Ratropolis – Build Guide (for Waves 20+)

This guide will provide you with some example builds that can clear wave 30.

Introduction

Why You Die at Wave 20+

The enemy scaling in the game is non-linear. This makes it feel like you’re crushing the game at wave 1-10, maybe struggling a bit in wave 11-20, but everything comes crushing down after 20.

At wave 20+, each normal enemy will have roughly the same health and attack as a rare unit like berserker or armored knight, not to mention special ability like AOE attack, fire attack, and projectile defense (for more info, look at Glossary in game).

This means if they class head-on with your army, most/all of your army will die. Even if you survive, you’ll be stuck rebuilding your army only to be met with an even stronger enemy.

So, to survive, you need better tools to deal with enemies!

Economy Scaling

Gold is everything. Buying new cards? You need gold. Building units? You need gold. Building buildings? You need gold (pun intended). Using skills? You need gold.Using level 2 cards? You need even more gold.Getting more gold? You need gold!

Did I mention you need gold? Yes, you will always need gold.

So, one of the key requirements to survival is you need either a constant stream of gold or you need a huge sum of gold.

Here are a couple of ways to get good golds!

  • Play as merchant leader. Well, this isn’t exactly helpful, isn’t it? But this is literally the best way to get gold in the game. When you activate merchant ability, you get +3% per card per leader level. This means at level 3, you’ll gain about half of your current gold with 5 cards. At level 6, you will double your total gold with 5 cards. Merchant leader works best when you have a large bank and high leader level early. You’ll need to be aware of where and when you spend your gold relative to your ability cooldown. Card draw is your greatest allies. If you play your cards right, you can get up to 1k gold by the end of wave 3, 5k gold by the end of wave 10, and hit money cap by wave 20.
  • Mining. Mining looks good on paper but is, by itself, a horrible and slow card. You need to cycle your deck 12 times (or 8 if upgraded) to make it worth a potter (+37 net gold). However, the best part about Mining is that Mining increases not only its worth but also any other Mining card you have in your deck. This means the more Mining cards you have, the faster your scale.

  • # of cycles to reach net gold per use with 1/2/3/4 Mining
  • + 37 gold (potter): 12/6/4/3
  • +80 gold (farm): 23/12/8/6
  • +450 gold (upgraded relic with 4 other upgraded): 116/58/39/29 or 77/38/26/19 if upgraded

Notice that 1) the there’s a diminishing return on how fast your scale per additional card, and 2) this is the number of turns to make each Mining card reaches certain gold per card , and 3) Mining scales significantly faster if you have smaller decks.

  • Farm and granary. Farm is a straightforward card, it nets you 80 gold/120 seconds (120 gold if upgraded). A granary will multiply the gold from farm by 3 (or 5 if upgraded), increasing it to 240 gold (or 600 gold, if both are upgraded). Additional granary increase the multiplier additively i.e. 2/3/4 granaries will together multiply the gold from farm by 6/9/12 (or 10/15/20). Upgraded farm with 4 upgraded granaries will allow you to gain 2400 golds every 120 seconds. This means you need a lot of base space and tavern, but it’s the only way I’ve found so far to gain a good amount of gold without economy cards.Fun note: 2 upgrade reuse + upgrade labor command will make farm goes 27 times faster, allowing you to harvest the farm twice in 10 seconds. These 3 cards cost about 400 together, so make sure you do some math before doing it.
  • Investment. This card can be both a run-saver and run-killer. It doubles or triples your current net worth after 90 seconds, but during that 90 seconds you’re basically running on low gold. Running on low gold doesn’t sound bad, but remember that you usually want to use investment when you have high gold (so you’d gain more gold), and those gold are supposed to go somewhere. So, you use investment, now that somewhere doesn’t have gold, and you also don’t have gold. So, before playing investment, you have to make sure you have some sizable amount of gold you can gain right away e.g. farm, low-cost economy cards, bounty multiplier currently in play, etc. Also, investment works best if you have festival!
  • Relic. Relic is another interesting card. Relic will only work if 1) you have multiple smithy running, or 2) you have multiple monasteries with cleric advisor (upgrade a random card when a card is removed). Research may work, but it’s quite slow. If you decide to go with Relic, Relic is the first card you want to upgrade since Relic counts itself. This means even even if Relic is the only upgraded card in the deck, it’ll net +30 gold, which is not the best card in the world, but it’s definitely not bad. If all of your cards are upgraded, Relic is + 450 gold for a 5-card hand.

Army Scaling

If you can’t win with current units, an obvious solution is “let’s make our unit bigger!”. In Ratropolis, there are a few way you can make that happen:

  • Simply getting better units. There are two ultimate units in this game, which are Royal Guard (obtained from Squire and Bachelor) and Duck (obtained from egg). It’s highly recommended to put the “baby” form of these ultimate units on inner walls since you won’t get the ultimate units of they die. Also, since both of these units are single-used, it’s highly recommended to combo with multiple Tavern so that you can deploy several of them, and with Aid Station or First Aid to keep them healthy. Upgraded them to level 2 whenever you can.

  • Literally making your unit bigger! There’s a single-use skill card called syringe, which increase the max HP of a single deployed unit by 100 (or 150 for syringe level 2). If you have multiple tavern running, you can make your unit huge and harder to kill.

  • Arm your units to the teeth with Re-Use and Arm. Arm is a simple skill card that give temporary buff to military cards in your hand similar to military leader’s ability. Re-Use is a skill card that makes the next skill card you used play 2 times (or 3 times if upgraded), including Re-Use. This means that if I played 2 Re-Use in a row, the next skill card will be played 4 times (and 9 if upgraded). 3 in a row will be 8 times / 27 times, and so on. So, what you have to do is playing Re-Use a couple of time, play Arm, and, boom!, you get a couple of super solders on the fields!

Side note: if you don’t have a second Re-Use, you can also do it with Specialize -> Re-Use -> temporary Re-Use you get from Specialize -> Arm

  • Barrack scaling. Barrack is a building that can permanently make your unit card stronger. You read that right, it make your unit card permanently stronger. However, due to its long cooldown, you will usually be able to use it only so many times, which might not be enough for the final waves.

  • There are a few cards like Visit that will allow you to use Barrack more often, but there’s one card in particular that will make this combo ridiculously strong: Labor Command. Labor Command is basically a global Work card, which is not exactly the best card in the world. However, Labor Command stacks multiplicatively with itself i.e. 2 Labor Command will make all production goes 4 times as fast (or 9, if both are upgraded), 3 will get 8/27 times, and so on. This means… well you know what I’m about to say, you can quickly upgrade your units over and over again as long as you keep multiple Labor Command in effects.

And if you didn’t skip reading the previous build, you’ll realize that you don’t need multiple Labor Command cards if you have Specialize or Re-Use. Yes, it works!

Wall Scaling

Tl;dr:

  1. Reinforce + repair + longbowrat.
  2. Reinforce + thorn fence.
  3. For both, ignite and bomb are also recommended.
Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 7958 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices. My first official job in the game industry started back in 2005, and I'm still doing what I love to do.

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