Mechabellum – Intermediate / Advanced Tactics

Intermediate / Advanced Tactics

Сrеdit gоеs to jleeming !

1. Spacing is vital, horizontally and vertically. You don’t want your units so close together that a single missile card (or sentry missile) can destroy multiple units, especially valuable units. Close formations of low hp units are a no-no (horizontal or vertical is fine, just not too close and not squares). Later in the game you’ll have no choice but to stack up and accept a little vulnerability. However, don’t keep your units (especially slow moving units) too close together. It’s begging for orbital bombardment, napalm, missiles, stormcallers, explosive fists…

Yes, you want to concentrate your forces, so everyone is firing at the same time. But you don’t want them physically concentrated, like a clump of tanks and mustangs sitting still. Ideally you want units at close range fighting (for example crawlers and balls), units at medium range fighting (mustangs or arclights) and units at long range fighting.

Try to space your units so that everyone is attacking at the same time but in different places. Crawlers should be pushing through the tanks, acting as meatshields for marksmen/phoenixes/fortress fire.

2. Try to out-mind game your opponent (this may only apply at higher mmr, I have no idea what happens at 1000 or below). Say the missile card comes up early/midgame and he has a lvl 2 mustang with the +100% attack card, it’s doing huge damage vs your crawlers/wasps. Say there’s no obvious pickup like either supply specialist. He’s fairly likely to shield it, assuming you’ll go missile so your missile will be wasted. You might want to attack another mustang, or some other soft target that’s unlikely to be shielded. Don’t go straight for the highest value target automatically, especially lategame when there are lots of shields going up. Likewise, you may want to napalm somewhere forward of where it would be most optimal. Consider where he’d put shields and then put napalm ahead of that, at least enough to fry advancing crawlers.

An extension of this is anticipating countermeasures. You’re going heavily into tanks vs giant specialist? Expect fortress/overlord coming up, so throw in some ablative crawlers to counter the counter.

3. Air defence is vital, light and heavy. I consider light air defence to be stuff like fangs, wasps or mustangs (fortress AA too, when it hits), stuff suitable to counter wasps. Heavy air defence is marksmen, phoenixes and melting points, suitable to counter overlords. On round 1 if you don’t have any AA and you’re fighting an aerial specialist with 2 ground units… get aa. They can take free experience and hp from you if you don’t have AA.

You should have air defence on the flanks as well by mid-late rounds. This can help fend off a wasp card, or a sneaky phoenix flank. I like having a pair of mustangs on the flanks, they’re fast enough to get up to the front if the other guy doesn’t flank. Using missiles to guard flanks is also a decent tactic if you don’t have any spare resources. Note that sometimes you’ll lose a round and your missile will get wasted on crawlers or whatever’s blowing up your pylons, so it’s not a perfect tactic. Also, if the missile deters your opponent from striking behind you, you’ve just lost 50 you can’t get back.

4. A devious tactic is putting a crawler or fang at the front-centre. It’ll die but drag a lot of enemy units into the centre, into a stormcaller/napalm/oil/acid killzone. Infuriatingly, a sentry missile right on top of that crawler can often miss 1 or 2 survivors, if you have it on a move order. Said crawler in the centre will also eat a lot of artillery fire, it’s a poor man’s anti-missile.
5. Lategame, once you’re running out of ideas, it might be a good move to throw 2 crawlers or fangs at the extreme rear left and right flanks. They can distract whatever’s back there for precious seconds, disjointing the enemy army. Then you can defeat them in detail.
6. Card combos. The free upgrade card and the training card have great synergy, naturally. Put the free upgrade on a giant unit, train it and save 200! Once your enemy identifies you’ve got a fast-lvling giant, they’ll throw down a melting point or make some arrangement to beat it. Then you can sell the giant, getting your free upgrade card back + cost + the 200, 400, 600 you DIDN’T have to pay. Selling is situational and this tactic is based a little on luck of card draw (the same luck that alway. Still, it should raise the value of free upgrade and training.

Likewise, deployment specialist (underrated IMO) and non-giant specialist have a good synergy. You’re basically saving 150-200 per turn, throwing down 3-4 units at 50 off.

7. Subsidized Crawlers. It’s a cheap card, it’s got potential for huge value. Crawlers seem to still get xp even if they die without doing any damage sometimes, late-game. If you’ve got a couple of crawlers near lvling up early-game, seriously consider it and go more into crawlers. Only sometimes do they throw down a vulcan and even then, you can shield the crawlers with steel balls!
8. Don’t fall behind in a Giant race. If the other guy puts down two fortresses or overlords, he may well be fully committing to giants. Don’t make the error of half-countering it, thinking ‘oh I’ll add some more steel balls and chaff, work around it’ – past a certain tipping point (many fortresses with shields are hard to handle) you need melting points, en masse and at high levels. Once you see he’s fully committed, it may be too late to throw down the melting points with the necessary tech, numbers and level. One lost match can lose you the game even from 2000 + HP, if there are many giants on the field.
9. Hero units. Sometimes (rarely, lategame) the match will be dominated by a hero or a couple of heroes, a lvl 6 arclight with the range card and 3 upgrades… Don’t hesitate to obliterate them with orbital javelin or ion beam. I once won a game by ion beaming this insanely powerful super-leveled wasp with about 200 range from elite marksman and the range card. It was too strong, nothing else could handle it.
10. Finishers. If your opponent is 1500 hp or less after you’ve been trying a conventional, symmetrical strategy, it may be time to throw down three frontline rhinos with a tech and a move order into the enemy pylon. Put them near the centre if you want ambiguity about which pylon you’ll attack next round should the finisher fail, or near the flank for maximum striking power (the right or left side is usually easiest for a big push through). Or 2-3 overlords on a flank with weak aa. This is rather counterable but can win you the round decisively. Don’t think that you have to stay with a conventional strategy the whole game, you can end with an omega flank or something cheesy.

I kinda like launching a phoenix flank, then getting those phoenixes back with quantum reassembly. If you’re planning to go big on phoenixes, you can throw one or two away for a flank attack earlier on, try to win that round cheaply.

11. EMP. If they have several fortresses with fists, EMP them. EMP is great at solving a lot of problems, it deals with people who go big into one unit type and tech it up. If you’re being EMP’d, try drawing it away with crawlers (for Melting Point EMP or storm EMP), EMP the EMP units (if you can). The Photon Field/Coating also blocks EMP while active.