The Hive

Why are people so tied to "hives"?  These large clusters of bases are supposed to provide mutual support during an attack, but in my experience, it doesn't work.  It is civil war tactics in a game where you are armed with machine guns.

Pros

• Short distances for trade
• Short response times for counter attacking invaders
• Short gathering times for war rallies
• Group attacking local rebel targets is easy
• Close clustering provides a time buffer from attack by enemies, as they have no place to land

Cons

• Hives are targets for players attacking to gather resources, which means you have to go further to gather
• Hive members compete for local resources amongst themselves
• Attackers have short distances, which increases the number of bases they can hit in a limited period
• Hives are easy to track down

So it is true that you lose some versatility when trading, but the principal component of the game is collecting resources, not giving them away.  With that in mind, the economics sways to the con.

Collective defense in this game is a joke.  We are all individual defenders, and rely on traps and hospitals to counterbalance the attackers advantage.  Hives provide a mechanism for rapid counterstrike, but a well disciplined attacker can avoid counter punches with good timing and a stock of fallbacks and deploy speedups to vary arrival time deploy.  If you are constantly deployed, you are very hard to hit  (if there is nothing in your base to lose).

Even with very large hives, I've seen a pair of attackers be almost unstoppable, with one planted in the hive with shields up, one constantly rallied.  When they attack, they ravage the farms (up to their warehouse limits), rally their troops for protection, and ship the gathered resources to the shielded partner as a bank.  Its almost unstoppable.

With small hives, you have a perpetual target on your back.  Large players randomly teleport around the board, or site to site hop into the middle of small hives to collect resources.  Unless you have several level 21s who can provide round the clock coverage, these kind of attackers are hard to dissuade.

Hives put too many men in the same foxhole.  Five men are a juicy opportunity, one or two is a waste of bullets.  In my opinion, a more correct strategy is spreading your bases around a region, approximately one base per screenshot.  How does this help?  You trade a little bit on group war rallying and trading speed, but you don't provide a way for attackers to quick strike multiple bases.  Being spread out tends to give you better access to local gathering resources.  Spread out hives make it very hard to locate an alliance, and that kind of secrecy is a big win.  All together, I believe this is the appropriate strategy for the future of Mobile Strike.

Gaming Extreme challenges with a new account

One thing to note about Mobile Strike is if you ever want to reach the top, you probably will have to spend some money.  Upgrading your "War Room", "Embassy", "Prison", and "Death Row" require specialty items that rarely appear.  But there may be some hope.  In the early game, extreme challenges will make items like "Golden Bullet", and "Tactics Manuals" more readily available.  The problem is you can rapidly outgrow this stage, where the challenges are still manageable.  Good players preach patience, so you can take advantage of this period as much as possible.

There is a way to extend the length of this period, if you have a lot of free time.  Many extreme challenges require to increase your "power" in order to receive higher tier prizes.  However, losing power doesn't actually hurt you.  For instance, if you are attacked, and lose some troops, your total for the competition doesn't actually go down.  The same applies for buildings; if you demolish a building, you are not penalized.  How is this important?

You can game this by maxing out your "free speed up" by improving your VIP, and increasing your construction speed.  Then, during such an extreme challenge, build a building only large enough that you can still auto complete it without using any additional speedups.  Once you reach that max size, demolish it, and repeat.  While tedious, you can effectively trade gathered resources for tier 1-3 prizes, which includes gold, XP, more VIP points, and those illusive specialty items that you will need to be a power player down the road.

I verified this only as a proof of concept... I myself don't have the patience to wait.  Let me know if you've had similar experiences in gaming the extreme challenges.

Tactics: the bear trap

Once state vs state kill events start, you have to be on your toes.  Players warp in, quickly probe for weakness, and lash out.  Since typically kills are the metric being tracked, small players can load up on traps and hospitals to get their fare share of points.  Large players have a harder time attracting medium sized attackers, because attacking can't be backed by hospitals, while defending can.  However, large players can set an ambush.  Here's how.

First, create a small force of tier 1 or tier 2 troops.  These are to be the bait at your base.  Second, create a large force of tier 3 troops, which will be used to ambush an attacker.  Ideally, you have enough hospital bids to support both forces. Third, send your main force on an 8 hour war rally.  This is the critical part, since these troops do not appear in your defense when scouted, so you can disguise your strength.  If you cancel your war rally, they immediately become available for defense.  Third, re-speck your commander to max out defensive capabilities, and equip him with whatever gear you have that will give him the biggest defensive bonus.

Now we wait for the kill event to start.  When you spot an enemy in your region, you should start by scouting them.  This is important, because it will tell you if your enemy is too strong to ambush, and often a mechanism to earn a counter scout.  If they have determined that you are an appropriate target, they may start a march towards your base.  Now, if your scout revealed that they are too big to ambush and the march is sufficiently far away, you should send a second scout to see how many troops they left behind.  If you determine that your large hidden force is sufficient to defeat him, wait until just before his march reaches your base, and cancel the war rally.  With the trap sprung, you can often defeat your enemy while taking significantly fewer casualties, especially if they have sent a smaller force based on an initial scout.  Suddenly, your opponent is surprised to find he has lost his force, and you are on the scoreboard.

The Skill Tree vs The Tech Tree

Figure 1: Each level of this technology add an ever increasing bonus as you level up

The "Commander Skill Tree" and the "Tech Tree" are two ways to upgrade your abilities in Mobile Strike.  The skill tree is updated by points earned when you level up your commander, while the tech tree takes resource and time requirements.  Both skills and technologies often have levels associated with them, where higher levels provide you with a higher rate of bonus improvement.  For instance, in Figure 1, after the first level you carry a bonus of 1%, the second level, your net bonus is 2.25%, the third level is 3.75%, and so on.

At some point, you find yourself confronted with a decision, "do I unlock a different part of the tree, or do I increase my skill/tech level of something I've already unlocked?".  Surprisingly, there are different answers for the skill and tech tree.  

Figure 2: Tech Tree

For the tech tree, you pay a penalty in research time when you level up an existing technology.  For instance, the first level may have taken an hour to research, the second level 4 hours, and the third level 12 hours.  When you could unlock the next branch of the tech tree for a smaller time commitment, it usually pays off better in the long run.  Why?  Well the technology that you achieve faster contributes its benefits more immediately.  Consider if you had two choices... leveling up tech A at 12 hours, or unlocking tech B at 2 hours.  Whats the difference between ordering these as A->B vs B->A?  After 14 hours, you will have unlocked both.  Had you gone A->B, you receive 2 hours of A benefits, and 0 hours of B.  If you had gone B->A, you get 12 hours of A, and 0 hours of B.  Since the time commitment tends to dwarf the technology benefit, this implies that as a rule of thumb, its more efficient to go for breadth in the tech tree, rather than level depth. 

Figure 3: Commander Skill Tree

The skill tree is a different story.  Here, you gain points which you can spend on your skill tree whenever you level up your commander with enough XP.  Once you earn a point, you can immediately apply it to any branch of the tree to which you have access.  Here, since your time commitments are 0, you are best served to go for depth.  For example, if you had a choice between opening up the "Commander Attack" skill with a 1% bonus, or adding a 3% "Energy Cost Reduction" bonus by leveling up, I'd take the deeper level.  As you can see in my skill tree, that means I max out each skill before moving on to the next.

This is just a rule of thumb.  If you are aiming to reach a particular skill further down the tree, you might want to skip levels to reach your target skill as quickly as possible.  Or perhaps, you want to maximize a certain technology before unlocking new skills.  The true "future given present" calculation can be much more complex than I've suggested.  However, I am convinced that you will achieve your technologies and skills more efficiently by going for breadth in the tech tree, and depth in the skill tree.

The VIP Shuffle

 Missions are the best way to gain materials, resources, loyalty, and commander experience, all of which are critical to upgrading your commander's skill set.  There are four types of missions available: Base Missions, Daily Missions, Alliance Missions, and VIP Missions.  Base missions are awarded for achieving milestones in the game (like new structure levels, troop counts, etc), and are not the type of mission I'm going to focus on in this post.  The others are made available every six hours.

An active VIP will give you additional benefits when it comes to your missions... most importantly are bonus missions and autocomplete functionality, so that you don't have to wait for timers to complete before starting your next mission.

A player will earn VIP days almost automatically via the challenges, as long as they are active.  These typically come in 30 minute, 60 minute, and 1 day varieties, with options to purchase 7 day and 30 day varieties.  When you activate a VIP day, immediately, a number of missions in each category become available.  When they expire, you lose whatever missions you haven't completed yet.

This leads to a tactic I'd like to call "The VIP Shuffle".  When you complete all missions, allow your current VIP session to expire.  If you add additional days to your current VIP session, you don't receive any additional missions... but once they expire, you'll typically get somewhere around 10 new missions when you renew VIP status.  This actually makes the shorter VIP periods more valuable, since your goal should be to complete as many missions in as short a period of time as possible.

Consider a 24 hour period, where on the one hand, you use the "1 Day VIP", and on the other hand, you activate ~47 "30 Minute VIP".  At my current VIP level (9), that means in the first case, I'd receive 23 missions 4 times in that day, for a total of 92 missions.  In the second case, I'd receive those same 23 missions 4 times a day, plus an additional 13 missions 47 times, for a total of 703 missions.  Effectively, that means your commander levels up at 7 times the speed.

This can further be refined, by realizing you can start a "1 VIP hour" 30 minutes before one of your 4 daily mission bumps, to first generate your 13 basic missions (which you complete in 30 minutes), and then get your 23 regular missions on schedule, and complete them in the next 30 minutes.  If you do receive an advanced, elite, or legendary mission during this time frame, you can always extend to a full day so you can reap these rare rewards.

In my opinion, this has been the most effective tactic to grow my power rapidly since I started the game.

Glossary

Glossary

This will be updated with the language of the game over time

Control Point: In the center of each state's map is a control point.  Whichever alliance controls the structure in the middle receives bonus rewards and taxes from other alliances while its being held.

Farm: An unprotected proxy account set up to harvest resources.  You then attack that account with your primary account to collect the resources.

First March: When two players approach a resource at the same time, "First March" refers to the player who first initiated movement to the tile.  It is considered courteous to allow the "first march" access to the tile.

Forest Farming: High level tiles appear in the forests surrounding control points.  Resource gathering of these tiles is called forest farming.  Players should be weary of gathering these resources, as typically the controlling alliance guards them jealously.

Ghost Rally: When you rally your troops for war, they are not available to be attacked by opponents.  If you do this, and later cancel the rally, its known as a "Ghost Rally".  It can be an effective way to protect your troops while you are away from the game.

Hive: Alliances often form as a cluster of players on the map for mutual support.  These are called Hives.

Jumper: Jumper accounts take advantage of level 5 and lower ability to move between states.  A Jumper will max out buildings, research, traps, and troops, and then teleport into a brand new state where they have an advantage over new accounts spawning.  A Jumper alliance is a group of Jumpers that all do this together, so they can get the early edge as top alliance in a new state.

NAP: "No Attack Pact" or "No Aggression Pact".  Its basically a cease fire.

KE: There will always be challenges running at any given time, for which you earn bonus rewards for completing tasks.  One such event is the "Kill Event", or "KE", where you earn points for damaging or killing opponent troops, traps, and power.

Port: players can buy or earn teleport abilities to move their base around the map.  There are two types of teleportation: random, and site to site.

SOS: Shoot on sight.  It is a mandate of an alliance to attack another player, or another alliance, without having to seek further authority.

Tile Hitting:  Attacking a player's troops when they are gathering resources.  Away from base, these troops will die rather than be hospitalized.  This is generally frowned upon outside of Kill Events.

First Post

"Mobile Strike" is a freemium cell phone game thats been around a few months, modeled after "Game of War".  The idea is simple: build your base and fortress to withstand attacks from your enemies, make alliances, gather resources, and some day rule the world.  You may have noticed Arnold Schwarzenegger pitching commercials for this game in the last few months.  The graphics are awful, I've had family state they felt they came away less intelligent just looking at it... but it is powerfully addictive, in the same way "Cookie Clicker" or "Drip Stat" were a few years ago.  Those freemium guys have really found a powerful niche!

As simple as the game is, there is room to develop tactics and strategy within the confines of the rules.  As I went through my first couple months, I stumbled my way to discovering there are right and wrong ways to go about playing this game.  The funny thing is, online there isn't very much information about strategies and tactics, or the lingo of the game.  I've decided to start this blog in an effort to track my thoughts on this game, so new players have a point of view to compare against in their own games.