How to play Kingsroad

Hold a winding medieval road for twelve waves — every map is proved beatable before you see it.

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Kingsroad is a fixed-path tower defence. The road from the gate to your keep is generated before the game starts, it is visible from the first second, and nothing you do will ever alter it. Your job is to line it with towers well enough that twelve waves of rebels die on it.

Setup

Every run generates a new road on a new field. The road always enters from the top of the map and always ends at your keep, and in between it snakes back and forth across the field four to seven times depending on the shape of your screen. Beside it sit between eleven and eighteen dashed build pads. Those pads are the only places a tower can go.

You start with 280 gold and 20 villagers. Twenty villagers is your health: nothing else can end the run.

How a wave works

A run alternates between a build phase and a wave. The first build phase is twenty seconds; every one after it is eight. When the timer runs out the wave marches whether you are ready or not, and you can send it early with the Send button or the N key to collect two gold for every second you skipped.

Marchers walk the road at a fixed speed and never leave it. They do not attack your towers and cannot be lured off the path — the only thing that stops them is damage, or men-at-arms standing in their way. A marcher that reaches the keep is gone, and takes villagers with it: one for a rebel or an outrider, two for a shieldman, three for a brute and six for the warlord.

Crucially, marchers cannot overtake one another. Each one keeps a fixed gap behind the marcher ahead, which is why the column bunches into a queue whenever the front of it is slowed or blocked, and why anything that stops the leader stops everyone behind them too.

Armour is flat, not a percentage

Every point of armour is subtracted from each individual hit, and no hit can ever be reduced below 1 damage. This single rule is what stops any one tower being the answer to everything.

A shieldman carries 6 armour. An Archer arrow is 6 damage at level one, so it does 1 — a shieldman effectively ignores archers. A Ballista bolt is 36, so armour costs it barely a sixth. The warlord carries 8. Read a wave's composition during the build phase and buy against it.

The four towers

Archer, 70 gold. Fast, cheap, single target, and the backbone of any opening. Its weakness is armour, and waves 4, 7, 9, 11 and 12 all carry armoured units.

Ballista, 135 gold. One heavy bolt fired along a straight line, damaging up to four marchers it passes through. Its value therefore depends entirely on how much road lies along the line it fires down. A Ballista placed beside a corner is a very expensive single-target tower.

Bombard, 150 gold. Lobs a shell that takes most of a second to land, and explodes for splash damage. It aims at where the target will be, not where it is, so it does badly against anything that stops moving unexpectedly and well against a dense queue. Its best pads are where the road doubles back, because one explosion can then touch two separate stretches of the march.

Barracks, 115 gold. Deals almost no damage. Instead it stations two men-at-arms on the nearest piece of road, and marchers within reach of them stop walking and fight. Because nobody can overtake, two men-at-arms hold up an entire wave. They take damage while they hold, and when they fall the barracks trains replacements after eleven seconds.

Upgrades and selling

Every tower can be upgraded twice, to level 3. Each level adds 62% damage and 10% range, and costs 85% of the tower's base price multiplied by its current level. A level 3 Archer does more than twice the damage of a level 1, which matters against armour far more than the raw number suggests.

Selling refunds 70% of everything you have put into a tower during a build phase, and 50% once a wave is running. Experiment freely between waves.

Where the road folds

The road snakes, and consecutive runs are only two or three cells apart. A pad in the gap between two runs is inside range of both. It is not marked, it looks like every other pad, and it is worth roughly twice what a pad on the outside of a bend is worth.

Finding those cells is the main skill the game asks for. The build cards show a range circle over the selected pad before you commit — if that circle covers two stretches of road rather than one, build there.

Gold

Gold comes from three places. Kill bounties are the reliable one, and they grow 13% per wave, so the same enemy is worth more later. The early-send bonus is two gold per second of build phase skipped. And during every wave, crates drop across the field carrying between fourteen and thirty-six gold; they last seven and a half seconds and then they are gone.

Crates are the only part of the economy that rewards your attention rather than your planning, and they are deliberately not required — the map's proof assumes you never collect one.

How the game ends

Clear wave 12 with at least one villager and you have held the road. Three stars means you did not lose a single villager, two means you lost no more than four. Lose all twenty at any point and the keep falls, and the run ends on the wave you reached.

Controls

Tap or click a dashed pad to open the build cards, then tap the tower you want.

Keyboard

[ and ] step through the build pads, 1-4 build on the selected one.
U upgrades the selected tower, X sells it, Esc closes the cards.
Space cycles 1x/2x/3x speed, N sends the next wave early, G grabs the oldest gold crate.

Touch

Tap a gold crate on the field to collect it before it expires.
Tap a built tower to upgrade or sell it from the same bottom sheet.

Strategy tips

Look for a pad in the gap between two runs of the road. The range circle shown when you select a pad tells you immediately whether it covers one stretch or two, and a pad that covers two is worth roughly double.
Open with archers, but stop before the wave that brings armour. Shieldmen arrive on wave 4 and every arrow you own does 1 damage to them until you own something heavier.
Aim a Ballista down a straight, not at a corner. It pierces four marchers in a line, so it is worth what the line is worth, and a corner gives it a line of one.
Put the Bombard where the road doubles back. Its shell has a real blast radius, and at a fold that radius reaches two separate parts of the march at once.
A Barracks is worth more than its damage suggests, because nobody can overtake. Two men-at-arms parked in front of your heaviest towers hold the whole column inside their range.
Send waves early whenever your build is comfortably ahead. Two gold a second compounds across twelve waves and is most of the difference between eight towers and eleven.
Grab the crates. They are pure profit, they expire in seven and a half seconds, and the proof that your map is beatable assumes you collected none of them.
Upgrading beats building once your good pads are taken. A second tower on a pad that covers nothing is worth less than a level 3 on a pad that covers a fold.
Watch which pads your towers actually reach before wave 11. The last two waves are brutes and shieldmen, and a build that has been carried by cheap archers finds out very suddenly.