This is the third post of a 4-part series where I discuss strategies for getting the most out of playing without paying in Transformers: Earth Wars:
Battles are the fun part of the game, and the core experience. so it’s important to play well if you want to enjoy the game and still don’t want to spend any money.
Battle Tactics
Use the following strategies to maximise your chances of winning battles, and therefore the rewards that you reap from them.
- Reduce the damage your team takes – when you first arrive at a base, don’t just launch all your bots in one spot. Take the time to assess the layout, and plan how to take out the defenses that will cause your team the most damage as they make their way through the base. Usually this means using air abilities on mortars, beam lasers and missile launchers right at the start, as soon as they’re within range of your specials. My personal preference after that is to take out nearby laser turrets, since these tend to do greater damage than auto cannons.
- Get right up close to Mortars and Missile Launchers – these structures cannot attack at close range, making them completely defenseless against a Warrior bot’s rush attack that brings them right up close.
- Trigger outposts to waste their special ability – use an attack that allows you to set off the defender bots without suffering their ability attack, e.g. Jumpstream/Headstrong’s Defensive Rush, Arcee/Nightbird’s Holo Decoy, the Shark Attack boost or
Gnaw’s Chomp Chomp Chomp(turns out these Sharkticons are different and do not trigger outposts!) These will cause the enemy to spring out and unload their specials, with minimal damage to your team’s health. - Use the “launch bounce” – when deploying bots right at the front edge of the launch zone, you’ll notice that the radius of your bot’s abilities will start slightly further into the battle zone, before pulling back a little. In some cases, you can use this to your advantage to hit a distant target as soon as you deploy.
- Soloing – an advanced technique for players looking to level up their bots more quickly, this involves taking an full squad into battle, but deploying the minimum number of bots required to win. When it comes to distributing XP at the end of the battle, the number that you saw at the beginning of the battle will be multiplied by the number of bots in the team, but the points will only be allocated to the ones that were deployed.
Zones
For the lower level zones, you can usually come in a little bit under the recommended team power and still manage to win. I recommend doing this for the extra resources and XP you gain from doing so. However, once you start getting to about Zone 7 or thereabouts (team power 2000), the sheer amount of variability in base designs and upgrade levels of different base components means that you’re likely to get a base that you won’t be able to beat because the matching algorithm sucks.
Alliance Wars
Because this is the only time you’ll get to see your opponent’s base before attacking, you have the ability to tailor your team specifically to that base – don’t waste that opportunity! The other notable thing is that it costs you no fuel, so you can usually throw in a few attacks after you’re done with your resources runs if you have bots available.
Events
Events are fantastic because they offer double XP. It’s always worth pushing yourself because this is the fastest way to level up your bots, and therefore progress faster through the game.
I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I feel that during events the matching algorithm gets a little bit tougher, probably so that you lose more and spend more money on cyber coins to get around a lack of fuel and cool off periods. Therefore, when choosing event zones, go one zone down from your normal pick, because losing battles means you get nothing except a few XP. It’s not worth the risk.
Leaderboard and Totalizer events
Use your strongest teams so that you earn the maximum number of points per battle to contribute towards the alliance total. This gives the best return for the fuel spent, whereas using weaker teams means fewer points. But of course if you’re waiting for cooldown, then naturally you’ll need to burn fuel using other teams so that you don’t waste any from letting it hit the maximum (50).
Individual events
When you have a solo event where each battle lets you score up to 10 points, you can send fewer bots into battle at a lower tier, to maximise your number of battles, and not have to wait around for cooldowns. However, you’ll still be constrained by fuel, so do 10 battles, and then wait the requisite 250 minutes (4h 10m) for your fuel cells to be replenished. This is also a good time to practice the soloing XP strategy described above.