HOARD on PSN Tomorrow, Learn How to Train Your Dragon Today

HOARD drops tomorrow on PSN, so it’s time you start thinking about tuning up your treasure-hunting skills! Here are a few tips to help you get started on your path to becoming a great dragon and racking up some impressive scores:

Preserve your score multiplier. You lose your score multiplier whenever you are wounded to zero health, and also whenever a thief finishes stealing from your hoard. If you want to earn Gold ratings on maps, you have to avoid losing your score multiplier too much. It’s better to fly home and heal before getting wounded all the way to zero. And always keep an eye out for those sneaky burglers.
Armor up for safety! The denizens of the realm are not friendly. Knights and archers make for challenging foes when they come in groups. While upgrading Speed and Fire Breath are sexy, improving your Armor can be key to good scores. If you find yourself constantly getting injured and sent back to your hoard, you probably need tougher scales! Having a few extra hit points means you can make mistakes and not get punished for it.
Tribute towns are safe points. When you terrorize a town enough without actually killing it, it will start to fear you and send you offering carts full of gold. But another great benefit is that the town’s archers will no longer attack you. If an opponent is chasing you down when you’re weak, go hide out near your tribute town and let the archers do the dirty work for you!
Don’t kill everything. As the kingdom becomes more populated with farms and houses, there will be much more valuable merchant wagons rolling around. More commerce means more treasure for the taking. If you kill everything and keep the kingdom in ruins, you’ll starve your own hoard! Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
There’s a counter-strategy for that. To win at multiplayer, you’ll need to craft a strategy that takes into account all the factors: your own play style, the particular map, and the choices of your opponent. If your opponent is less skilled at fighting, make a fast dragon with powerful breath, and mercilessly hunt him down. If you’re weaker at the twitch stuff, upgrade armor—you’ll be able to take a beating and still get back to your hoard without getting defeated and having to drop your treasure. Keep an eye on what your opponent is upgrading (you can tell by how his dragon appearance changes during the game) so you know what you’re dealing with.

Ok, I promised five tips but we’re on a roll here so how about a sixth for free:

Gold bandwidth. Upgrading Carry increases how much gold you can pick up before having to return home to your hoard to unload. But another huge benefit is that it increases how quickly you drop off that gold into your hoard. The speeds can get pretty fast at higher Carry levels. Less time dropping gold means more time out pillaging the kingdom, which in turn means more gold for your hoard! And gold for your hoard is the whole point, innit?