Info about game play mechanics of Hero Academy

A Canadian fan and member of the Robot forums “Zombo” enlightened the rest of the world to some of the game play mechanics of Hero Academy. In a recent post he put the following:

“You get five moves per turn, any action you make counts as one move. Moving a unit, healing him with a potion, attacking an enemy twice, and then putting another unit on the field would be a good example of spending those five moves. Alternatively, you could just smash an enemy in the face five times (most likely killing it) and end your turn that way. That’s five moves too! Units can be revived with potions or spells if they’re knocked out. A cleric can revive a unit if it’s in range and bring him back with a sliver of health, maybe spend a few more moves healing him to full even. This game is basically super crazy chess. There’s a TON of different stuff you could do on your turn with the moves you have.

If you knock out an enemy and move onto his tile you can remove him from the field permanently, this is great if your opponent just keeps reviving a particularly annoying unit over and over, but you have to consider that moving onto his tile uses up an extra move which could otherwise have been used to retreat/advance/heal/etc. If you’re up against a Dark Elf team there’s more stuff to watch out for, their mages for example can scoop up your dead and bring them back as phantoms!”

Items are acquired the same way you get new units. Remember how I said it was like wacky chess? Now throw in a card game into the mix too. You start the match off with a “hand” of random units and items that you place onto the board as you please. Putting down a “card” like that allows you to draw however many new cards from the “deck” as you need to replenish your hand. Putting down a warrior, moving him twice, buffing him with a scroll, and then attacking an enemy counts as five moves. At the end of that turn the game spits out two more things into your hand to replace the warrior and the scroll you just used up. There’s only so many cards in that deck so games won’t go on forever, I don’t remember how many exactly but it’s very easy to run out of cards to play if you’re not very careful with your units and item usage.

There’s also a bunch of other stuff I haven’t mentioned too but I’ll list a few of them quickly.

-Units are very unique, each has their own particular HP, magic or physical resistance, and attack and move range. Some units have a splash attack, another might have a knockback effect.

-Keeping your crystal alive while plinking away at your opponents is the main objective, attack and defense are both equally important here and you never know what your enemy is going to do on his next turn!

-There are tiles on the field that can help you out, standing on a sword tile allows that unit to do more damage for example. Standing on a crystal tile will allow all your units to do extra damage on your opponents crystal. Unit placement and position is quite important as you can imagine.

-Items can change everything. There are defensive items that buff your resistance or heal you and offensive ones that let you dish out more damage, etc. The best part is many of these items change the way the unit looks cosmetically, it’s a nice touch!