When playing a game of Future Invaders, the winner is decided by a combination of three factors: arsenal building, arsenal piloting, and luck.
While luck can't be improved, your skills in building and piloting your arsenal can be developed through practice, strategic thinking, and learning from your mistakes.
This page outlines a few concepts which should help you think about the game in a more strategic way. For deeper strategic discussions, you will have to interact with the community on Discord or IRC.
Speed is a defining element of an arsenal. There are three different speeds. You might consider building your entire arsenal around one for optimal results. Each speed comes with unique strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.
Aggro arsenals are the fastest. Their goal is to win quickly, often by opening with strong threats to pressure the opponent. Even if they don't achieve an outright win, they aim to disrupt opponents by forcing them into a defensive playstyle.
Control arsenals are the slowest, preferring slow, deliberate games where every move is carefully planned. Rather than being aggressive, control arsenals focus on neutralizing threats and patiently developing their own win conditions over time.
Midrange arsenals bridge the gap between aggro and control, blending steady aggression with flexibility. They aim to deploy big threats gradually while maintaining enough control to defend against early aggression.
These speeds create a strategic triangle: aggro usually outpaces control, control typically outlasts midrange, and midrange often holds its ground against aggro. When building your arsenal, consider which speed it are optimized for, but also whether your reserves cards allows you to switch from one speed to another between games.
A key concept in Future Invaders is that your base's durability is a resource.
You only lose when your base's durability hits zero or below. Letting it drop to 20, 10, or even just 1 is not a loss, as long as you can still protect it. Sometimes, it might be worth sacrificing a bit of durability early on to gain a greater advantage later in the game.
For example, imagine an opponent deploys two weak ships facing you on their first turn. You could block them to protect your base's durability, or you could skip deployments, draw an extra card, and prepare for a stronger response on your next turn. In some situations, learning to accept small durability losses rather than seeing them as setbacks can be a valuable strategy.
In the early game, your goal is to balance drawing cards and protecting your base. Try to draw as many cards as you can early, but only if it doesn't allow your opponent's threats to spiral out of control.
When building your arsenals, be mindful of their resource curve.
A well-balanced resource curve ensures you have impactful options at every stage of the game. If you have too few cheap cards, you will have issues getting enough resources to play your more expensive cards. Don't underestimate the value of including cheaper cards in your arsenal.
Each arsenal type has a unique resource curve, depending on their speed. Aggro arsenals favor a low-cost curve, packed with free or cheap cards to ensure they can play every card they draw. Control arsenals have a higher curve, with the minimum amount of free and low-cost cards to reliably reach the late game. Midrange arsenals balance their curve to achieve a smooth progression, with a mix of low, mid, and high-cost cards.
To refine your arsenal's resource curve, shuffle and draw the top 8 cards. Ask yourself: do these cards support your game plan? If you often find yourself without resources or impactful plays, consider adjusting your arsenal's composition to better match its speed and respect its resource curve.
Games of Future Invaders often develop a tempo: one player may start advancing their game plan faster, creating a strong threat that others must respond to. This player controls the game's tempo, forcing opponents into a reactive, defensive position.
Your approach should shift depending on whether you control the tempo. When you're in control, focus on deploying ships and playing actions to keep opponents on the backfoot. Forcing them to play reactively limits their ability to execute their own strategies, which increases your chances of winning.
Learn to recognize when you're losing tempo. If your opponents' defenses become too strong to break through, it may be wise to shift tactics. Use your tempo advantage to buy time, draw more cards, and prepare a defensive strategy of your own. Strengthening your position can allow you to regain control of the tempo later in the game.
The more cards you have in your hand and on the game grid, the more options you have. Aim to keep your hand and grid as full as possible by drawing and deploying cards whenever you can.
Having more options than your opponent creates more pathways to victory. For this reason, the player with more cards in hand and on the grid holds a "card advantage". Always pay attention to how many cards your opponents keep in hand, they are as much a part of the game as their deployed ships and structures.
When you play an action or reaction card, consider that it has two costs: the resource cost, and the cost of having one fewer card in your hand. This means that even "free" actions and reactions carry a subtle hidden cost.
When playing on the offensive, a common pitfall is losing due to overextending.
If you immediately commit all your cards and resources to a play without considering how it could backfire, you risk being left with nothing if your opponents have a way to counter it. Only use all your resources when you have a clear plan in mind.
For instance, if you hold a direct-damage action against an opponent's base, you have three main choices. One, play it immediately to apply pressure and perhaps force a reaction. Two, wait until your opponent's turn, when their resources are spent, so they can't counter it. Three, hold it in your hand to surprise your opponent and finish the game.
Each approach is valid depending on the situation. If you act too quickly, you might overextend and lose momentum. If you wait too long, you might miss your chance to win. Weigh the consequences of each move, and adapt your strategy to the situation.
Two cards have synergy if they're more powerful together than they are separately.
When building an arsenal, consider how well your cards work together. Strong synergies across your arsenal will raise its overall power level. Conversely, some cards have anti-synergies: they weaken each other's effectiveness. Be mindful to avoid pairing these together.
Not all synergies are obvious. For instance, a Ring Station and a Trading Station might seem underwhelming on their own, but together they guarantee you two cards per turn. Detecting these synergies and leveraging them is key to mastering arsenal building.
Beyond the speeds of aggro, midrange, and control, arsenals are also classified by archetype.
An arsenal's archetype represents its general gameplan or goal. Unlike a specific strategy or speed, an archetype is a guiding approach for how the arsenal plays. For instance, a Combo arsenal relies on powerful card synergies to achieve victory, while a Ping arsenal uses small sources of direct damage to gradually weaken opponents' bases.
When building an arsenal, define its archetype and make sure each card supports your approach. There's no fixed list of archetypes, and new ones will continue to emerge as the game evolves.
Every arsenal needs a win condition: a clear goal or method for securing victory.
When building your arsenal, ask yourself: How do I plan to win the game? Make sure your deck includes enough cards to support this goal. Your win condition doesn't always align with your archetype or speed. For example, even a slow control arsenal can rely on one big, aggressive action to win in a single turn.
Understanding your win condition is crucial. You must know how to protect it, as your opponents will try to counter it. Without a clear win condition, it can be difficult to close out games.
An arsenal's reach is its ability to break through opponents' defenses and secure a victory.
In some games, the situation may stagnate, with both players stuck in a defensive position. When this happens, the arsenal with the greatest reach will typically win. Keep this in mind when building your arsenal, and ensure you include threats that can deal direct damage to your opponents' bases.
On the other hand, you also need ways to defend yourself against your opponent's reach. Make sure your arsenal has enough options to remove ships, structures, and counter actions that can directly damage your base.
Some games will go poorly. You may lose tempo, find yourself on the backfoot, and struggle to avoid crumbling under pressure. These situations are inevitable, so your arsenals should be resilient: able to handle pressure and recover.
Pressure can come in many forms: being overwhelmed on the grid, being resource-starved, or facing direct damage threats. Your arsenal should account for all of these scenarios, with reserve cards that can be swapped in between games to counter your opponents' methods of putting you under pressure.
The fewer cards in your arsenal, the higher your chances of drawing the necessary cards to assemble your win condition. This is why it is heavily recommended to build arsenals of 30 cards, the minimum allowed.
You can further improve your chances of drawing your key cards by thinning your arsenal. Include cards with low utility that allow you to draw more cards, increasing your odds of finding the right ones.
For example, cards like Accelerate or Space Scanner may not win you the game directly, but they replace themselves by drawing a card, thinning your deck and improving your chances of drawing a win condition.
Arsenals focused on a single win condition should aim to be as thin as possible, even if it weakens their overall power. On the other hand, versatile arsenals with multiple paths to victory should focus on strong cards to ensure flexibility, and do not need to be thinned down.
A card's power goes beyond its text. With the right mind games, you can make a card seem much more powerful than it really is, using bluffing, misdirection, and other tactics to influence your opponents' choices.
Any card in your hand is unknown to your opponents, giving it potentially infinite power in their minds. As long as you keep an air of mystery around your cards, they might think you have stronger options than you do. At the same time, you must anticipate the cards your opponents hold and keep counters ready for any of their potential win condition.
The only time there is no mind game is when your hand is empty. When it happens, your opponents can see everything you own and know they won't be countered. That's why it's wise to always keep at least one card in hand, to keep them guessing.
Becoming a better player involves more than just understanding the game mechanics, it's also about learning how to anticipate your opponents' moves while making them doubt yours.
Before making a decision, always assess the risks involved. For example, when playing a key card, how likely is it to be countered or removed? When an opponent plays a key card, is it worth countering or removing, and are they likely to play a stronger card right afterward? When leaving a lane empty to draw an extra card, what are the chances an opponent will deploy a strong ship in that lane and cause your base a significant durability loss?
Risk assessment is only possible if you know all the cards in the game and understand the composition of your opponents' arsenals. This knowledge is gained through experience, by building arsenals, playing games, and paying attention to the key cards that influenced your victories or defeats.
This ability can make a huge difference between two equally strong arsenals. The player with a better understanding of their opponent's arsenal will play more confidently, make better decisions, and be able to act more aggressively when the time is right.