How to get off to a flying start in Dragon Storm - hints, tips, and tricks

The maker of Dragon Storm hasn't got time to worry about things like tutorials, in-game instruction on its systems, or even explaining the very basics of play.

Instead, Griptonite Games is concerned with mercilessly kicking your metaphorical ass in the battle portion of its new freemium world builder.

You know what you need? You need a handy beginner's guide to understanding this often confusing freemium builder / strategy game.

Well, you're in luck. Simply scroll down this page a bit, and you'll find one. Aren't we good to you?

Okay, some very basic info for you first. Stuff that you should probably commit to memory.

You gain resources automatically, so you don't need to fret about setting actions into play to generate them, or collecting them when they're done. Effectively, if you run out of them, all you need to do is stop playing, go do something else, and then come back to find you've made more.

The longer you don't play the game, the more resources you'll have when you return. However, the amount you'll have when you return is dictated by how highly each resource building has been upgraded. So, it's at least worth your building everything you possibly can in your first session before logging out.

You should also be aware that the Wizard's Tower is the equivalent of your tech tree, i.e. the space in which you'll organise research to be carried out on new technologies. This will then open up new military options for you. Most importantly, though, it'll also increase the stats of units and the speed at which you create those all-important resources.

Most of the time you'll spend in the game - especially early on - is on building and upgrading these resource generators.

After building up everything in your homestead, you'll notice you're out of resources, and therefore cannot build any longer.

This isn't actually the case... if you play it smart.

While you've been building all of these parts of your home up, awards that you've achieved are being ticked off a list. Unfortunately, you haven't been notified of these achievements.

If you tap the 'Quests' button in the bottom left of the screen, however, you'll see that you can collect a whole heap of rewards. These rewards include resources you'll so desperately need at this point.

So, gather them all up, and start going back through the objectives again. One thing you'll want to do instead of following the Quests laid out for you is to construct every building on the map, even at the expense of upgrading others. This will not only mean you earn a nice Game Center achievement, but it'll also ensure you start setting some buildings to 'work' on Jobs.

The purpose of Jobs is to produce large quantities of specific types of materials faster than you would gather them normally. The difference is, however, that you do need to set these in motion, and you do need to collect them manually. Come back every day without fail to get the most from this area of the game.

There are small things that you can do to speed up your progress through the game, too. These things aren't immediately obvious, but you'll wonder how you ever coped before once you're aware of them.

Firstly, you should use up all of your speed-up potions while you're starting out. You're mainly given tonics that remove a small amount of wait time. Use them now, and enjoy them.

Secondly, if you're going to get involved with the Story mode at this point, then you should be sending a single inexpensive soldier to a tile to see what lies in wait. After that unit has been destroyed, build other army bods that work effectively against your opponent.

A third and final small tip for you: you don't need to always take over all of the tiles on a map to complete a mission in the Story mode. So, if you're running low on troops and merely want to finish the job, you can always just put in the minimum amount of effort.