Knightica: How to Beat Normal Difficulty

I’m making this guide to help people who are struggling with beating Normal difficulty. I saw in the community hub people complaining about the difficulty, even after the first patch that made normal mode easier, some dubious tips about Ogre start being the only viable one and mandatory units/enchantments to beat the game, like units boosting stats and frenzy to trigger the Ogre passive, Chaos Lord seems to be the only legendary valued by a bunch of people etc…

Please note that at the time of writing I have played this game for 80+ hours, beat the game on Insane difficulty with all the characters at least once, reached Endless 25 on insane and found startegies to reach infinite attack and defense that doesn’t require an Ogre or a Chaos Lord (the latter being the best to reach infinite stats but you can do it with other units too).

I’m thinking about making other guides, but as my main objective is to help new players/people not used to strategy games or auto battlers, I will only cover how to beat World 3 on normal difficulty here.

I kept the save I’m using to illustrate this guide and will continue it later to reach Endless 25. When done I’ll eventually update this guide to add “how to reach Endless 25 on Normal”. I didn’t force myself to play perfectly in this game, meaning that while this works on Normal, I probably wouldn’t have gone past the 1st Boss on Insane.

When you want to start a new run you’re prompt to choose a game mode and difficulty. Here we’re playing in Campaign Normal, which is the only mode accessible in a new game since Hard and Arena are unlocked by beating Normal difficulty, and Insane by beating Hard.

Then we’ll have to choose our Champion. Each of them have unique mechanics and exclusive units (except for one), some are easier to play than others, some are funnier to play than others, so it’s up to you which one you prefer.

In this guide I used the Warrior for two reasons :

• It’s the first character unlocked when starting a new game, so if it’s your first run you can follow this guide
• Its mechanics are the simplest of all the Champions and his exclusive unit, the General, is a good late game unit

So what’s so good about this Warrior ? First, it gets a special shop each time it faces a Boss or an Elite. Special means that you’ll see rare, epic or legendary units depending on how far you are in your run. Remember that it’s just one shop, so rerolling will give you a shop with your usual odds of units and not another shop with increased odds. Second it heals all its HPs each time it beats a Boss or an Elite. So we obviously want to face as many elites as we can in the run (the 3 worlds play as follow : 3 regular encounters, 1 Special encounter, 3 regular encounters, 1 Special encounter, 3 regular encounters, 1 Boss Fight).
Third its exclusive unit, the General stacks def each time it gets hit (with a 1 sec cooldown) and gives 1% of it’s def as atk to units on the same line as them, doubled for common and uncommon units. So that means this unit gets more and more def, to give more ans atk to its allies, plus its size 2×2 makes it the smaller units of the game (on par with some other). Its synergie type is also Knight, it’s not important for now but keep it in mind I’ll go back on that later.

After choosing your Champion you’ll have to choose a start (if it’s your first run this step is skipped but beating the game on your first run is still doable). You’re prompted with three choices but there are lot more different start options, so if you don’t like your starts you can reroll them by going back and starting a new run again (that’s what people thinking Ogre is the only viable start do). While I think it’s totally ok to reroll a start whatever your reason is, I don’t do that and play what the game gives me (because Knightica is a roguelite after all, and I’m the kind of player that plays comps that don’t exist on TFT and still manage to get top 4 somehow ^^).

So here I was prompted with these choices :

• After 3 turns, heal all HP
• Start with units costing HP instead of gold
• Start with a common unit level 2 on board

Because of the passive of the Warrior I think the first choice is useless, but it can be very valid on other characters and it’s a safe choice if you’re unsure about your capacity to wun early game (especially on higher difficulty). I have a preference for the third choice so I’ll go with that but the second choice is also good with this Champion.

Now about what I’ll try to do during this game. First I want to get a specific unit as early as possible. It’s one you want in your every game, no matter the difficulty or Champion you’re playing : the Miner. Why ? Because this little guy gives you 1 gold every turn + 1 if it’s not adjacent to any unit and 1 gold at the start of battle if you have at least 20 gold. Meaning that you want to be over 20 gold as often as possible (don’t let it restrain you to go deeper if needed to strenghten your board). The gold income increases with every level, so that at level 100 it gives you 100 gold every turn (+1 if not adjacent) + 100 gold at the start of battle. This is the only unit that’s madatory if you want to clear the base game. You’ll need others if you want to beat endless but I’ll cover that later.

Specifically I also won’t play Ogre or Chaos Lord during this run because I’m tired of people thinking they are the only viable units of the game and that there is only one strat to beat the game. You’ll see that I’ll end up playing Bombs, which are in my opinion better than Ogre, but few people seem to know about their potential.

Lastly, before diving into the run I want to give you one last advice : Don’t merge your units ! . Seriously, if you don’t have enough copies of a unit to level them up, put them on board, if you don’t have enough space and buying tiles make your econ go under 20 gold, don’t buy them, bench your units. If you don’t have a miner yet, you can buy the tiles but try to keep a bit of gold, you never know what your shop will look like on the next round.

But why shouldn’t you bench your units ? Simple enough, buying a unit costs 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 gold depending on their rarity. Each unit needs XP to level up, 100 for lvl 2, 150 for lvl 3, 200 for lvl 4 and 250 for lvl 5 and above (you can go up to 100). Every lvl 1 unit gives 50 XP, so you’ll need 6 gold to have a common unit lvl 2, but this same unit will only be sold for 4 gold, meaning you’ll loose 2 gold in the process. Same goes for a lvl 1 with 50 XP which will sell for 2 gold even though you spent 4 gold to buy 2 copies.

Now into the run ! So I was given a lvl 2 Spirit which has the special effect of dying at the start of the fight to gain atk and def. Seems pretty useless huh ? Well while this unit sells for 0 gold it instead spreads its stats among your board permanently, so you want to have one early, level it to level 3 or 4, stack a lot of stats and sell it as late as possible. So it is in fact a very good start. Now in my shop I had some units nothing giving me a direction but at least it gives me a board.

I totally ignored the Salamander in this run, but note that’s the patch served it well as I managed to win a run on Insane with it and a good setup. So totally playable if you want. Instead I bought all the other units, costing me all my gold. I merged the Spirit directly (yes I know I told you not to), because this one sells for 0 so I loose the gold anyway it saves me a bench slot for later.

So here I played what the game gave me, without rolling, you usually don’t need it in Normal, until I got to my first Special encounter. It gives you two choices and you have to pick one. Here I had to choose between fighting an elite monster or recruiting troops in the garrison.

The other Special encounters being :

• the merchant selling you enchantments for your units
• the Tavern selling you food that restore your champion’s HP, or give stats or XP to your troops
• the alchemist selling you spells that can do a bunch of things like giving you gold, free rerolls, reroll your shop, swap atk and def stats (I’ll cover this one later) etc
• a forgotten treasure giving you gold
• a haunted temple that lets you pick an augment in exchange for some of your HP
• a gambling game where you have to choose between three boxes and you gain random rewards (the description of the event also says you can gain nothing but it never happened to me, so I don’t know about it)

With my Champion’s passive I obviously went for the Elite Monster and got my first Special Shop. Since I’m still in World 1, I got a shop full of rare units, one Mercenary, two Miners, two Gardians. Since I already have a Scrapper a Burrower and the Slime that has a chance to give you free rerolls I decided that I’ll go for a Greed comp. Now I have a direction.

Mercenaries gain atk and def for each gold you have up to 50 gold. So now I want to be over 50 gold as often as possible. For this fight I managed to get 10 gold so that my mercenaries would get 1 atk and 1 def at the start of battle. They also have a utility effect that gives you a discounted Greed unit if you have over 50 gold at the start of the turn. This is why I consider Greed comps being the easier to play for most of the Champions.

After winning an Elite or Boss fight you can claim rewars named Souls (but I tend to call them Augments because of TFT ^^). In my case I had to choose between loosing half my HP to gain 13 free rolls, loosing half my HP to gain 20 gold or adding a free random rare unit in my next shop. So they are all econs Augments because if the rare unit doesn’t fit in my comp I can still buy it for 0 gold and sell it for 6 gold.

Remember that you can buy free units and sell them for their original cost, this doesn’t work for discounted units though. For example, if you get an epic for half its price, it will buy and sell for 4 gold.

So when doing my maths, the best choice is the first because 1 roll = 2 gold, so 13 rolls = 26 golds, so I should normally choose this one. But now that I have Mercenaries I want to hit 50 gold as soon as possible, so I took the second option.

I repeated what I did previously for the normal encounters, except this time I was looking for units fitting my comp and not anything that came by. During the second special encounter I had to choose between an Elite Monster or the Tarven. Again I went for the Elite Monster, and again I had a shop full of rare units. This time I also had Bombs so I added them on my board. This unit is basically Voltorb, it runs on enemy units exploding and dealing a lot of damage. The good thing is that they give you 1 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ each time they die. They have two others passives, they gain atk each you roll your shop and the most important of all, when their defense is altered they gain a percentage of the defense change as bonus atk.

After the fight I had to choose again between three Augments. Loose 50% of my HP for 13 free rerolls, add a free random lvl 2 unit in my next shop, or have a tailored shop containing only units of my comps. I chose the free rolls because I now have the bombs and they are scaling on rerolls.

Now about the other passive of the Bombs, I was lucky enough to have what is probably the most broken spell on this unit. It’s a spell that swaps the atk and def stats of the selected unit. I started the round with this board and shop (note that I put two miners on board to generate even more gold, I now have 4 gold from the bottom left Miner + 3 gold from the bottom right Miner each round).

So, what did I do ? First, as I had 1 Bomb on board, 1 on bench and 1 in y shop, I merged them to have a Bomb lvl2, it now had 36 atk and 14 def instead of the usual 28-14 because I started to stack atk with my rolls. Note that the higher the lvl, the higher the atk bonus, so I didn’t wan’t to spend too much of my free rolls on a lvl 1 Bomb. Also at lvl 2 their other passive gives 125% bonus atk instead of 100%. So I used the spell after the level up to swap their stats.

Here are the maths : with the swap the Bombs now Have 14 atk and 36 def. 36 – 14 = 22, so they will gain 22 * 125% bonus atk, 22 * 1.25 = 27.5, 27.5 + 14 = 41.5. So now my Bombs should have 41 atk and 36 def.

So here I showed you just a tiny part of what makes the Bombs completely broken, I’ll cover more of this strat with Endless because I intend to keep playing them till the end of the run.

Now onto the first Boss ! It’s a giant Spider that spits venom (or something like that) on your board, it gives a debuff of 5 atk to any unit standing on those tiles. So try to avoid it, and if you can’t avoid having your best damage dealers on it. It also spawns reinforcements regularly, so the longer the fight, the harder it will be to beat.

Here I moved my Bombs away from those tiles, resulting in them being near the miners so i’ll loose 1 gold at the start of next turn but that’s not important right now. If you don’t beat an Elite you loose some HP, but if you don’t beat a Boss you loose all your HP so your run ends. I also rolled to find a few enchantments and ended up going down to 20 gold, which is fine during tough fights.

I had to choose between three augments again. Gaining free rolls at the start of each round for every 10 gold I have up to 4 free rolls, 50% chance to gain 1 gold when merging units or adding dragons to my shop that cost 2 less gold. I chose the first, because again, I’m playing Bombs and it’s overall a very good Augment.

So now onto World 3, still doing the same thing over again, regular encounters aren’t that difficult with a few good enchantments and lvl 2 units starting World 2 you should be able to get around them. You only want to spend gold leveling your main units to level 3 to 4 if possible. If you can level them up more or get Legendaries it’ll be even easier. On the first special encouter I had to choose between an Elite Monster or a Tavern again, and again I chose the Elite. My special shop now contains epic units since I’m in world 2.

I’m given three Shamans in this shop, so basically a lvl 2. While it’s a good support unit that will boost the atk and def of both my Bombs I don’t intend to play it in the long run as I’ll have better ways of boosting my Bombs, so I rather go for the princess. While this unit is not mandatory if you just want to beat the 3rd Boss, you’ll need exactly 9 of them on your board if you want to clear Endless 25 (and that’s exactly what I’m aiming for so I bought it). Otherwise, two Shamans, one behind each Bomb is a pretty good setup, you can merge them when merging your Bombs, or sell them.

On the second special encounter I faced an Elite again, and again had a special shop with epic units. If you look closely you’ll also see that I have a spell that rerolls my shop with higher rarity units. Meaning I can have a shop full of legendaries near the end of World 2.

So after the reroll I got two Generals and one Spellblade. I’m purposely ignoring the Chaos Lord because as I said before you can win runs without it, even if you aim to reach Endless 25 on Insane. The Spellblade gain stats for each lvl on your board + atk on hit, so while its scaling is quite limited for a legendary unit it’s still strong. I won’t go over the general again as I covered it before, if just placed them so that they’ll give atk to my Bombs, Mercenaires and Spellblade.

As for the rewards I had to choose between a shop full of enchantments with their price reduced by 2 gold, a free epic unit (remember if it doesn’t fit your comp it’s still 8 gold) and a shop full of epic units. I took the enchantments because I still had nothing on my Bombs and I’d like to stuff my newly found legendaries. While lacking enchantments is ok during World 2 on Normal, the second boss can be the end of you if you don’t get anything before you reach it, so I needed either this Augment or a Merchant.

Luckily I found Lone Wolf to put on one of my Miners, it gives them atk and def if they’re alone, which is exactly how you want your Miners to be placed. I took Rage for my Mercenaries, since they have now over 300 atk they gain an extra 3% atk at the start of battle. I also took an enchantment that spawns zombies based on def for one of my general and an enchantment that deals melee damage based on atk on my spellblade.

The boss is a big Kraken that burries itself underground, you have to take down its tentacles to be able to hit its head. While its vulnerable, tentacles will spawn behind its head and deal heavy damage. If you don’t have Shadow Step like me to take them down you’ll have to out DPS them. Eventually the head burries itself again and spawns more tentacles. While against the Spider it’s okay to have a long fight as long as you can quickly clean the spawns, here you want the fight to end as early as possible.

For the Augments I had to choose between 50% chance to gain 1 gold on merge (again), refresh the shop each time a unit level up or +4 gold when a unit reach lvl 5, +8 when they reach lvl 10. As I want to keep playing the Bombs, I took the second Augment (its the passive of one of the other playable Champions).

I forgot to take screenshots of key moments during World 3 so I’ll just describe what I did.

So first of all, remember the Princess ? Each time I found one in my shop, I bought it and put it on board. Princesses are units you basically never want to merge because they give XP to units on the same line as them, horizontally or vertically, so if you place them correctly on your board your princess can give XP to other princesses, and other units too. If you end up having many princesses in your shop then its ok to merge them, you’ll find enough of them during Endless to fit 9 of them on your board, I beat World 3 with 6 of them on board.
The other passive effect of your princesses is to raise the max lvl of every other unit by 1 per lvl. So 9 princesses at lvl 10 raises the max lvl of your troops from 10 to 100 (which is the maximum, adding a 10th princess on board won’t raise the max lvl any further).

If you don’t intend to go for Endless, you can skip the princesses, there are other ways to beat the game without them. I’m doing this specific setup because I’m aiming for Endless.

Then I found 2 other legendary units, a King and a Cauldron. The King is obviously strong in my comp because it gains atk based on the amount of gold you generated, and that’s because of him that miners are mandatory, the King is really strong and scales way better than the Mercenaries (that’s when I got rid of them). The only downside is that you pay a tax at the start of the battle to gain even more atk. 14 gold decreased by 2 for each Knight unit you have on board (except the King). Remember when I said the General was a Knight ? Well that’s exactly where its trait comes in handy, more Generals means less tax to pay.

I ended the run with five Generals on board so I paid 14 – (5 * 2) = 2 gold per round. Yes 2 gold and not 4, my calculation is correct. Why is that ? If look at my last screenshot you’ll see the princess near the King has an enchantment. It gives the unit the Knight trait in addition of its original trait. So that means I actually have 6 Knights decreasing the tax. A 7th would allow me to pay 0 gold and still get the atk bonus.

Now onto the Cauldron. This one I didn’t get its mechanic at first and it wasn’t until I tried it out that I understood how strong it really is. In my opinion it’s the best support of the game on par with the princesses raising your max lvl.

What does it do ? It gives buffs to your units depending on the incense you’re using. There are four colors. Red gives atk and evasion for 2s during the fight. Green gives def and healing based on def during the fight. Yellow gives both atk and def and increased move speed. Blue gives XP and doubles the range during the fight (its pretty good to lvl up units but become useless once your board is at max lvl).

The incense effects procs each time you buy one from the shop to put it in the Cauldron AND at the start of battle. Remeber that they count as spells, so Augments like halving the cost of spells or gaining 1 gold for each spell used synergize well with the Cauldron. I recommend having the enchantment that gives you bonus XP on it for a while, because while it gives bonuses to units around it, it doesn’t give bonuses to self. So you either want two Cauldrons on board or giving it extra XP.

The Cauldron is one of the main reason why I find the Bombs OP. Imagine giving def to a unit and it gains even more atk ? Add the spell that swaps atk and def that described earlier and the Selfish enchantment, and your Bombs have infinite scaling. Selfish is an enchantment that make your unit steal 5% of the stats of adjacent units. While it is rather useless in early game due to the low stats of your units, the farther you get in the game, the stronger it gets.

The 3rd boss has a unique mechanic of stealing units from your shop and adding their stats to itself (its basically a Chaos Lord like), so you want to avoid to reroll your shop too much against it, especially on higher difficulties. I generally set up my board against it during the last regular encounters so that I’m already prepared against it and I don’t need to roll too much.

During the fight, either you’re stong enough to one cycle it (it did on Insane and it was pretty fun ^^) either it will leap out of the board after some time and spawn minions. It will heal itself while you’re cleaning the trash mobs, so the faster you take care of them, the less damage it will take.

With three units ove 1000 atk the win was guaranteed, so again I kept my gold and rolls. I managed to get it to 10% HP before it spawned its minions, I took care of them quickly so it didn’t heal that much and the fight was over pretty soon.

After beating Normal difficulty for the first time, you can either continue your run and dive into the Endless trying to go as far as Endless 25, or you launch a new run in Normal or test out the new unlocks, namely Hard difficulty or Arena mode.

As stated before I will continue this run to reach Endless 25 in Normal difficulty, because I want to cover Endless too. I’ll update this guide later on to give you tips on Endless.

Please remember that my run isn’t the only strategy to beat the game, even on Insane, there are other synergies that work well and while Greed units exploit the best out of the Miner’s gold generation, its role as a support generating gold is enough to want it in every other comps. There are other ways in the game to generate gold but the miner is the best at doing so.

As the second patch went out while I was writing this guide, Normal difficulty should be even easier than what my game was. The biggest improvment being tiles unlock now costing 4 gold instead of 6.