Road to Grandmaster for the beginner:

1. You play ten times and likely lose them pretty much all unless you have a year of testnet experience under your belt. Especially during the early stages of launch a heavy influx of up to some 20 thousand players with alpha tester experience will happen through the Peasant ranks. Do not get discouraged as those player will soon speedrun their way to Grandmaster but try to learn some tricks and keep on working on a well functioning formation in formation view. Without NFT’s perhaps one of the best early strategies to win is likely, as previously said, with ranged units (archers, mages). Continue playing in order to be able to mint your first NFT’s through buying a chest from the shop (though it is good to always check out marketplace for cheap items before, even cheap chests themselves). 
2. Go to the formations to equip the NFT’s (If you get limited by their Ancient Power or by item level restrictions for player ranks, see below, you can remove some units to manage your formation AP). Your formation Ancient Power is limited according to your rank. In late testnet you started with Max 1.5k ancient power for a formation. Lets see how this works in mainnet. 
3. Try to work your way towards your first win to claim the related CGO rewards to make it faster to buy chests and get the wins rolling. Remember, Ancient Power of the items (AP) is kind of a negative. Of two otherwise similar items the lesser Ancient Power item is more valuable as you can equip more of them.

Game mechanics affecting formation strategies:

Unit properties (that get modified by equipped NFT’s)

1. CRT -> this is the chance for critical hits. A critical hit will deal double the damage

The CRT is the percentage, so the probability is: 

P_crt=CRT/100

2. ACC -> Defines your hit chance. Values above 100 will be used to negate a part of the evasion. So 130% accuracy means that you ignore 30% of the evasions of your enemy. 70% means you miss 30% of your attacks. The opponent also has a chance to evade.

The attacking unit ACC defines chance of a miss: up to a hundred % its the complement of the raw ACC percentage, above a hundred ACC its still just a 0% chance of a miss (no other adjusting parameters).

P_miss=max(0;1-(ACC/100))

Evasion comes to play when a hit hasn’t been a miss. Then EVA% defines the chance of a evasion unless the opponent had over 100% ACC. Then the EVA gets adjusted according to the attacking unit ACC (for example for attacking unit with 130% ACC and defending unit 30% EVA, the chance of evasion is 21%, 30% off the EVA% due to above 100% accuracy).

So in a nutshell, the miss and evasion are two different events, evasion only possible when hit wasn’t a miss, the non-missed attacks may be evaded at a propability of

P_eva=EVA/100*(1-(max((ACC/100)-1);0))

3. LST -> heal based on damage you dealt, percentage of dealt damage
4. EVA -> Your chance to evade an attack that wasn’t a miss. See ACC for more details.
5. SHL -> Selfheal. Passive healing after each round 
6. ATK -> Attack, Attack affects the amount of dealt damage, along with defending unit Defence
7. DEF -> Defence, affects the inflicted damage of attacking unit
8. HP -> Hitpoints, affects the amount of damage that unit can take before death

Damage calculation:

For example currently in closed alpha as of writing this blog post the base damage is calculated like that:

baseDamage = (attacker.attack * 50) / defender.defense + 10;

Then a couple of modifiers are applied to the baseDamage:

critical hits (if success): x2

type advantage: x1.5 (mage to knight or knight to archer or archer to mage)

So what can we for example do with this info?

We can perhaps want to try maximize Expected Damage Per Attack EDPA (instead of more defensive unit expected lifetime or hits taken before death):

EDPA=(1-P_miss*P_eva)*(50*atk/(def+10)*(1+P_crt)*type_bonus

Easiest way to generally maximize it, is to 

1. a) prefer these parameters (ACC, ATK, CRT) in equipment over the more defensive ones (DEF, HP, SHL, and LST that do help our unit expected lifetime or hits taken before death)
2. b) optimize your formation considering type bonus against the generally accepted best strategy available, for example using Mage heavy army against the LST knights in case of a knight army rich environment.

So for example a mage + knight (2m+1k or 1m+2k) formations could work well against two knight or three knight armies (2k or 3k). Or add a supporting priest behind your lines for heals.

This knight/mage formation generally requires using a line formation (or zig-zag where mage line is one square behind the knight line) and using your mages as the main damage sources, while still bringing them back or close to your formation line at the end of every turn in order to capitalize from enemy errors from attacking your line with single knights (as they will be easy prey for your damage heavy lineup alone)

I personally liked to use a three knight two mage army (3k+2m) in the testnet to go against the grain against the two or three unit armies, and finally modified it to a (2k+2m+2a+p) for fun and variety rather than strict efficacy!

Happy hunting for a succesful strategy! In testnet we saw all archer strategies, all knight strategies but not yet all mage or all priest strategies! Maybe you are the first to find them?

Item level limits for different player ranks (Peasant, Squire, Knight, Lord, King, Grandmaster) during testnet alpha late stages:

Peasant = Level 1 Items

Squire = Level 2 Items

Knight = Level 3 Items

Lord = Level 4 Items

King + Grandmaster = Level 5 Items

Formation Ancient Power limits for different player ranks during late testnet were:

Peasant = 1500 AP

Squire = 1800 AP

Knight = 2100 AP

Lord = 2400 AP

King = 2700 AP

Grandmaster = 3000 AP

Let’s see how the AP limits work in mainnet! See you in Altea, in the Grand Master ranks!