The offensive phase for Alliance Wars in Marvel Strike Force lasts 24 hours. Below we take a look at tips to help your alliance handle the offensive side of Alliance Wars to maximize your rewards. In addition, look to Gaming-fans.com for help in all areas of Marvel Strike Force including Offensive Counters in Alliance Wars and more.
Phases of Alliance War
Well-run wars typically have 3 phases:
- Race for Global Boosts
- Find and eliminate Armory & Barracks and Medbay & Hangar
- Take out Big Value Rooms
- Reactor & Bridge
- Sweeping up Low Value Rooms
- Flight Decks & Cargo Bay
After the globals are taken out, it’s not necessary to finish the big rooms until you are ready to finish the war (either after 24 hours or when you’re ready to full clear).
Oftentimes wars are won or lost in the first phase: getting to the global boosts early and eliminating them. Eliminating these boosts early either speeds up your attacks or slows your opponent. So the earlier you can get to these boosts, the less cp you spend on clearing subsequent content and the more your opponent has to spend.
The most important room if you’re going for a win is the armory because it stunts your opponent’s offense. Conversely, if a win is out of hand, going for the barracks and medbay are the most important targets.
Energy Timing
Energy comes in the following timing. You start with 2 energy, get your first refill after 1:45 and every 3:45 after that:
The Hell Zone and Golden Zone
There are two key periods of time in a war known as the Golden Zone and the Hell Zone.
The most key phase of war is the time between when the last global defensive boost falls and the time when your armory falls. During this phase, your offense is boosted 20% against unboosted defensive teams. The more points that you’re able to get in this phase, the better your offense will be. We call this phase the Golden Zone. The goal is to maximize the number of attacks on the golden zone.
On the other end, if your armory falls before you clear their global boosts, then this is the Hell Zone. If you play too long in the death zone, you end up burning too much collection power and the final run for points will come up short.
Typically if you’re making significant progress in war, you’ll be in either the golden zone or hellzone for some period of time.The goal is to maximize your attacks during the golden zone and if you enter the hell zone, get out of it as quickly as possible spending as few resources as possible.
Generally, racing to put your opponent in the hell zone is the best strategy because putting your opponent in the hell zone can happen by simply taking out the Armory versus having to take out two rooms to enter the golden zone. So knowing where to go is important, which is where identification of the carrier layout is helpful.
Manifestly, you only ever experience the hell zone or the golden zone in a given war — you can’t experience both. So this means that the types of wars you can experience are:
- Both experience golden zone (both armories fall after the barracks and medbays fall)
- Both experience hell zone (both armories fall before the barracks and medbays fall)
- You experience the golden zone, they experience the hell zone
- You experience the hell zone, they experience the golden zone
The first two are battles of efficiencies — who can either take advantage of the golden zone most or get out of the hell zone fastest. The last two are where either you have a significant advantage or disadvantage and these are likely blow outs.
Notice these phases have nothing to do with points — it’s all about how quickly you find these rooms relative to your opponent and how long you can take an advantage.
How quickly can you enter these zones? It typically takes clearing 5 to 9 half-rooms to clear the armory and put someone in the hell zone. It typically takes clearing 7 to 11 half-rooms to enter the golden zone.
Without any energy purchases, you can clear 6 half-rooms immediately at the start of war, 9 half-rooms by the first energy refill (1:45 into war), and 12 half-rooms by second energy refill (5:30 into war).
War Offensive Strategies
There are two different ways to win: simply having the most points at the end or being the first to clear the opponent’s carrier. These have slightly different strategies in the phases of war.
At the higher brackets of Alliance War, it is more feasible to go for full clears, so all defensive strategies need to be adjusted accordingly.
Win Strategy: Points Win
Going for a points win is about getting the most points. The above phases work well. Generally, fighting through rooms that have one adjacent room bonus makes sense rather than spending time eliminating the adjacent room bonuses. This is because you may not have enough firepower to take out the higher value rooms if too many attacks are spent on Security or Engineering. If you don’t have the golden zone, then it can be difficult to clear an entire carrier, particularly if your alliance has top-heavy rosters.
Win Strategy: Clearing First
This is a race to clear the opponent’s carrier, technically, this can be done after the second energy refresh, 5:30 after the war starts. Of course rarely do alliances have all 24 players buying 4 additional energy and not losing a single battle. But it should be remembered that when fighting against offense-heavy or extremely overpowered opponents, their progress can happen quickly.
The biggest difference with going for a full clear over a points win is that you are planning to take out the entire carrier, so you should eliminate all roadblocks as early as possible. This starts with the global boosts but extends to blowing the adjacent room bonuses immediately afterwards.
Defeat Strategy: Maximizing Points
Sometimes it isn’t possible to win. Therefore the best thing to do is to maximize points. A defeat is often guaranteed if you’ve entered the death zone and your opponent has entered the golden zone. If this happens, the most important thing is to exit the death zone as quickly as possible. You must drop attacking the Hangar or Armory and immediately find the Medbay and Barracks and take them out. From there, you should make a plan for the Bridge and Reactor. That may involve taking out Security and/or Engineering to conserve your offensive CP. The Hangar and Armory are worth no more points than the Flight Decks and do not help you attack. The Armory is almost always strongly defended, so wasting CP on it will lower your ultimate points total for a pyrrhic victory.
Deciding on War Strategy
The key thing in deciding between the two War Strategies is based upon your own alliance.
Decision Point: Alliance
Does your alliance have 192 winning battles? This is based on:
- Depth of rosters: If you don’t have a deep roster, it is impossible to win. You can use up to 100 toons — 60 on offense and 40 on defense — while it’s not necessary to use an entire roster to win a war, you need some fraction available in leveled toons.
- How much CP is devoted to defense: How much CP is devoted to defense, particularly in the form of meta teams.
- How many battles your alliance typically does: This is pretty straight forward, but the more battles your alliance does the more likely it is to win. If you have players on full defense who don’t do any winning attacks, it makes it more difficult to get 192 winning battles.
- What fraction of battles your alliance wins: How well your alliance creates matchups and plays in battle can make a huge difference.
- How well the alliance allocates offensive CP: If your alliance spends too much power on weak teams, it may not have the power to take difficult teams.
Decision Point: Matchup
Is this a war that can be won with a full clear? This is based upon:
- Alliance Relative CP: If your alliance has a huge CP advantage or deficit this can immediately determine which strategy to play for. This includes if you or your opponent is short-handed.
- Opponent Defense: Has the opponent allocated a lot of CP to defense and is done intelligently.
- Mistakes in Offensive Strategy: Did your alliance take any missteps in the offensive attack that caused your alliance to use unnecessary CP. For instance, not getting to global boosts early and fighting through multiple triple boosted rooms with the globals in place can drain CP.
Date: 2020-06-23
Written by: Avenue Assassin