Clash Royale: Merge Tactics Beginner’s Guide

How to Play Merge Tactics – The Basics

If you aren’t familiar with the auto chess genre, this mode probably feels very weird. In general, the way to play is to buy troops from the shop at the bottom of the screen and place them on the board. Once the round begins, your troops will automatically battle until none are left.

Choosing Troops

At the bottom of your screen, you’ll see three troops to choose from. You’ll also see an elixir amount to the right of it, which indicates how much elixir you have to spend. At the bottom of your screen, you’ll see three cards at any given time, as well as their price. You buy troops by clicking on them from the buy screen, at which point they’ll automatically spawn on your board (or your bench if you don’t have enough room). Keep in mind that the bench is exclusively for storing troops you want but can’t yet fit on your board. Benched troops do not contribute to your traits.

Selling Troops and Cycling the Shop

To sell a troop you no longer want, just drag it down to the shop. When you do this, you will get its elixir cost back minus one. So if you buy a troop for 3 elixir, you can sell it back for 2. Buying troops is also a way to cycle the shop, as any time you buy one the shop refreshes. You can effectively re-roll your shop for 1 elixir by purchasing any troop and selling it back immediately. This is a great way to hunt for the cards you really want, but don’t do it constantly since you’ll waste all your elixir.

Leveling Up Troops

Leveling up troops is essential for staying competitive throughout the whole game. Troops can be leveled up to 4-star, but it’s rare. 3-star is typically what you want to aim for. To upgrade from 1-star to 2-star, you need one additional copy of a troop. Then if you want to go to 3-star, you’ll need two more. So to get from 1- to 3-star, you’ll need four copies of a single troop. The higher your troop level, the more powerful they become. Even if you have a perfect team comp, without highly leveled troops you’ll struggle in the last rounds.

Troop Placement

Troop placement is the most important key to winning games other than getting a good team comp. In general, you want your tanks in front of your ranged troops. There are some traits that will impact where you place troops, but in general you want to keep tanks on the front line and ranged ones in the back corners. I usually split my ranged troops across both corners so they don’t get swarmed by troops that target the back line, but there are a bunch of ways to go about it depending on the troops you have. It’s also sometimes smart to separate your tanks out across the whole front line so they don’t get hit by splash damage together.

Dealing Damage

The way you deal damage to other players is pretty straightforward. At the end of each round, the losing player will take damage equal to the amount of enemy troops still alive plus 1. So if you lose a round and your opponent still has three troops out, you’ll take four points of damage. Games go quick since everyone starts with only 10, so you can’t afford too many losses.

Quick Tips and Notes

Here are some smaller things to know about Merge Tactics that don’t really warrant their own section, or at least don’t since this is just a beginner/intro article.

• From Silver tier and up, each game will have a random modifier that affects the match. You can check these on the ranking screen.
• There are two different King tower options, but you don’t unlock the second one until further into the game.
• You gain rank as long as you finish in the top 2 of your game, and you gain a crown reward for every round won.
• While your standard Clash Royale card levels aren’t used here, you do get rewards to use in standard Clash.