Inktide strategy guide

The how to play page explains the controls. This page is for the match after that one: why the player who looked weaker at the start is often the one holding the map at the end, and what they did differently. None of it is a secret, and every number here is one the game really uses.

How your army actually grows

Your army has a ceiling: a hundred soldiers, plus twelve for every tile you hold. Ten times a second, your army closes a sixty-fourth of the gap between what it has and that ceiling. Two things follow, and together they are most of the game.

An army far below its ceiling refills fast, and a full army does not grow at all. Spend half your soldiers and half of what you spent is back in about four and a half seconds. Sit on a full army and you have earned nothing for as long as you sit. The strongest habit you can build is to keep your army working: a steady run of medium orders beats one enormous order followed by a long wait.

Land is the only thing that raises the ceiling. Every tile you take is twelve more soldiers you can hold, for the rest of the match. That is why the first minute is a race for empty ground and not a fight: empty ground is the cheapest ceiling there is.

What a tile costs

Every tile you take is paid for in soldiers, and the price depends on whose it is and what it is made of. The price the game shows beside the force dial is the first part, per tile; the ground itself can add more on top.

• Empty land costs 5 soldiers a tile. Highland adds 4 more, which is why the hills are the last ground anybody claims and the first place a slow border holds.
• Water in the way adds 25 soldiers per tile of water crossed. A front can wade across a river or a strait up to four tiles wide. Anything wider needs a boat.
• Another player's land costs 30 a tile, plus their army spread across their front. A player with 3,000 soldiers and a hundred tiles of border adds 30 more to every tile, so their ground costs 60. Each Factory they own adds another 25 to every tile of their country.

The same tile, taken from the same player, can cost twice as much a minute later, because the price is their army divided by their front, not a fixed number. Two consequences are worth learning early.

Attack a player while they are fighting somebody else. Their army is being spent on the other front, their border has grown longer, and both of those lower the price of their ground. Every tile you take from them also takes with it the soldiers standing on it, so the player who is already losing a war loses it faster.

A narrow country is expensive to walk into. A player pinned behind a one-tile gap of land has their whole army funnelled through that tile, and the price shows it. Do not pay it. Go around by sea (below).

The opening

Pick a start with room. Before the match you choose where to begin. The ground around you matters more than the ground you stand on: open lowland in several directions is the fastest start in the game. A corner is safe and slow. Highland is slower still. A coast is a second front, one that works both ways: it is where your boats leave from, and where somebody else's come ashore.

Claim empty land before you fight anybody. At five soldiers a tile against thirty, a minute spent taking empty ground is worth several spent at war. The players who reach contact with the biggest ceiling decide most matches, and they got there by not fighting first.

Point your orders at open space, not at a wall. An order advances as a front and leans toward the spot you tapped, and a longer front moves more tiles each tick. Aim into the middle of empty ground so your border widens as it goes, rather than threading along a coast.

Watch your neighbours. Every player's army, tiles and price are on the screen during a match. The player next to you who has the same army on half the land is the one who will come for you when the empty ground runs out.

How hard to push

The dial goes from 5% to 100% of your army in steps of five, and the soldiers it commits are only spent as tiles are taken. An order pauses when you run short and ends when its budget cannot pay for the next tile. You can only have one order at a time, and a new one replaces the old.

Against empty land, a high setting is rarely wrong: the ground is cheap, your army refills behind you, and nobody is contesting it. Against a player, set the dial from the comparison the game shows you: the soldiers you will commit beside what their border costs. Sending everything wins the fight in front of you and leaves every other border empty, and the neighbour you were not watching can see that number too.

A useful rule of thumb: in the middle of a match, send enough to take a real bite (a strip of their country, not three tiles) and keep enough back that your own border is not the cheapest one on the map.

Coins and when to build

Coins arrive separately from soldiers. You start with 150, you earn 5 a second on your own, and nothing about coins costs a soldier, so building never loses you a fight directly. What it costs is the ships you were saving for.

Every building has a base price. The second one of a kind costs twice that, the third three times, and how many you may own grows with your land. You can have at most two buildings under construction at once.

A Mine first is usually right. It costs exactly what you start with, it is built in five seconds, and it nearly doubles your coin income, so it has paid for itself in under forty seconds. The second one costs 300 and takes about twice as long to pay back, which is still well inside a five-minute match.

A City pays while you are spending. It speeds up the refill, and an army sitting at its ceiling is not refilling at all, so a player at war gets far more from a city than a player waiting on a full army. It is also the dearest building, which is why it usually comes after a mine.

A Factory is a defence for the smaller player. A small country's ground is cheap to take, and twenty-five soldiers more a tile can add a third or more to what taking it costs. If a larger neighbour is about to walk through you, a factory changes the arithmetic they are doing. It cannot stand on highland.

Build away from the front. A finished building that is captured changes hands, with everything it does, to the player who took it. One still under construction is destroyed. Either way, a building on the border you are losing is a gift to the person you are losing it to.

Water

Water is not a wall, and the player across the strait is your neighbour.

Transports. Tap land on another shore and a transport carries part of your army there. It costs 20 soldiers to launch, you can have one at sea at a time, and the soldiers on board are not in your army until they land. They come ashore near where you tapped and carry on as an ordinary order from the landing point. That is the answer to a choke point: land behind it.

Ports. Your first port doubles the speed of your ships, which is time your transports are not exposed at sea. A port also lets you build warships, and every port opens up to two trade routes to other players' ports on its own: no agreement is needed, only a sea path between them. A route pays both ends about 3 coins a second for as long as both ports stay where they are, which makes a neighbour with a coast worth more to you standing than conquered, for a while.

Warships. A warship costs 220 coins, needs a finished port, and you can have two. It holds a patch of open water and sinks any enemy transport that comes within eight tiles, so two warships on a strait make a crossing a real decision for whoever is on the other side. They can also seize a trade ship that sails too close. If you are about to cross water that somebody else patrols, cross somewhere else.

Allies

You can offer an alliance to anybody, and either side can break it at any moment with no warning. An ally's border is a front you do not have to watch, which frees the army that was standing on it. That is the whole value, and it is large.

• Ally with the neighbour you are not fighting, so everything you have goes to the one you are.
• Do not leave the border you share with an ally empty. Breaking an alliance is instant, and an empty border is the most tempting thing on the map.
• Peace with a coastal neighbour keeps the trade running. Your ports and theirs trade whether or not you are allied, and a port that changes hands ends its routes, so the war you did not start is income you did not lose.
• Bots never accept an alliance. A bot is labelled in the lobby and on the results, so you can tell whether an offer can ever be answered.

The end of a match

A match ends after five minutes, or earlier when one player holds 60% of the land, or when only one player is left. Everybody still standing is placed by how much ground they hold; everybody who went out is placed by how long they lasted. Leaving the match counts as giving up.

That ordering has a practical edge. In the last minute, ground is the score, and nothing else is. Coins you did not spend are worth nothing at the end, and soldiers you did not use are worth nothing either. Put the last of both into land: the cheapest tiles on your border, wherever they are.

Stay to the end even when you are losing. A player who survives to the last second places above every player who went out before them, and the game pays experience for being there when the clock runs out. A small country that is still on the map at five minutes has beaten everybody who is not.

When the sea rises

The map is not fixed: at set points in the match the sea rises and closes in on one spot of the map, taking the land furthest from it first. It happens in every match — the public pool, private rooms, duels and challenges alike. The clock at the top of the screen counts down to each rise ("Sea in 20s"), and the game warns you when your own ground is next. A tile the sea takes is gone, with anything built on it, and the share that ends a match early is counted on the land that is still dry.

Play it by moving toward the ground that goes last, before you have to. Land the sea is about to take is cheap and short-lived; the ground it reaches last is contested and lasts. A player whose last tiles are about to go under can still sail out: a transport at sea keeps you in the match while it sails, though an army with no ground to stand on loses soldiers the whole way, so make for the nearest dry coast.

The mistakes that lose most first matches

1. Sitting on a full army. It is not growing. Spend it on empty ground.
2. Attacking a player in the first minute. At thirty a tile against five, you are buying the most expensive land on the map while your neighbours buy the cheapest.
3. Sending 100% at somebody. You win that border and lose every other.
4. Building on the front line. It becomes theirs.
5. Paying for a choke point. Land behind it instead.
6. Leaving an ally's border empty. Alliances end in an instant.
7. Leaving early. The last minute is where places are decided, and a player who stays is placed above everybody who went out.

Then play the next one. Most of the difference between a first match and a tenth is having seen each of these happen to somebody else first.