Troy Tactics rules and tips

You move a small force across a hex board and solve the day's position. The situations come from four well known scenes of the Iliad: two champions facing each other, the assault before the gate, the defence beside the beached ships, and the night of the wooden horse. The board, the rules and every number are ours, and no sentence from any translation of the poem appears anywhere in this app. It is not affiliated with any film or commercial game.

One board opens per day. Everyone who arrives on the same day gets the same scene, the same terrain and the same starting positions. Both generating the board and playing it happen inside your browser, so there is no account and nothing travels to a server.

There is a reason for the hex grid. On a square board a diagonal neighbour is adjacent and yet somehow further away, which makes every rule about distance longer to state. On a hex board all six neighbours are the same distance, so stepping back one tile means exactly one thing.

One move

A move is one unit acting once. After it moves, if an enemy is within its range it attacks as part of the same move. A unit may also stay where it is and attack from there. When every one of your units has acted, the turn passes. You can also end your turn early while units still have moves left.

The Greeks move first. Your opponent is a bot, and the screen says so. It plays one of two temperaments, decided by the board. Bold closes on objectives and enemies; steady holds its ground and avoids tiles where several enemies can reach it.

How damage works

Damage is attack minus the defender's cover, and it is always the same. There is no to-hit roll and no random draw. The same attack from the same tile always does the same thing, which makes this a puzzle about ordering rather than luck.

There are only two sources of cover. A spearman standing next to a friendly spearman takes less, and any unit standing on the gate tile takes slightly less. At least one point always gets through, so two units can never grind against each other forever.

Terrain

Open ground costs one step, sand costs two, and nobody crosses rock. Gate and ship tiles are the objectives of their boards and cost the same as open ground. Chariots and the wooden horse cannot enter sand at all, so a route can suddenly become much longer for them.

From here on this is what the code actually does. The numbers in the two tables below are read straight from the game constants, so they cannot drift away from the screen.

One board a day, the same for everyone

The board is built from the date. The date picks the scene, and the same value places the terrain and the starting units. So everyone playing on a given day plays the same position, and a board link opens that same position for whoever receives it. The link carries only a scene number, that value and a check character, and if a single character is wrong the link is not opened at all. Opening a different board and calling it the same one would be worse than opening nothing.

The five types differ by axis, not by numbers

The spearman is holding, the archer is distance, the chariot is speed, the champion is force and the horse is cargo. A roster of fast, tough and cheap units is one unit with three price tags: it adds arithmetic and removes decisions. Each of these five does something none of the others can, which is why the archer being unable to shoot an adjacent enemy is a rule rather than a flaw.

Undo

Undo goes back as far as you like. One tap rewinds to the point where it was your turn again. You cannot take back only the bot's move and roll for a new one; the bot plays the same move on the same board every time, so rerolling would change nothing anyway.

There is no penalty and no limit on undo, and Replay puts the whole board back to the start.

What this app does not do

Regular runs are not timed and have no leaderboard. Turn on Compete and a win on today's scene goes on the shared leaderboard by server-measured time. There are no streaks. Nothing is awarded by chance and nothing is for sale. There is no hint feature, and we say so rather than implying one. Everything you need to solve the board is already on the screen.

The five unit types

The four boards

Place the archer first. It only shoots from two or three tiles away, and an archer with an enemy beside it does nothing at all. Put it behind a spearman and let the spearman hold the front.

Keep spearmen in pairs. A spearman beside a friendly spearman takes less damage. Spread out they are ordinary soldiers; paired they become a wall the bot would rather go around.

Do not lead with the chariot. Four steps means it can arrive late and still arrive. Leading with it puts it next to several enemies at once, and since it cannot enter sand its retreat is often cut off.

The reachable tiles are highlighted before you commit. Look at them, and count how many enemies could reach the tile you are about to stand on. Two or more is usually a bad tile.

Ordering is damage

The same set of moves plays out differently depending on who goes first. Finish a wounded enemy with your first move and it never gets to answer. Attack something you cannot kill and you have only told the bot where you are. So begin each turn by asking which enemy you can actually remove this turn.

Before the gate is about passing, not fighting

You win that board by standing on the gate tile, not by clearing it. Trying to fight all three defenders runs you out of moves. Pin one side with spearmen and send the chariot around the other. Check the sand first, though, because on some boards it cuts the chariot's route and the other flank is the short one.

By the ships is about buying moves

You win that board by lasting the full count, so delaying is worth more than killing. A pair of spearmen in a narrow gap costs the attacker a whole turn. Ending your turn early is a real option, but it advances the count by the number of units that did not act, so it is not free. That is deliberate: sitting still should not be the best line.

The horse is cargo, not a defender

The horse cannot attack, moves one step and cannot cross sand. So plan its route first and post the escort along that route rather than ahead of it. An escort standing on the gate achieves nothing, and a move that carries the horse one tile further is almost always the better one.

If you tap a unit and no tiles light up, that unit has already acted this turn. Units that have acted are drawn faded. End the turn and they move again.

If you tap a destination and the unit does not go immediately, it means there is something it can attack from there. Tap the enemy to attack, or tap the tile again to stop without attacking.

An archer cannot hit the tile next to it. Archers shoot from two tiles out. Step back one tile first.

If a chariot refuses a tile, that tile is sand. It is drawn in a different colour.

If a link you received opens today's board instead, the link was truncated. We do not open an approximate board from a broken link. Ask the sender for it again.