Soldiers always take damage before their captains, and effectively multiply the captain's health as well as damage potential. Since soldiers cannot go underground, each soldier is converted into additional health for the captain. The captain's health is converted back into soldiers when the unit emerges on the surface. Only champions and ground-based captains can travel underground, which focuses underground gameplay on a party of individual units rather than the surface world's squad-based armies, and plays more like a role-playing game. Underground maps feature party-based dungeon crawling gameplay: units must negotiate traps, gather treasure, and hunt monsters. Items are stored in a global inventory accessible to all units. Dragonshard has three resources: Dragonshards: used to construct units and buildings. Dragonshards periodically rain from the sky to the surface map. Gold: used to construct units and buildings. Buildings generate a small amount of gold over time, but the majority of gold in the early to mid-game is gathered by exploring the underground map for treasure, completing quests and looting corpses. Experience points: used to upgrade troops. Experience points are gained by killing units, destroying buildings, and completing quests. Buildings Possible locations for bases and expansions are predetermined by the map. Furthermore, each base or expansion is self-contained, with individual buildings placed on a fixed grid behind protective walls. The limited size of each base places strategic limitations on the makeup of the player's army. Experience points Experience points in Dragonshard are assigned to a global pool. The player spends experience points at unit-producing structures to level up captains. Once the player levels up a captain type, all captains of that type belonging to the player are leveled up, and new captains of the type start at the upgraded level. To train a captain above level two, the player must build two or more unit-producing structures of the same type in the same group of four building pads. To reach the maximum captain level of five, the player must fill a group of four building pads with four unit-producing structures of the same type. Instead of filling a group of four pads to maximize a captain's level, the player may opt to build one or more monuments that grant bonuses to all unit types produced from adjacent buildings. Champions do not level up but they can be upgraded in campaign mode with "Champion Artifacts." Game modes Dragonshard has single-player campaigns for the Order