Surprise!  I’m still alive.

And still playing Warhammer 40k: Tacticus, which is still going strong in its third year.  They are dropping new modes, new characters, and new events all the time.  I’ve previously covered how to collect stuff and how to unlock characters, so this time I’m going to write about every Warhammer player’s favorite topic: how to pick up your little mans and womans and tap them against someone else’s while going “pew, pew, pew.”  That’s right: we’re talking PVP.

How to Take Heads and Influence People

There are three PVP modes in Tacticus: Arena, Tournament Arena, and Guild Wars.  I’ll go through them one by one, laying out how they work, what rewards they offer, and tips and tricks that will keep you on the right side of the blade.

Arena

Arena is the oldest and most basic PvP format there is.  Five v five, final destination, no items.  Well, sort of.

How It Works

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Arena is asynchronous.  That means you are not actually matched against another player: you are matched against their team, which is run by AI.  Your Arena team is simply… the last team you took into Arena; you don’t have separate “offensive” and “defensive” teams.

This asynchronous aspect is simply an emergent property of mobile games, which by their nature lend themselves to short spurts of play at irregular hours.  It means you don’t have to wait for a match.  Once you load in, you are on one of a dozen or so maps, and you get to pick your five heroes.  There are no level caps here, no stat squish: pick your best!  You get the first turn, and turns proceed in typical fashion from there.  The winner is the person with the last unit standing (and summons count, so if you lose all of your heroes, your replicating scarab swarms can save the day).  Tournament Arena is also the only PVP mode that runs 24/7/365, and is always available.

Matchmaking is easy as heck: going to the Arena screen shows you three enemy teams, and you pick one to fight.  If you don’t like any of them, you can spend one Blackstone to see three new teams, as many times as you want.  You get one Arena token every ~145 minutes, up to a maximum of 15; each match, win or lose, costs one token.

The Rewards

Rewards in Arena come from two sources. First, there is a bar that fills up by one point every time you win a match.  As it fills, you get 17 crates of rewards, with the last one coming at 50 wins.  These crates contain items, upgrades, Blackstone, xp books, coins, raid tickets, and Snappawrecka shards, and the last one at 50 wins also contains a number of shards for a random character you own.  The Arena “season” lasts one week and then resets, so you have a week to fill the meter and get all 50 chests – typically easily done.

On top of that, you get one chest at the end of the season, its contents determined by your position on the leaderboard.  Arena is separated into leagues, from Aspirant to Chapter Master. Each league has a leaderboard, determined by rating points.  These come from winning and losing matches: if you win, you gain rating points; if you lose, you lose those points.  At the end of the week, depending on how many points you have, you earn a chest: the top person in each league earns a special chest, the second person earns a slightly less generous chest, numbers 3-10 get a slightly less generous chest than that, then numbers 11-50, and so on.  The end-of-season chest contains items, upgrades, coins, xp books, Snappawrecka shards, shards for a random character you own, and – importantly – badges and orbs.  You can get as many as ten legendary badges in this crate, which is a pretty impressive haul given how slow those things are to accumulate.

Then, at the end of the week, everything resets.  If you were above a certain rank within your league, you go up a league; if you were below a certain cutoff, you drop down a league; in the middle, you stay where you were.  And the wheel turns.

Strategies and Tips

The key to winning in Arena is the AI.  The AI is very, very bad and dumb.  Tacticus characters are generally way more potent offensively than they are defensively, and if you get a strong alpha strike into your opponent you are very likely to take out 2-4 characters and be in a position to mop up.

As a result, you shouldn’t feel intimidated by power differentials: as a rule of thumb, once you get some practice, you can usually beat a team whose power level is about twice yours.  Above that point, they might just overpower you even with the dumb-as-rocks AI.  And there are wildcards: an enemy Thaddeus that outlevels you significantly might get lucky with Basilisk Barrage and kill 2-3 of your characters.

Re’vas is a great Arena character, since the enemy is dumb enough to run into her Overwatch.  Kharn is another all-star, since it’s not hard to set up double or even triple kills with him.  Beyond that, pick characters that can alpha strike HARD, and make sure to use the “threat range indicator” button in the lower right of the screen to show you how far enemies can get you – standing just outside of their threat range usually means you can saunter right up to them on your Turn 2 and lay down the law.  Machines of War are allowed here, and can be helpful; the Biovore is great, since enemies will prioritize killing the mines, and you can distract someone by dropping mines for them to run around killing.  Forgefiend is also great at taking out summons, which can otherwise gunk up the relatively small maps.

As you succeed in Arena, you will rise through the leagues, and sooner or later you will rise to a league where you can barely beat anyone.  That’s normal, and an unfortunate by-product of how the system works.  Typically you will yo-yo back and forth between two leagues – one you are strong enough to promote out of, the other you are not strong enough to remain in – until your roster strengthens up.  That’s fine and normal.  There will always be some other people in the same boat as you, so be patient, lose some matches to tank your rank if necessary, and you’ll get your fifty weekly wins.

Tournament Arena

Tournament Arena – the king of modes.  Highly polarizing, it’s my favorite way to play Tacticus, and I won’t hear a word against it.  Tournament Arena is true live pvp, and while it only shows up twice a season for about three days at a time, it’s always the high point of my season.

How It Works

Let’s start with the similarities to Arena: you get tokens (starting with 6, capping at 12); you get one every two hours; matches are 5 v 5 on one of a number of preset maps; as you accumulate wins, you get chests, leading to a final chest and then a leaderboard-position-based chest at the end.

And that’s really where the similarities end.  The biggest difference is that Tournament Arena is live PVP – there is a person at the other end making the moves.  That one difference completely upends how the mode plays.  You get forty seconds to take your turn, but you have a “reserve pool” of 45 seconds in extra time.  That reserve pool does not replenish across a match, so while you can take a 1 minute turn if you want to, you’ll only have 25 reserve seconds left for future turns.  There are a couple of always-on modifiers, too: whoever is going second starts with a MASSIVE shield on all of their characters that dissipates at the top of their turn, to prevent top-of-turn-1 alpha strikes, and after a certain amount of time has passed a creeping barrage starts from both sides, encouraging players to mix it up in the middle rather than run away endlessly.  Killing one enemy scores a point, and when you score five points, you win.

Every Tournament Arena is played with a specific ruleset.  These are modifiers applied to the base rules:

• In Powerups mode, there are power-ups available: one that increases character armor, one that increases health, one that increases damage, one that adds +4 melee hits, and one that adds +2 hits to all attacks.  Picking one up also gives your character a shield with health equal to their base health for one round.
• In Infested mode, there are spawn nodes at each corner of the map, and after each player’s turn neutral Tyranids spawn.  These are AI controlled and hostile to all players, and they can interfere with your plans in all kinds of ways.
• In Conquest mode, there are three capture nodes in the center of the map, and stepping on one is worth a point until your opponent takes it from you – so you can have up to three points not from killing (which means, if you hold all three nodes, you can win by killing just two enemies).
• In Draft mode, you pick seven characters instead of 5.  A random selection of 3 of them start on the field.  On the first player’s first turn, they pick one of the remaining 4 characters, who deploys on a pre-set deployment hex.  On the second player’s first turn, they pick two of their remaining four, who deploy on deployment hexes; then on the first player’s second turn, they pick one of their remaining 3 to be the last character deployed.  Deployed characters can act at once.
• These modes can be combined (i.e. Infested Powerups).
• Every other Tournament Arena, in addition to its modifier, is also Faction War.  This means that instead of making a team of your five best meatheads, you pick a faction and run that faction.  Factions with four characters get an assist from someone else (for example, Morvenn Vahl in Adeptus Mechanicus and Godswyl in Blood Angels).  If you pick a faction for whom you do not have all of the characters, the remaining characters will be filled out by “loaners” – you will get to play with them, but no matter the rarity you picked they will be Iron 1 with 8/8 abilities, so you really should only play at Common rarity if you’re borrowing.

That’s a lot to take in already, but there’s one more critical point to note: Tournament Arena is played with level caps.  What that means is that you pick a rarity, Common through Epic (Legendary tournament arena has not debuted yet), and all of your characters will be “squished” down to that level.  If you are playing on Common, all of your characters will be Iron 1, with 8/8 abilities and 3/3 Common items equipped; on Uncommon, they will be Bronze 1, with 17/17 abilities and 5/5 Uncommon items equipped; and so on.  Characters below the cap won’t be leveled up, but anyone above the cap will be leveled down temporarily.  If you have an item of a higher rarity equipped, it’ll show up as a max-rank item of the appropriate rarity – so a Rank 1 rare knife will become a Rank 5 uncommon knife.

Tournament Arena runs twice in every battle pass season, for four days at a time.  Typically, this is Wednesday-Sunday in the first and third weeks of the season.

The Rewards

As with Arena, you unlock chests periodically by getting wins.  The difference is that Tournament Arena counts points.  Killing an enemy is worth a point, up to 5, and then if you win the match you get a number of bonus points based on the rarity you were playing at – so a win at Common rewards 7 total points, a win at Uncommon rewards 8 and so on.  In Faction Wars, if you were playing with a full team of owned characters (no loaners) you get an additional 2 points per match, and even if you only owned 3 or 4 characters you still get a bonus 1 point instead.

It takes five points to win a match, so you can earn up to four points even if you lose.  Every time you lose, points equal to 6 minus the number of points you earned are placed in a “redemption pool.”  That is, if you lost but earned 3 points, 3 more go in the pool.  You can play “redemption games” to earn points out of this pool – up to two per day by watching ads, and then more games in exchange for Blackstone.

So what do you do with all of these points?  Well, as in Arena, there are chests at intervals, leading to a final chest at 200 points.  The chests contain coins, blackstone, xp books, raid tickets, Calandis shards, and, best of all, energy.  This is one of the very few ways to gain energy above and beyond the daily refreshes, and so it is very valuable; you get a total of 315 energy for earning 200 points, which is a significant sum.  In addition, the chest you open at 200 points has a requisition scroll in it.  The leaderboard chest at the end contains Calandis shards, xp books, raid tickets, coins, and more energy.  Overall, the rewards are very generous and helpful, especially the second tournament arena of the season, which overlaps with a hero release event – that extra energy can help you complete the last two quests in the HRE chain, which each involve playing 250 campaign battles.

Strategies and Tips

Ah, I could write a whole article on this.  Probably I will, eventually.  TA is the deepest, most complex and strategic mode in all of Tacticus.  There are too many variants to really cover them all here, so I’ll make a few broad points.

• Alpha strikes are king.  As I said above, Tacticus characters are much better at dishing out damage than taking it.  Mataneo, Kharn, and other characters with a LONG threat range are strong here.
• Overwatch is a strong strategy here, since it makes it dicey to alpha strike you, but a human is much smarter than a computer and probably won’t walk into an Overwatch.  Mataneo is a super popular character who can ruin an Overwatch set up, too, so look out for that.  Overwatch is more useful for zoning than actually killing enemies.
• Unlike in regular Arena mode, summons don’t count – a match ends when a player has killed five heroes.  Focus on heroes rather than summons if you can.  By the same token, if Isabella or a Genestealer Cult character revives a dead hero, the enemy can score twice for killing them.
• In Infested mode, Tyranids will often “soak” Overwatch shots.  Overwatch is much less useful in this mode as a result.
• Powerups are strong, but they’re not worth dangling yourself into murder range for.  The best powerup is probably the +health one, which is especially nasty on Aleph Null (whose death explosion and passive self-healing are both calculated as a % of its health).  +hits powerups vary wildly in power; adding +2 hits to Ragnar is a less than 33% increase in his damage, while adding it to Mataneo is a 200% increase.

• In Conquest mode, beware of enemy attacks that can displace you off of a point.  It’s unheard of for Conquest matches to end with 5 kills, so mostly you are looking to kill 2-3 enemies and take the points to fill in the difference.  Tjark, Godswyl, and a few others can shove an enemy off of a point and take it themselves, for a big points swing.
• Characters that can move twice in a turn are very strong in Power-ups mode, since they can take a power-up and scamper to safety.  Calandis is probably the queen of this mode, but the Parasite of Mortrex, Darkstrider, and Mephiston can all snag a powerup and get back out of range without exposing themselves to retribution.
• TA is notoriously new-player-unfriendly.  If you are new, stay in Common mode and build up a small core of common TA all-stars: Calandis, Godswyl, and Re’vas are all easily available, and beyond them, Sarquael, Mataneo, Sho’syl, and Aleph-Null are all respectable characters.  You just need them at Iron 1 with 8/8 abilities to complete in Common mode, which is not too heavy a lift.
• In Faction Wars, Orks are a very strong team that even relatively new players should have access to – you unlock Snotflogga, Gibbascrapz and Snappawrecka just by playing the game, and Gulgortz and Tanksmasha are both available in the guild store, so there’s no reliance on requisitions to fill out your team.

Go out and compete!  Tournament Arena is great, and once you get used to the mode, it’s my favorite way to play bar none.

Guild Wars

Tacticus’s most recent PVP mode is a bit of a hybrid, blending the asynchronous PVP of Arena with guild-wide coordination.  It’s polarizing (not as much as Tournament Arena, but still), but it has a lot to recommend it, and there’s no other mode that really rewards good communication as much as this one does.

How It Works

Guild Wars starts halfway through the second week of every battle pass season and lasts for two weeks.  A “season” of Guild Wars consists of six wars, with a break of about a day in between each.

When the Guild Wars season is active, a map opens up on the Guild Wars tab with 15 locations. Each location has two zones.  You begin by signing up to defend a zone.  That gives you five “rows” to play with: that is, five lineups of five heroes each.  You staff the zone with your heroes, who then defend that zone.  Each location also has a “level,” either Trooper, Veteran, or Elite.  This affects the level cap for your defenders, as well as any attackers trying to clear your zone: for example, Trooper tier zones allow two Rare-capped lineups and three Bronze-capped ones, while Veterans allow two Epic-capped and three Rare-capped, and Elite zones have two uncapped zones and three Epic-capped ones.  A hero, attacking or defending, who exceeds the level cap will be “squished” down to fit it, just like in tournament arena.

Once the war starts, each player who signed up to defend a zone is enrolled in the attack.  You start off only seeing the front three locations in your opponent’s layout.  Attacking a locations requires you to select one of the ten available lineups (five in each zone) and picking a lineup of your own heroes to attack.  Once you’ve done that, the match plays out like a standard Arena match: five on five, with the opponent controlled by AI.  As in Tournament Arena, only hero kills matter, and when a player loses all five heroes the battle ends.

If you won, the lineup is clear.  If you lost, any damage you inflicted persists, so subsequent attacks against the same lineup (by you or an ally) will have an easier climb – plus, for each failed attack against a lineup, all of the characters remaining alive take a persistent and stacking -% debuff to their current and maximum health, letting you grind down tough defensive lineups through persistence. Once all ten lineups in a location are destroyed, that location is destroyed, revealing the ones behind it and to both sides of it.

Once you’ve used a lineup of heroes to attack, none of those heroes are available for any more attacks that war – they’re all one-use, live or die.  You have ten tickets, so you can use up to fifty characters to attack, and when the next war starts your tickets and heroes all refresh.

The locations have different types: frontlines, headquarters, a Warp Rift, anti-air batteries, etc.  Each location has a passive effect that either affects itself (Fortified Positions buff the damage and health of heroes garrisoning them), itself and neighboring zones (artillery and anti-air zones damage attacking heroes at the start of a battle), or all zones (medicae stations provide a stacking 25% hp buff to all defending heroes until destroyed).  At the start of a battle, the guild officers can move zones around to more tactically advantageous positions, and can set the overall battlefield level from 1 to 5, which affects which guilds you play against and also determines whether the zones will be Trooper, Veteran or Elite.

The war itself lasts for a bit more than a day.  Points are scored by clearing zones: you get points for each unit kill, bonus points for fully clearing a lineup (with more points awarded for doing it on the first try and losing few or no heroes), and a big shot of bonus points when the entire location is cleared.  The side with the most points at the end wins.

The Rewards

Fighting in Guild Wars rewards Guild Wars Credits.  You get 20 for every enemy hero you kill, and 50 just for spending a token, for a maximum possible 150 credits per token, or 1500 per war.  At the end of each war, you will get a chest whether you won or lost, which will contain badges, coins, xp books, and, if you won, war credits.  And of course there’s a guild leaderboard, and at the end of the season everyone in the guild will get a leaderboard chest with coins, war credits, and a requisition scroll.

War credits can be spent at the guild war store.  The store is pretty sparse right now: it always offers shards for Nauseous Rotbone, Njal Stormcaller, and Deathleaper, in batches of 20 shards for 3600 credits, or 3 shards for 540.  It also sells a random selection of legendary upgrades (Psychic Force Conduits, Master-Crafted Ammunition, etc.) for 760 credits per.  Unlocking Rotbone is great, but the other two characters are niche – however, leveling characters to Diamond 3 requires a lot of legendary upgrades, which are otherwise a huge pain to farm, so the war store is a welcome source of them.  Snowprint has said that they’re looking at making “mode stores” like the Guild War store a lot more rewarding and expanding their offerings, so it’s possible that by the time you read this the Guild War store will have a lot more on the shelves.  Watch this space!

Strategies and Tips

Strategy for Guild War games is very much like Arena: take advantage of the dumb AI.  That said, you can’t just faceroll into the teams here and expect to do well.  For one thing, level caps mean you are fighting fair; for another, the buffs defenders get are significant, and until you’ve unpicked them, you will face a bit of an uphill struggle.

Most strategy is on the planning level.  You need to coordinate with your guild members to clear a path to the most vulnerable locations while avoiding tougher ones.  Officers can designate a zone as a priority target, which has no in game effect but lets people know where they should be focusing.  There’s also a lot of strategy in how you set up your battlefield: do you put your high-value, heavily-defended zones in the back, and hope your opponent exhausts themselves too much reaching them to take them?  Or do you create an iron wall up front, denying the opponent points if they can’t crack through them, but leaving your soft underbelly vulnerable if they do punch through?

Often, some zones will be defended by heroes below the level cap (or not defended at all, because nobody signed up to defend them – in that case you will face five copies for Brother Firstname Lastname, the generic Black Templar intercessor).  Those are pretty easy wins.  Most guilds don’t have 30 players of fully equal rank, so it makes sense to save some weaker lineups for your lower level players to kill – that saves tickets for higher level players to focus on difficult enemy lineups.  It’ll often happen that you get down to the dregs of your lineup with a few tickets left; but even if your Stone and Iron misfits can’t hope to clear an enemy lineup, they can at least attack it, and as long as they inflict a single point of damage, apply the stacking -% health debuff.

Overall, efficient use of tickets is what wins wars.  The most important thing is to participate, to use your tickets and do something.  A guild with 25 characters signed up can, through clever play and high-level lineups, defeat a guild with 28 or 29 (or even 30, maybe).  But it’s much easier if everyone is contributing as much as they can.

Play With Togepi!

Hopefully this article has been illuminating about the various ways to tap your digital spacemans against other people’s.  I quite like PVP modes, and I’m glad Tacticus has such a variety of options.  If this article has been helpful to you, I’d be gratified if you could enter my referral code – CUE-13-REV.  You can only do this once, but it’ll give you and me both some free stuff in game, plus if you ever need me to help you move a couch, I’ll act like I can do it and then flake on you the day of, then call really apologetically and ask if you want to go out for a drink.  Best I can do, sorry.

My guild also has one more spot, so feel free to hit me up on discord (or in the comments if you’re not a Patron, though I’ll need some means of getting in touch with you).

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