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dancer joey 14.38

weed peter 23.93

the shed 21.38

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On my first attempt, the game felt super hard. I was doing well at the start, but then I got overwhelmed by santa's attacks.

On my second attempt, the game felt super easy.  The game is easily winnable with just elf guards. Here's a breakdown of my strategy for those interested:

On day 1, take 3 neighboring territories with the 3 elf guards, one per territory. Since the snowmen's attack patterns are simple and since there is only one guard in each territory, it should be straightforward to kite them without taking damage. The snowmen will try to move to where the elf guard is, so simply move away from your tile than attack the tile you were just at.

After completing day 1, build as man xmas tree farms as possible. Territory is easy to get for the first couple of days, and winning a battle gives you chocolate coins, so the limiting resource at the start is xmas trees, which you need to build other factories / elf guards.

On day 2, since the elf guards should be at full health and santa's enemies aren't at full strength, you should be able to take another 3 territories with just the elf guards you had previously. I have only seen 4 snowmen or 1 cavalary on day 2; the 4 snowmen can all be kited by one elf guard, and one elf guard can kill one cavalry by tanking all of the hits.

After completing day 2, you should have a lot of territory to build in. At this point, there should be a clear frontline separating santa's territory from your territory, but if there are any of santa's territories lingering on your side, you should focus on getting those so that you can move all of the troops to the frontline. Besides that, you should start spamming elf guards and xmas farms.

For the next couple of days, just focus on training elf guards and building xmas tree farms. Once you get low on chocolate coins and cookies, start building cookie bakeries and candy cane mines instead. Eventually, you'll have more resources and elf guards than you know what to do with. You can also build the elfen barracks and toy assembly for the other units, but I didn't find them very useful. By now, your frontline should be secure with many elf guards.

To get more territory from this point, you have to move your frontline into santa's territory while supplementing the old territory with more elf guards from a neighboring territory; otherwise, you might lose the territory you already have if they decide to attack that one. Repeat this step until you see the victory screen.