Strategy Tips The surface level strategy to bad north follows a rock-paper-scissors dynamic: Shields beat. It's always a good idea to study the island before you commit to a battle. Having a unit retreat to replenish is always a risk, so you should be confident in your other units'. Bad North - Unit Summaries + Strategy Tips. Written by Bizzle02 / Nov 17, 2018. Descriptions of the pros and cons to each unit class, as well as how they interact.

Bad North is a unique take on a challenging real-time strategy game, simply by virtue of its simplicity. Giving a nod to games like Into the Breach and Kingdom: New Lands, as oppressive difficulty ramps up slowly over time, the actual game-play behind positioning your units, issuing commands, and using special abilities remains relatively stable. While the initial set of islands comes off as a relaxing take on zone defense, later missions can quickly devolve into chaos at a moment’s notice. They bill themselves as a 'micro-strategy' game, but this is secretly a roguelike that will satiate both RTS newcomers and grizzled virtuosos.

The core concept is to travel from one island to the next, defending homes from exponentially increasing waves of invaders. Combat revolves primarily around a rock, paper, scissors strategy of having the right types of units facing off against each other, though limited use items and commander skills can add in an extra layer of agency to the player.

Additionally, you can order units to lodge in a home, slowly regenerating their health (and thus being unusable) until they’re at a full unit size again, or outright seize an enemy boat and make a run for it. Honestly, there’s not much more to it than that, and that’s Bad North’s greatest strength. There’s no baggage or dead weight here, just a simple concept that allows for mastery over time.

Defending homes successfully will net you gold, along with potentially new items or commanders, depending on where you choose to travel. Much like in FTL: Faster Than Light, players will be restricted on how many islands they can visit before a wave of destruction takes over a portion of the map. The dotted line below shows that Bery is about to be swallowed up on the next round, though luckily in this case I’ve already completed the island.

Soon enough I had to make some choices between pursuing islands with bigger homes (and thus larger gold outputs upon successfully defending them), or smaller outposts that yielded unknown items or a commander. Depending on how successful you are, it is entirely possible to completely max out a character’s commander ability, unit experience, and item power. Near the end of my first few runs, after fully upgrading two commanders, I would look for islands that seemed easily defensible instead, focusing merely on surviving and progressing forward.

Unfortunately, there comes a time where one or two small mistakes can cascade into a total party kill. My loyal infantry vanguard, Allena, who had been with me for most of my voyage, was unable to fall back to the safety of an elevated ridge. As a result, I lost a crucial aspect of the weapon triangle, and her unique sledgehammer item. Soon enough, on my next excursion I came across too many enemies that were specialized to overwhelm archers and pikemen. My journey to a glorious afterlife was complete, and all faded to black.

Normally in real-time strategy games I can sometimes get frustrated at not knowing exactly what I should have done to prevent hitting a fail state. In Bad North your mistakes are immediately evident, which allows for a faster learning curve and less confusion. I know exactly why Allena died, what I could have done to prevent it, and the importance of having a backup plan for each type of commander. I was able to carry the catastrophic loss forward as a lesson in later playthroughs.

If there’s one criticism I have of Bad North, it’s that the first few islands just feel incredibly slow once you’ve got your footing. An optional fast forward button to increase the pace at which enemies arrive would be beneficial in allowing players to quickly retread their steps back up to where things get interesting again. Past that, this is an engaging game that doesn’t bog you down with an overwhelming learning curve, or tooltips within tooltips.

Position your units, use an ability or item here and there, and watch the carnage unfold in real-time! I can certainly see myself giving Hard Mode a run for my money, and I may even pick up a copy on the Switch to enjoy this on the go or during lunch at work. The gameplay suits itself well to both small bursts of play and extended campaign sessions once you’re past the early game. Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time with this straightforward little title, and I’m excited to see what designs developer Plausible Concept can cook up next.

Bad North strips away just the right amount of complexity and headache that real-time strategy games tend to have, resulting in a core experience that is challenging, rewarding, and very replayable.

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Into the Breach is one of the most perfect games I’ve ever played. It’s tactical warfare with every sliver of fat trimmed away and I’d put it up there with Chess and Invisible, Inc. In the pantheon of turn-based games.will not be entering that pantheon. Not because it doesn’t seem capable of reaching lofty heights – it absolutely does – but because its own take on micro-tactics takes place in real-time. It’s a game of positional play, providing a handful of units and gorgeous, tiny, procedural islands to defend.Combat is simplicity itself. The maps are so small that you’ll be rotating the camera around an island rather than scrolling across them, and units require guidance but also seem to have a life of their own.

If they’re attacked, they’ll defend themselves, and if there are enemies in range, they’ll attack.The specific role of a unit depends on its type. Pikemen should defend beaches, where raiders land and are impaled before they can head inland. Archers are best-placed on high ground so that they can launch volleys at approaching boats, sending the occupants tumbling into the water. Warriors, with sword and shield, can defend themselves from ranged attacks as long as they’re not distracted by a melee.There’s more, but Bad North is a microcosm of real-time strategy. There are no bases to build, just houses to defend. Those houses serve a double-purpose.

Save them from the raiders, who want to raze them, and they provide cash to spend on unit upgrade, and while fending off the waves of Vikings your units can spend some down-time indoors to recover from their losses. It’s a risk, healing during a mission, because the unit is sealed in the house until fully recovered. If the house burns, so does the unit. And the micro-scale of the game means that having even one unit out of the fight may well mean you’re fighting at one-third or half strength.The scale of the islands doesn’t prevent them from having character. Artist Oskar Stalberg, one of the two developers working on the game, has featured on these pages before, and the islands here, with their subtly carved height maps and pathing, have something in common with his previous urban designs.

They feel like places with purpose rather than simply functional arenas.People are the real stars though, not islands. Units are made up of several warriors and they fidget and bustle around as you give them orders. Sometimes a straggler will pop out of the main group briefly and they’ll hop back and forth from foot to foot as they fight. They’d be adorable if they didn’t seem so anxious, and if they weren’t staining the islands red with blood.

Sometimes their own, sometimes not.It’s not just in its ruleset, the delicacy of the counter-attacks and blocking of routes, that Bad North distills real-time strategy to a pure form. When the last wave attacking an island is defeated, you’re whisked away to an FTL-like map of nodes, choosing your next destination as you attempt to outrun the bulk of the Viking forces. But there’s time for reflection before the campaign continues and the camera pans around the island you just defended, the blood-stains telling the story of your brief moment of last-ditch glory.Units persist from one island to the next and losing one is a heavy blow. Replacements don’t come cheap – in fact, you can’t buy them at all. The coins that each surviving house gifts to you can only be used to improve the units you already have, adding active or passive abilities that give them new tactical options, or simply make them harder to kill. Warriors can learn to plunge from cliffs onto the heads of their enemies and archers can fire things more destructive than simple arrows.When we first saw Bad North’s beautiful GIFs, the appeal was obvious, but how the thing might play wasn’t clear. It’s clear now, and it’s a smart blend of precise orders in tight spaces, and slightly looser simulated aspects of movement that make things just a little less predictable than they might be otherwise.

A hulking unit might send units scattering and bouncing toward a cliff edge, but the physics rather than the roll of a dice decide whether they tumble into the water. Arrows thud into shields, flesh, grass or water, their flight and trajectory left partly to chance.It’s that element of messiness that I find most appealing and it, more than the real-time nature of the game, marks the biggest difference between Bad North’s approach to tiny battles, and that taken by Into the Breach developers Subset. Bad North has very clear objectives and rules, but every click you make feels like its half-way between suggestion and command. The units will do as you say, but the twitchiness of their animations and the way they can fall back and break under pressure suggests that sometimes they really don’t want to do as you say.And, fantastically, you can let them off the hook. If an island is being overwhelmed and all seems lost, your units can cut and run. Tell them to seize one of the boats that brought doom to them and now lies discarded on the shore, and they’ll scarper out to sea and continue with the campaign. You’ll get no reward, having abandoned the people of the island and its resources, but sometimes that might be the only way to survive.

Lose all of your units and it’s game over; lose an island and there’s always another just over the horizon.That next island might have a hero of its own and if you can survive the raids, that hero becomes a new unit in your miniature army. In that way, recruitment is part of the game’s flow. There’s no break from the frontlines to create units, they’re found in the field and they stay in the field.I think that’s the real beauty of Bad North. It’s relentless without being exhausting, managing to maintain a jovial momentum even as the bodies hit the floor and settlements burn. Into the Breach is a time-twisting war to save humanity that takes place one screen at a time, an enormous story presented in perfectly sculpted miniature.Bad North does something similar but, as far as I can tell, without the same sense of scale.

It’s a few single moments repeated in an infinite variety of forms – the first boats emerging from the sea-mist, the assault on the beaches, the exchange of arrows and the lamenting for the dead.It’s too early to say for sure how many times I’ll want to replay those moments, but right now I’d happily take a month of them or more.