Last year during the early alpha stages of ChainGuardians I wrote a walkthrough to help people learn about the game. Since then the game has continued to grow and the Beta has been released to the general public. As the game has grown in popularity I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of views of my old guide and figured I really should release an update.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with ChainGuardians:
ChainGuardians is an anime and cryptocurrency inspired turn based strategy game. The browser based game has been available to the general public for about a year and a half. Even though the game is inspired by cryptocurrency, and utilizes block chain assets, it plays like a normal game and will be possible to play freely on release.
In addition to the Turn Based RPG, ChainGuardians has a gas-free mining platform which allows you to earn multiple currencies (both on and off chain) and is closely related to ChainBoost a “NFT & DeFi Focused
Incubator and Boostpad”. If you are interest in either of those things, feel free to check out the official sites or let me know you are interested in the comments and I’ll put an article together.
This article is strictly focused on getting you up to speed as quickly as possible in the RPG.
At the time of this writing, the game is still under active development with lots of improvements planned. That being said, you are able to do a lot in the current version. This is particularly helpful for free to play / play to earn players as you can start building up your squad and farming resources.
A new player starts with 500 consumable soldiers and can summon one free Lieutenant (also called a “Randomizer”) per day. Once you run out of soldiers they will replenish up to a maximum of 50 over time so don’t hesitate to use them. Additionally you can fuse nine Lieutenants of the same rarity (stars) into a Lieutenant one star higher. Once you get to three stars, there will be a path to mint the character as an NFT in the future.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The very first thing you should do is claim your daily free unit.
SUMMONING
Every 24 hours you are able to freely summon one unit. Click on the “CHAR SUMMON” button, click on DAILY, and then click on FREE.
You will see a purchase confirmation screen and a full screen view of the summoned character.
Once you have been playing for a while, you will eventually earn enough CGC for the paid summons. The premium summon costs 5000 CGC. You will see a picture of the unit you will receive, and it can be a two or three star unit. If its not a three star unit DO NOT BUY IT. Realistically speaking if it isn’t “psychic”, “light”, or “sound” element its not worth buying either.
The biggest piece of advice I can give, and this applies to the “normal” summon as well, NEVER CLICK THE LEFT BUTTON! I have seen a lot of people confused as to why they didn’t get their 100 CGC summon. That is not a summon button, the “refresh” button just rerolls the available unit. It does not give you a unit.
In addition to the Premium summon, there is the normal summon which can give you a one or two star unit for 1000 CGC (again, NEVER CLICK THE 100 button). Don’t waste your CGC on this unless you see a two star unit with psychic, sound, or light element.
The final type of summon is the Special summon. This one is for the gamblers among you. All other summons show you what you will get before you spend any CGC. The special summon charges 300 CGC first and then gives you a random unit. This unit can be a normal Lieutenant or one of the special female models. The unit can be between one and three stars rarity.
This summon can definitely be worth it if you want to spice up your collection and don’t mind taking a risk.
A few final notes about summoning
- The units will automatically refresh over time. Each page, with the exception of the special summon, tells you how long you have to wait.
- The special summon does NOT give white haired male Lieutenants.
- There will be changes to summoning currency and costs in the future.
TEAM FORMATION
Once you have your first Lieutenant its time to take a look at your team. You won’t have much in the way of choices yet, but at the very least you need to add your newly summoned unit to your team.
Every person starts with five soldier units. They all have the same stats, they don’t gain any experience, and when they die they consume one of your initial 500 soldiers. They are strictly filler until you get NFTs or summon enough units for a full team.
Replace one of them, the position doesn’t matter at this time, with your new unit. You are now ready for battle!
CAMPAIGN (PVE)
Until you have a fully leveled team, campaign is where you will spend most of your time. There are four worlds to chose from with more planned for the future.
Of these worlds, Bitcoin is the starter planet. Ethermon and MCH (My Crypto Heroes) are collaboration inspired worlds. They are difficult and don’t offer “loot” at this time. Ethereum is hard mode.
Once you click on planet Bitcoin, you will be greeted with some flavor text (which I won’t share here) and then you will be presented with the stage select screen. You start with a single stage unlocked, and each time you clear a stage the following one will unlock.
Selecting a stage will display the stage information screen. It will tell you how many waves of enemies you will fight (2 or 3 usually), the recommended element of unit to use, as well as a full list of the enemies under the monster tab on the right.
The Loot tab will show you what you can find. The “dollars” are fiat, which is in game currency used for practically everything. The “pill” item is a healing potion (which does not currently work), and the other items are used for evolving (limit breaking and enhancing) characters.
The Trial tab tells you the missions you need to accomplish in order to earn CGC. Each completed mission also rewards a star and once you earn enough stars you can open one of the reward chests from on the stage select screen.
There are always three missions:
- Defeat all Enemies
- Clear the Area without casualties
- Use a specific element unit (usually one which is strong against the enemies in the stage)
THE FIRST MISSION
Unless you waited five days before playing, and are using a team of level one Lieutenants you have to actively try to get less than two stars on the first mission. You are only fighting three units and you out number them at least two to one at all times.
Battles are elementally modified rock/paper/scissors. The enemy will show their last played attack over their head. You want to use the appropriate counter attack as indicated by the chart on the top right. Using the appropriate attack will multiply the amount of damage you deal.
You will also notice your enemy has a different colored sword or shield. This indicates their element. If you choose the appropriate element you will do additional damage. All your soldiers are Earth element (green) so they will be strong against Water (blue).
Each unit will have three different types of attack. The soldier had Strike (Red), Thrust (Blue), and Slash (Green). When a units turn begins, each attack will be assigned a power between 1 and 6. The higher the number the more damage it will do.
Your free Lieutenants will have a slightly different selection of cards, Charge (Yellow), Strike (Red), and Slash (Green).
Each of your units will act in “SPD” (speed) order. Once all five of your units have acted, the enemy units will take their turns. It is possible though that an enemy unit will act out of turn and counter attack. The enemy’s SPD stat determines how likely they are to counterattack.
It may take a few attacks, but you should be able to defeat the first soldier and move on to the second wave.
Unless you are very unlucky you will be victorious. Each mission you complete will earn you 5 CGC for future spending. You only earn this CGC the first time you complete any given mission.
You will earn a set amount of fiat and random loot. Your Lieutenants will earn experience and leveling up will improve their stats. Any killed soldiers will immediately be replaced from your soldier counter.
During battle you most likely noticed the items button and “soldier bar”. The items button lets you use consumables like healing potions (when they are implemented). The soldier bar will charge after every action you take. Provided you have 50 soldiers it will eventually charge fully. You can then consume 50 soldiers to use a “The Aphrodite SAC” (SAC stands for “Satellite Assisted Combat”). This is a team heal which can be very useful later on. Soldiers respawn one every 10 minutes, so practically speaking you can use the Aphrodite once a day.
Helpful Combat Tips:
- Enemies can counter attack even if you use an item or the Aphrodite.
- By default, enemies will attack either the unit with the least HP or the lowest level unit.
- Using the Aphrodite CONSUMES 50 soldiers. A lot of people are surprised by this.
- The Aphrodite will only charge up to the number of soldiers you have available. If you only have 30 soldiers, it will stop at 30 and you won’t be able to use it.
- Once you have less than 50 soldiers, soldiers will regenerate one every 10 minutes.
RAID BOSS
Once you’ve gotten the hang of basic game play and collected more free Lieutenants (or decide to spend soldiers) you are ready to start farming the Raid Boss. The Raid Boss starts with a massive amount of life and can only be defeated by the community working together.
Each player gets three attempts a day and each attempt rewards 5 CGC and a random number of Core Manipulators (an item used for character upgrades). You earn this prize regardless of how long you last. This will change in the future, but for now this means you can earn 15 CGC daily with 5 minutes of work.
Fighting the Raid Boss is simpler than the PVE stages. You have one enemy and at most 50 attacks. The Raid Boss does NOT display its previous attack so there is no element of Rock/Paper/Scissors, its simply guesswork. The Raid Boss will attack after all your units have attacked and it does have the ability to counter attack.
Until you get a really high level team, you will most likely be knocked out LONG before you have used all 50 attacks. As mentioned before, that’s ok, you still get the prizes! Additionally, one lucky community member, who deals the final blow, will earn a bonus of 50 CGC.
There is a trick to farming the Raid Boss more quickly. This will be removed in the future, but for now if you have a single conscious unit, and click cancel when prompted to revive the dead units, the raid boss battle will still begin. You will start the battle with a single conscious unit who will quickly be KO’d allowing you to earn your rewards in a handful of turns.
While I don’t know the dev’s stance on this, aside from that fact that it will be fixed, I consider it an exploit, so use at your own risk.
INVENTORY
Once you’ve been playing for a while you will earn a bunch of Fiat and collect a lot of inventory.
You can buy various resources in the store to help with crafting or character enhancements. There are also various consumables you can purchase. You should poke around it on your own. I personally recommend farming as opposed to buying though.
There is one item which is very important to draw your attention to though, the Shady Market Voucher. This is used as part of character fusion which is how you increase the rarity and power of your characters. I’ll discuss this and crafting more later.
HERO FUSION
This tab is not accurately named, it is used for more than Hero Fusion, it is used for Limit Breaking and Hero Enhancement as well.
You have two options on this screen, enhance and fusion. When you select a character and click enhance you will be brought to the enhancement screen.
Once they are max level, you can increase the level by 20 through limit breaking.
This requires element based items and fiat. The element based consumables are obtained through crafting.
The same is true for increasing your Weapon (attack), Armor (defense) and Skill. Skill is not yet relevant but will be in the future.
If instead of clicking enhance you click fusion, you will be brought to the fusion screen. This will only display units which are eligible for fusion, this means any NFTs you may own, or any units currently in your team, will not be displayed.
To perform fusion you must first have the previously mentioned “Shady Market Voucher” in your inventory.
Performing Fusion:
- Click on the unit you want to upgrade, it will then be labeled with a number “1”.
- The display will automatically filter out any units of different rarity.
- Select 8 more units. These units will be destroyed / removed from your collection.
- Click Confirm
- Click Fusion in the next popup
- Click Confirm in the next popup.
After a short animation you will see a message saying success and the unit you selected first will have an extra star. Levels and upgrades should remain and the stats should be slightly better.
CRAFTING
As it is likely to be a while before you do any crafting, I’ll keep this simple. You will need to craft resources to upgrade your units. To do so you click the crafting button in the inventory screen.
You start with a single crafting slot unlocked and can open additional for 5 CGC.
The main things you will want to craft are under the UNIT (items for limit breaking), WEAPON (items for weapon enhancement) and ARMOR (items for armor enhancement) tabs. There you will see a list of different element items. Though there are no scroll arrows, the list IS scrollable. Click and drag your mouse to see more. Choose an item to craft and wait for it to finish.
You CAN log out and crafting will continue, BUT people have previously reported issues when reloading so I suggest crafting and immediately using to ensure you don’t lose anything.
PVP
Last, but certainly not least, is PVP. I saved it for the end because there is no tiered match making currently. You are very likely to end up fighting max level legendary units.
Once you feel you are ready you have the option to play a private match or be matched against a random opponent through Quick Play.
If you create a match a string will be generated to give to your opponent. Though it may not be obvious, you CAN click on it an control-c to copy it. You don’t need to manually type it out.
Joining a match looks basically the same. Again, you CAN paste in a string using control-v, you don’t have to manually type it.
If you win enough games you will find yourself on the leaderboard. Currently it does not reset so that may take a while.
With that I have given a basic overview of ChainGuardians. There are a lot of promising features for the game and I look forward to what the future holds.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments and to ask any questions. If people find my articles useful I will happily post more!
