Welcome to the weekly installment of Marvel Strike Force (MSF) tips and tricks, where Nerds on Earth helps take your D+ squad to a solid B-, which will hopefully get your dad off your back about your poor grades!
This week we are talking about Alliances, the term for a collection of players who join together like a Girl Scout Troop! Getting into a good Alliance is paramount to your success. So here are some tips on picking a good Alliance as well as Alliance etiquette to make sure you are being a good alliance member!
Why is an Marvel Strike Force Alliance important?
The first question always has to be “the why?” If don’t understand the why, then we are less likely to follow through with the plan. And in this case, the why is rather simple.
You CANNOT progress well through Marvel Strike Force without an alliance, especially if you want to play for free. There are some specific game modes that require an Alliance (Raids, WAR, and daily donations). In addition to essentially being required, once you find a good Alliance, it will make the game more enjoyable!
What makes a good Alliance?
A good Alliance is like any fellowship, a group of people with a common goal who work together to achieve that goal. The goal here is to progress through the game well, as individuals as well as a group, the Alliance.
There is a daily reward for the minimal donation to Alliance 10,000 gold. The game makes the individual return for this donation worth it, so it really should be something that everyone does each day. DO NOT join an Alliance that says everyone donates more than the minimum. This is likely not true and will cost you power cores (yet another, and even more precious, form of currency).
A good alliance will have 24 (that’s the max) members, all of whom are active, meaning they regularly participate in Alliance activities like Raids.
Spending campaign energy will result in Raid credits which max at 600 daily per member. These go into a collective purse for your Alliance to use to launch Raids.
Raid rewards are vital to your progress within the game, and you get more rewards the more active you are. The raid rewards are broken down like:
- 1-2; The top performers earn top rewards.
- 3-6;
- 7-12;
- 13-24. So, say you missed a raid because you were especially busy with life/work etc., you would still benefit off of your Alliance’s efforts, even if your activity ranked you at 24 out of 24 Alliance members.
How to be a standout Alliance member!
Listen, we all know that this is just a game and that real life responsibilities won’t always allow us to participate as much as everyone else all the time. Any reasonable Alliance should realize that there must be ebbs and flows to our participation.
With that said, you might find that some people jump in an Alliance (especially if it is a public one) and hang out, contributing very little, yet gaining from the Alliance’s efforts until someone realizes it and boots them. This is not being a good Alliance member, let alone a standout.
You can first be a good Alliance member by handling your Daily Objectives which the game has set for you. If you handle these you will contribute well to your Alliance, and these daily objectives can be handled in a very timely manner and in a future post I will tackle how to maintain progress on a time crunch. Just that effort means you are handling your business and you are a good Alliance member.
But to be standout there are a few etiquette pieces you need to abide by!
Raid lanes
Lane jumping is one of the highest offenses in MSF, but what is lane jumping and how do you avoid it? When entering raids you have to understand that for the Alliance to achieve 100% (which unlocks the highest level of rewards), every node must be completed. You cannot do that if people aren’t mindful of raid lanes.
Above is a very basic lane path image. In raids you cannot go backwards, so once you pass a node, if someone else isn’t coming behind to complete it you have lost your shot as an alliance for 100%.
Some Alliances post these maps and even assign lanes so that there is little to no confusion. However, if you are in a less organized Alliance you are operating on the first come first serve method and you will also need to think logically. If you enter a raid, make sure that you look at the progress already achieved by your Alliance and try to pick out nodes that are otherwise going to be missed. Unless you are first in, then you have the right to choose your path!
WAR
WAR happens 3 times a week and once again requires the Alliance to be working together, as to maximize your WAR points you need to clear the entire room.
As an Alliance member you need to be active in WAR and if you have enough squads you need to have some toons on defense and also enough on offense to at least make use of your free War energy.
One tip is that you do not need to use a full group of 5 toons to defend or attack. On defense you can us low level toons provide by the game mode to round out your defensive squads.
On offense you can engage an attack with just 1 toon. So if you have a super powerful toon you can roll the dice against the defense depending on their collective power.
You can also purchase addition War energy using Blitz Currency. Buy refreshes. While most of us need our Blitz currency to unlock and level up toons, we need to be willing to sacrifice a little of our currency on behalf of the Alliance.
Again, if you are in an Alliance that is requiring you to ALWAYS max your refreshes you might want to rethink your Alliance choice (unless, of course, you are a whale). I will go in depth on WAR in the future, but if you can be active, you will start to be recognized as a Standout Alliance member, and maybe even win an MVP or two in the process!
Lastly, Most Alliances use Discord for communication—some require it—and in my opinion this is helpful for organization. However, not every Alliance uses it, so if you are adamant against discord, you can still find a good Alliance. However, those etiquette pieces are MUCH harder to avoid in Alliances that don’t use other ways to communicate because the in-game communication function isn’t great. Just something to think about!
Game Radar
Be ready for what is coming down the pipe!
Blitzes: Tonight the Fathers-day blitz event for Mr. Fantastic; Thursday we will get the Carnage blitz round!
Events: Space Ace event starting tonight! Unlock the Legendary StarLord.
Unity: Gain points by using toons with the unity tag which will gain you unity orbs for a chance to unlock land Negasonic Teenaged Warhead!
Next Legendary events: Invisible Woman is coming early in July (characters needed; Sinister Six tag at 5 stars), so start planning ahead now!
Tabletop Takeaways: Tips for Dungeon Masters with a Narrative Spin