The Tone Rebellion/Combat

Basics
Combat in The Tone Rebellion is similar to that of most RTS games. You have combat units (or "Warriors"), and these units will defend themselves if attacked and can be directed to attack enemies. Your worker units can also fight using the panic button, and they are very weak compared to warriors, though you will likely have a lot more of them and there is strength in numbers.

On higher levels of difficulty, you will definitely need to use the panic button to defend your home base as monsters will definitely attack before you have sufficient defenses. The Panic Button is not very elegant; when you click it all workers drop whatever they were holding and rush towards the nearest enemy. They cannot be controlled individually. One the one hand, a worker is much easier to replace than a warrior, meaning that it is worth using them to cover your warriors when you don't have enough. On the other hand, they die quite easily and losing floaters counts against your score, and losing workers means you have less of them to deliver Crystal Tone to your Dojos, which slows the progress of your warriors (see below).

Warriors are created in Dojos, which you do not begin the game with and must build. They can only be built on medium or large tone pools. A stocked Dojo will convert existing workers into warriors, so your population remains the same. You can have up to four different kinds of Dojos that produce different types of warriors, and each Dojo starts off with the ability to house three warriors (except for spell towers, see below).

A Dojo requires Crystal Tone to function. It uses crystals to convert workers to warriors and to "power" them. It is worth thinking of Crystal Tone as "Ammunition." All warriors have a charge rating which represents the number of attacks they can make before having to recharge. Typically a warrior will break off combat and return to the dojo automatically when they are down to only a few charges.

The Warriors of a Dojo cannot be controlled individually; instead orders are given to the entire dojo and all members of the dojo try to follow it. You can click on the Dojo itself, the warriors themselves, or the image of the Dojo in the building clipboard to select that Dojo. Right-clicking on an enemy unit or building will order the warriors of that Dojo to attack that enemy, while right-clicking on an empty space will order the warriors of the Dojo to move to that area and defend it.

Alternatively you can use the combat control icons in the lower right corner of the screen to give orders to the warriors. These orders include the ones described above but include two others. From left to right they are:
 * Move to and defend an area
 * Defend a specific friendly unit
 * Return to the Dojo (this allows the warriors to heal and to recharge using the Dojo's crystal stockpile)
 * Attack a creature
 * Attack a growth or building (Note: you can attack your own buildings with this command if you wish, which is useful for getting rid of Tone Spreaders that you no longer need. You need to use the order icon for this; just right-clicking on one of your buildings sends the warriors to guard that location.)

Combat Attributes
Each warrior has a variety of statistics that describe how well it can fight. There are two categories of such statistics, the visible ones (in the tooltips) and the unlisted ones.

Visible Attributes
When you click on a specific unit in the lower left you should see the statistics for that unit. These are:
 * The unit's level, which is arguably an indicator of how tough it is. Player units need to level up, but monsters are just born with a specific level.
 * The unit's current amount of experience points, and then the number of experience points the unit needs to reach the next level (if there is one). Each successful hit by a unit gives it one experience point.  Note that the total amount of experience needed to level up is based on the difficulty level, with more difficult games requiring more experience.  On the other hand, there will be more enemies to attack in such games.
 * The unit's current charge level, compared to its maximum. Each point of charge allows the unit to make one attack.
 * The unit's current number of hits, compared to its maximum. When a creature reaches 0 hits, it dies.
 * The unit's strength. This represents the unit's chance of scoring a hit when making an attack.  Individual attacks seem to only be able to remove one hit each.

Monster tooltips list some of these attributes, but monsters do not have a charge rating (they can attack indefinitely), nor do they have experience (they do not level up).

Growths have tooltips but only the name is listed. The strength, range, and hits stats are listed in the manual.

Invisible Attributes
There are some statistics that units have which are not displayed in in-game text. Particularly:
 * Range. Some units have a range of close, meaning they must be adjacent to their target.  Other units have a range at a distance, though different units have different ranges (values for these ranges can be found in the manual).
 * Speed. How fast the unit moves around (values for speed can be found in the manual on a scale of 1-4).  Faster units tend to have less hits and charges.  The fastest monsters (Ronths and Varnths) have a speed of 4 which matches the speed of faster player units (Each faction has at least one unit that has a speed of 4).
 * Rate of Fire. This is not listed in the manual, but is clearly a factor.  It seems at least partly based on the speed of attack animation, though the animations may sometimes be cosmetic.  Ranged units fire a visible missile of some kind and generally do not fire again until that missile has reached its target, though this limitation does not apply to growths with a ranged attack.  Melee units seem to have higher rates of fire than ranged units.

Differences in rate of fire become apparent in matchups between monsters and warriors. I have noticed that in a fight between a group of three Tark warriors (Order of the Tentacle) and a single Rakalingus, the Rakalingus has a decent chance of killing one of the Tarks despite the Tarks having 17 hits to the Rakalingus' 16 and 5 strength compared to the Rakalingus' 4. This indicates that the Rakalingus must be making at least three times as many attacks in the same time span to keep up with the attacks of three Tarks.