One very fundamental feature of the tactical battles is the various structures your units, or enemy units, can occupy. I am talking of towns, bridges, watchtowers, catapults, but also placeable features like mantlets. Hovering over the feature gives you a list of advantages that occupying it will give you. Maybe the most universal and most important is that a unit occupying such a feature won't use stamina to fight or assist. That is especially important on the highest difficulty, where it usually takes several fights to kill an enemy squad, which quickly depletes your squads' stamina. If you are approaching a big fight against several strong enemy units, and there are no features in which you can put your assists, consider placing a mantlet either in the back for free assists, or at a choke point in the front to occupy with your strongest squad.

The enemy usually makes great use of watchtowers for ranged, magical, or healing assists. As long as the enemy units occupy the watchtower, they can provide those assists endlessly, and the watchtower increases the effective range. The trick here is to use provoke, either from a warrior like Lex, or from a "beckoning" item. It makes the enemy leave the watchtower and run towards you to attack. A group of archer attacking you is easier to deal with than trying to capture overlapping watchtowers. Provoking doesn't work on garrisons of towns. Towns are very important features to occupy, as stationing one of your units in such a town will slowly heal it, including resurrecting fallen units and replenishing stamina. You can also deploy units there, and even withdraw units on one side of the map to redeploy in another town for a quick "teleport".

Outside of battles, in the overworld, one shouldn't underestimate the importance of resources. Right after the tutorial, when arriving in Cornia, you can already explore most of that kingdom and gather all the resources and divine shards. You can either dodge the enemy units that are running around on the overworld, or you can quickly skip the battles with them. As long as you technically "win", that is deal them more % damage than they deal you, they get stunned for a while and you can continue exploring. If you are strong enough to one-shot kill them, you get a bit of honor. If you ever lose a fight, you only get thrown back to the last town or battle spot you visited and can try again from there. You need resources to do deliveries for towns you conquered, which will unlock features like boats, and the ability to station guards. Each delivery also gives you some honor and money. Stationing guards in every town will auto-collect the resources around the town, plus money, giving you a nice passive income after each battle.

That brings us to sigils, which are the repeatable battles of Unicorn Overlord. Besides being a great way to level up units, and to farm honor, every sigil battle, even trivially easy ones, will respawn the resources on the overworld map. Thus if you are in desperate need for resources, you can just quickly do a few easy sigil battles and get resources both from the towns you already stationed guards in, and from respawns on the overworld map. Somewhere mid-game you will start conquering towns faster than you get new story characters. It is well worth then to hire cheap soldiers from forts for a few honor points and use them as stationed guards. Even if you completely conquered a kingdom, you'll still want guards stationed in every town there. Besides the money, the resources that accumulate will also be useful, because you can always go back and make more deliveries for money and honor.

Later in the game, tactics become increasingly important. It is impossible in the scope of this blog post to tell you everything about tactics, as it is a complete system of "programming" your units for the auto-battles. Just one important tip is to check the order for both the red and the blue tactics each of your units has. You will want to have conditions set for the higher priority orders. If a higher priority order has no condition, or a condition that is always fulfilled (like "prioritize"), you will *never* get to the tactics lower on the priority list. Thus you will typically want to start with something conditional, like for example an attack that hits a whole column only if there *is* a full column, followed by another type of attack when there isn't.

Once you liberated Baumratte with the level 14 quest "Another Prince", you can start visiting the coliseum (sic). The important part here is the possibility of online battles. Even if you can't win a single one of them, you get 200 coliseum coins just for doing 10 online battles every day. And as there are some absolutely great weapons for that level you can buy for 500 coliseum coins, this is well worth doing. Note that you can select who to fight, and without cost renew the list of 5 enemies on offer, until you find somebody you can beat. Winning battles online gives you even more coliseum coins, and allows you to farm the prizes faster.