Ok. You've arrived here at the best beastkeeping site on the internet and you feel that you're ready. You've bred your pets, you've built some buildings, you've done some fighting on the arena and exploring on the islands, and now it beckons: The Battlefield. The place where beasts really prove their worth. Or fail dismally, depending.

So you click on Battlefield. And there's the Map, yes like the one above. Look at the Map. Become one with the Map. Stare into its eyes for four minutes.

Ok not really.

Do you see how its divided into sections? Each one is a position that your squad can hold. Red flags show other squads holding position on the map, and green flags are your own squads. As you can see, I already have another squad on this map.

All the Dark green sections are ones that you're allowed to move to. Light green ones are sections that are not yet in your reach, or that are blocked by natural formations, like rivers, mountains and forests. But before you can click on a dark green section, you need a squad...

Ok, it's time to touch on Tactics. Go to one of your pets and click on the third tab underneath its picture. This is to assign tactics to your pet. There are three that you can assign, and one that is there by default.

Genetics here is very important. Only with good genes can you get the best manoeuvres. In fact, bad genes give you negative points in a fight, and there's no way to counter this. You have to breed or buy good pets for the battlefield, or you will lose most of your fights, and that will make you discouraged very quickly.

Take a look at Larkspur up there. She has Attack (1 point), Defence (1 point), Movement, Electric Attack (between 3 and 4 points) and Tornado (cancels one enemy attack). So she is pretty good. She has no bad genes, so her default fourth Tactic is Wait - 0 points but at least it isn't negative. I chose Defence, Electric Attack and Tornado, as you can see. Because of her stats, her Electric Attack gives me four points in a fight.

Once you've saved your Tactics, you need to find three more pets to make up your squad. Assign tactics to them, and put them in their own group. Edit the group to upgrade it to a squad. (The Tactics FAQ shows you how to do this.)

Ok, time to look at the map again. You can get as close to the screen as you like, but not too close, because then you'll go all crosseyed.

Now that you have a squad, whatever squad you've chosen and named with a suitably martial-sounding name, it's time to actually get on the map.

Take a deep breath. Good. Now you have to decide where you want to go. Are you aiming for the Portal, that round spiky thingy where all the goodies come from? Or one of the lesser sites, that only give vermillion and silver? Let's say you want the Portal. You want the chance to get a wild throdama or symurgh, vermillion and maybe a top-level blueprint or special item (money-tree sapling, nightcat, snake eye or whatever). So do yourself a favour: choose a sector on the map that's close to the Portal with as few jumps as possible needed to get there. Otherwise you'll spend extra days just trying to get past mountains, crevasses and forests. Once you've traced the shortest, easiest route, click on the nearest dark green sector and get ready.

If it's unoccupied, click on the Move-to button on the bottom right of the map (there are no tooltips on the buttons, unfortunately, so you'll have to look at them on the Tactics FAQ so you know which is which). In this case, it's the button with an arrow pointing to a blue X.

(You'll notice on my map that there is a button before the Move-to button; this is the Research button, which only appears on the Mirror world. You have to click this and wait for your squad to research the way to the Mirror world before you can enter the map, and this can take a few hours.)

If it is occupied, with a red flag, then you'll have to fight another squad to gain control of it. Then you have to press the Attack button. (Two crossed swords.)

If it's unoccupied you simply have to roll a defensive roll; this will be used to defend against the future attacks of other squads. I'll touch more on this later. If it is occupied you'll be rolling against the previous defensive roll of the other squad. Whoever gets the most points wins the sector, and the loser must retreat or else leave the island. If you're the one attacking and you're already on the island, you merely stay where you were when you attacked if you lose. So close and yet so far.

Choosing a squad:

This is definitely an important aspect, and needs its own post.

Some players invest in beasts with lots of four-point attacks: electric strike, blizzard, fire strike or acid strike. These are good, but not very useful if your opponent has Tactic Manoeuvres. Tactics like Theory of Chaos, Deadly Frost and Hold the Line, not to mention Complete Confusion, are devastating if you aren't prepared.

So try to have a mix of manoeuvres in your squad. Hold the Line, if you look at the Tactics FAQ, gives you the same amount of points as your opponent's attacks give them, up to 16 points. This is very nice to have, and can only really be countered by a lot of Defensive manoeuvres and Theory of Chaos. So absolutely work by trial and error in your squads. I have two squads that are based solely on tactics; my third squad just has as many attacks as possible and tries to ride roughshod over the opposition. Oddly enough this last squad has been the most successful.

One of my squads has a beast with Complete Confusion and another three with as many Confusion manoeuvres as possible; this is great as long as you roll four Confusions and one Complete Confusion, because otherwise you can lose quite spectacularly. It's all down to pure chance and what the roll of the dice gives you. This same squad also has Hold The Line and Theory of Chaos with Strafing Strike and Regeneration thrown in. Sometimes not a single one of these tactics activates, and that's when I get the most frustrated. But moving on...

My other squad is my Deadly Frost squad. Four Ice Breath Lykoses with Ice Aura, which give me a fairly good chance of winning. If the Deadly Frost activates, every attack of my opponent is negated. This is very good, but sometimes the opponent has Theory of Chaos and a lot of Regenerations and Strafing Strikes and even if Deadly Frost activates they win. So really it's down to a mix of chance and the choices you make.

It's nice to have more than one squad, so build the Military Academy 2 as soon as you can. Then you can approach the Portal from more than one direction, which is twice the fun.

Take a look at this fight:

The opponent has a lot of Ice and Acid and Fire attacks. In the first round she rolled a Tornado, which wiped out one of my Confusions. In all the following rounds she got more points than me, but I was fortunate: I rolled a Complete Confusion in the first round and a Hold the Line in the third. Both activated. The Complete Confusion gave me 28 points and Hold the Line 11. That's 39 out of a total of 45 points. When this squad does its job properly, it's very hard to beat.

On this map, I have selected the sector that I want to attack. It is occupied, so now I have a fight on my hands. I click the Attack button and a window appears:

Click the button that says Roll. It's ok. The computer will not bite.

You roll once, twice, three times. Each time, you click on the squares you don't really want and click Reroll:

As you can see, on the third roll I got two Waits. I click on them and then on reroll. It doesn't help much because:

Yup, I lost. You'll see that my Theory of Chaos and his Theory of Chaos both activated, but because I had so many Confusions (which give 0 points) and Waits, I get considerably fewer points.

See? I may have lost but I didn't get any unpleasant electric shocks or loud choruses of Boos and Hisses. And I can try the whole thing all over again in about ten hours...

Right. This time I'm on the Homeworld map, not the Mirror world, and I'm right next to the Portal. Vide:

I've selected the portal sector and then I click the Attack button:

I don't really like the Strafing Strike or the Wait, so I click on them and reroll. Another roll later:

You can see that this squad has Deadly Frost, but fortunately for me has not rolled many Ice Auras. In fact, the only one has doubled the attack that followed it, giving my opponent eight points. But no biggie:

I win with a little help from my Hold the Line tactic. Every little bit helps in this game. And here I am on the portal: you can see the green banner of my active squad below. Now I just have to wait ten hours for my reward!

You can see that the enemy's squad has retreated and for now can't be attacked by anyone else.

You can also see that as soon as I won the round, the game asked me to make a defensive roll. This set of manoeuvres is saved to use in fights against squads that will attack me in the future.

And just for fun, here's the best win that I ever had (some players have done far better, though)

As you can see, my Hold the Line gave me 10 points, but I was fortunate in that my Complete Confusion rolled and was activated, giving me 23 points, for a grand total of 50.

A note on an issue that more than one person has had recently:

People go to the battlefield and their squad isn't there. They check their squad's page and their pets are On Battlefield, What's going on?

The solution is simple: click the Mirror button. The squad has researched the way to the mirror world and is either ready to enter the map or is on it already. You can leave the Mirror world by clicking the Leave Map button (arrow pointing away from a red X.)

Thanks, that was really helpful! But... I try to attack a other squad but my attack button is greyed out, what's wrong?

You can only move to or attack a dark green sector :)

Here's an interesting one. My Complete Confusion activated and still didn't help, because my opponent rolled a lot of Leaderships:

How do go to the "Home" world from "Mirror"?

Ok, if you're on the Mirror world map, click on the Leave Map button (green arrow pointing away from a red X). Then click the Homeworld button at the top of the map, wait for the homeworld map to appear, and you can click on any dark green sector and attack it.

Provided you have enough energy.

this guide is so so so helpful, thank you! Here's my first (probably dumb) question: What role does squad energy play?

I also am dying to know how the earliest players figured these things out without a guide...

They begged for help from players who knew what they were doing or they just gave up.

It took me forever to figure out how the little buttons worked (still wish they had tooltips)

Didn't know the Tactics FAQ existed.

Glad you found it helpful, I had a lot of fun writing it :)

Now, energy has to be at 10 for all your pets in the squad in order to move/attack. I have a squad of Tireless Heart lykos whose energy is at 15, so I can move/attack, they drop to 5, then I only have to wait 5 hours to move/attack again. 

Defenses don't take energy. You can be attacked every five minutes or so, and as long as you don't lose, there won't be an effect.