Spun out of the successful Clash of Clans, Clash Royale is a free-to-play real-time multiplayer game where you build a deck of cards comprising of Clash of Clans characters, spells and defences, as well as the Royales: Princes, Knights, Baby Dragons and more. Your goal for the game is to use your deck to deal damage against your opponent’s towers and try to knock the king off his tower while simultaneously protecting your own towers.
Clash Royale can be addictive, exhausting, and cruel. If you’ve taken a look at the mobile top charts lately, you’d have seen that Clash Royale is the top grossing game on mobile. The game reportedly makes as much as $1.5 million a day.
The dastardly thing about Clash Royale is its “freemium” model. Thanks to lengthy timers (that go up to a full day) on treasure chests — which are one of the key factors to progression in the game — and limited slots to said chests, coupled with having to level up cards to stay competitive, progression is very slow without sinking money into the game to speed these processes up.
The fact that the core gameplay is actually pretty enjoyable makes it hard to resist spending money on the game so that you can play more of it and progress faster. Chief Pat, one of Clash Royale’s top-ranked players, has spent at least a whopping $12,000 on the game in the span of approximately 3 months.
If you aren’t looking to break the bank, here are some tips and tricks to help you be a pro at Clash Royale:
Build A Good Deck
Unlike a certain card dueling anime, believing in the heart of the cards isn’t enough. If you want to be good, you need to build a good deck. To do so, it’s crucial to know your cards and experiment with them in different deck combinations. The more you become familiar with the types of damage different cards can do, the attacks they can withstand and the card combos that work, the better your deck will be. Card rarity doesn’t mean a whole lot in Clash Royale, so a rare card might not necessarily be best for your deck.
Mind Your Elixir
Elixir is your resource meter used to summon cards, and different cards have different elixir cost required to summon them. Having a balance of low-elixir-cost troops and high-elixir-cost troops in your deck is key. If you fill your deck with heavy-hitters with high elixir cost, you won’t be able to move out as quickly or as often.
Be Patient
You have 3 minutes to either win or lose each match. Resist mindlessly throwing out powerful troops right at the start of a match or you risk telling your opponent that you don’t have a strategy, and you’ll have a lot of downtime spent waiting for your elixir to recharge while the enemy mounts an offensive against you. Clash Royale is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes it’s better to deploy just a couple of cards instead of 3 or 4 and wait and see how they fare before sending out more. You may need those extra cards for defense after all.
As your 3 minutes comes down to its last minute and seconds, the rate at which your Elixir refills will double. This gives you a chance to put even more troops on the field than before.
Spend Your Time And Gold Wisely
Chances are you’re not going to sink $12,000 into this game, so you’ll want to spend your gold — the in-game currency — wisely. Stick to spending your gold to upgrade cards you know you use often, and remember that common cards are cheaper to upgrade.
As mentioned, every chest is progression through the game, and you get a chest whenever you win a battle, so you will be able to upgrade other cards along the way from the goodies you get in those chests. You get one free chest every 4 hours, and you can store 2 free chests at a time, so you can open a chest before you go to sleep, and have 2 when you wake up.
Silver Chests take 3 hours to open. Golden Chests take 8 hours, Magic Chests take 12 hours, Crown Chests open up instantly (you’ll get a new one every 24 hours), Giant Chests take 12 hours, and Super Magic Chests take 24 hours.
You only have four slots for chests at any time, so while you can still do battle when all your slots are full, it means you won’t be earning any new chests either. I know people that set alarms so that they open these chests on time in order to maximise efficiency. Whether you’re obsessive enough to do that is up to you.
