More advanced rats let you build robots and buff them during a session. There are six to choose from (the first couple are sort of tutorial rats that make it easy to make money, and easy to fight respectively) but I like the Builder Leader, who can play a house on a house to make it a bigger house, without requiring any specialist building upgrade cards. Before any run you appoint a leader to your clan, who comes with a passive bonus and an ability you can activate on a cooldown. I have tried to get around this monstrous onslaught of fatal rammening many times, and thankfully there are a lot of ways to experiment. Soon after that the huge ogre mutants bring battering rams. Then, as you pass wave 20, you start seeing clusters of huge ogre mutants. There are attack cards that you can play directly on enemies, and one of the most satisfying and yet unnecessary moves you can make is to play a chain lightning card on these poor muckers. In the beginning you’re charged by tiny diseased enemies, easily picked off by your mighty rat archers. I tend to make it to about wave 20-ish, which is around when the waves suddenly become brutal. You can knock down buildings and replay them using certain building cards, but it’s time consuming, expensive, and takes those buildings offline - rarely a worthwhile sacrifice. This raises dilemmas a dozen or so waves in, though, when space there is low or non-existant. Ideally, you want your best buildings close to your hub, because that puts them behind more defensive walls. Some buildings take up more space but come with powerful abilities - I like the Scrapyard, which you can use to ditch unplayable Scrap cards from your hand - and naturally the confined space in your territory forces you to pick buildings with the functionality to support your deck. These are the simplest buildings you can buy, and essentially convert gold into Ratizen resource at the expense of space in your base. Ratizen colonists are needed to support any plans, though, and they need houses. I feel busy, but have enough time to start building my deck towards a particular style of play. It all takes place under that constant, mutant-driven time pressure, and for me the game is just stressful enough to be fun. "It all takes place under constant time pressure, and for me the game is just stressful enough to be fun." But before any of that you want to play the Pottery card you drew, because that gives you 10 gold for any card of any sort in your hand. Cheese cards give you 30 gold for every one in your hand, and you always draw a few - but the developers Cassel Games have also set a mousetrap, because if you’re too hasty when you’re clicking around you might accidentally play the final Cheese card for a gold loss. You quickly learn that playing efficiently means playing the right cards in the right order, and sometimes not playing certain cards at all. Your cards are also the basis of your economy at the start of a run. Efficient, quick use of these cards is essential, because they let you deploy forces to your left and right fronts, unleash special attacks, construct new buildings, upgrade your settlement - which is spread across a 2D plane - and build new defensive walls farther from your town. When the game starts you draw a hand from a deck of cards, and can draw more on a cooldown timer. Oh, and it’s a base-builder, and a tactical attritional survival game like Plants Vs. You’re clicking on to order guard rats around, you’re clicking on chests enemies have dropped, and you’re also clicking on cards, because Ratropolis is a deckbuilder too. At its most frenetic moments, Ratropolis becomes closer to a clicker game. Want to visit the market? An icon will sometimes appear in your base and linger for 30 seconds or so if you miss it you just have to wait for it to come around again. As you’re building defensive walls and placing troops, the clock never stops. If they trash your central base building, it’s all over. Sadly, they are attacked every few minutes by waves of deadly and annoyingly punctual mutants. Historically much maligned as a species, all the cute little Redwall-esqe critters want to do in Ratropolis is build beautiful cathedrals and a functioning society. On paper Ratropolis ought to be a mess, but only difficulty tuning and a few clashing ideas hold it back from greatness. An absorbing hybrid of deckbuilding, basebuilding, and tower defense against the clock.
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