***NEW PLAYERS START HERE*** General tips and tricks for Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics players. (No, not Marvel Avengers Alliance – this is a whole new game expected Summer 2014 from the same developer.)
Tactical Roleplaying meets Base Building
M:AA Tactics combines base-building with tactical roleplaying gameplay (SRPG).
- Strengthen your home base by constructing and upgrading buildings, such as the Refinery and Vault.
- Level up your heroes to win harder fights and advance the storyline
- Attack other players in asynchronous PVP (not realtime PVP)
- Customize your heroes with a variety of attacks and stat upgrades
- Recruit famous Marvel heroes and villains to your squadron
Unlike in M:AA, you do not play as an Agent representing yourself. Instead, you are an unseen Commander giving orders to Marvel heroes such as Iron Man and Black Panther. Most fights are 4 vs. 4-6. If you’re fighting an enemy player you will face at most 4 other players. If you are fighting the AI you can face up to 6 enemies at once. There are no waves like MAA had.
6 Hero Classes
There are six “classes” in the game. Classes are introduced in Ch. 1, Assignment 1-4. All heroes, villains, and agents belong to one of these classes.
Clockwise from the red “Blaster” icon in the upper left, the M:AA Tactics classes are:
- Blaster – Strong against Bruiser, weak against Tacticians
- Bruiser – Strong against Scrappers, weak against Blasters
- Scrapper – Strong against Infiltrator, weak against Bruisers
- Infiltrator -Strong against Tactician, weak against Scrappers
- Tactician – Strong against Blasters, weak against Infiltrator
- Generalist – No strength or weakness to any class
Don’t worry about remembering all this, the game is good about displaying “RESISTANT” and “VULNERABLE” over each enemy target you consider attacking.
Base Buildings
There are 8 buildings to construct in your base. These buildings are:
- Command Center: upgrade to unlock upgrades for other buildings
- Barracks: upgrade to increase capacity for heroes and agents
- SHIELD Vault: upgrade to hold more Silver and ISO-8 currencies
- Flight Control: upgrade to run more simultaneous Flight Deck missions for passive silver
- Quinjet Hangar: upgrade to unlock more Quinjets (World Map vehicles)
- Refinery: upgrade to generate more passive Refined Iso-8 currency
- Training Center: upgrade to let heroes and agents train to higher levels
- Iso-8 Workshop: unlock new ISO-8 upgrades
Currencies
There are a lot of currencies in this game. Here’s what all they do:
Silver – Looks like a silver coin. Used for buying things. Silver is the most common currency. You get silver from finishing Assignments, completing Flight Deck missions, attacking other players, winning it in the roulette, etc. Early on, you will have lots of silver, but you will find that your need soon outstrips your ability to earn it unless you build a Flight Control and are diligent about running remote op missions.
SHIELD Points – Looks like a purple coin. Also used for buying and upgrading things, like base buildings and training heroes. SHIELD points are only a problem if you don’t have a lot of allies. Add allies, and you can collect a free SHIELD point every day from each ally.
Gold – Gold is the only currency form that can be bought directly using real money. Gold is used for buying things and speeding things up, and gold can be converted into other forms of currency. Do not waste gold on things that just take time to complete. Save gold for limited-time things and emergencies.
The game does a decent job of giving out free gold, such as through leveling up, and as long as you are patient and don’t spend it on speeding up every other thing, you should be able to collect gold at a steady rate. If you do feel the need to buy gold, wait for a gold sale (MAA has one every 3-4 weeks).
Command Points – Only used for buying playable characters. Costs vary by character.
Refined ISO-8 – Note: Refined ISO-8 is not Unstable ISO-8 like you might recall from the SpecOp missions in MAA. Refined ISO-8 is won by defeating enemy player buildings and it’s also manufactured in your home base by your ISO-8 Refinery.
Get more Gold
You can buy gold, or you can try to earn it in game. Here are methods to earn MAA Tactics Gold for free:
Leveling up your Commander level gives you 1 Gold
More ways to acquire gold will probably be added as the game grows. As of this writing, the game is only in beta.
Get more SHIELD points
Do not spend gold to get SHIELD points. Instead, add allies so you can collect 1 free SHIELD point from each of them every day. If you do this, the game gets a lot easier (and less expensive). You shouldn’t ever run out of SHIELD points if you’re good about adding allies and collecting them daily.
Experience (XP)
The best way to gain experience is to play Assignments and/or win PVP fights against other players. Winning fights awards XP for both your heroes and yourself as Commander. When a hero or agent is ready to train, start training him or swap him out for a different hero in need of XP.
Training (Leveling Up)
Training heroes and agents to the next level unlocks new abilities, such as a new attack, guard, or passive ability. These new abilities are useful in combat. To train a hero or agent, click the training center and then click the “TRAIN” button in the building’s pop up menu.
Leveling up a hero or agent:
- Increases stats
- Makes that Hero/Agent better in combat
- Unlocks a new armor ISO-8 slot.
Attaching ISO-8 chips to a character increases that character’s stats, so it’s important to fill those sockets up as you unlock them.
Heroes and Agents who are ready to train do not continue to get XP. Any XP they earn goes to waste, so train heroes to the next level as soon as you can. Try to always have a hero in the training center, especially at later levels when training starts to take an hour+.
Training Agents is worthwhile, too, since they’ll be on defense duty until you get more heroes. Leveling up Agents increases the amount of squares they can walk in a turn and unlocks a nice healing ability at level 2, so don’t neglect your Agents just because they start off worthless in comparison to heroes.
PVP Strategies
PVP is an important part of MAA Tactics, but it’s easy to overlook in favor of doing the story content. PVP has better rewards (Silver, Iso-8) per combat and is the only way to get enough silver to advance quickly once you’re past level 3 or so.
There are 2 kinds of PVP fights in Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics:
- Offensive PVP (you attacking another player)
- Defensive PVP (when you get attacked by another player)
In both cases, the PVP is asynchronous, meaning the human attacker fights AI-controlled opponents. A successful attack steals a portion of the defender’s Silver and Iso-8 resources, so it is important to be well-defended.
PVP tips:
- Before you log out, assign your best heroes to defending your Command Center and SHIELD Vault.
- Always leave at least at least 1 defender at each of your base’s buildings.If you don’t assign a guard, attackers will “instant win” when they click your building.
- When attacking, look for enemy bases that are almost 100% destroyed. If you defeat the last building in a base, you will get a prize roulette.
