Diplomacy is Not an Option | Beginner's Guide

Diplomacy is Not an Option is a fun game and, sometimes, a hard one. The highest difficulty in the game is called the ‘Feat of Resistance’, and beating it is no easy feat. As is the case for many games like this, you need to have a proper build order, know the basics of combat, efficient production, the best buildings to upgrade, key areas to set up fortifications on, the best use for magical powers and the best way to utilize tech.

Knowing these things greatly helps you in the long run and gives you an advantage when starting the game. In this guide, we will learn how to get a good start, focusing on the difficulty level of the Feat of Resistance.

Day 1

The map is procedurally generated, which might vary in your games, but the starting setup remains the same. You start with 3 swordsmen, 3 archers, 6 free workers, 50 food, and 60 wood. The first order of business is setting up and securing your wood supply. You should start constructing two lumber mills in the forests closest to the keep. Generally, you want to build them in the same forest to ensure one doesn’t get attacked by the enemy while you’re clearing out the other one.

Afterward, you want to build a fisherman’s hut or a berry picker’s house. While either one works, the berry picker tends to waste production time, and on the other hand, the fishermen stay in the same location, and there are two of them. Ultimately, you should place whichever one is closer to your keep. You would want more wood than anything at lower difficulty settings, so you should queue up another lumber mill. While that happens, you should send your soldiers to look for resource carts; these contain wood, stone, food, and iron, which are extremely valuable.

The first thing you research is Advanced Toolkits; this speeds up the construction and repair of structures.  Afterward, once you have completed the collection of nearby resource carts, you send your soldiers to the closest stone deposit and clear the area of the enemy. The best spots are the mountainsides; generally, you will want to find ones with fewer enemies nearby.

If you find that there are massed enemies in the area where your stone deposit is, try to move around them and find another less defended one. This should take you a while, so you should start building houses next to your castle to keep your workers busy. You should build as many as possible; generally, 3 is the golden number here.

As you find more resource carts, immediately put the resources to use. Make a granary next to your fishermen’s hut or berry picker’s house if you find the stone. If you get more wood, build additional houses. Whenever you destroy an enemy camp, you will find you can loot it. Do this every time as they give you soul crystals; they will be useful later.

As we mentioned previously, you generally want to avoid larger enemy formations. But, after you have secured your stone, you should go out and clear the surrounding areas. If you meet smaller groups, you can easily handle them thanks to your regenerating soldiers. But if there’s a lot of them, you need to kite them. To kite the enemy, you make your archers stand a bit further away and move your swordsmen to ‘aggro’ a few enemy units by getting close to them.

This makes them chase your swordsmen while your archers get free reign to shoot them.  Make sure to get the archers to focus fire on one target to kill them quickly while avoiding going into the fog of war with your swordsmen. Also, be careful not to move too far away from the enemy to lose their ‘aggro’ [i.e., get them to stop chasing you]. If you do this correctly, you can mop up large amounts of enemies relatively easily, but it's fine if you lose a swordsman or two; it takes a while to get used to.

So, at the conclusion of Day 1, you should have ample amounts of wood and food being harvested, as well as some soul crystals lying around. And your final build order for day 1 should look something like this:
Lumber Mill > Lumber Mill > Fishermen’s Hut/Berry Picker’s House > (Lumber Mill, if you are playing on lower difficulties) > Advanced Toolkits > House > House > House > Granary > House > House > House

Day 2

The next day, you need to start constructing more buildings as soon as possible. If the stone deposits you’ve found are close to you, build two stone mines, but if the deposits are further away, build a builder’s house and then queue the two stone mines. We like to build the builder’s house anyway as they’re useful in making buildings more efficient. Build a second food-producing building; we recommend the fishermen’s hut and, if you lack them, a third and fourth lumber mill.

Then, with the stone you have collected now, research Comfortable Shoes. At this stage, if you have extra wood, build a barracks. As night approaches, you should get onto building more houses. Your workers and builders do their thing, so focus on exploration and clearing out enemy camps. Much of the exploration is similar to the first day and night. Overwhelm smaller groups of enemies and kite the larger ones, ransack their camps, and profit!

At the end of the day, your build order will now look something like this:
Builder’s House > Stone Mine > Stone Mine > Fishermen’s Hut > Lumber Mil l> Comfortable Shoes > Barracks > House > House > House

Day 3 & 4

By now, you should be able to see the direction of the first enemy attack on the corner of your mini-map. Focus on stocking up as much wood as possible and expanding your production buildings while creating a slow trickle of archers and swordsmen. Upgrade your swordsmen with the mongoose reflexes and archers with sharpshooting. Start building towers and gates along the rough path of the enemy wave in preparation. Remember those soul crystals you had; you will now use them to summon death knights.

 You get 5 of them for 120 seconds, and you’ll want to use them as a rock that the metaphorical sea of the enemy washes up against. If you had time to construct a good wall and towers, you could just put your knights on a chokepoint. But if you haven’t, you should kite and draw most of the enemy away with the death knights while your swordsmen and archers finish any stragglers. The death knights can loop back around as more stragglers go to attack the swordsmen and archers. Piece by piece, you should be able to finish off the enemy while losing no or a few soldiers.

 After finishing the enemy wave, you should quickly send out your army to clear out camps near the border or your resource collection sites. This should allow you to build more production buildings, focus on getting food and wood over stone, and, all the while, build more houses. Conventional build order goes away now as things will vary a lot.

Eventually, you will exhaust some resources, so you should keep an eye out and move the buildings when they run out. You should also build a simple obelisk to unlock stronger spells, and well, for spells, you need crystals, so get onto destroying those camps ASAP! Before the next day begins, try to stockpile some wood and stone. You should already have a surplus, but saving up doesn’t hurt.

Day 5, 6 and 7

At the start of Day 5, upgrade the keep to the second level and start building farms, as you will start to run out of spots to fish and gather berries. Upgrading the keep requires 150 wood and 100 stone, unlocking other buildings we will use in a bit. If you have too many resources, build stockpiles and granaries to keep more of them.

Day 6 will see you doing much of the same: assembling a bigger army, clearing out more camps, and expanding your town. You should have built a hospital, a stone obelisk by now, and a shiny new wall and towers on the way to the second wave. The farms will be paramount now, as you need a relatively large army.

On day 7, you’ll try to wrap up your defenses and, again, expand until the wave arrives. Like last time, you will distract and kite the enemy with your death knights, but only once in a while will you stop them and let the enemy mass up. Then you’ll drag the magic astral ray along the enemy formation, blowing the enemy to smithereens and clearing out most of them, leaving your swordsmen and archers to mop up the stragglers.

Day 8, 9, 10 and Onwards

On day 8, you will upgrade your lumber mills to level 2, relocating them closer to uncut forestry. Then, you will start mining iron.  Do not detract away from building farms; it is generally good to have a market up to trade any resources you have an excess of/are in need of.

Days 9 and 10 will see you greatly expand your army with level 2 barracks, upgraded units, and new units. Generally, we really like the healer, as they help you save units rather than having to retrain new ones. You will also keep expanding your town with houses and resource buildings as well as by expanding your tech tree.

After this, your game plan will be repetitive, with the same kiting and choke-point strategies. With the help of this guide, you should be able to go far into endless mode. Remember that throughout this, you will make quite a few mistakes, and everything will take a while for you to learn. So be patient and keep trying; good luck, and remember, diplomacy is not an option.