Combat — First Battle, Barracks & Zombie Defense

Quick answer: Combat is a checkpoint-capture and tower-defence hybrid, not a reflex action game. You move your squad with the red banner, clear a checkpoint of enemies, hold it until the countdown ends, and unlock a new part of town. You lose only if your base falls or the Keeper's health reaches zero — and most of the fight is won before it starts, by building barricades and arming zombies.

How a battle actually plays out

Arrive at the battle location with your squad.
Drag the red banner to move the squad, and to make it hold a position.
Clear the enemies holding the checkpoint.
Hold the checkpoint until the countdown ends — that unlocks the next part of town.
Lose condition: your base falls, or the Keeper's health hits zero.

Reading the battle HUD

Pressure bar — shows which direction the next wave is coming from, so you can pre-position before it lands.
Red Banner — your follow/hold order. This is how you move and station the squad.
Undead Encampment — your undead garrison outside the town walls.
Win reward: keys — keys open restricted areas; hand them to your looters/raiders to pull rare materials out.

Before the battle: build or lose

Barricades and archer towers are the core of defence.
Spiked barricades deal passive damage to anything that walks into them — place them where enemies must pass, not spread evenly.
Chokepoints beat open lines. Funnel attackers into a short stretch covered by both towers and spikes.

Your units

Mercenaries — you pay them and they fight. (The demo-era Barracks-quality system below is how you used to raise defence power.)
Armed zombies — free to field, but each one needs a weapon and armour. The collar only adds perks — it does not make a zombie fight better.

Turning bodies into soldiers

Reanimation is where the army comes from, and it has hard requirements:

Resurrection Table costs 2 Oiled Planks + 4 Glass + 4 Polished Stone.
The body must have all six organs intact.
The collar must match the red-skull count: Bronze ≤5, Golden ≤10, Steel ≤99.
Reanimation Liquid must sit in an open storage in the same room as the table.
Recharge once per week.

Red skulls = combat value. The red-skull count sets the perk ceiling on a zombie, so high-red-skull bodies are army material — and because the body has to be complete, the heart, bone, brain and skin you would otherwise harvest are mutually exclusive with using that corpse as a soldier. Decide per body which line it feeds.

Where the zombies come from:

The Plague Doctor hands you 2 early.
Gunter gives you 3 after the first battle.
Your weekly cap is managed through the PR Machine.

When you can fight

Some battles are only open on specific days of the week.
The sewer is open all six days — the reliable place to practise the banner-and-checkpoint flow without burning a story fight.

Demo-era first battle (retail unverified)

The pre-launch demo's "Swords and Bell" route — Barracks quality 12, the Magic bell (1 Blood + 1 Bronze Ingot), the red banner and the Healing Potions from Herbert — is demo-only. No post-launch source mentions Barracks quality or the Magic bell, so treat that entire chain as retail unverified and do not plan a run around it.

What still holds from that era: the objectives could be done in either order, the start button stayed disabled until defence power and a weapon were both ready, and losing cost nothing — you talked to Herbert and retried. Review consensus at the time called combat a side dish rather than the main course (TheBigBois scored it 5.5/10) — the demo fight was the tutorial for the system described above.

Known contradictions & TBD

Healing potions at the start of the first battle: this page previously said 3 in one place and 2 in another — the correct value is TBD.
Enemy counts, damage values and wave sizes: TBD — no post-launch source publishes them.
Keybinds: the claim that spacebar is the attack key is single-source — treat as unverified.

Full walkthrough · Technology guide · Zombie troubleshooting · Town restoration

Last verified: September 2026 — data from post-launch guides; all values below source to their linked URL.

Graveyard Keeper 2 Combat — First Battle, Barracks & Zombie Defense