Ratopia – Basic Guide

Guide to Basics

Ideal Soldier Ratio

It depends very much on how your base and defenses look like, the stats of your soldiers, the food/necessity/joy/hygiene buffs and how you fight them. You can definitely play through the whole game with 5 buffed soldiers if you rush the enemy each wave and you can play with 0 if you have a good defense in traps, though 10 might be more comfortable later on.

You can also take the squad with you and make them hold the position on a gravestone and then destroy the grave stone. Grave stones respawn, but not 100% of them every invasion. With that you can basically do one wave at a time and keep them down so much that you only get 1 actual invasion wave or even none. This can cause troubles later on though for spoiler reasons.

A rather cheap decent defense without much research is alternating spikes and barricades. Spikes hit everyone in the tile (including you and your ratizens) and the barricades make sure the enemies stack in front of them, so they all get hit by the spikes at the same time. 5 of those should be enough for most waves, but it depends on where you build them. Some enemies are a lot faster than others and could trigger the spikes before the rest is there.

You can also dodge and hit enemies without taking any damage (hard with the ranged ones, but those can’t hit at all if you are 1 tile below them) or take aggro and pull them apart so your soldiers only face a few at the same time or can do another spawn while you just kite one.

How many waves at the same time are you getting? How big are they? At what difficulty do you play? 2-3 spear rats should be enough for quite a bit if you have defenses, depending on what you call “early game”. Does “3-ish” mean 3 and above? I am not sure why population should have any influence or a ratio. I am rather sure enemy waves just depend on the spawner numbers and the prosperity.

Food, Money and More

Food and money is really “done” with a rabbit hunting or grain farm food chain and money with taxing and some reliable way to collect the taxes if you don’t rush towards 100 population. Probably multiply those by 2 around 35 population and by 3 at 60 or so? (never gotten that high). You do not need to tech a lot for that, unless you want to stack more of that (e.g. for food buffs or to get higher class citizens with more wealth stacked onto them).

You only need sticks on top of lumber to make spike traps. Thorny wood gives you better barricades, but you do not need those for a decent defense. Just normal processed wood will do for a long time if you have some space. I think 2×4 of that barricade + trap combo is enough for quite some time.

Enemies and Your Army

You absolutely do have control where enemies tunnel in. They try to get in from their spawn towards your base. If there is only wall in the way and no opening, they start tunneling in. If you have your base open in that direction with some line of tiles, they will tunnel in onto that tile line instead of directly into your base. If the way is completely open up to their spawner, they will also not tunnel at all and just walk to you (can be unreliable with snow on surface).

The Squad Headquarter (wasn’t that the one you get researched for free at 4?) lets you command your military instead of them just running randomly into enemies and over the traps etc. You can make them escort you and rush to where you want to kill the enemies quickly or make them guard one spot (e.g. just on a barricade, so they are safe from range attacks and have their combat power stacked or on a cliff so their knockback is pretty dangerous). Even without squads you can also “Command” the enemies with running through them and pulling them away so you military does not have to fight all of them at the same time.

The shrine is mostly useful to hunt down the spawners (but only on invasion days), but if you explore the map around you and have a telescope (or abuse other mechanics to “look around”) you can find the spawners without that. When they respawn, they will create “unexplored” territory around them, so when you see a spot that should be explored but isn’t anymore, a new spawner will have popped up inside there.

You can take your military with you and attack it and destroy it, keeping simultaneous spawns low. Your military can kill them quite quickly on spawn when all together or at least tank for you. You can also destroy it alone if you stay at max range on the side away from your base. That way the ones that spawn will mostly ignore you and march towards your base, while you can keep hitting the grave. If you keep the button down, you will probably get aggro by hitting them from 1 of them at a time though, but all except the fliers will die before they get a chance to hit you. Destroying spawners at prosperity 5 that can mess things up though.

Doing it with stacked soldiers:

Doing it alone (don’t have to use the traps):