack. The flip side of this is squishy units want to take up as little space as possible. If I have 1 stack of squishy units and 7 of tanky units or distractions, then each enemy stack has a ⅞ chance to miss my relevant stack. If I had 4 stacks of squishy units, then each of their units has a 50% chance to hit instead.

Your damage-dealing stacks should never be too big. This is at odds with trying to minimize the number of squishy stacks you have. If there are rules for exactly how to do this, I don’t know them. That said, there are some approximations. If over half of your army’s pop cap is in one stack, you are probably doing it wrong. Similarly, if you ever have 50 phoenixes in one stack, then you should examine your life choices. Units with multiple attacks or barrage can afford to be larger than units without since their damage is more spread out, reducing the amount of overkill damage they inflict.

Controlling reinforcements is about making sure your army is topped off as often as possible and the enemies army gets no bigger. One common tactic is to ‘rotate’ heroes out of combat as they get low on troops. Retreating troops take 50% more damage and lose terrain bonuses, so try not to rotate a hero with anything important on it. The ideal target for rotating is a hero with only rearguard units so that the defence penalty is unimportant. Don’t forget to bring one frontline unit with you whenever you reinforce! This helps cover for your retreating hero and is the most efficient way to spend 30-60 gold.

You can deny the opponent’s reinforcements by instead retreating onto their reinforce point. Even if your hero ends up dying, they can’t build troops there since there’s fighting on their reinforce point, giving you some turns to fight with a numerical advantage.

Since battles are auto-resolved, most fights are won by decisions made before the battle has begun — Sun Tzu

The defender has a massive advantage in Callasia, often 50%+ effective health compared to your units. In some extreme situations they might have over double your effective hp. This means you shouldn’t engage a fight unless you have some sort of advantage. This is a list of the advantages that can make starting a fight a good idea. The more of them you have, the better. If you don’t have any, just don’t do it.

-You have a bigger army than them. This is pretty self explanatory. More troops deal more damage, making the fight better for you. Loosely, a 30% advantage against someone fortified on unupgraded terrain or a 50% advantage vs a fortified citadel should be enough.

-You have strong cards. This is also pretty obvious. One advantage the attacker has is that they know what turn the battle will happen, making cards more easily deployed with effect rather than making defense guesses. A well-timed Smite or Charge (or both) can lead to a huge advantage in the initial round of combat. This is particularly important if the opponent cannot reinforce, as they cannot replace the troops lost in the initial shock.

-Your opponent is out of position. Combine map awareness with your opponents’ poor choices. A hero attempting to capture land takes a 50% penalty to unit defense, and razing incurs the same penalty. Building or movement actions are neutral in terms of unit defense modifiers, but it can be more advantageous to attack a fort before the hero on it can build a citadel.

-Reinforce Points. If one player has a reinforcement point and the other does not (or has no gold), this hugely influences fights. If the opponent has a lot of gold and a reinforce point, and you do not, then you better be able to win combat in one round, because otherwise things are going to get messy. If you have a reinforce point and the opponent does not, then the longer the game goes on and the more gold players amass, the less tenable it is for them to keep holding their location. This is one of the big things that can prompt an attack. If both players are sitting on citadels, staring at each other, then at some point the advantage of denying them a reinforce point (since you are fighting on top of it) becomes greater than defender's advantage.

-Your opponent’s composition is rubbish. Maybe you are fighting someone who has never read this guide and their army is 20 golems and 50 phoenixes with no other units. In which case an army of equivalent gold cost with 3 heroes, each with a front liner and spread out decoy units, will annihilate them. You can even increase the effectiveness of your decoy units by stacking up your damage dealers, since the enemy has no decoys to overkill.

Concise list:
Larger army
Strong cards
Better position
Better reinforcements
Better unit composition


Thank you for reading my guide and may you crush your opponents beneath your iron boots/hooves/skeletal toes.