Crown Siege beginner guide
The first hour of Crown Siege is one loop: kill enough of a wave to afford the next troop, keep the tower alive, then spend the currencies that drop so the next node is not a wall.
This page is the 1.0 / v1.0.1_a version of that loop. It uses the store description, the 18 September launch post, the 19 September patch, and the Steam HUD visible on official screenshots. It does not invent gold costs.
The HUD, from official screenshots
Store screenshots of live combat show a top bar with four numbers:
| Readout | What it is tracking |
|---|---|
| GOLD | Spend this on the troop buttons along the bottom of the screen |
| TOWER HP / BASE HP | The keep. If this hits zero the node is over |
| TROOPS | How many of your units are currently alive |
| KILLS | Enemies defeated this node |
Troop buttons are bound to keys. Early shots show Knight on Q and Archer on W. Later shots add Fire Archer, Ranger and Pike on the same bar. The gold number on each button is the current spawn cost for that unit in that run.
The version string sits in the bottom right of the main menu. When you file a bug, that is the number the developers asked for.
The three spend currencies
The 12 September post is the cleanest source for what you are actually spending:
- Experience — levels the units you already have.
- Crowns — unlocks nodes on the skill tree.
- Unit-specific SP — upgrades that belong to one troop line.
The same post says adaptive difficulty exists because the developers could not fully balance every map-plus-tree combination before launch. If a node feels unfair on day two, v1.0.1_a already lowered scaling and capped the late game. That is the live rule, not the demo.
How a node is supposed to play
- The wave walks in. Official copy: spawn troops, gold comes from defeating enemies, each wave pushes harder.
- Spend gold on the troop you can actually field. Knights and Archers are the two units every player has at 100% achievement rate, so they are the real tutorial pair.
- Keep the keep's HP off zero. Early Forest shots show BASE HP in the teens out of 20; a later wheat-field node shows TOWER HP 65/65. The cap grows. We do not have the formula.
- After the node, spend XP / Crowns / SP before walking to the next map node. Official pre-launch note: the world is no longer a linear list of levels.
First-hour mistakes the Steam board is already hitting
- Starving the tower to stack one unit line. A day-one thread said a maxed Archer + Knight pair barely beat the toad boss and could not reach a "wheat" region. That post is from before v1.0.1_a. The patch exists because that complaint was fair.
- Ignoring flying units. v1.0.1_a made every unit type able to attack flying enemies. If your save is on 1.0.0, update before you decide a composition is broken.
- Expecting Healers to work in Goblin Lair. One player reports Healers stand idle only on that node and heal everywhere else. We have not reproduced it. It is a reported bug, not a design rule.
- Chasing Ember on day one. A thread titled "how do i get ember" has no official answer yet. Do not plan a build around a resource the patch notes never mention.
What "short incremental" means here
The developers call it a short incremental siege game. Length is not published as a number of hours. The achievement list is the better yardstick: Forest is at 100%, Cursed Kingdom at about 9%, and the namesake "Crown Siege" achievement is at 0.5% on the day after launch.