Red Rock Valley Illustrated Strategy

This article is an illustrated example of how to tackle Red Rock Valley by killing Rock Snakes, taken from actual (unplanned) gameplay.

SPOILER ALERT: this article contains spoilers on how to "win" Red Rock Valley. You may wish not to read further if you wish to discover strategies on your own.

Here's the initial approach to Red Rock Valley from Crossroads:

Shortly upon entering, we notice a Rock Snake approaching from the upper right.

Notice the narrow channel that just happens to be situated between the player and the snake. This seems like a good channel to lure and trap the snake. The troll off to the right seems like a good candidate for building an obstruction to block off the channel once the Snake enters it.

A few turns later, here's the situation:

The first troll is killed at the exit of the narrow channel, but the troll approaching from above is just a little too slow to complete the obstruction. Worse, a stray Metal Beast has sneaked into the valley from the Crossroads, which adds another level of complication to the situation. Meanwhile, a second Rock Snake has entered the scene above the first one.

The situation is not good, so we begin running away. However, it just so happens that the approaching troll, even though it was too slow for adding a second layer to the original intended obstruction, was in time to occupy a hexagonal tile at the exit of the narrow channel, blocking the Snake from moving away. In the meantime the Metal Beast has entered the Valley. We lure it towards the Rock Snake to obstruct the Snake's way even more:

This is a lucky setup: notice the heptagons, that together with the approaching trolls and Metal Beast completely block in the Rock Snake. It has no way to escape!

We step off the heptagon, and boom! Our first Rock Snake is down:

Already, its body along with the elevated islands have now become an inaccessible stronghold of heights 2 and 3, with only a single height-1 entrance where its head was.

We kill off the approach trolls and push the Metal Beast out of the way, and ascend our stronghold:

Meanwhile, the second Snake, unable to penetrate the now-blocked narrow channel, has wandered off somewhere else.

And now that we have a relatively-safe fort to retreat into, we can pause a few turns and observe something about Rock Snakes: they are actually quite stupid and easily get trapped. After just a few more turns of picking up the treasures that are now accessible (literally just another 12 seconds of gameplay), the second snake has managed to somehow kill itself, widening the plateau:

Now that we have established an initial stronghold in the valley, we can begin to explore further by using the Rock Snakes' very long bodies to reach other islands of treasure:

Occasionally, the stray Red Troll will manage to climb onto the plateau, perhaps by climbing onto the head of another Rock Snake that got ensnared by our expanding plateau and died. We have to constantly watch out for the occasional intruder and eliminate them to maintain the safety of our stronghold.

When rock trolls begin to gather around the walls of our stronghold, we stand on the edge and kill them in pairs to erect height-2 barriers against further intrusion. Sometimes, if only a lone troll is in sight, it's better to kill them on a heptagon so that the resulting height-1 entrance into the stronghold cannot be accessed by a Rock Snake. If a Rock Snake manages to break into our stronghold, the situation can quickly deteriorate, and we may have to abandon our fortress and begin a new one. In the following image, the marked heptagons next to the player were made by killing pairs of trolls on either side in order to prevent intrusion:

Gallery

Here's a screenshot of a different run, using the same strategy, in which the player managed to collect 55 Red Gems before escaping Red Rock Valley alive.