Ratropolis – Challenge-Related Achievements Guide

General tips

“Common knowledge” that might help you build your own strategies.

• Work (from Waterwheel building) is skill card you can use to make builds produce faster or combat buildings shoot faster. You can apply Work multiple times to multiply the effect.
• Re-use (multiplies the next skill used) is a buff. Re-use is also a skill and so it multiplies itself. 3 (lvl2) uses gives 9 stacks of buff, instead of 3 that you would get using 1 card at a time. Work and many others buffs are also skills.
• Stone Skin card can be upgraded to make it non-ephemeral. This is useful with builds that can infinitely replicate cards (like female Scientist’s ability). Oh and it’s also a skill, so…. you can make your troops immortal with Re-use.
• Male General Leader skill buffs military cards. If you use it on Growth troop card and it completes the growth, the card you get next gets stats of that buff, but doubled.
• If you buff a Military Card (let’s say attack) with a temporary buff, Place the buffed troop and then recall the troop to return as a Ephemeral card to your hand, the ephemeral card retains the buff.
  It can be buffed again before placing. Buffs that troop gain while deployed (as icons over their head) are lost when recalled.
• Succeed can be used to transfer temporary buffs on 1 card (including Ephemeral cards) onto another card and make transferred stats permanent. Keep in mind it might also transfer Permanent card onto Ephemeral and you might lose a card.

Madness

Win the game in under 22 minutes

To do this, you must Rush all waves. To survive rushing all waves, you need strategy, which scales with progress and not over time. You will also need some luck to get the stuff you need and remove everything else.

Few strategies I found

• Scientist’s Static electricity
  • Damage: Static Electricity (and/or Crackle to get Phantom Static).
  • Researcher (troops) are essential as they give 1 skill damage (2 if upgraded). Keep them on inner most walls. If they fall the achievement is lost for this run.
  • Agit buildings to double the damage. Burst can also be good if you don’t have too many Agits.
  • Early gold can be handled with phantom cheese strat. For this you need Cheese Market, and once you get a Preserve card from Leader’s ability use Cheese Market and “keep” up to 3 (up to 5) cheeses from it.
  • With multiple Crackle cards you can opt for Research for gold as it gives 30/45 gold per skill use.
  • Your end goal is a small deck that you can draw in its entirety.
  • Get/Use Generator to upgrade key buildings when possible.
• Male Scientist’s Hyperbeam
  • Biome: Coast as you need blessing to Reduce card cost and keep economy sustainable.
    PAY ATTENTION TO COASTAL BOSSES! You lose any cards you play when they are doing suction attack.
  • Damage: Hyperbeam. You can use Static Electricity or Bomb early on.
  • Phantom Cheese strat for gold is a must(see above). Hyperbeam increases re-draw cooldown, so you have to be able to afford to pay for re-draws.
  • Agits building and Re-use skills to buff hyper beam. Burst skill can also be used, especially if you get no Agits.
  • Priority is on implementing the Phantom Cheese strat, because it allows you to pay for redraw and spam your 1 skill card.
  • You want to use blessings to remove the price of non-phantom cheeses early on, and reduce price of Hyperbeam (priority, as you can spam it without the other 2). Re-use is the next card.
• Merchant’s Arrow.
  • Biome: Forest. Expansion on houses to increase Taxes.
  • Damage: Arrow (scales with Taxes/Skill damage). Get Arrows from Fletchers (troop), Arrow Shower (on Discard), Fletchers Houses. Fletchers remain good, but they have to keep dying for you to be able to get arrows from them. I found fletchers alone to be super unreliable.
  • Increase Taxes using Tax office (this is a priority and upgrade ASAP), Mansion, Houses, and hopefully events. Apartment Houses are fine if you’re not getting many houses, but keep in mind they give less taxes per space used.
  • Female merchant is more consistent as first advisor boosts Taxes (so damage) a lot better (also she starts with 1 Fletcher). With that said, Male can boost gold to crazy amounts and possibly utilize golden tower for the last boss.
• Builder Towers
  • Biome: Forest for easy tower upgrades, and not having to deal with coastal non-sense.
  • Damage: Flame Towers and Watchtowers. Catapults are a nice supplement to the towers.
  • Build as many Water mills as you can. Work cards they produce boost tower firing speed.
  • Focus Fire is good as it boost damage itself.
  • Build some useless structures you get from Leader powers, so you can use Rent without disabling essential structures.
  • Your walls are paper thin (even with upgrades) so Pikerats (for slowdown) and Slingers (for stuns) are a good idea to give towers some time.
  • Demolisher (building) is a great tool and can be a nice saver in a pinch. It allows you to move towers while expanding. You can use it before last wave to move towers to 1 side (possibly to 2nd outer-most area, because boss might break the outer wall and kill your towers). It also gives you a chance to destroy and move your best tower 1 wall back just before the outer wall falls. Also, Demolisher level 2 gives you an upgraded card of whatever building you demolish. It’s more expensive than Builder’s Guild, but you can use it to upgrade your structures.

I came really close with Male Merchant Something like 23 minutes and got it done with Female.

Obviously, do it on Pollution 0.

Calculator

This is a nasty one, mainly because of the last boss.

Monsters give you a bunch of gold and last boss gives you 500+ gold and that still counts towards the achievement. i.e. the boss can literally fail your achievement on its own.

There’s not specific build/strategy I can suggest. The main tips are:

• Do not rely on re-draw on last boss. There’s a huge range of gold that is not enough to re-draw, but enough to fail achievement once boss dies.
• Don’t use ANY strategies that can kill the boss too fast. Last wave gives you too much gold with boss and you need to space out monsters and boss, to have time to spend gold.
• Have a set of cards that is capable of using 500+ gold in about 5 seconds.
• On last wave you want to keep your gold at ~300 (or less).

If you use a merchant, you can save a Noble for late in the run as Nobles empty your bank, while being an okay troop.

Fair and square

Achieve victory without using non-melee military units

You can use anything you like, except from ranged and support units. This is difficult using actual melee units, but relatively easy using skill or tower builds.

Male Scientist’s Hyperbeam + Phantom Cheese strategy (refer to Madness achievement section) works perfectly fine. Just make sure you use Lab Rat (or morphed version) for starter troop and not gate guard. At some point you won’t use any troops.

Tower Builder is also an option, as long as you don’t touch non-melee troops (Guard are ranged).

Millionaire

Easiest done by Male Merchant. Level up his ability, and save up gold. Once you get to about level 5 and 5k gold it should be going up steadily. I suggest getting Cheese Market for phatom cheese cards, so you have easy access to cards to discard using his ability.

Oops

Beat the final boss before he attacks.

I would suggest Male merchant’s infinite gold strategy (You need to be at 99999 for the last boss). Focus on Arrows( Taxes, skill damage, Arrow Rain, Fletcher ) and finish it off with an Upgraded Golden Tower (which will hit for 20k at 99999 and should kill any boss in 3 hits). You need the tower to be at max damage, so only place it for the boss wave and not before. Ideally keep your leader ability ready to cap gold out again if it drops to ~70k (or whatever amount you can restore in 1 use based on card count you CAN have; remember that ephemeral cards work too.).

I found Owl (Forest boss) to be the easiest boss to do it on, because it jumps over the wall and positions itself as priority target for the tower. Other bosses can stop behind normal enemies can you might not be able to reach the boss before its first attack.

If you get notifications of last wave spawning on both sides, pause the game and see which way it’s coming from. Spider signals on both sides, but it spawns on 1 (and then it switches sides). You can also try to prepare for this by getting 2 upgraded towers and keeping leader ability on standby. If they go through troops they burn .

Avoid movement speed together with melee units with this strategy. Melee units will chase enemies and might start attacking the boss outside of tower range (that’s an instant fail unless you get the owl).

Under The Shade

Achieve victory with only 4 or less Defensive Walls.

You don’t need a super in-depth strategy for this one as many things work (especially on low polution level), but you can do it together with Millionaire or Oops (if lucky in forest).

I suggest going as Male Merchant in the Forest. Take Arrows (Arrow Rain, Fletchers) for damage (they don’t need much space or upgrades to work). Build/Upgrade: Tax Office, Mansions, Houses, Warren, Appartment House (priority in this order, but Warren is in 2nd spot if you get Tax office). Almost any sacrifice you can survive is worth taking for Skill Damage advisors. The only exceptions I can think of are rebel cards that you cannot remove (these will reduce damage) and losing all gold after wave 20.

Try to get a Golden Tower before wave 30, but do not place it until wave 30. Arrows might struggle to keep up against 30 wave boss and you REALLY don’t want the tower to be on different side than the boss.

Mafia

Kill one unit that carries 999 Bounty

One way to do it is using Upgraded Bounty Hunt economy card 2 times just before the final boss dies. Slim deck, spam pay to re-draw and use it. 2 uses of Bounty Hunt lvl2 just before final boss dies virtually guarantees this achievement as any bounty over 400gold (last boss has ~500) will bring it over 1000.

Either have a slim deck or 2 upgraded cards ready to use.

You might also consider spamming Upgraded Wanted (maybe Aggro, if you can survive Danger cards) economy card to build up bounty. It turns into a good source of income and makes your Bounty Hunt more than just a gimmick card for 1 achievement from last boss.

Slayers

Acquire the advisers “Ironclad”, “Silent”, and “Defect” in one game.
This one is 100% RNG however you approach it. Your best bet it getting many chances to roll by exploiting Quest card that awards Treasure Chest.

Before I begin, I want to suggest doing in in 120 run. Explorer is a good fit for 120 run and their troop-power-scaling strategy involves you doing almost NOTHING after you set it up. You have plenty of time to do quests. Finally, it benefits your 120 run A LOT more than 30 wave run.

1st option: Phantom Chests
This makes it difficult to get a chest, but it can happen randomly and if it does – you win.
Using Female Scientist Leader get a treasure chest quest from event. Complete the quest and do not use treasure chest. Spam Replica ability on your treasure chest, to get phantom chests and pretty much every advisor in game.

2nd option: Farm Quests
This gives you access to reliable quests, but you need to complete them manually.
Play as Navigator and use their Expedition card or Guild Office building to get quests somewhat reliably and aim to complete them reliably. Treasure Chest is your primary goal, but at some point you might get an advisor that gives a random advisor after every quest.

Basic strategy/Completing quests

• Expedition card and/or (Multiple) Guild Office buildings (upgraded for better odds) for quest cards. Always pick one that rewards Treasure chest. Ignore others.
• (Multiple) Monasteries to complete the quest easier. You need a lot…
• Smithy (or a few) to upgrade quest cards and require less removals.
• Anything that gives you ethereal cards, that you can keep removing infinitely. I got an advisor that gives me a random military card, but you can use pretty much anything.

Optimizing basic grind
Get (Multiple) Black market and/or Ship Cards (technically you can make use of all of them) so you get a chance to get cards from other leaders. Ships offer a different card every time you draw them, so you can re-draw to keep looking. You’re hunting for 3 cards.

• Catalyst as it Morphs (when Leader ability is used) into Fusion. Fusion gives an ephemeral copy of the next card you use. i.e. 2 Treasure Chests for price of 1.
• Start as Female Explorer Leader’s. Cheater (advisor) can cut ability cooldown time in half every time you redraw. Since that is the big bottleneck of doubling chests, you can just get 1 chest and spam leader ability to get this done quickly.
• Water Wheels (as many as possible) –> Work –> Faster buildings (Monastery, Smithy, Guild Office, etc). This is if you cannot utilize the above.
• Any card that removes cards and is not Single use can help. I suggest Dark knight. as It removes a random card in your hand card when deployed to become stronger. It allows you to complete the quest easier, while placing a decent unit in front lines (front-most wall so they die). If you get dark knight though, make sure you’re able to only keep useless (removable) cards in your hand.

Torment (+Nightmare, Hell)

Survive 60th / 90th / 120th waveAt 120 basic enemies have ~40k hp. Lizard monsters ~500k. You need to scale to that level without relying on Leader ability, because you have to choose a new Leader every 30 waves. Pretty much every winning strategy so far has been patched out one 1 by 1, so it’s safe to expect this one won’t last either (it already got Nerfed to a degree).

The strategy below is reliable (credit for base strategy goes to 2 people in this reddit thread), but requries some luck (and/or save-scumming) to setup.

To my knowledge Explorers are the only class that can still somewhat easily and reliably reach 9999 damage for troops (making it possible to setup a win in first 30 waves) and still continue scaling. A similar power strategy is possibly with General, but general’s troops do not get crazy attack speed boosts or access to Re-use (a huge boost to this strategy).

• Handgunners are your main troops. They have good range, their speed scales with Stock so it makes sense to boost their damage.
• You want to position them on 2nd outer wall (not outer most). See placement section below.
• Buff their attack speed by increasing their stock. Ideally you want to get at least 100 before you begin buffing damage. Reload and Supply Depot is one way. Merge is the other (I only realized it’s a thing after my run), Older posts suggest you can deploy a troop, recall using Rope Ride and then Merge the resulting ephemral troop into main card to double the stock (I didn’t test so it might not work anymore).
• Buff their damage by buffing temporary troops and then using Succeed to combine their stats into 1 troop.
  1. Deploy 2 of them (at a time)
  2. Use Rope Ride to recalls 2 handgunners as ephemeral cards.
  3. Make sure you only have those 2 troops in hand and then proceed.
  4. Use 4x Re-use (lvl 2) to max out the buffs.
  5. Use Grind (buffs cards a lot) and Succeed (combines card stats).
  6. Place the ephemeral Handgunner on safe isolated wall (you don’t want them killed or mixed with other troops).
  7. Do this a couple of times to get 2 troops at similar power.
  8. Use Succeed to combine the 2 troops into 1 strong troop. (don’t overdo it as it becomes easier)
  9. AFTER THE GAME SAVES attempt to Succeed your Ephemeral Handgunner into the main Handgunner card.
  10. If Normal One gets merged into Ephemeral one do some save-scumming. Exit game (do not abandon) and choose continue to reload. Try again.
  11. At this point you can setup your slightly buffed Handgunner as a main troop.
  12. Now use the buffed Handgunner card to deploy buffed Handgunners and Rope-Ride and Succeed them until you have 2 maxed ephemeral troops (3 if you didn’t upgrade Succeed).
  13. Succeed them all into your main card and you’ll get a 9999 attack Handgunner. At this point phase out your “slightly” buffed troops with maxed one.

Cards (required)

• Smithy (technically optional, but it speeds up too many things)
• Market
• Rope Ride
• Black Market
• Water Wheels –> Work to boost other buildings
• Succeed (from black Market)
• Grind (from black Market)
• Re-use (from black market). 2x in first 30 waves (if you get 1 you need 2x intel agency). 4x later for 120 waves+).
• Intel Agencies (from black market) – (several) this is mainly to duplicate Re-use.
• Museums(from black market). This is just to reduce costs of Re-use, because multiplying effect by x16 also results in x16 cost.
• Supply depot (unless you manage to get 9999 stock). You’ll want to delete Reload at some point
• Breed/Warren for Ratizens

Cards (recommended)

• Wanted. Use this from time to time and this will build into stable income. You can combine it with Wanted Hunt (+50/75% bounty for 15 sec).
• Demolition building. Being able to discard useless stuff (like watchtowers) is amazing value for long runs.
• Lighthouse/Library.
• Factories. 1 is a must, 2 will be helpful. Balance to have 0 cooldown (0 after draw animation ends, not full 0).
• Public bath (duh)
• Drawing building, to quickly get 4 Balistas and 2 Vine launchers and 2 Rat in a Box. Discard after that.
• Expedition/Guild Office. You’ll have lots of time. You can use it to get Slayers achievement. Treasure chests give a high chance of advisor and one particular advisor gives a random advisor on any quest completion.

Cards (for 120+)

• Medic (get like 5 on each side early to place near missionaries and delete the card)
• Priestess (10 is enough). Some enemies in large groups can break through. This just makes your troops tank 1 any hit without worries.
• 4x Re-use (2 is good early on, 4 is pretty much mandatory past 150).
• Poison Fog. Mandatory past 150 (Re-use up to 4 times and fog on outer most wall)
• Vines. This is amazing for clumping enemies up if you don’t manage to get full row of Moats. Saves you LOTS of gold on spamming 4x Re-use + Poison Fog. Also can save your troops when you’re attacked from 2 sides. Place on 1 side – deal with other.
• Stone Skin. Get 1, upgrade it (so it’s not ephemeral and can be discarded) and DO NOT USE IT. Use Intel Agency to make duplicates and use those with Re-use X4. With enough uses your troops will be immortal and poor performance will cause you to quit before you die.

Placement

Example positioning for left most side of the map (left is for orientation, do both sides)

• Left most wall is broken (you can repair in when you need it)
• Area between 2 walls is almost completely filled with Moats, and last spot (closest to troops) has Rat in the box for knockback
• Behind the wall you have 2 balistas, 1 vine tower.

It’s fine to have something else for first 30 waves, but once you get your buffed handgunners, towers cannot don’t even come close in terms of damage. This setup focuses on giving gunners the most time to shoot and will probably handle everything up to 120 without your help (as long as you keep adding handgunners).

Screenshot shows Golden tower, but Balista would be better if you find it.

Some tips

• Do Slayer’s Achievement during 120 attempts.
• Avoid advisors that give ephemeral cards on redraw. It’s basically a permanent negative card draw once you have +5 card draw.
• Avoid advisors that make you KEEP cards (unless you know what you’re doing). It’s a detriment until you slim your deck down.
• Pay attention to bosses on waves that multiples of 30.
• When switching Leadesr consider Builder, to get buildings you’re missing. Also, Moats and Balistas are the your biggest survival tools for your Gunners.
• Scientist is also a good choice for Factories for 0 re-draw cooldown are a must for 120+.
• Male explorer leader ability gives stock to all cards in hand. Buff it and use it.
• Save scum in first 30 waves
• Remove houses once you cap out ratizens.
  • Random choice buildings (like shops). You can reliably get useful stuff after each wave.
  • Combining cards (and losing a card).
  • Accidentally buying/deleting cards.
  • Avoidable battle losses. Early on this is a big one. You cannot afford to lose Handgunners buffed by mercenary, before getting a permanent buff on the main card. Redo the wave and pull them back before a wall falls.
  • Chest drops. If you get 2 consecutive waves (the save after 1st one doesn’t happen) and 1st chest has crappy drops – reroll.

Theory on “See event” Achievements

There are many events and you need to see each one of them.

Check the name of events you’re still missing, and look them up in this scripted event guide to see which wave they happen in. If this is the last achievement you need, just quit and re-do.

Save scumming might be an option, but I haven’t personally tested it, so I’m not sure how events in each run are determined (the same each time, fully random or fixed on save).

There are 2 options to try, if you want to experiment. Both rely on knowledge that the game saves AFTER a wave is completed and only if it’s safe (it will not save if you start a wave and you kill it after another one has spawned). So let’s say your event is on wave 27.

1. 1 prepare the event. There are 2 options.
   • After beating wave 27, event should pop up. This might not work if the game saves info about event you got.
   • During wave 27, but don’t finish it off until 28 spawns. When 28 starts (you see the enemies) finish 27 off. Wait and event should pop up. This will work if event is randomly generated on event wave.
2. Do the event.
3. If it’s the wrong event Exit Game–>Continue. This will load you ready to retry from step 1.

If either works, let me know, and I’ll update the guide.

[WIP] Plaguelands

Complete Pollution Level 20

I haven’t done this one yet. I’ll update the guide once I do.