The response to my last Warhammer Tacticus column was surprising and gratifying.  I figured I’d just share my thoughts about a mobile game that has made me smile over the last few months, but it turns out that there is more of an audience for this sort of thing than I expected.  Lots of Warhammer dads with a need for mobile entertainment, I guess. 

As I said last time, the sheer complexity of Tacticus is probably the biggest barrier to entry – so if you’re relatively new (perhaps if you started playing as a result of my last column!) and you’re finding your head spinning with all these orbs and shards and bafmodads, read on to get yourself sorted out.

I’m going to list each currency in Tacticus, where you get it, what it’s used for, and when it bottlenecks you.  That last one deserves some explanation – at different stages of the game, you’ll find yourself specifically needing one currency or another, and as you pupate from a wriggling Tactigrub to a beautiful Tactifly, which currency you have the most need for will switch.

So let’s rustle around in our space-wallet and see what we’ve got in there:

Coins

• Where you get it: Just about everywhere.  Beating missions, beating Salvage Run, opening crates from whatever source, reclaiming items; you can buy it in the store for blackstone or from the guild shop for Guild Credits.
• What it’s used for: Mainly upgrading skills and forging equipped items, but you can also buy items and upgrades in the storefront for coins.  Technically it costs coins to apply an experience book or an upgrade to a character, but it’s such a tiny, nominal sum that’ll never be a problem.
• When it becomes a bottleneck: Later in the game, upgrading skills becomes extremely expensive, tens or even hundreds of thousands of coins per rank at the very top.  Early on, you’ll have more coins than you know what to do with, but later on you’ll find yourself frequently tapped out and having to rebuild your accounts when you unlock a new character and power-level their skills.

Experience Points

• Where you get it from: Experience tomes, and a small amount from winning battles.  You get experience tomes from a variety of sources: winning missions, Arena and Tournament Arena crates (and some other crates as well, at a lower probability), the guild shop, sometimes the main storefront (for blackstone), and the Rogue Trader (see below). 
• What it’s used for: Leveling up characters, duh.  Oddly enough, characters don’t get stronger from being higher level, but higher character levels unlock higher tier skills and upgrades.  You can’t upgrade a character’s skills higher than their level, and certain upgrades have level thresholds as well; for example, you can’t advance to Gold II rank until you’re level 38, and hitting Diamond 1 requires you to be level 44.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Late in the game, this is the bottleneck.  The exp curve is astonishingly steep; the first few levels zip by, but once you hit level 30 or so, it’ll take multiple Codexes of War (worth 12,500 exp each) to advance each level.  Going from level 37 to 38 requires 73,000 experience; going from 44 to 45 requires 178,000.  You will learn to value Codexes of War more than life itself.

Energy

• Where you get it from: The inexorable passage of time, which grinds all things to dust.  Also you can get some more by watching an ad (1x/day), and then spending blackstone at an increasingly unfavorable exchange rate (50/110/250/etc.) which resets each day.  Occasionally there are other sources: one day a week you get some as a daily login reward, you can sometimes buy a small amount from the storefront for Raid Tickets, and the Tournament Arena crates reward some.  It’s also a reward on the battle pass track.
• What it’s used for: Playing missions, duh.  And that’s it.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Always, or alternatively, never.  It’s basically a constant.  You need energy to play missions.  You never really need it more or less; it’s all about how much you want to play.

Blackstone

• Where you get it from: A variety of crates; scoring achievements; referring friends to the game; the battle pass track; and of course cold hard cash if you want.  There’s a daily blackstone shipment that’s pretty good value if you’re looking to spend a little bit of money but not too much.  Also the official Snowprint Discord frequently runs contests that award some blackstone as a participation prize. 
• What it’s used for: Buying energy, and then buying a variety of other things.  If you save 100% of your blackstone for energy you are being very smart, as buying the 50 blackstone energy package each day is the most value you can get.  You can buy items in the storefront for blackstone, but the value is really not very good.  You can also buy requisition scrolls, and this is the only reliable way to get more requisitions (you can always spend 3000 blackstone on a ten-pull) but this is really not good value.  But hey, whatever makes you happy.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never, really.  As a rule of thumb, if you play consistently you will passively earn a little more than 50 blackstone per day on average, so you can buy the 50 blackstone energy pack every day.  Buying the 110 will deplete your supply over time unless you have an alternative source (i.e. you bought some).

Upgrades

• Where you get it from: Completing missions; buying for blackstone (and sometimes coins) in the storefront; opening crates from a variety of sources (daily, events, arena, etc.); the Rogue Trader.   The Guild storefront and Guild War storefront both sell legendary upgrades for their respective currencies.  Of note, Mirror Campaign missions have better drop rates than normal campaign missions, and Elite Campaign missions have the best drop rates of all, especially for rare items; it costs 60 energy to get 3 copies of a rare item when you are farming from a mirror campaign, but only 30 energy if you have an appropriate Elite Campaign node unlocked.  Quests (a special event that shows up twice per battle pass season) are a particularly reliable source of upgrades, especially higher-rarity ones.  The battle pass itself also rewards a few upgrades.
• What it’s used for: Upgrading characters!  Collecting upgrades and using them to power up characters is the central gameplay loop of the game.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never, or always, really.  Later on, upgrading a character by one level requires a truly staggering amount of upgrades, but it’s basically always something you’re farming.  When you first unlock a new campaign and blitz through it you’ll find yourself temporarily flush with upgrades, but you’ll spend them soon enough.

Badges

• Where you get it from: Earning campaign medals and opening campaign chests; Onslaught; Quest events; the battle pass; the guild credit storefront; sometimes the main storefront; the end-of-week Arena crate.  You can also forge 10 lower-rank badges into 1 higher-rank.  When you Honor your Warriors after Onslaught, you have a chance of awarding a badge of the character’s rarity, except when the character is one tier below promotion (i.e. is Rare with one red star), when you might get an orb instead.  Legendary rarity characters can give you a badge and/or an orb when they are Honored.
• What it’s used for: Upgrading skills.  Between levels 1-8 you use Common badges, between levels 9-17 you use Uncommon, between levels 18-26 you use Rare, between levels 27-35 you use Epic, and from 36-50 you use Legendary.  Plus if you don’t have enough of them, traded Pokemon won’t obey you.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Each badge bottlenecks you at different stages.  Early on you won’t have much access to anything above Uncommon.  Later on, you’ll be swimming in Common and Uncommon, but will need to scrounge for Rare and Epic.  And still later, your hunt for Legendary Badges will be all-consuming; you need so many of them to max out a skill.  Typically, Chaos badges are the easiest to come by, because you get them from doing Imperial onslaughts, and there are so many Imperial characters that you’ll be doing that Onslaught a lot.  There aren’t as many Chaos characters, so you won’t use them all right away.  But since you choose which Onslaught to do, you have some control over which badges you’ll get.  Above level 30, Onslaughts become genuinely challenging to complete, so your badge production will slow down if your team hasn’t kept pace.

Orbs

• Where you get it from: Onslaught’s “Honor Your Warriors” option; Requisition drops; defeating guild raid bosses; the battle pass; sometimes the guild storefront.  You can forge 10 lower rarity orbs into 1 higher rarity one with a forge badge.
• What it’s used for: Ascending characters.  That is, turning a common character into an uncommon one takes 10 uncommon orbs of the appropriate allegiance, turning an uncommon character into a rare one takes 10 rare orbs, etc.  Once you hit legendary, every new rank takes orbs.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Early in the game you’ll really find yourself wanting more rare orbs.  As you progress, you’ll be flush with uncommon orbs, then rare ones, and so on.  Eventually, legendary orbs are a huge bottleneck, since they drop very slowly and it takes 10-20 of them per promotion in the legendary tiers.

Shards

• Where you get it from: Campaign missions – each campaign segment’s boss level drops shards of that character when you beat them, and you get a few more shards the first time you beat the levels on the way to that boss.  Also Honoring your Warrior gets you shards of that character.  The battle pass always rewards shards of a specific character, and the Guild and Guild War storefronts each sell shards for a specific subset of characters.  You can find just about any character’s shards in the Rogue Trader or via Requisitions.  And finally, Legendary Release Events and Hero Release Events reward shards, and are the primary means of acquiring a new character.
• What it’s used for: Unlocking, promoting, and ascending characters.  Unlocking is self-explanatory; “promoting” a character adds stars above their name and comes with a small stat boost, but is mostly just an intermediate step between ascensions.  Ascending a character changes their rarity (common to uncommon to rare to epic to legendary, in true MMO tradition) and boosts their skills, but is most important because it increases their level and rank cap.  Common characters can only go up to Level 8 and Iron 1 rank, Uncommon characters can go to level 17 and Bronze 1, Rare characters can go to Level 26 and Silver 1, Epic characters can go to Level 35 and Gold 1, and Legendary characters can go all the way to Level 50 and Diamond 3.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Early on, it’s a major bottleneck, since you need to unlock three characters to unlock each campaign (which is really what you should be doing).  Later on, it’s sort of choose your own adventure – if you aim to unlock legendary characters, farming up 500 of their shards (at a rate of 3-5 per day, depending on whether you have their Elite node unlocked) is both slow and necessary, but if you don’t care you don’t care.  You can also just rely on Requisition drops, if you like the gacha element, but they’re resource-intensive and not very reliable.  Sometimes you get 5 character shards in a drop, sometimes you unlock a legendary all in one go (the equivalent of 500 shards).  One of those things is much less likely than the other, though.

Items

• Where you get it from: Salvage runs; arena crates; the storefront (for blackstone); the Rogue Trader; daily login rewards; the battle pass.
• What it’s used for: You equip them to characters to give them a crit or block chance (or increase it).  Armor items increase armor and sometimes health.  Each character starts off with two item slots and unlocks a third at Rare rarity.  These items are key to maximizing your characters’ strength, and upgrading a character’s rarity also lets them equip rarer items.  Upgrading an item requires coins and Salvage.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never, really, although Legendary items are very rare, so you may have Legendary characters wielding Epic or even Rare items for a long time.

Salvage

• Where you get it from: Salvage runs; some elite campaign missions; very rarely in chests; reclaiming items; the battle pass.
• What it’s used for: Along with coins, upgrading items.  This is key – upgrading items to maximum rarity wildly increases their power, especially at epic rank and above.  Fully upgrading a legendary item is very expensive but can enable some truly stupendous crits (or push your character’s armor to unreasonable levels).  You can use Salvage to upgrade a fully ranked-up item to the next highest rarity, along with a forge badge, but you shouldn’t.  Reclaiming an item gives you back all the salvage you invested in it, but upgrading it cancels that – it doesn’t “remember” what you spent on it when it was a lower rarity, so while a Rank 5/5 Uncommon item is worth 100 salvage, a Rank 1/7 Rare item is only worth 60.  And Rank 1 items are significantly weaker than max-rank items of the previous rarity.  I’ll never say never, but you generally should not use salvage to turn a max ranked item into a minimum ranked item of the next rarity up. 
• When it becomes the bottleneck: It’ll never truly bottleneck your progress, but once you start upgrading legendary items, the quantities of salvage you need rapidly become unfeasibly high.

Requisition Scrolls

• Where you get it from: Completing campaign segments (i.e. each of the five zones); leveling up your account’s power level (which happens when your cumulative combined character power crosses certain thresholds); leveling up your quest crate (which happens periodically as you complete enough quests); the battle pass; the storefront (for blackstone); the final chest in each Tournament Arena season; completing a Guild War season; completing the final mission in a Hero Release Event; referring friends to the game, if they hit level 25.
• What it’s used for: Requisition drops!  Slam a quarter into that gacha machine and watch it run.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never.  Requisition scrolls are a fun bonus but they are not the main means of acquiring anything.  They’re just fun.  You should always save until you have 10 and spend them all at once (on what we call a “ten-pull” or “ten-drop”).

Forge Badges

• Where you get it from: Salvage Run; the storefront; the Rogue Trader; the battle pass.
• What it’s used for: Upgrading other things: items, badges, orbs, etc. by combining lesser versions.  Also, upgrading Machines of War.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never.  The value on combining stuff is very bad.  The one exception is Legendary forge badges, because very very senior players have tons and tons of epic orbs they don’t need, but always need more legendary orbs.

Raid Tickets

• Where you get it from: Crates of all kinds; the battle pass; daily login rewards; a few other places.
• What it’s used for: Raiding missions (that is, completing them without having to replay them) costs 1 ticket in addition to the energy.  Also, occasionally you will have the opportunity to trade some in for energy at the storefront, but not often.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never!!!  You will get so many of these things!  They had to patch the game to increase the amount of space the raid ticket counter had allocated to it because people had 10000+ of them stored up!  I have heard of players running low on them, but the only circumstance I’ve found that to happen in is when someone literally never plays Arena at all, ever.

Archaeotech

• Where you get it from: When you have a character completely maxed out on shards, their red stars are replaced by one beautiful blue winged star.  When this happens you unlock the Rogue Trader, a special storefront that takes Archaeotech.  Gaining shards for a character with one winged blue star converts them 1-1 into Archaeotech, which can be spent in the Rogue Trader.  Most people find that Snotflogga and Snappawrecka are the easiest tickets to the Rogue Trader because of how many shards you get for each from Salvage Run and Arena, but Aethana is also a popular option.
• What it’s used for: The Rogue Trader sells a variety of shards, items, forge badges, but most importantly, exp books.  It’s a major source of Codexes of War in the lategame.  It’s also the only place to acquire the Heavenfall Blade, a unique legendary crit item for Dark Angels only that adds 40% crit chance.  This would be better if any of the Dark Angels were truly good.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never, because you never really need what the Rogue Trader is selling.  It’s just a nice alternative source of Codexes of War for very lategame players, who need all the Codexes they can get.

Munitions

• Where you get it from: Daily logins; arena crates; the storefront; Incursion events.
• What it’s used for: Using active abilities on your Machines of War
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Never really, although Machines of War are still new enough that it’s hard to be sure.  When their skills are fully upgraded, it’s possible that their active abilities will be strong enough that you’ll really want to have lots of munitions so you can use them all the time.  But right now nobody knows.

Components

• Where you get it from: Incursion events; salvage runs; the storefront (for Blackstone)
• What it’s used for: Upgrading abilities on your Machines of War.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: See above.  Right now it’s a bottleneck because Machines of War are so new and there’s just one Incursion every five weeks, but who knows?  If a Machine breaks open the meta, maybe everyone will need to hoard Components for it.

Bafmodads

• Where you get it from: Scattered around Sauria
• What it’s used for: Bringing Fox back to life when he dies
• When it becomes the bottleneck: This item is from Star Fox: Dinosaur Planet for the Nintendo Gamecube.  I just included it in this list because I like the name.

Guild Credits

• Where you get it from: Fighting Guild Raid bosses; beating Guild Raid bosses; completing Guild quests; buying (or having a guildmate buy) guild credit bundles.
• What it’s used for: Buying stuff in the Guild Store.  Early on, that’s shards for Eldryon, Archimatos and Boss Gulgortz, three campaign characters (the first two of which are also rock-solid meta picks).  Later on, once those three are unlocked, you can buy Codexes of War and Aun’shi shards.  You can also buy gold, legendary upgrades, various badges, sometimes orbs, and after you reach level 30, Abaddon and Tanksmasha shards. 
• When it becomes the bottleneck: You never really need this stuff, so never, but it is useful to have a steady stream of credits in the lategame – it’s a way to get lots of experience tomes and gold, two things that are significant bottlenecks.

War Credits

• Where you get it from: Using Guild War tickets; beating enemy characters in Guild War.
• What it’s used for: Shopping at the Guild War shop, which currently sells shards for Nauseous Rotbone, Njal Stormcaller, and Deathleaper, as well as some legendary upgrades.
• When it becomes the bottleneck: Unlocking Rotbone will make LREs so much easier, so that should be a priority.  After that, though, the rest of the Guild War store contents are firmly “nice to have” so I would say it’s not really a bottleneck.

Fat Stacks of Stuff

Whew! That’s a lot of currencies.  Tacticus forex traders have it made.  I hope this article was helpful to those of you starting out – planning what to do with all those currencies is a lot easier once you know when you’ll need what.

My guild is still recruiting, so if you want to join, hit me up on the Goonhammer Discord.  (Not the comments please – I can’t guarantee I’ll see those).  I’m in a great guild and we’re on the lookout for active players.  You can also 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 it means if we ever end up imprisoned in the same prison for crimes we didn’t commit, I’ll help you break out and clear your name, even if I heroically die in the process.

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