Last Updated on by Samuel Franklin
This comprehensive For The King strategy guide provides tips to winning the difficult roguelike strategy adventure. These strategies and walkthrough steps will help players beat the odds based on my experience beating every campaign on the hardest difficulty level.
This guide covers the following (quick links below):
- Campaigns: The key differences between the campaigns and any applicable campaign specific tips.
- Difficulty: How the different difficultly levels impact your For The King strategy and the mechanics.
- Characters: How to effectively use characters and optimal team composition.
- Resource management: How to manage all resources including health, experience, focus, gold and consumables.
- For The King tips: General tips and tricks for various situations to increase your chance of victory.
While reading these sections I recommend that any terms you are unfamiliar with in this guide that you consult either the in game encyclopedia that IronOak Games have made accessible through the options menu (help) or the For The King wiki.
For The King Campaign Guide
The campaigns (game modes or adventure) in For The King have their own core gameplay mechanics and impact your overall strategy. While the core campaign is not the easiest I still recommend players start there as it is designed to introduce mechanics to players.
| Adventure | Key Mechanics | Core Strategy |
|---|---|---|
 For The King (core campaign) |
|
Highly efficient movement and experience gain with a balanced team composition. Maximising sea cave dungeons for loot, experience and Lore Store gains. |
 Frost Adventure |
|
An easier adventure as it lacks a time limit provided you overcome the damage (up to 5) per turn to your heroes from the cold weather.
Maximise time spent in early locations where cold weather damage is reduced to boost your heroes power and unlock the Inferno equipment from the Lore Store before attempting this as it provides health regeneration. |
 Into The Deep |
|
Bring a talent skill focused party to maximise ship movement in this campaign against the Kraken God.
The flood mechanic is relatively slow so use the additional time and flexibility of objectives to maximise your party strength through levels, items and consumables. |
 Hildebrant’s Cellar |
|
A straight forward challenge that can be useful to farm lore currency.
Hildebrant’s Cellar success relies heavily on your team composition and should favour combat characters with high speed like the Hunter. As this mode lacks diverse events you can also use duplicate classes. |
 Dungeon Crawl |
|
Similar to the main campaign focus on movement optimisation to counter the chaos counter while finding the dungeons.
Players will need a flexible team and strategy to adjust to the different starting biomes. |
 Gold Rush |
|
This game mode uses a unique small landlocked world with endless lives as players compete for the most gold. To prevent your opponent from acquiring gold players can use a range of creative strategies that leverage your game mechanic understanding. This includes activating fights for your team that are unwinnable before running away, pulling them into a dungeon, taking all the good items and manipulating last hits on enemies to claim the coin drops for yourself. |
 Lost Civilisation (DLC campaign) |
|
Similar to the main campaign a focus on optimising resources with a balanced team is critical to stay ahead of the planetary alignment mechanic. |
For The King Difficulty Guide
Each of the campaigns above has three difficulty levels (Apprentice, Journeyman and Master) that will punish you for any mistakes by impacting the following game mechanics. These can also be altered through the house rules option to create a custom game difficulty.
- Lore Payout: Ranging from 60% to 100% and 150% this impacts the lore earned throughout a campaign to spend in the lore store.
- Chaos (or similar) Frequency: At higher difficulties the number of turns between increases in chaos, flood or other timed mechanic is significantly faster changing from as many as 8 turns down to 4. This has an impact on how long players can accumulate gold and experience in an area or to explore for useful locations.
- Life Pool: One of the hardest things about Master difficulty is the 0 life pool that means you need to rely on event sources for team revives. With the larger life pools on lower difficulties players can make death resulting mistakes without it completely nullifying a For The King run.
- Economy Inflation: All core campaigns are subject to inflation which is the increase in cost of items from stores over the length of the game, usually after a key milestone or set number of turns have taken place.
- Enemy Health: While this might seem minor due to the 90% on Apprentice and 110% on Master it can actually add up over the course of an entire campaign needing an extra attack from time to time that means your characters will take slightly more damage overall.
- End Turn Health Gain: A mechanic not actually driven by your choice of difficulty and instead tied to the campaign you select but still appears on the difficulty summary screen.
- Starting Items: Easier difficulties provide players some basic starting equipment from extra gold to herbs and equipped items. This can significantly assist players with the early uphill battle of For The King and shouldn’t be underestimated for its impact.
- Stat Bonus: Stats are fundamental to the various random events and combat which makes the Apprentice bonus of +5 the most powerful boost of the lowest difficulty as you’ll deal more damage and have better event results.
- Max Focus Bonus: Another boost only available on Apprentice the +1 to maximum focus across your characters like the stat bonus above guarantees better results in combat and events. The +1 is highly deceptive as it sounds small on paper but given the number of times you’ll refresh focus throughout a campaign can end up being worth multitudes more.
For The King Character Movement & Combat Guide
Choosing the best classes for your adventure is a critical first step combined with effective overworld map movement, events and combat.
- Stay Together: Keeping your team together at all times is important when in the overworld. This allows a full party for each combat encounter for less health lost and the right characters available for any event.
- Play To Your Strengths: For The King does not reward jack of all trades gameplay, players will want to ensure that characters play to their strengths. This means using your strongest strength character for that strength check event to maximise your odds and focus their gear to reach the maximum possible statistic of 95. Players can even store statistic boosting items and equip them before events to maximise your chance for success.
- Leverage Your Skills: Each character has their own unique skill that is a significant part of their power and require playstyle adjustment. The Trapper for example can ambush enemies with one less stat roll which means you’ll want to lead with them to initiate any combat when in your party.
- Offense Over Defence: For The King rewards aggression in combat and players should always be looking to attack on their turns with prioritisation towards removing enemies before their next attack. Using the example screenshots below as I cannot kill the Timberwolf before their attack I’ll instead attack the Beastman as using my characters two attacks I will be able to kill him and prevent his attack entirely.
Every character has several statistics that have different uses:
- Strength: Primarily used for melee weapons this stat also plays a role in bashing down doors, destroying chaos structures and various item events.
- Vitality: Impacts on the maximum health of character and used in events that impact your health positively or negatively.
- Intelligence: Used for magical weapons intelligence is important for puzzle events that reward items or experience.
- Awareness: Empowers bows and polearm attack chance while also being a vital statistic in ambush and sneak attempts.
- Talent: Used for musical weapons the Talent stat is also useful in disabling traps and travelling the ocean.
- Speed: Speed is a vital stat given its impact on overworld movement distance, how often you attack in combat and your success at fleeing.
- Luck: All characters have the same 50 Luck points but this can be significantly increased through items. Luck is vital in games of chance that often have significant rewards so hoarding Luck items to equip before such events is a powerful strategy.
- Armour: Mitigates physical damage taken and is increased with equipment. Each point in armour reduces corresponding damage taken by 1 and if your armour value is higher than the total attack damage you’ll block the attack entirely. Armour items usually provide bonuses to Strength at the cost of speed so not all characters can reach high armour levels.
- Resistance: Similar to armour but for magical damage with items that boost resistance generally having bonuses to Intelligence.
- Evasion: Reflects the percentage chance of a character to dodge both physical and magical attacks and is primarily boosted by items that provide Speed and Awareness.
For The King Resource Management
As For The King is a roguelike strategy game the key to victory is optimised resource management:
- Health: The most important resource, every decision should be about preserving your health. This is because there is only a small number of free healing options so every health point lost is less gold to spend on boosting your power instead. In order to protect health focus on fast combat to reduce the number of enemy attacks and where possible always fight with a number advantage so the enemy doesn’t get an attack opportunity. Ambush in particular is useful as a successful ambush allows you to fight enemies one at a time.
- Experience: Avoiding fights saves health but will actually hurt you more in the long run as you need to acquire enough experience to reach higher levels and beat the final bosses. If you consistently start well but see a rapid decline in mid to late game your issue is likely not acquiring enough experience, gold and items early on to propel you forward. Using the ambush strategy above can significantly help in achieving this along with a general approach of never failing to take any other 3v1 battle that presents themselves and using the optional dungeons that spawn.
- Focus: Managing your focus given its guaranteed stat roll power is another key resource. While equipping items with the refocus ability can help you’ll generally want to be saving your focus for the events with the largest negative impact if failed. While some of this requires game knowledge events that end in death or significant damage taken are obvious candidates.
- Gold: Gold from combat and exploration needs careful management given its role in healing and shop equipment. For careful spending players should prioritise new weapons and spending gold on the biggest leaps in power rather than buying multiple small jumps along the way. With the threat of inflation buying items earlier and when available is also an important tip as opposed to hoarding gold.
- Consumables: The final key resource is your consumable inventory which needs to be carefully used. For example if you are poisoned but expect to heal in a few turns then save your vital Panax herb for a battle where you actually need it. Ensuring you split consumables across your team is also vital in case a character dies or is not in a particular battle.
For The King General Tips & Tricks
Below are other For The King tips with a mix of beginner tips and advanced tactics that are not immediately obvious.
- Effectively using dungeons and ships can quickly gather your party from being spread out across a biome as this action brings all these characters together.
- You should always be planning multiple moves ahead of your current situation. Where do you want to be in 2 turns? 5 turns? And how do you plan to get there?
- Exploring all game hexes can significantly improve the number of useful events you encounter and ensure you find all the important locations (e.g. Sanctums). While keeping your party close is important, you should move them across different hexes to fully explore while staying in range.
- Prioritise pipe upgrades above all equipment opportunities. If relying on party heal in your team setup you can focus specifically on the party healer as this is what decides the healing amount.
- Always check towns for quests but only accept a quest if you can complete it within the next 20 turns required. Chaos limiting quests should always be prioritised.
- While an item might have slightly higher damage an item that uses less stat rolls and has an effect on a perfect attack is often more valuable.
- If you are using a breakable weapon always have a backup for that character as using your fists is a highly ineffective attack.
- Scholar’s Wart can double as a healing item when used strategically before, during or after a fight to allow a character to level up.
- Tinder pouches can be used multiple times when placed in the overworld and can be useful when placed near multiple objectives allowing you to heal and refresh your focus in between these major battles.
- Always use your average character level as a guide on whether you are ready for a dungeon or next objective. You should always aim to avoid attempting a fight higher than your current level and absolutely never take a fight that is 2 levels higher than your characters as levels are a large factor in character power.
- Avoid certain enemies when in the overworld, there are a number of imbalanced enemies that have deadly side effects or hit significantly harder than most.
- Always use your focus before activating a Sanctum or Hero Monument Statue as both of these refill your focus to the maximum.
- Focusing gold multiplier equipment on a single character and giving them all the gold from battles can significantly increase your gold income.
- Enemies that steal gold can be useful and abused to increase your total gold gained if you kill them before they flee the fight. If your gold is stolen and you kill the thief and then collect your stolen gold after the battle it is multiplied by your gold find meaning you’ll receive more gold than the amount stolen.
