How to Play Drones War — a Beginner's Guide
Drones War is a free, single-player, turn-based hex strategy game you play right in your browser — no download, no account. You command a combined drone-and-infantry force against an AI that fights back. This guide walks you through one full turn so you can win your first match.
Your goal: destroy the enemy HQ. Everything below serves that.
Each turn has two beats: you issue orders (no timer — take your time), then hit Resolve and watch them play out. Here's the loop, step by step.
1. Scout the fog with recon drones
You start under fog of war — you can't strike what you can't see. Send a recon drone from a launch point out over enemy ground: it lifts the fog along its path and marks any targets it spots (launch points, workshops, squads). Marks fade after a turn or two, so keep eyes on the front — reconnaissance is the setup for every good strike.
2. Strike with kamikaze and bomber drones
Once a target is marked, hit it:
- Kamikaze drone — a one-way precision strike on a single hex. Cheap, deadly, expended on impact.
- Bomber drone — an area payload, great over clustered enemies or structures; it flies home to re-arm.
- Artillery / air support — not a unit but a request. It's a probabilistic roll (battery availability, distance, your fire priority), so it might not fire — set priority on the targets that matter.
Drones can be shot down by air defense over enemy territory, so mind your range and corridors.
3. Take and hold ground with infantry
Drones soften the enemy; infantry squads take and hold the actual ground. Give a squad a rally target and it advances there each turn, capturing hexes. Set each squad's posture:
- Advance — push outward to the nearest front and capture ground.
- Hold — dig in and defend the line.
Squads route intelligently around lakes and rivers (a one-tile ford costs extra time; wide water is impassable). When two enemy squads meet, they clash — the side with more strength and friendly ground wins. A squad can also spend half its strength to build a fire point: a fortified emplacement that anchors captured territory and shoots nearby enemy squads. Lose the squad, keep the ground.
4. Grow your economy: Supply and connectivity
Supply is your single resource. You earn it from territory that's connected to your HQ — so expansion pays off, and cutting the enemy's supply lines starves their pocket (no income, no reinforcements). Resource hexes give bonus income. Spend Supply on production, buildings, and research.
5. Build, produce, and research
- Build launch points (extend drone range), workshops (produce drones), and jammers (electronic warfare that raises enemy drone attrition).
- Produce drones at a workshop, then ship them to a launch point to sortie.
- Research a short tech tree: longer drone range, wider recon, harder-hitting strikes, cheaper production. It's the classic tension — army now, or tech for later.
The spice: weather, jammers, and events
No two matches play the same. Weather (clear, wind, fog) shifts drone range and recon. EW jammers carve out zones that punish enemy drones. Random events — resupply, equipment failure, a sudden push — keep you adapting.
Tips for your first match
- Scout before you strike. A wasted kamikaze is a wasted turn.
- Hold what you take. Advancing infantry that out-runs its support gets cut off — use Hold and fire points to consolidate.
- Watch your connectivity. A disconnected pocket earns nothing. Keep your territory linked to HQ.
- Pick your difficulty. The bot has Easy / Normal / Hard handicaps — start on Normal, drop to Easy if the front collapses.
- Your game saves automatically in the browser, so you can step away and pick the campaign back up.
That's the whole loop: scout → strike → capture → supply → research → repeat until the enemy HQ falls.