Game Plan:
Spend the first 3 turns placing as many enclaves and warriors as possible and scoring when convenient. At the end of turn three, you would ideally have 6 points, 16 frogs, and 10 enclaves on the map.
Starting at turn four, reconcile and settle such that you have four enclaves of one suit and 8 peaceful enclaves. This enables you to integrate for 4 pts per turn and draw four per turn to mill through the deck for craftables. Overall, try to get as many enclaves down before the board gets clogged and then aim to outpace your opponents and make it expensive for the table to stop you.
A rough breakdown over 7 turns: (1+2+3+4+4+4+4)=22 points from faction scoring, 8 from craftables.
Turn by Turn
Turn 0 / Setup
Pick the river clearing that best matches the suits in your hand; e.g. if you start with 2/3 rabbits in hand, pick the rabbit clearing. This is important because we will discard two cards when provoking turn one, and want to maximize our chances of being able to score 2 instead of one point. If we have a choice in clearing (e.g. hand of 1 bird, 1 rabbit, 1 fox), I prefer to pick one of the top two high-adjacency river clearings. If you have a tea in hand, picking a mouse clearing for your first enclave and crafting tea turn one is also a great start.
Turn 1
Provoke twice in river clearings, spawning two militant enclaves. Provoking requires you to discard a random card. Then settle and place a peaceful enclave in the suit of the remaining card in your hand.
Provoke order matters; the first clearing that is provoked in will have two frogs, while the second clearing will only have one. Provoke first in the river clearing with the highest adjacency; this clearing will have the most flexibility in settling. After discarding two cards, look at the suit of the remaining card. Settle in a clearing matching your remaining card. If you are lucky, you can score two points if the remaining card matches your initial peaceful clearing (your newly settled clearing will be of the same suit, scoring +2 for integrate). If you have a choice in which clearing to settle from, choose your starting clearing with 5 frogs. You will recruit more next turn in the militant clearings.
Why not provoke thrice? This results in no scoring turn 1 and 1 less card draw, making it harder to score turn 2.
End state: 1 (+1) point, 8 frogs on the board, 2 militant and 2 peaceful enclaves, 3 cards spent, 2 cards drawn
Turn 2
Rally, adding a frog in each of the two militant enclaves.
Provoke once in the final river clearing, adding a militant enclave. This should result in one militant enclave of 4 warriors, one militant enclave of 3 warriors, and one militant enclave of one warrior. Look at the remaining card in your hand, and aim to settle and place peaceful enclaves in two clearings of the suit of the remaining card. When settling, aim to use your two river militant clearings with 3 & 4 warriors, leaving only one frog to defend the militant clearing and moving 2+ to the new peaceful clearing. It's ok to leave the river militant clearings more sparsely defended; you can always provoke and spawn many more warriors.
End state: 3 (+2) points, 13 frogs, 3 militant and 4 peaceful enclaves, 2 cards spent, 3 cards drawn. the militant clearings should be less defended than the peaceful enclaves.
Turn 3
This is the last setup turn. Rally, adding a frog each in each of the militant enclaves. If no militant enclaves have been removed, settle and place peaceful enclaves three times, prioritizing the suit where integrating will score the most points. You should be able to score at least three points. If your lightly defended militant enclaves have been removed, provoke back up to 3 militant enclaves and add more troops back to the board, and use the remaining daylight actions to settle.
End state: 6 (+3) points, 16+ frogs, 3 militant and 7 peaceful enclaves, draw 3
Turn 4 and onwards:
After turn 3, you should have at least 16 frogs on the board. If not, it will be difficult to settle up to 10 enclaves without enough warriors. For turn 4, reconcile at least one clearing, such that you have at least 8 peaceful enclaves (to enable max 4 card draw) and also four peaceful clearings in the suit of one of your cards. Your priorities are now as follows:
1. Reconcile/Settle so you can integrate for four points at the end of every turn
2. Reconcile so you have 8+ peaceful clearings in order to mill through the deck and find as many craftables as possible.
3. Settle/Reconcile so that you can craft any items you have drawn. Ideally have at least two peaceful enclaves in fox / rabbit and one peaceful enclave in mouse. This distribution of peaceful enclaves allows you to craft anything you draw before you might have to provoke (potentially causing you to discard the craftable)
4. Settle with redundancy; aim to settle so that you have four enclaves in two suits. Should the board team up against you, they need to remove four enclaves instead of two to reduce your scoring from 4 to 2. Drawing four cards (2.) helps with integrate flexibility. It's much easier to recover lost enclaves by resettling(up to 3 per turn) than to try to defend every clearing as frogs. Additionally, allowing enemies to trigger fears come to pass will enable even more card draw for crafting points.
5. Settle in a way that makes you an unappetizing target; For each enemy faction(especially militants), aim to share 2-3 clearings with opponent tokens/buildings. The threat of fears comes to pass (After an enemy removes a Peaceful enclave or battles you at one, flip all Peaceful enclaves with that enemy’s pieces to Militant and place 1 Diaspora warrior at each one you flipped) is the best deterrent against policing. You must keep a few frogs in the supply so that when an opponent triggers fears come to pass, you can recruit in those clearings. This will make enemies think twice about policing as they will be hard pressed to defend multiple clearings from battle.
6. Prioritize defending non-river clearings. You can always place enclaves on rivers with one daylight action, so if there are opportunistic raiders (e.g. Knaves), try to make river clearings the most appealing target.
End state after turn 4: 10 (+4) points, 16 frogs, minimum 8 peaceful enclaves, with the integrate suit having 4 peaceful enclaves.
How To Prioritize Which Clearing To Settle
You want to place as many enclaves as possible per turn in the first 3-4 turns. Never spend more than one daylight action to place an enclave in the early game. This is because once the board gets clogged with warriors, it will be much harder to settle (you need to respect rule when moving into the target clearing, and rule in the target clearing to place a peaceful enclave). Frogs also have a hard time gathering a lot of warriors in once place, as they need to spread ~16-17 warriors amongst 10+ enclaves. Thus, when I have multiple options for what clearing to settle, I think about the following (in no particular order):
1. Will this be one of my two integrate suits with four enclaves per suit? You should think about this at the start of the game; e.g. if the moles have fortified 6 warriors in a corner rabbit clearing, it will be very inefficient to place an enclave there (gathering 7 warriors is expensive, as those warriors could be settling & defending enclaves elsewhere. The other option is move warriors in with settle, provoke to spawn a militant enclave, then flip to peaceful next turn to prevent the enclave from taking a hit from battle, costing warriors and 2 actions). So if a faction like moles or rats have chosen a rabbit clearing to fortify, it is easiest to pick the other fox & mouse suits as your 4 clearing integrate suits.
2. Will I be unable to settle this clearing if I do not do it this turn? This is extremely important; is a lizard eyeing a specific clearing to set up gardens in next turn? Settle there before they play the garden, then coexist peacefully! Will the eyrie move to your starting clearing of 5 frogs, preventing you from leaving? Settle using your homeland, moving most of the frogs out. If you don't do this, you may have trouble getting to four enclaves with the same suit as a card in your hand by the start of turn 4, which will slow your scoring.
3. Can this clearing help me reach more clearings next turn? This is helpful if you need to be flexible in getting suited peaceful clearings. Additionally, if you plan to use the clearing as a staging ground, you should move more frogs in to help obtain rule the next clearing so you can place the enclave. When playing on maps with random clearings, this also applies to your starting clearing and first provoke clearing. You want to be flexible enough to be able to settle at least two of any suit regardless of what cards you get in the first few turns
8 Points from Crafting?
8 points from crafting seems quite high, but it's quite reasonable with the frogs' high card draw and crafting ability.
Suppose we aim to win by end of turn 7. Ignoring our starting hand which we will likely discard and ignoring cards drawn at the end of turn 7, we will have seen 2 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 + 4 = 20 cards. With the frog cards, there are 68 cards in the deck instead of 54. There are 20 craftable cards in the deck, and the average value of a craftable card is 33/20 ≈ 1.5. The expected amount of craftable cards we draw is 20 x 20/68 = 5.88. The expected number of points from crafting by the end of turn 7 is 9.7 points. If we aim to win at the end of turn 8, the expected point value would be 11.6. If we can obtain 1-2 points from cardboard, getting the remaining 6-7 points from crafting is a very reliable strategy.
tip: hold onto a few craftables until the end of the game, so that you can avoid being the table punching bag and burst to victory!
Crafting Priority
Obviously craftables are the most important. I also like extra movement, extra battles and corvid planners, as I find that in the late game it's quite hard to maneuver the thinly spread frogs in order to defend or attack specific clearings.
End
I noticed there aren't very many homeland faction guides, so I thought I'd make one. This is my first time writing a guide, hope it's helpful!
edit: fixed some typos and added a few more words