Heroes of Gaia Strategy Guide for Beginners

Heroes of Gaia Strategy Guide for Beginnersby crateo

Ok, you’ve read the begginers guide in this forum and you know everything about game mechanics. But you want more. You are a hardcore gamer and you want to optimize and reach the top500 the faster possible. And you start looking for help. Maybe not everything is written in the books, but in internet it is. This document is not a begginers guide, but a strategy one. Here we will explain how to get competent as soon as possible.

First HOW TO: How to not look like a newbie

You should know that asking certain question will make you be recognized like a newbie immediatly.

-Yes, we know that you ACTUALLY have space in your inventory but system don’t let you open the lucky boxes you have. It’s normal. You need a master key for opening it, that you can only obtain by making a daily task. This task will exchange two boxes for a key, so you need three lucky boxes for opening one. Two for the key and one for opening it. You can also receive a key with the other daily task that will give you either ANOTHER lucky box, or a precious key.

Hey, at least it’s free!

-You don’t need to ask where you can find X item or Y monster, since there is button called SEARCH in upper-right corner of the game screen. Use it. It will be good for you and also good for people in global chat.

-The best way for getting exp is doing Hero Taks. They are completly stupid mini-tasks that gives you from 1000 exp to 2000 exp. Fod doing that just remember that a rich resource pile is a 5-stars one and an enormous one is a 6-star one. The second best way is appointing your hero as a castillan, at least at the beggining. This is made in hero Tower. That will make your hero get exp for each thing you build, research, train or heal. You need to have the castillan only when your thing will finish, not the whole process, so remember that. Thats why both methods are compatible.

-For donating resources tasks it’s enough if you accept the task. Resources will be automatically withdrawn from your reserve.

-When you have to kill a lv X guardian, that means that you have to face the monster that guards a lv X item. Beware because they are quite more strong than lv X NPC.

-APs are recovered by completing daily tasks or with time. Each hour you will recover 10% of your maximun APs.

-Fame is obtained by killing, building, training, healing or researching. It’s the fame what will determine your max heroes, mines or castles, so keep growing.

-And don’t worry, you can’t lose your main castle. Only lose resources. When someone attack you, he will get 20% of the resources you have in that moment.

Obviusly this means that you can’t get other people main castle. Only his second castle if they have : P.

-To finish, if a guild is recruiting, they will accept you when you will apply in ambassady. You’re not good enough for offering yourself to a guild in global chat : P (At least for the moment).

This table shows information you’ll find useful:

Second HOW TO: How to profit your first AP

So, you’re in gaia. You have a hero and some units. In your city, Access to your city hall and build hero tower, barracks and tavern. Now go to tasks. There you have some tasks already fullfilled. Get all the rewards and take all the tasks. Again in city hall, start building a lv1 warehouse. Now go to barracks. There, recruit 5 lv1 troops and leave the castle. And now…¿What are you doing? C’mon! Fast! Occupy your mines!

Look around your castle for yellow mines (unocupied) and send your hero to get them. For it you shoud use only your ranged tropos in four stacks. That lets you optimize you troop damage. Believe me. Yes, you should believe me. Why? I have experience. And here comes the combat. If you want to know something about that read the Combat Section. You will find out that its a piece of cake. You can occupy a maximun of 5 mines, so you have already some work.

Now you have much more income but not a lot of resources. Lets take some instant stuff.

Push find button. You will use it a lot, so try to get familiar with it. In world building tab you must find a WINDMILL and a WATERWHEEL. This two buildings will give you a good amount of resources and gold (400 of ore/Wood or 200 of cristal/sulfur or 2000 gold) once a day. Pay attention to have enough space to store them, so wait to finish the construction of warehouse before visiting that.

Then in resources section seach any 4 or 5 start resource pile. Anything but gold. Click in view button. Now ATTACK. Keep doing that until you have enough resources to build city hall lv2 (It shouldn’t take you a lot of time). Then build it and after that, magic tower and ambassy.

I will tell you a secret. Each resource is the same. In the market you can trade sulfur and crytal 1:1 and wood and ore 1:1. You can also trade Wood/ore for Sulfur/Crystal 2:1, and 1:2 in the other direction. You can do it so many times as you want, so each time you will build troops try to maximize the amount you build by trading the resources you have. I’m telling this things about gold because while you can always rade resources for gold, you can’t buy resources WITH gold. That’s why it’s better to have money in resources.

Ok. I recommend you to do ALL the main task lv1 as soon as possible. Rewards are nice, and it will get you fame and cards. Don’t forget about appointing castillan always when something is about to finish.

Now you have some lv 1 troops, your bunch of ranged guys, 5 mines, a bunch of resources and a magic tower. Lets go to your magic tower. There are 4 castle skills for resource improving. Research them all instantly. They will give you a LOT of resources in the beggining, by increasing the base hourly resource income. Use your final APs for fullfilling the daily tasks.

Now you should focus in obtaining two decent armies. That will let you to farm 6-star resources without problem. That is what you should make in the future. If you don’t want to lose troops, you should make the combats by yourself.

About what to build, i would tell you to make all the main task easy missions and after that you should focus in TH lv 3 or 4 (your first ranged unit level) and barracks lv 3 or 4. Keep growing the warehouse with the lv of your townhall. If you want you can also raise tavern lv. But your hero isn’t really important in this stage if the game.

Keep market, arena and ambassady at lv 1 Don’t worry about it for the moment. You’re not going to be a guild leader, so you need only ambassady lv1.

Now you’re prepared to face the world!!!

Third HOW TO: How to survive in the times of war

Ok, i hope that now that you’re so close to 2,2k fame you already have a lv 4 town hall, and a lv 4 barracks/graveyard/etc. You have two option to defend yourself from the world. First one is to be in a powerful guild that will protect you from bad guys. If so, you are free to walk around farming and building more troops and life will be happy. But well, it’s not easy to join a powerful guild. They will require you some fame or maybe they are just full of people, so you must join a little guild. You can also not join a guild at all or create one by your own. That means that you will be sistematicly and automaticly farmed each day for a lot of people, so it’s beter to be in one.

The problem of little guilds is that they will be in guild wars quite often, and, while you will be more protected against farmers, it doesn’t mean that a 30k-famed guild will be a life insurance. That’s why you need to protect yourself. The best way for doing it is by constructing towers. A pair of lv 5 or 6 towers are quite cheap, fast, and will keep low lv enemies far away from your castle. You should construct them when you will remark your first declaration of war. In the 8-hours time before the first attack, you have time enough for having two lv3 towers.

There is two ways for playing in war times, online and offline. At first, online:

Let’s think that you’re in a war with a farmer (for example a 16 k fame as me). You will receive in your screen the message that you’re being attacked by player X. Inmediatly, you should make a scan of the attacker using the ranks (learn more about ranks in the other HOW TO). If he’s clearly superior, then you must prepare yourself for receiving him. Follow this steps:

1.-Create an army with ONE single lv1 troop in each troop slot. Put this hero as your castillan.
2.-Use inmediatly all your resources by researching or building something, or training troops.
3.-Enter the battle.

During the battle you should alternate between Mass Attack and Mass Retreat buttons. With that you will gain time. There is a time counter in each batle and if it’s finished, defender wins, so everything that will make your rival lost time is good. Let your towers attack as much as possible. The eventual troop lose and the poor size of the combat spoils will disencourage your rival of further attacks, making him find another prey.

In the case of a even match, you can use the same strategy but using your whole ranged army in your castillan, but this will not be the usual case.

If you can’t use your resources because your queues are already full, a good idea is to sell them all in order to buy scrolls. Your castillan is supposed to have an high INT, so just throw your resources to the head of your enemy. They really hurt ^^.

What about war being offline?

You should use the same army formation that i’ve just spoken before, in your castillan. Try to use all your resources before quitting the game if you have any open wars. You should assume that you will be farmed until the moment that you will be in a good guild or having fame enough, so try to live with that.

Fourth HOW TO: How to combat and don’t get your butt kicked.

Ok. I think you’ve already realised that IA in this game isn’t precisely Kasparov, so your troops really need you to command them in a hard fight. This means that you should select the objectives and tell your melee when to advance.

Lets see your hero. You have Attack, Defense and Speed. Inteligence isn’t useful for combat, so don’t look at it. What you really need is a good speed base, because in combat, high speed troops attack first, and in this game, the first hit is important. So boost your Hero Speed and get to a combat.

There you are, in the combat screen. You have 4 buttons at bottom. This are the mass order buttons. They are useful for telling ALL your troop to make the same thing. Hold button will make ALL your ranged troops to attack the same enemy. Attack button can be useful only for unlocking all your troops at once.

Let’s see the bar at top. There you have all your troops. By cliking in one a mini-order menú will open, and you will be able to choose the order for that troop stack. You can also do that by clicking the troop sprite, but i recommend you to get familiar with the top bar.

Ok, lets start with strategical tips:

-In general, you must always trie to optimize your damage. This means that if you have a big stack, you should’t use it for killing a 2 skeleton stack, because with that you will lose a lot of damage. It’s better to use a little stack for finishing it. Two skels have 68 HP, so use for killing them something that will deal 100 damage and not something that will deal 1500 damage. For this you must use Hold order. So get familiar to it and be fast when using it.

Do you catch the concept? yes? Then next tip.

-Things that can attack you this turn are much more dangerous than things that will attack you in two or three turns, so start killing all dangerous ranged stuff on the first moment, and after that, start with melee troops (But please, don’t use a turn to kill 5 stacks of 5 elven archers if you have 200 crazy dryads running directly to you)

If you use melee and you’re facing melee troops, let them move in the first moment. Movements are always at maximun capacity, so clicking at “Stand by”, you will let your enemy to get close enough to your troops for landing the first hit. Remember to change to Attack when enemy’s melee troops start moving.
If you use melee and you’re facing ranged troops, click stand by only if you’re stupid.

Always use the hero skills you’ve researched in magic tower. You may think that not, but they help.

The best battle formation is with your troops divided in 7 stacks. Never leave a troop slot free. This is for damage optimization, to be sure that you will not waste your attack.

-For a battle against a castle you must think in two additional things. At first, the towers. High level towers can be a pain, but much less than a ranged unit stack. They have a LOT of hps and a LOT of defense, but their damage is not too high, in comparison. You should never attack a tower until finishing with dangerous enemy’s stacks. When you’re done with that, you can focus in towers, but never let a big ranged stack fire you freely. Troops, ranged and melee, have a tower obsession, so if you don’t control them, they will start attacking towers like idiots. Notice that player can’t control towers, so they’ll attack to a melee low lv huge stack. As usual, be sure of using always Hold Button. By the way, towers are weak against high tier troops, and very strong against low tier troops, so 10 king lich will make more damage than 200 skels.

The second thing you must know about castles is the time. There are not a lot of things that you can do for controlling it, but you should be aware that time plays in defender side.

-The best trick in this game is the ranged-scouts formation. AI priorizes attacking over moving. This means that if you have a formation composed of 4 ranged stacks and 3 scouts, you can gain great advantage. Imagine you try a combat against a mixed melee/ranged army. When combat starts, your scouts moves first due their 50 speed. After that, you can kill the ranged enemy stacks because enemy melee units will lose a turn killing your worthless scouts. This extra ranged turn will allow you to take high lv stuff without loses at medium levels, so just remember it.

That’s all about combat strategy notions. You will learn a lot more from real experience, so go there and start fighting : ).

Fifth HOW TO: How to profit each day.

Life can be really hard, so we must try to relax. Each day you hero have to leave his warm castle and exanguinate himself against the hordes of lurking monsters of your lands only for a pirric amount of resources. Here are some general tips about how to make that.

-Never farm any resource of less than 5 stars. Since the APs you will use is always 6, try to maximize the resource you get.

-Each day you should visit Windmill and WaterWheel. You are getting a great amount of gold and resources there, and you must never forget to make that visits.

-Raiding a castle is nice, but try to know of the effort will be worthy. At max you’re getting 1/5 of the resources a catle has, but you have another limit. This is the Max Carry of the hero. This capacity is given by the LOAD attribute of the troops. This means that a hero with only a few guys will not be able to carry a lot of stuff of a castle, even if the warehouse is plenty of resources.

-Each time you level up (in fame) your dailys will refresh, so be sure to finish them all before reaching a new title.

-For the moment ranged troops rock. If you want to get directly the best, aim to the buildings you need for your first ranged.

-Really. Use resource cards in the same moment you get them. You’re not needing them for a special moment or something like that. That resources are much better in a building form than in a card form.

-If you’re in war with someone and he’s online (you can know if he’s online by sending a private), you can try to ambush his heroes when they are out of the castle. For that, just send your hero in a scouting mission near of his castle. Then, inmediatly after getting the scouting report, click on your hero in map and stop him. Now wait until spotting enemy hero to exit the castle and click on it. You will see that you will be allowed to attack him, if your hero is near enough and he is already returning from mission.

What do you get with that? In first moment, it’s probably that you will face only a portion of his troops, so after that assault will be easier. And second point, you will be able to attack without bothering towers : ).

-There is a way for calibrating the converted cost of troops. Each wood/ore is worth a unit of converted cost (CC in advance), each sulfur/crystal is worth 2 cc and each 5 gold is wrth 1 cc. This gives you a way to calculate relative costs of diferent troops. For instance, a skeleton costs 45 gold (9cc), 6 lumber (6cc) and 3 crystal (6cc), this means, 21 cc. A zombie costs 101 gold (20cc), 12 lumber (12cc) and 16 ore (16cc), this means, 48cc, little more than two skels.

-For know how far away a building is, just attack it. In the pre-attack window you can get that information before confirming the attack. It’s easier than scouting.

-If you want to get some easy resources while sleeping, then you should use resource towers. For creating a farming party of heroes, you will need 5 lv 20-25 heroes. Don’t worry for the colour. Then, equip them with some low level stuff, without worrying about features. Then you should have like 900 T8 shooters and 1000 dwarf soldiers. Equip each one of your farmers with 6 stacks of 30 T8 and a single stack of 200 dwarfs. Then, just go to the borderlands, on minimap, and send each one of this heroes to an empty resource tower. They will always win the guardians without suffering huge loses, and after 12 hours, you’ll have a huge boost on your resources, when they’ll come back.

Sixth HOW TO: How to get a lot of information about people

Information is power, and in this game much more. Of course Scouting will give you a good report about situation, but at the cost of warning your enemy that you’re preparing an attack. Ranks tool will become your best friend for spying your foes.

Let’s enter there. You’ll find at first a top10 fame guys. Hi LTK, hi elf. And so on. But we are not interested in that top10. Lets imagine that we have a war against a guy we will call “Victim”. We already know Victim’s fame, because it’s said in the castle. But you can also look for the ranks in a lot of other things.

Let’s open Rank Type scroll down menu and select units. Normally, high fame means high units rank. ¿Do you know what this rank means? The total amount of forces of your enemy. And a sometimes, high fame guys doesn’t really have a lot of resources. Let’s check our 10k famed Victim, searching for his name in units rank…Oh, 60k forces. ¿Not a lot, eh? It seems a good target for farming. You will easily win sending a 100k army or so.

But there are more ranks. Let’s see one of my prefered, Aftermath. That’s the amount of player troops that guy have killed so far, so it’s a good indicative about the real combat experience he has. This means that if it’s your first combat against a player that as some kind of good rank in aftermath, he may pown you if both armies have the same size.

By searching for Victim in Combat Hero’s rank type, you can know exatly the lv, stats and gear of all his heroes. Good enough for knowing if he will pass you in speed or not (for instance, which 7-speed shooters will shot at first), and most important, the amount of combat force he can deploy. A person can have 2 million of combat force at “Units” rank, but if his hero is only lv30, he will be able to deploy barely 500k.

In Guilds tab you can know things about Victims guild, (GuiltyGuild). Let’s search for GuiltyGuild in guilds ranks tab. Ok, we find that it has only one member. So we can deduce that Victim is one of this guys that tried to build it’s own guild and after that he realised that he has no friends to defend him in war times. The other possibility is that we will find that GuiltyGuild is actually a 40 members guild with 30 million fame that can destroy you in a second. All this are good things to know before declaring a war if we want to crush and not be crushed.

Ranks will be very handy to get a fast list of the members of a guild. At least the most powerful ones. Just start checking the first fame or units pages, and save the coords of everybody that belongs to your enemy guild.

Seventh HOW TO: How to conquer your second castle

This will be your highest ambition at the first steps of game. To expand yourself. But, when you’ll manage to scout any NPC castle you will realise that a force of 150k waits you there. Don’t worry, it’s not so horrible if you follow some tips.

Ok, check your forces. If they are below 200k, don’t even think about that. Yes, maybe you will succeed, but you will lose quite a lot of your army. For attaking a NPC castle with guarantees, you should have about 160-200k of ranged troops and about 20k-40k of cannon fodder. With cannon fodder i mean lv1 troops, of course : P. Have you that? Ok, then take your hero with highest attack. Speed and defense are not very important here, because you’re fighting against a NPC (whose troops will use their base speed in order to calculate initiative) and using ranged troops (That you hope that they wil not take a lot of hits). We will arrange our troops in 4 stacks of shooters,1 stacks of cannon fodder and two stacks of 1 t2 scouts, equally divided. Of course, shooters will be in the rear and cannon fodder at front. Don’t be afraid of a bunch of dragons/monsters/archangels, we will take care of them : P.

Let me tell you a secret. With that forces you will conquer the castle. I’m explaining you how to lose the less troops possible : P. The strategy we will follow require you some experience with orders stuff, but i’m sure that you have printed this guide and you read it each night, so we will suppose that you already know everything about that. And now, Launch the attack!.

At the beggining the initiative is for castle, since high tier troops have much more speed that your 3/4 lv marksman, unless you’re an undead and you’re fighting with lichs (That will make things much easier, btw). Don’t worry, we have cannon fodder for this inconvenience. At first focus your two scouts in the t9 and t10 stacks of enemy castle. After that, focus your ranged troops to kill high tier enemy shooters, like monks, lichs, priests, cyclops, elite archers, etc…They should be the first unit to kill. If you don’t need all your first turn shots, attack the rest of ranged troops until you’re done. Then your low lv fodder will advance. Tell it to attack the lowest lv melee unit where they can reach (It will be something like harpys or pegasus). This is the first turn and it’s quite important : P.

Now, if everything goes well, the castle melee troops will be atracted by the enormous hp bag of your cannon fodder and the two scouts you sent. Everybody will attack it (You wish), and maybe even the shooters. When it will arrive your turn, aim now with your higher tier troops to higher tier castle troops, and to lower with lower. Hopefully, you will not suffer a lot of loses in your ranged troops. Let the towers for the end. If you see they are attacking your ranged, you can take them down before.