Mechabellum – Intermediate Guide to Winning

This is a guide for people who’ve already played around to the point that they know how to play, know how the units and abilities work, but just can’t seem to win games. This is a game of counters.

Winners Tips

Your goal is to come up with a comp to counter the other player’s team, or create an army fast enough to where the enemy doesn’t have time to counter. The way you do this is to not over commit to something. Then, when you see a chance to go for the win, you go all out on an idea. The reason that you don’t want to over commit early is that you can get countered. If you get countered when you are overcommitting, it’s going to be hard to come back into the game because your opponent will probably be trying to counter your counters. Here are some tips that can help you with this tactic.

1. Don’t spend too much money on creating one unit type until you are ready to commit. Do not spend more than 500 to 800 credits (depending on the situation). If you build too many of one unit type early, the enemy will know how to counter those units well ahead of time. You will not be surprising them. But if you have a few different unit types on the field already, you have different options to commit to and they will have a harder time guessing.
2. Don’t buy upgrades unless they are essential to the board. Good example of this is armor and shield upgrades. Just 2 units with armor counters a ton of low attack units. It’s a small investment that doesn’t make you over commit to a strategy. Shields are another example for dealing with a lot of single target, high damage attacks. But even with those upgrades, do not use them unless the enemy is pressuring you to use them. Usually the threat of the upgrade is enough to make a good opponent rethink. If they rethink before you upgrade, then you just saved money on an upgrade. An example would be fangs vs marksmen. If you got fangs in front tanking marksmen shots of a few marksmen, you do not need to buy the shields. But if they still go even more marksmen with other units and you find your fangs are barely working or not working… by all means shield. But you’ve at least waited until you had a while making them feel comfortable to build more marksmen into your counter.

Upgrades are better with the more units you have. You want to have multiple options to have a unit type you want to start upgrading when you want to commit so that your enemy has to guess which unit you are going to commit to.

3. Don’t level early unless it’s an essential level up. Good example is armor. Armor gets better with level. Sometimes you need to level up a unit that is doing a lot of tanking. If you level up too early, that’s putting more money into a unit type that you might not want to stick with or that will get hard countered.
4. Use your health as a delay. There is no advantage of losing fights besides giving your enemy XP to level up. But as I said earlier, that can hurt them. Just take your time to figure out what you are going to do. If you lose the first few fights and the enemy thinks he’s winning and then levels up those units and upgrade them, you can spend less credits summoning counter units.
5. Be careful about advancing units to the absolute front in the early game. It commits that unit to the front. Example would be if you start the game with 5 crawlers at the front. Once you do that, there will always be 5 crawlers in the front for the rest of the game. The enemy can put a counter unit to kill them. But let’s say you put your crawlers slightly back and let them die a few rounds as your enemy builds mustangs to counter the crawlers. Now you can put a unit like steel balls with armor in front of the crawlers. The steel balls will soak all the damage and make your enemy have to come up with something new.

This is just a quick and dirty guide. I just started playing in the last 48 hours. My combat power is only 1000+ but climbing before writing this.