MarZ: Tactical Base Defense – Secret Mechanics (Tips and Tricks)

Ever wonder, what makes special crew truly special?
You want to know how what certain perks do?
Well, here you go, I’ve collected all secrets I’ve found in the game until now to help you uncover these mechanics.

Special Crew

All credit goes to Immortalits!

Special crew has a lot secret mechanics on how they function, because their tooltips barely shows anything about the real bonuses.

As first thing to make clear, they get ‘experience’ by killing an enemy, dealing damage to it doesn’t matter, they also get experience if they control a tower.

By Themselves:

• DPS: 3 -> 3.6
• Range: 8 -> 9.6
• Speed: 2.5 -> 3
• Health: 30 -> 36

As you can see, they’re 20% stronger in all aspect compared to regular crew.

In Towers:

• They give a simple 20% damage boost for towers.
• It is recommended to swap them around to lower kill potential towers, so they get the damage boost too, while the higher kill potential tower lvl up other crew, so you can stack up special crew too as a backline defense.

In Extractors:

• +1 building material/ sec.
• So with the perk, you can get +9 resource/sec from a single extractor.
• It’s not written in the tooltip of the extractor, you’ll see +7 (+8 with perk) / sec, but in reality, it will give you an extra building mat every second.

Reserch Lab, Uplink and Arms Factory:

As far as I’ve tested, they don’t get any bonuses from having special crew handling them.

Perks

• Good As New – 50% repair cost, nothing extra.
• Refound – You don’t lose money by repositioning towers.
• Quick Support – 50% faster crew requesting (it actualy is better in rushing crew, than +1 crew/order).
• Hurry Up – Faster reserch, you should swap it if you’re done with you most important reerches to something else, it’s only important on certain maps, where you don’t start with missile and you need it fast, but for that, you might want UNLOCK, that gives you all building baseline.
• Protection – Only usefull if extractors are actually in the way of zombies, otherwise don’t pick it. (Sometimes you will ony know if it’s worth it or not if you are inside the map). My personal favourite in challenge mode, since there are often extractors in the front and it helps ignoring their defense, makes it easy to turtle up at the lander.
• Reinforcement – It’s a value perk, best way to use it is to order +1 crew each time, you spare at most 120 building materials/ 60 sec, so you’re better to pick TURBO, if there are 3 places for extractors, because they give you +180/ 60 sec and so on, if you have even more.
• Coffe Time – Incredibbly strong perk, it actually gives you effectively +210 building mats/ extractor (lvl 3 and 240 if manned up by special crew)/ zombie weave; the extra time also gives you sure preparation time to get all extractors in most map to lvl 3 without risking being rushed down at start.
• Superweapon – 50% cost reduction on superweapons, only usefull if you use all of them realy often (like 3-4 at each weave), otherwise it’s better to pick resource boosting perks.
• Bombastic – Same as superweapons.
• Turbo – One of the best resource boosting perks, only coffe time can be a bit better if you need more reaction time, also makes it better to spam out all resource extractors.
• Energy Boost – Only good if you minmax and want to get 5 slot energy hubs fast, then it’s better to switch to this perk, or in realy long maps, at the end, to get even more tower slots.
• No Worries – 400 resource caches are dropped every 60 seconds randomly on the map, a crew must go out to pick it up, it despawns if no crew picks it up after 60 seconds, it despawns; spawn countdown only starts after the current one is picked up or has despawned. So it’s theoretically gives at most 6+ 2/3 resource/ sec, but it’s better to calculate with 6 at most. Has a chance to spawn on top of a building… it can’t be picked up from there, which is a serious desadvantage, but it’s still quite a good resource boost.
• Catapult – If a building is destroyed, crew escapes; the exact mechanic is that it escapes through a capsule and it lands next to the lander after ~10 seconds and goes into the lander automatically.
• Power Up – Simple reduces towers upgrade costs.
• Bounty – Personally haven’t tested, but since there are realy lot small zombies, that baseline only give 1 building mat, the +2 effect on maps, where small zombies swarm, this perk can be realy good, but only if you swap it constantly back to other resource boosting perks, because there are only ~1000 zombies at most on 1-19 maps, so other perks are just better mathematically, the 20th map however is a different scenario, there, you can get serious ammount of resources from this perk, but if you realy want resources on that map, you can just use NO WORRIES, because until you don’t use up all the monoliths, you won’t descend to the next lvl and you can farm as much resource caches as you like… well, that’s still quite a boring thing, but technically better 🙂
• Rambo – You still start with normal crew, that needs to be leveled up, but every new crew you order will start as special crew, so it’s quite usefull.
• Unlocked – Unlocks all techs, but also blocks their reserch options, since they’re counted as finished, but after switching the perk, you can reserch them still. An important fact is, that the perk is only required to build the towers, to upgrade them, it’s not required, so it’s actually possible to build up your advanced tower defences with lvl 1 towers, spaw out the perk and later upgrade them.
• Challenge – All weaves are instantly summoned and you get the max bonus for calling them early.
• Duck & Cover – Meteors stike down on the map randomly (even completely outside of the combat zone. Haven’t waited them to strike on a tower maybe or sure-hit a mutant, but they probably deal a lot of damage… not a too usefull perk.
• Hell Yeah – You get a button at the top of the upgrade option for the gun turret, with that, you can man up the tower by yourself, no actual crew required. You won’t get any map messages, so it can easily cost you the game if other lanes are not properly defended, needs a strong computer or low resolution setup. The tower gets ‘infinite’ range and you can kill most zombies by one hit, with right click, you can even zoom in for better aim; personally not tested, since all lesser zombies are oneshotted anyways, but headshots might deal extra damage to stronger zombies if they don’t die from a single hit.

Other Tricks

• Perk swapping – Perks, that has a certain cooldown time are instantly activated, when they are equipped, also you should wait for their ‘last’ activation, before swapping them out.
• Cliffs – Towers can attack at every elevation within their range, althou there are only a few maps, where you can use this, this trick can be quite effective on that few maps with some long range towers.