Building an Army – A Guide on Heroes and Troops in Puzzles & Survival
In Puzzles & Survival, you play as the commander of a sanctuary that acts as a safe haven for survivors of a zombie apocalypse. With that said, it is your responsibility to ensure that your sanctuary is composed of enough military power to be able to gather resources and defend itself from zombies and even rivals.
This guide will explain to you how to build you own sanctuary army by training and upgrading troops. We’ll also be discussing heroes, which are special troops that will give useful perks both in raids and in the game’s campaign.
Training Troops
Your troops are basically the military units of your sanctuary. They are responsible for carrying out raids and hunts in the world map. The more the merrier is certainly the case in Puzzles & Survival since more troops will increase your Might, which is the measurement for your sanctuary’s overall strength.
There are four types of units in the game and these are: Fighter, Shooter, Rider, and Vehicle. You can train these units in the Fighter Camp, Shooter Camp, Rider Camp, and Vehicle Depot respectively. Training them will require plenty of food and time depending on the number of units you’re planning to train. You can reduce the training time with speedups (can be earned through the main campaign) or you can instantly finish it by spending diamonds. We suggest training equal amounts of each unit for a balanced army.
Upgrading Troops
You will initially start with weak units; however, you can upgrade their respective training camps to higher levels in order to unlock stronger variants of said units. The newer variants will require more food to train but the spent resources will be worth it since the new units are statistically stronger.
Moreover, you can improve your units’ stats by researching them in the research center. Upgrades for your troops will be under Military and Military II. From there, you can improve different aspect of your army such as the amount of damage of their attacks, their marching speed, and the like. Keep in mind that the research center works like a skill tree, which means that you need to finish upgrading one part first before moving on to the other.
Your troops are only part of the equation when it comes to the power of your sanctuary. Heroes are the ones who really give the most benefits since they can not only help you clear levels in the campaign but can also benefit your troops. We’ve discussed in a separate guide how heroes can be used in battle but now let’s talk more about how to upgrade them and how to get more of them.
Upgrading Heroes
Heroes are upgraded using antiserum and they can be upgraded 10 times until they can eventually be “evolved”. Evolving a hero will greatly increase their stats and will also allow you to upgrade them further until you eventually upgrade them 10 times again. Hero evolution requires a certain amount of “combat manuals”, which can be earned by playing through the main campaign.
Aside from evolving, heroes can also be “enhanced”. The enhancement is done by spending hero frags, which are essentially pieces of a hero that are needed to initially recruit them (we’ll talk more about hero frags later on in the guide). You need a certain amount of hero frags to enhance your hero. Upon doing so, your hero will not only have their base stats increased but also have their Troop Skills boosted. Now, what are these Troop Skills?
Levelling up your heroes up to certain levels will reward them with Troop Skills, which are essentially passive buffs given to your sanctuary troops. For instance, Amber’s Troop Skill allows her to boost the damage of troop attacks by 100%. It is also important to note that each hero will only support a specific type of troop and this can be seen through the icon beside the hero’s name. Going back to Amber as an example, she is a “military type hero who can buff Shooters in battles”. This means that her Troop Skills are only applicable to Shooter-type troops.
The buffs that Troop Skills provide are very useful when engaging in raids to scavenge for resources. However, do not forget to dispatch heroes when setting up a raid since the buffs will not be in effect if there are no heroes who will provide them.
To know more about acquiring resources in Puzzles & Survival through raids and other in-game activities, read our Resource Guide.
Recruiting Heroes
To recruit heroes, all you need to do is go to Noah’s Tavern in your sanctuary. The tavern is located right beside your headquarters.
There are three types of recruitment: Basic Recruit, Intermediate Recruit, and Advanced Recruit. The overall power of heroes is measured with the number of stars that they have with two-star heroes being at the lowest tier while six-star heroes are at the highest. Each type of recruitment will give you a hero that is within a given range of stars. The complete details for this are detailed below:
| Number of Stars | Basic Recruit | Intermediate Recruit | Advanced Recruit |
| 2 stars | 46% | 43% | |
| 3 stars | 11% | 20% | 30% |
| 4 stars | 5.50% | 30% | |
| 5 stars | 30% | ||
| Others | 43% | 31.50% | 10% |
Recruit coins are used as the currency for hero-recruiting. Note that each recruitment-type has its own recruit coin so you can’t use a Basic Recruit coin for an Advanced Recruit coin. You can earn more of these coins by playing through the main campaign or through micro-transactions. Alternatively, you can wait until the game gives you free coins for every type after a certain amount of time. The game gives you a Basic Recruit coin every eight minutes, an Intermediate Recruit coin every 24 hours, and an Advanced Recruit coin every two days.
Recruiting heroes may look simple enough but there’s a caveat. Spending a recruit coin will not actually directly give you a new hero but will instead give you a “frag” of a particular hero. You’re going to need 10 frags of a hero to unlock said hero. You will inevitably acquire some duplicates along the way but fortunately, you can exchange these duplicates for Noah points.
The Noah point is a special currency that can be used to buy frags of specific heroes. The cost of each frag will depend on the number of stars that the hero has. More specifically, three-star hero frags cost 50 points, four-star hero frags cost 250 points, and lastly, five-star hero frags cost a whopping 1,000 points.
So how can you convert duplicate frags to Noah points? Your frags are located inside the “Bag” tab of the Hero menu. Here, you can do exchange them for points by clicking on “Recycle” and selecting how many frags you want to convert. We suggest carefully picking which hero frags to trade for points since frags can also be used to “enhance” heroes. If a hero that you currently don’t own has nearly 10 frags, it is best that you do not trade these. Similarly, it’s likely a good idea that you don’t sell the frags of heroes whom you’re willing to further upgrade since it’s best to spend their frags on their enhancements.
