Lords of Diskonia - Learning and adapting Carrom skills

Diskonia is a complex game because it operates successfully on two levels - as the game of firing discs that is its inspiration, and as the fantasy-themed strategy game that guides higher-level decision making, army builds, etc. This is a short guide focused on the tactics that are similar to Carrom - the physics and how they create game scenarios - versus the special unit mechanics.

Carrom and how it's played

The classic carrom game, which has counterparts in shuffleboard, curling, billiards, etc., is somewhat regionalized in its exact rules, but India is credited as its originator and still the most popular place to play. The basic concept of the game is to knock discs(carrom men) into pockets at the corner of the board. The board surface is smoothed to near-frictionlessness and is unobstructed.

There are many video game versions of carrom if you'd like to focus just on this side of the game. Some important tactics come from it, which we can develop further in Diskonia:

• Instead of focusing on scoring, you can focus on leaving your opponent in a worse position.
  
• When your carroms are clustered close together, they are harder to address precisely than when they are broken up.
  
• It's possible to win matches without relying on difficult bank shots, by planning your positioning ahead very carefully.

What Diskonia Does Differently

Diskonia has terrain, instead of an abstract board. It has deadly water and fog, sand traps, walls and trees to bounce off of, and health, crystal, and gold pickups - some are roll-over, others are bounce-off.

The units in Diskonia have different size and mass, and are allowed different numbers of shots per turn. The Ogre and Dragon are very large pieces, and move slower, but are also harder to push. The Golem is nearly impossible to push. Conversely, the Rat and Spider are fast but are also easily pushed.

Scoring in Diskonia depends on attacking the other player's units. One of the common ways to defeat units is still reminiscent of Carrom: pushing them into the water or the fog.

However, a novel tactic in this game is to punish opponents in a more direct fashion for leaving their discs clustered close together. Every bounce created by pushing them into each other adds an additional combo attack. This can turn units like the Spider, ordinarily a threat that isn't able to finish the job, into something that immediately wipes out two or three units in one turn.

And, the late-game AI is quite good at finding ways to use trick shots to create additional bounces.

Therefore, the focus of your tactics for the achievements should be on "how do I use positioning to nerf the AI?" Since you aren't going to be able to get all the trick shots all the time, you need to consistently present it with bad options every turn.

Team Composition to Mitigate Bad Positioning

There are a lot of trade-offs to make in Diskonia. If you focus on small and light units, they may get pushed into the water too easily. If you use large, heavy ones, the congestion on the terrain makes it hard to create good threats. My read on the game as of this writing is that a mix of small/medium/large generally helps to give you more tactical options.

Here are some ideas to try out:

• Break on turn 1: Instead of focusing on the attack with your first turn, use it to break up your own starting position and create space. This may be the most effective thing to do if you mostly have medium units without special combat powers(Knight/Champion/Miner).
  
• Successful turtling: Instead of moving all your units out, if you have a mix of Golems and Ogres, you can effectively shut out any one attacker. The Golems will stop the progression of the attack and let you maintain control over positioning, while the Ogres will do stun damage. The AI cannot do it's trick shot thing with a stunned unit, so it will respond to stunning by moving a different unit instead, which you can then also stun... Repeated a few times, you can reduce the AI's options quite a bit and start to combo them as a collection of stunned units accumulate near your line.
  
• Rushing with light units: You might have one or two Spiders, Slimes or Rats. The ideal case for these is to let them charge forward and punish clustered foes before they can do anything, especially the large ones. You might trade in the process, but you're trading a 3-4 gold unit for a 6-8 one, possibly multiples. The AI often neglects to take the easy option of shoving these small units in the water in favor of looking for another trick shot that does 2 HP of damage and collects 1 gold.