A guide by a new player for a new player.

So you want to hit Master Tier in Prismata? Read on!

Introduction

Hey all, I bought Prismata on March 21, 2018. On May 27th, in just about two months, I made it to Master Tier and shortly after made it onto the top 200. I'm not saying all this to brag, nor do I think I'm even close to a top player yet, but I'm here to let you in on a little secret: you don't need to be a strategy game genius to learn this game and make it to Master quickly! My current ranked win rate is only about 52% and it was around 43% when I entered Master Tier. In this guide, I'll show you how, with a little dedication and effort, you can go from never having played Prismata to being a competitive Master Tier player in just a couple short months.

The first and most important thing is to have a list of milestones or goals to hit so you can make progress efficiently. It also helps to remind you that you are making progress. I haven't analyzed a big sample of Prismata player data, but from my own experience and watching a few friends play, the game seems to have a very terraced learning curve. Due to this, you need to spend at least a month or so playing the game in order to really experience the depth of the game. It may feel like you aren't making a ton of progress at first but then suddenly you will see yourself gaining tiers in leaps and bounds until you hit your next skill wall.

Purpose

I would consider myself, at the time of writing this guide, in the top 150 or so players. While that is nothing to scoff at, I believe the most qualified strategists of the game to be the top 25 or so players. Therefore, this guide does not make any novel suggestions on what the correct strategy is: that type of information will all come in the form of links to guides produced by top players. The purpose of this guide is instead to give new players some direction on how to approach this information and most quickly improve their play to get to what I believe to be the core of the game, Master Tier ranked play. This guide will also ready players for tournament, league and other competitive play.

It feels like every other day that I see a new reddit post or someone asking in the global chat: “How do I learn this game?” That was me just a few short months ago. The answer is always a similar amalgamation of links thrown around, offers to help coach, and recommendations to play some of the single player content or against bots. I thought it would be helpful to have this information collected in a single place as an onboarding guide for new players. So, here we go!

Early Access Disclaimer

Two things ought to be mentioned here. The first is just a simple notice that this guide has been written during early access and as things get closer to launch some of the information contained herein could become outdated. I will do my best to stay on top of things and keep the guide relevant and updated. Secondly, the player base is fairly small currently. That makes ranked queue extra hard since the number of other new players you will be matched against is low. It is very likely that you will be matched against top players even while in the lower tiers. Sticking through these early rough patches really pays off, it just takes a bit of time to get up to speed. Additionally, as the game gets closer to launch and goes free to play, this problem should mostly resolve itself.

Milestones

If you do nothing else, these are the milestones you should complete, in order, to go from a completely new player to hitting Master Tier. Starting Ranked Play is difficult and you should expect to lose a lot at first. That is ok, the Prismata rating algorithm is very forgiving and you cannot lose Tiers (though you can lose progress after Tier 2, you can never lose a whole Tier). Learning from your losses is a really important skill in Prismata. However, some of these milestones have ranges: if you'd rather jump into ranked earlier and are ok with losing more often then just get to the lower end of the range; if you'd rather be a little more prepared then spend more time getting towards the higher end of the range.

Complete Chapter 1 of the single player campaign on regular difficulty

Complete the “Beginner Lessons” in combat training

Complete the “Intermediate Practice” in combat training

Read “The Standard Style” for the first time (it's ok if it doesn't all make sense). https://prismatalibrary.blog/2017/12/22/the-standard-style/

Play a few games against Master Bot (at least Base + 5, no time controls is fine)

Win 10-25 casual match games with the settings centered (medium amount of units, some bots)

Complete the “Advanced Exercises” in combat training

Complete the “Expert Scenarios” in combat training

Read “The Standard Style” again (it should be making some sense now). https://prismatalibrary.blog/2017/12/22/the-standard-style/

Defeat Master Bot at least once

Play Master Bot games and casual matches until you are comfortable beating Master Bot 30-50% of the time

Start Ranked Play, don't wait until level 40. I would say a good range is level 28-32 and you can still throw in some occasional casual and Master Bot games to mix things up if you want, but you should be mainly playing ranked

Watch occasional replays of your losses and see what your opponent did. You can also ask for help with this from other players.

Watch 307th's Planning Ahead strategy video and game commentary. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnyWrbCEKrE )

Read the next three recommended articles (“Common Openings”, “Absorber Rankings”, “Intro to Set Reading”) on this page: https://prismatalibrary.blog/new-start-here/

Get to Tier 3-5

Ask on the discord (go to further reading) for a player willing to coach you during your ladder games.

Watch Msven's video series ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NylDNfjEHoA&list=PL9gDhaOQQIWkN79kVFwuJuNYeGjmxEOCM )

Get to Tier 4-6

Complete the “Master Challenges” in combat training (This is optional, you can just keep grinding tiers if you want)

Play ranked until you hit Master Tier

Starting Out

The bare minimum any new player should do is complete the first chapter of the campaign. It is designed to be a tutorial and show you the basic mechanics of the game. Make sure you pay attention to the lessons you are taught and try to incorporate them into later missions. They are all fundamental to the game.

Next, I would highly recommend playing at least some of the Combat Training missions. They also help teach you about key parts of the game and get you familiar with more of the units. Casual play will also help you put the skills you learn to the test while you are still familiarizing yourself with the units.

Third, Master Bot is a good opponent. Playing many Master Bot games is key to improving early on in my experience.

Finally, studying a little bit goes a long way in terms of helping your play. In order to get to master quickly it will help to spend a little bit of time studying the various strategy guides that have been written.

Tiers I Through VIII

Despite how it may feel at times, tiers one through seven or eight should go rather quickly. Here, you should focus on playing often, reviewing your games, reading more articles/watching more videos and getting coaching.

Watch Msven's video series ( )

Watch 307th's Planning Ahead strategy video and game commentary. ( )

Read 307th's articles here:

Watch amalloy's video series (start at episode 17 for ranked play):

The most important thing to learn as you play ranked are fundamentals: making sure you absorb maximally, not overdefending, spending your resources efficiently, etc. There is also the general “flow” of a Prismata match to be aware of. First, you buy drones to build your economy. Then, you buy the tech you need and finally, you transition to building attackers and defending as necessary.

As you improve your fundamentals, you should also begin to learn how to read each set. Set reading is a core skill of Prismata. Understanding the random set and devising a good strategy is how you win games when both players have good understandings of fundamentals. Most of the time, the early turns of the game determine the eventual outcome even if it isn't obvious at first. In high level matches, great openings can build you unshakeable leads, and small mistakes can snowball into losses. Set reading involves asking questions like:

What's the biggest absorber?

What's the best damage?

Are there any great unit synergies?

What's the best soak?

Are there any units that change the openings like alternate tech buildings or alternate drones?

How much econ do I want to support my build/tech choices?

For more information:

The Final Grind

This is it! You've nearly made it. The last couple tiers take the longest, and will likely take even longer than all the other tiers combined. If you find yourself struggling to get to Master, don't get discouraged. You will get there, it will just take time.

Additionally, this is where you should really begin to take another look at tricks and tactics important to the game. Understanding when and how to offer both hard and soft gambits, hard and soft counters, unit synergies, freeze tactics, attack and defense granularity and exploits. All of this will help you in the final push to Master Tier. Don't bite off too much at once though! Despite the name, you don't need to master every facet of the game before getting to Master Tier.

Also, in addition to the static content mentioned before, watching streams of top players (go to further reading) can be helpful here as you can ask them questions about their plays. This is usually much more helpful than just watching a replay. At this level, you should be able to grasp what is going on in high level games even if you can't actually play at that level.

A note about tilt

Prismata is a perfect information strategy game, therefore if you are distracted, tired or in a bad mood you may start playing badly and won't have luck to save you. Further, this can affect your future games and put you in a bit of a tailspin. Losing streaks happen to all of us, so don't get discouraged! Prismata's rating system allows you to get back your points quickly. If you feel yourself getting tilted I would suggest taking a small break from ranked. After all, as much as you want to get to Master Tier quickly, you also want it to be fun!

Beyond Master

Congratulations! You made it to Master! Now what? Join the competitive scene. Rank up on the leaderboard, play in tournaments or join the league!

Your work isn't done here, there's always room for improvement in the many areas of Prismata. It may not be super helpful immediately to ranked play but understanding the economic concepts at work in Prismata is both fun and occasionally strategically useful. Yujiri's site has some great content on the math in Prismata.

Questions

Should I play bots?

The short answer is yes, but not all of them!

As for the normal bots, I would personally recommend against spending much time at all playing bots below Master Bot. Adept and Expert Bot are ok, anything below that is a waste of time. To this day, I have only ever played a handful of matches against any bot besides Master Bot and most of those I did just for the achievements.

The interesting part of bot play comes in casual matches. Casual queue contains a wide range of bot personalities at different skill levels. They each try a specific strategy (usually given away by their names) that works in some sets and not in others. This will help you learn how to play against those strategies.

You can see all the bot personalities here:

Should I play casual matches?

The short answer is again, yes! But you don't need to spend that long in casual queue. As mentioned in the answer to the last question, casual queue has a wide range of bots that are good to play against plus you get to play the occasional human. However, none of the bots are better than Master Bot*, so once you can can do well enough against Master Bot, you should be playing it or queueing ranked.

You can see all the bot personalities here:

*Technically, Deep_Drone is master bot, and BottyMcBotFace is master bot with an opening book for a few strongish rushes, but you can't choose to play them.

Should I play expert missions/puzzles?

If your main goal is to get to Master Tier as quickly as possible, then the short answer is no. Expert missions and puzzles are a ton of fun and will train some of your tactical ability, however they don't have much to do with PvP or ranked matches because you don't follow the same types of strategy. They are definitely worth playing at some point and are a great part of Prismata, but they are not a great way to improve at ranked.

When should I start ranked?

As mentioned in the Milestones, I would recommend starting ranked when you are able to beat Master Bot at least 30% of the time. This is because Master Bot is approximately as good as a Tier VI player. You will likely still lose a lot on the ranked queue, but you want to start ranked as soon as you can understand what's going on enough to begin to analyze why you are losing. That's how you improve!

Further reading and other resources (listed alphabetically):

307th's (articles on: chill, big red units, openings, alternate drones, set reading, etc.) and

amalloy's and

Msven's

MasNHub (coaching, strategy discussion and base + 1 unit guides):

Prismata Discord/Subreddit:





Twitch streams (top players that stream): , , , , , , ,

(Authors: Allecto, Apooche, Elyot, Redrame, Zezetel) These are older articles but still have some useful information in them

Yujiri's site:

Thanks for reading!

I stream pretty regularly and run tournaments! Throw me a follow if you're interested!

I would love to hear your feedback on whether this guide was helpful! Also, if you produce content related to Prismata and think you should have a place in this guide/I missed you, please let me know!

Looking forward to creating more content in the future.

Also, thanks to all those who took the time to teach me as a new player and to edit this guide. Special shoutout to amalloy for the specific feedback/proofreading.