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TFT guide

Hints from MacMark.

This is a general guide for The Frozen Throne. It will be updated often until it's completed. Latest entries are found on top of this page.

Attacking what counts

Read what you should attack during a combat in the open fields or your own base. A combat in the enemy's base is different.

Gaining the strategic upper hand

Remove certain units to gain the upper hand. Assume your opponent has some anti air units and lots of units, that can only attack ground units. Assume you have some air to ground units and some ground units. Guess if you can kill the enemy anti air fast enough to save your air to ground units.

Look at armor and weapons upgrades, hit points and the number of units, that you and your enemy have. Take in account possible healing spells on both sides.

If it looks feasible, do it! After this, your enemy has nothing to attack your air to ground units and you can kill the rest of his army without any shot at yourself with your air to ground units.

Easy kills first

Attack weak units first, attack heroes at last. The one thing that counts during combat is, how many units you kill. Damaging a unit and not killing it gives you nothing. Damaged units will be retreated and healed by your enemy. Especially heroes can easily survive an attack by using hero items (healing potion for example) or healing spells and their high hit points.

The other thing that counts during combat is, how many units of your's survive. This means, don't let them die! Move them back and heal them later or let them regain hit points on their own during time. Every dead unit of your's makes your enemy stronger in terms of hero experience and bigger army and the time you need to rebuild your army.

Attack order

So this is what to attack:

Check, if you can gain the startegic upper hand. See above. If not go on with this list.
Look for non-hero-units with a red bar being close to death.
Use the alt key.
Kill them first. A hero close to death can regain 500 hit points with a single hero item! Don't attack him!
Look for units with low hit points that can easily killed by you. This means archers of NE, troll headhunter of Orc, riflemen of HU and ghouls of UD for example. Most spell casters are easy to kill too. Most of the weak units are usually in the back of the enemy army. Move to them, then attack.
After having killed all normal units, kill the heroes.

This way you can beat an even bigger and stronger army than your's is.

Dead queue

Avoid to queue units in your barracks or the likes. There should never be more than two units be queued in a units producing building. The same goes for upgrades and researches. Your buildings should never have more tasks queued then two for every building. Ideal is one task at a time per building.

Yes, it's easy to use that queue ability, but you should not use it! Why? The money and lumber for every queued task is paid as soon as the task is queued. Having more than one task queued means, that the resources for all further tasks in that building are unused at the moment. The goal is to use all resources. Better spend the resources for other things before you bind them without being used immediately.

Queueing several tasks in a building makes you poor (no resources) and gives you no results (units, upgrades etc.) for it. And it removes your flexibility in deciding what to build.

Immediately build

You might have noticed, that peons (or workers) of good players, when they come out of the main building, immediately run to a certain place on the map and begin to build as soon as they arrive there. This is accomplished by this:

Set the way point of the main building to the place you want to construct the next building and build a peon (worker).
Make with your mouse the selection rectangle around the way point
When the peon runs into the rectangle, release the mouse and issue the appropriate build command to the peon with your keyboard. For example "ba" for "build altar". If you do this by mouse clicks on the images, you will be slower.
Now tell the worker, what to do immediately after having fininshed the building: Hold down the shift key and apple-click (right-click) on a tree or the gold mine to let him gather resources, or issue another build command like "bo" for "build burrow" in another place.
Repeat the previous point if you like, but make sure the last queued command directs the peon to a tree or the mine.

This way no time will be wasted for this worker and you build really fast. You can select the worker inside the building anytime by selecting the building and then clicking on the worker's image. So you can issue queued commands to him.

Disclaimer: Caution! Kids, don't try this at home!