Purpose And Scope
This post captures some advice that I find myself giving repeatedly to new free-to-play players of Tacticus, especially the stuff that I don't see other people saying. Lots of very knowledgeable players giving advice are also older players that have forgotten what it's like to be a new player without Yarrick, so there's a niche for me to say useful stuff. I will also try to say some stuff these guides don't. Those guides say a lot of very useful stuff, so I don't have to say those things.
This advice will mostly assume you are fairly new, completely f2p, and have not been lucky getting characters from requisitions. On occasion, I will try to cover the possibility you have Yarrick.
Abbreviations
I will use these abbreviations:
- Char: character
- Aleph/Al: Aleph-Null
- Archi/Archie/Archy: Archimatos
- Bell: Bellator
- Hark: Haarken
- Mak/Mac: Makhotep
- Vin/Vinny/Vinnie: Vindicta
- Indom: Indomitus
- PMT: Poor Man Team (Aleph, Archi, Vin, Mak, Hark)
Some Good Early Goals
You probably enjoy making progress in the campaigns, but also, unlocking campaigns and progressing them is important for unlocking characters and powering them up.
Indomitus has some 3-char levels that require Varro, Bell, and Certus; invest in them when you can't win one of those levels. Yarrick and Vindicta are better investments for Indomitus's 5-char and hardest levels...and other game modes like arena. Invest in Incisus as little as possible. Indom level 74 is much harder than previous levels, and 75 even harder, especially if you want to get 3 medals. Once you hit 74, it's okay to focus on the other campaigns for a while, especially if you need to farm for shards. In fact, since the starting imperial units (not Yarrick) are not the best overall chars, I'd say Indom is one of the least important campaigns.
Unlock Mak, Al, and Imospekh as soon as possible. Starting the Indom mirror campaign is great for getting upgrades you need. Mak and Al are great chars for basically every game mode. Getting Mak to uncommon is important to unlock his very powerful movement-buff passive.
Unlock Angrax, Archi, and Hark as soon as possible. The Cadia campaign has a lot of needed upgrades, including upgrades your imperials need but can't get from Indom. Archi is one of the best chars in the game and is useful everywhere. Hark is good for arena and doesn't require much investment.
- Shop around for the best ranked guild that you can join. This helps with Angrax shards and orbs.
- Play plenty of arena. The rewards are good and help you unlock/promote Hark.
- Play plenty of onslaught. The badges are crucial and the Archi shards are great.
- Unlocking these chaos chars doesn't "compete" with your other goals.
Unlock Gibba (daily login), Snot (salvage), Snappa (daily mission) and Gulgortz (missions) so you can get the Octarius campaign. Again, unlocking these characters doesn't compete with your other goals. These characters aren't very useful outside their campaign but unlocking the Octarius Mirror campaign is very nice.
The mirror campaigns have nice drop rates on commonly needed upgrades so it is good to work on unlocking them. It will take a long time of farming shards.
Spending Resources
Don't use an upgrade or badge on a character just because you can. Get used to very uneven investment between chars and particular abilities. Also get comfortable with not using badges, upgrades, salvage, or orbs until you have a specific reason. Your character tab will quickly have a permanent "9+" icon even if you try to use stuff immediately.
For example, invest in Incisus as little as possible. Don't give him a single upgrade, item, or badge until you have a clear and immediate need (promoting him is fine because that only uses Incisus shards that can't be used by anyone else). Don't give anything to your orks until you start using them in their campaign or some game mode.
I don't want to scare you from using anything. It's okay to give something to Archi for the non-specific reason that Archi is a great char that makes good use of everything. It's okay to give something to Varro because he'll probably eventually need it for later Indom levels, but do try to prioritize, especially badges. You need to invest in Certus to progress in Indom, but using badges on his passive beyond level 8 is probably a mistake.
Every char benefits from upgrades, and upgrades mostly just cost you energy which you will get plenty more of. Upgrades help even a bad char not die so you can get 3 medals on a campaign level. Badges are much more limited and some abilities are soooooo much better to level up than others.
Badges
Here are lists of best uses for your badges in the early game in descending order (best first within each alliance). The lists are not complete and assume you don't have more than the bare minimum characters for the non-mirror campaigns. This ordering assumes trying to do well in campaigns and arena.
- Imperial
- Yarrick active
- Vin passive
- Vin active
- Bell active
- Varro active and passive
- the rest
- Xenos
- Aleph active
- Mak active
- Ork actives that summon and Gulgortz passive
- Chaos
- Archi active
- Archi passive (mostly for campaigns)
- Angrax passive (especially helpful for onslaught)
- Hark does not need badges.
Some abilities are much, much better than others. At some point, it might take 5 badges to level up Al's active and only 1 badge for Mak's passive; Al's active is still the better use of badges. Get comfortable with very lopsided allocation of resources across and within characters.
If you have Yarrick, he is great for everything and his active is really, really good. Vindicta is really good for imperial campaigns, onslaught, and arena because she does so much damage to multiple targets. Putting badges on her will let you kill 3+ enemy characters in one turn in arena. At some point, she'll have served her purpose and her low pierce ratio will not do well against high armor enemies. So, I wouldn't be eager to ascend her to epic, but rare is good.
Archi and Al have extremely good actives. Give those abilities absolute priority over other abilities in their alliances.
Farming, Shards Vs Upgrades
Should you spend energy getting shards or upgrades? The short answer is upgrades are a better use of energy but you also need to farm shards well before ascending the char.
Things change overtime. At first, promoting/ascending a character does not take many shards and the 10% boost to base stats from promotion is okay (you do get nearly +10% total stats if you don't have a lot of upgrades). Beyond uncommon, a lot more shards are needed to get promotions and ascensions, and the boost to base stats becomes less significant (one random example: 4% total stats). Roughly speaking, upgrades give you a lot more stats per energy, even when you have annoying multi-part multi-tier upgrades.
But, you can only power up a character so much before you need shards to ascend a character to the next rarity. Early in the game, you have a bunch of common characters, which only require 40 shards to ascend, and you might feel bottlenecked by orbs. Later, orbs will be less of a bottleneck, and characters will take 70, 130, and 250 shards to ascend. It takes a long time to get all these shards, so you need to farm shards well in advance of ascending. If your only source of shards is 10 battles/raids per day with a 1/3 chance each, then those shard quantities would take 21, 39, and 75 days to farm.
For chars where you naturally get their shards from playing the game, you should probably not farm their shards or honor them in onslaught. For example, with Hark, you'll get to the point where you do not want to waste legendary chaos orbs on Hark even though you have more than enough Hark shards to promote him within the legendary rarity. Typically, honorings are best used for chars that you have no other reliable way to get shards for: Yarrick, Death Guard, Tau, Aeldari, most Sororitas, etc).
Arena
Proper Expectations for Arena
Arena and the leagues are a bit weird...
- With a well chosen team and decent play, you can beat opponents with a much higher power score.
- You will see a bunch of opponents with a much higher power score and it will feel weird that you are in the same league as these guys.
- A lot of older players do not play much arena and older players outnumber new players. Thus, you will see a lot of high power teams that could be in much higher leagues if the player wanted to.
My advice is to win and get promoted until you actually hit a league where you are unable to get all of the win chests and also get demoted. Then, you can consider staying for a while in the league where you can get all the win chests and place ok for the end of season rewards. Also, consider the end of season rewards, especially badges, for each league; I don't need the legendary badges from captain league, so honor guard league seems good for me right now.
My own journey was...
- Got promoted each season until I hit captain league.
- Got demoted to honor guard league because captain league was hard.
- Looked at the end of season rewards and concluded that maybe the best thing was to oscillate between lieutenant league and honor guard league.
- While in honour guard league, I made sure to be ranked low enough to be demoted to lieutenant league, but that meant that I did not get all of the win chests.
- I reconsidered the oscillation strategy and decided it would be best to stay in honor guard league until I can start using the legendary badges from captain league.
- I got third in lieutenant league and got promoted to honor guard league. The competition for first and second is fierce. It is much easier to get end-of-season reward for 3-10.
- I am in honor guard league for a few seasons and has been pretty easy to get all the win chests and also to not get promoted. Often I'm ranked ~70 at the end of the day and ranked lower than 100 (the promotion cutoff) the next morning.
Assembling a Decent Team for Arena
Here's a poor man's arena team I've stuck with for quite some time and am going to call PMT (Poor Man Team):
- Archi
- Aleph
- Vin
- Mak
- Hark (least important)
If you have Yarrick, use him instead of Vin or Hark. Investing in these guys is good for many game modes.
If you are missing some of the above, use some of the below:
- Varro
- Bellator
- Certus
- Gulgortz
The badges for Archi and Aleph actives are super important. Badges for Vin's passive are important and don't neglect her good-but-not-as-important active. Stats (via upgrades) are important for Vin and Hark. Stats are nice for Archi and Aleph. Mak's passive is important to exist (please get uncommon) but no need to level it; Mak's stats are the least important stats on the team. Stats on Archi and Aleph are good, but much of the time are irrelevant because good use of their actives often wins the battle before they would attack the next turn.
If you are using Varro and/or Bellator, badges for actives and stats are good. Stats for Certus are good; I feel like Certus's active just doesn't scale well and there are much better use for badges.
It might seem weird to say Mak and Hark are great and then say their ability levels (and Mak's stats) don't matter much. The big advantage of these two characters is that you get a lot of value from them without using up badges/stuff, and you get to put those saved resources into Archi/Aleph/Vin. A team of 5 imperial characters that all need a lot of imperial badges, upgrades, and orbs will be always be starved for resources.
PMT is very resource efficient. With PMT and wise use of badges, you will be able to win against arena teams many times your power score.
Also, you shouldn't have to farm shards for Archi or Hark. Playing arena and onslaught will give you plenty of their shards.
PMT Strategy
Like arena in general, PMT wants to be just out of reach of the enemy team for a turn then kill the entire team the next turn (or if the map is too small for that, you probably want to pounce as much as possible during the first turn). If the battle goes beyond that, summons should help finish things on the next turn.
Usually and ideally, a battle goes like this:
Turn 0: Before battle starts, deploy with...
- Mak in center and adjacent to as many deployment tiles as possible.
- Vin and Aleph next to Mak.
- Archi close to Mak if possible.
- Hark gets whatever is left.
- Often you can't move at all, so make sure you deployed wisely.
- Hopefully you can have Mak at "front center" with all team mates adjacent to him.
- Putting Aleph more forward than Mak will limit Mak's ability to step onto the tile where Aleph just killed someone and reactivate both scarabs. Thus, it's fine to have Aleph behind Mak. With 4 movement and flying trait, Aleph will usually be able to attack a good target. If Mak can reactivate both scarabs, you might be able to get 2 kills from that, depending on his active level. Also, giving the scarabs a chance to spawn more scarabs is very powerful.
- I like to prioritize Vin to be at the side of Mak that is most front. Vin can use all the help she can get in positioning for the best attack.
- Hark, again, is the least important to position well.
- Clumping together, even if it doesn't help you make the most of Mak's passive, makes the enemy tend to clump together when they move. Clumped enemies are great for Vin and usually is worth any awkwardness in space for summoning.
- If Vin is on the left side of Mak, then you want to put Archi on the right side of mac in order to minimize the movement downsides of fire. Al and Hark have flying trait so they don't care about fire so much.
- Almost always, start with Vin;
- If you don't start with Vin, you'll really feel the downside of her AOE damage that hurts friendly characters.
- High ground is great and crits can pleasantly surprise you compared to the damage indicators before you attack.
- Imagine there are two clumps of enemies. It's great if you can move Vin to be able to attack either clump in case Vin kills a clump with her active (or kills the part of the clump that was in attack range).
- Aleph is almost always next because of positioning consequences that are trickier than Archi.
- Really try to choose a target to do Aleph's active on so that Mak will be able to use Mak's active on both scarab swarms.
- Simplest case: Aleph's active kills the enemy and Mak moves to the tile of the dead enemy.
- Sometimes due to un-occupiable tiles, you can get the swarms to spawn adjacent to each other and Mak can move to a tile that is adjacent to both swarms. This is especially useful if the scarabs may not kill Aleph's target at first.
- Plan ahead with what you are going to do with Archi.
- Depending on the details, you might do the following things in various orders:
- Move Archi.
- Use Archi's active.
- Move Mak.
- Use Mak's active.
- Due to space issues for summons sometimes you want to guarantee things by moving Mak then using Archi's active then using Mak's active. Or: move Archi, move Mak, use Mak active, use Archi active.
- Usually last, use Hark to finish an enemy, which makes a more capable of killing another enemy next turn.
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