Puzzles & Conquest: Mastering the Elements on PC
The battle dynamic in the Puzzles & Conquest campaign mode is not particularly complicated, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t need a touch of strategy if you’re going to be victorious.
As the hoards of undead descend on Saurland, it is up to you to go forth with your team of heroes and fight back the evil invaders. The method by which you will do this is through the matching and placement of gemstones which, when successfully matched, release your armies to overwhelm your foes.
The 5 Colors of Damage
In Saurland, there are five distinct elements with which you can fight the undead armies. Those elements are:
– Light (Yellow)
– Dark (Purple)
– Gale (Green)
– Water (Blue)
– Fire (Red)
These five elements are represented everywhere on the battleground, from the colours of gems waiting to be matched to the affiliations of your heroes and, crucially, of your enemies too.
The elements aren’t just for color either. Each element has a weakness, another element that it is particularly susceptible to, and an element against which it is stronger. Dark and Light form a kind of couplet against each other, while the others form a kind of power triangle. It works like this:
– Light heroes do 2x damage to dark foes, but only do 0.5x damage to light foes.
– Dark heroes do 2x damage to Light foes, but only do 0.5x damage to dark foes.
– Gale heroes do 2x damage to water foes, but only do 0.5x damage to fire foes.
– Water heroes do 2x damage to fire foes, but only do 0.5x damage to gale foes.
– Fire heroes do 2x damage to gale foes, but only do 0.5x damage to water foes.
Thankfully, you don’t have to remember all of this, as a diagram reminding you of how it works is always in the top left-hand corner of your screen when you’re in the heat of battle.
Complicate though it may sound, these elemental dynamics are really important. When you make a gem match, the damage you release on your enemies will be of the same element as the gems you matched.
Given that, in Puzzles & Conquest with BlueStacks, damage from matched gems travels straight up towards enemies, you not only have to think about how to make matches, but also where you make them. After all, even the most impressive 5-match is of little use if the damage completely misses the boss that you’re trying to kill.
Building your team
It is also worth pointing out that the elements are important in the makeup of your team too. Every one of your heroes will be attached to an element and will benefit whenever you make a match of that same colour.
Once you have made enough matches of a hero’s color to charge them up, their special ability will be ready to use. These abilities can be anything from direct damage to a foe, buffing the defence of the rest of your team, or healing all of your heroes after they have taken damage, so they are worth keeping an eye on as a battle progresses.
There are usually 3 waves during a battle, and your hero’s charge will carry over into each round, so don’t be afraid to save up special abilities for the final boss round, if you feel the need to do so.
Now, your team is made up of 5 heroes at any one time, regardless of how many you have in your inventory. This means that you can, if you want, have on hero of each element, meaning that every single match you make will be charging up one of your team and every color of gem will do damage. However, if you make a match of a colour that is not represented on you team, it will do almost no damage to your opponents.
As you begin your journey in Saurland, the ‘one of each’ setup is the method you will use, as you are given 5 heroes, one of each type, when you first begin playing. However, pretty soon you will start collecting more heroes, either from the Hero Hall or as part of the central storyline campaign.
At this point, you face a choice. You can continue to use a diverse team, with each of the 5 elements represented so that you benefit from the full range of available matches and do damage with every move, or you can start to swap heroes out for more powerful ones, but possibly lose elements in the process.
The thing is, there is no limit to how many heroes of an element you have on your team, so there is nothing stopping you getting rid of your one Light hero to replace them with your second Fire hero, for example.
How you choose to put your team together is entirely up to you, and very much depends on what kind of player you are when it comes to games like Puzzles & Conquest on PC with BlueStacks. The one piece of advice that we would give is that you probably want at least two or three elements represented on your board, just to maintain a variety of special skills and ensure that most of the matches you make actually charge at least one member of your team up and do a decent amount of damage.
But rules are there to be broken, so if you want to put together that all fire team you’ve been dreaming about, go for it. Good luck!
