Azyle's Clash of the Titans - Surviving and Winning in the Uber End Game

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The Immovable Rock vs The Unstoppable Hammer
Introduction - The Uber End Game
When one arrives post level 25, especially when hitting level 30 and beyond, they make a choice. Either wait for a long long time and gear up slowly as they win the Arena battles they can, perhaps 60%, fighting the other players like themselves and bow gracefully out of battles and taking the loss when they see the Face of God in a fully geared up player, often saying "Just another $$$ Hero, oh well". No matter what your thoughts about spending $$$ on Mojo to fast track into the Uber End Game, the bottom line is that in my Mojo article I have shown how by level 30 and by spending $99.99 you can be fully decked out like the other Uber Titans. Which is why so many are like this. It is not an expensive prospect to spend a hundred dollars to be able to fight with the best and compete with everyone as well as continue to maximize XP and Mojo generating abilities at this level. As well, there will come a day when more and more players have earned the Mojo to hit this Elite status, meaning more and more Uber clashes and Mirror Matches. And no, spending $100 bucks is not going to give you "automatic win" status where you are some kind of unique Hero winning and killing everything in sight simply because there are many many players at this level playing and thinking the same way as you. This is why tactics are still important now, if not even more so, than before. This article will focus on the Berserker and Behemoth Heroes simply because the Succubus is played far different compared to these two classes and although much of the information is still highly relevent to a Succubus, these are not her tactics. It will require an entire article on its own to fully explore the Succubus Uber End Game strategies.

It is FUN being Uber...
Most of the time, this is very true. When I refer to Uber, I mean you have all your End Game spells, Tier 4 Equipment, Tier 6 weapon and End Game rings and know how to play at this level. Just buying all the gear does not make you good at this game. It just means you can roll Noobs and think you are good, until you get your ***** handed to you in the Arena by a passive player with the same gear. Then you begin to realize you either must learn to compete with sound strategy or start taking the losses to the other Uber players. And if you are bowing down to the other Ubers because you are not playing smart, then why exactly did you get geared up in the first place?
At the Uber End Game, you get two types of Arena battles. Type #1 is the lesser player. You know them instantly because they lack Tier 4 Equipment and a Tier 6 Weapon. So in this case, if you are Berserker or Behemoth, you simply straddle the enemy Hero and another unit (usually a Troll Cyborg) and that is it. Yes you only place out your Hero. No other units are needed because you are Uber. And they are not. And you do not feel like losing a single unit to any damage or spells as this will cost resources and units that you need for the real fights. And it is just plain damn good ole stupid fun to sit there and clear a whole enemy army with just your Hero, flinging purple goo all over the screen and then rinse and repeat on the next one. Your Hero and his Purple Goo spells can dust an entire Army this way all on his own.

Arena battle #2 is the other fight. The hard fight. you know this fight because you wake up a little and wonder if you remembered to keep enough units on hand to bring the Titan on the other side of the field to his knees. You know this fight because the enemy Hero (Berserker or Behemoth) has full Tier 4 gear, Tier 6 weapon and you can almost see those rings and purple goo spells oozing out of his pockets. He has the look on his face as he polishes his weapons that says "get ready for my DPS..." This is the Arena battle you must win. Why? Because it is composed of XP that you often need, it is another Wheel Spin which you really need and perhaps in a far away place in your mind, you care about your rank.

This fight comes with units to back it up and often the composition of the fight is going to look like this:

Enemy Line:

Cyborg1 Cyborg1 Shaman Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel4 Archangel4
Cyborg1 Cyborg1 Shaman Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel4 Archangel4
Hero Hero Shaman Archangel2 Archangel2 Archangel5 Archangel5
Hero Hero Shaman Archangel2 Archangel2 Archangel5 Archangel5
Cyborg2 Cyborg2 Shaman Archangel3 Archangel3 Archangel6 Archangel6
Cyborg2 Cyborg2 Shaman Archangel3 Archangel3 Archangel6 Archangel6







Now the reason the lineup looks like this is because the Uber player needs Troll Cyborgs and Archangels for the style of play he is currently using in the Arena and because Cyborgs and Archangels take a very long time to build compared to other units. So he will have them on hand and will have stockpiled them as well. There will be variations to the setup because again the game system takes his units he has on hand and places them according to the scripting process it thinks is effective etc. Sometimes you see Wolf Rider and Iron Wheels and Priests and such mixed in. There are many variations to the setup because it is all based on how many units he has built and of what type and how the game script places it all for him as you enter the Arena Battle. That is not the point however. The point is that it is another battle you want to win for the XP, Rank and Wheel Spin. Often, this battle can gain you 400XP to 500+XP. And it is not a battle that is about units. No longer are we looking at this screen and thinking, "how can I best place my units to kill his Archangels" etc. Simply put, this is PVP now. We are now facing a bitter reality, the first Hero to die will lose the battle. Even if I am at 10% of my life and the enemy Hero dies, because of the incredible healing rate of Heros at this level via items, I will live. And it is impossible to kill a Hero with normal units anymore. No matter what lineup, the only chance you have of killing a Hero is with your Hero involved. This is why I feel the End Game has become a Hero VS Hero or PVP style of play.

Therefore, winning this battle has one single objective: Kill the Enemy Hero as fast as possible. Why fast? Because he has Purple Goo Spells! The longer he lives, the more he tosses the spells around, the more units you lose and the more chance your Hero dies. The biggest threat to any costly and time sensitive units you are using in these battles is the Enemy Hero casting spells.


The History of God Battles
The old theory was to be more powerful than the opposing melee Hero and kill him man to man before he kills your Hero. This was practical in theory until all Uber players become almost equal to each other. 30+ Level did not matter and stats had little impact anymore, equipment and spell choice was god and as the gaps in player Hero power became closer and closer, with more and more top players buying all the required equipment, these battles became a literal crap shoot with the one over riding factor that the Berserker when facing a Behemoth in a 1 on 1 fight from the opening front lines, the Berserker had the edge in DPS. Simply because the Behemoth closes in on the Berserker and Berserker has a range of 2, the Berserker Hero gets one or two "first" shots. Which often crit since the crit rates have become so high. Because the Behemoth cannot fight this battle by straddling another unit anymore due to range issues preventing him from hitting the other melee unit, who charges forward, and the Berserker Hero, who does not charge forward, the edge was lost. In this situation, disaster would occur as Behemoth is only hitting the single front line unit and not hitting the Berserker with his second attack, but the Berserker is hitting the Behemoth with his range. The Berserker does more damage than the Behemoth at this level, he will out DPS the Behemoth and the Behemoth will find very few ways to ever counter this edge. End result was Berserker > Behemoth in this Clash of the Titans. Berserker VS Berserker or Behemoth VS Behemoth became true games of luck when a Mirror Match of same same would occur. And at this level of play, in these must win battles, that means a loss of Hero VS Hero battle will cause a loss of units and time to rebuild to even try to beat him again. It was an ill advised tactic for the player looking to keep winning and moving forward as fast as the game would allow.
So quickly a new system of attack was invented by the players. Race to the Wall! Yes now, because the attacker in the Arena gets to set up his units based on what the Enemy has produced, he has the ability to literally place and plan his battle as best as possible. So now we had a new method. Place our Hero top or bottom two rows so he never meets the other Hero and race him to the Castle wall, while placing units that take the most time for him to kill in his rows and making a heavy damage efficient last double row that could win that row VS row battle and possibly add some DPS to the castle wall before dieing to Hero spellfire. The critical thing became Castle Wall Defense, or Castle HP. And thus the great Arms Race began. So in many ways, the primary reason you see so many older and high level players with insane amounts of White Columns, Totems and Pumpkin Kings etc, is because they actually had a lot of value to the End Game battles and winningthose matchups. The added benefit was that units could be stockpiled during downtime due to crazy population levels, allowing many Cyborgs and Archangels etc, to be stockpiled in anticipation of the losses that would be taken in these races. Certainly, the best thing to place in front of the enemy Hero in a close Castle Wall Burn Race was 3 Troll Cyborgs in a row, as this would slow the Enemy Hero down from getting to your wall at the highest possible rate.

However, this is an ineffective solution as it requires you to not only spend even more Mojo and $$$ on those Columns etc, but it causes you a massive loss of rebuild time as you would simply need to lose 2 or 3 Troll Cyborgs as well as other units including Iron Wheels and Archangels etc., that have very slow build times. If you should happen to face the Mirror Match (Never mind the Succubus match up which is its own nightmare in itself to handle) more than 1 or 2 times in an hour of playing, you would find your units depleting faster than you could possibly keep rebuilding which equals downtime and is simply not effective. And the resource loss is massive in rebuilding the units and although high level players are typically wealthy, they face repair and recharge costs that are extremely high.


Searching Outside the Box...With My Good Eye Closed
As I was leveling up, I had the luxury of having lunch numerous times with my Chinese friend who was already past level 30 when I was in my teens. He had already complained and told me about this situation and how my thoughts of only needing to spend about $100 at level 30 could bring me up to speed game wise with everyone else. He explained why Castle Wall Defense was important and also said the battles were kind silly now, either you rolled the opponent with just your Hero and spells alone because they are not geared, or they would be a geared up Behemoth or Berserker and you would need to Castle Wall Race them and felt you needed to truly max out your wall with $$$ buying Columns and Totems to the point every inch was filled on your land and even sell every unnecessary building including mines! His idea was that unless you planned to use a triple stack of CCC against the Enemy Hero to slow him down, you cannot win the Wall race. And if you start using CCC to win races against those who have the Columns, then you will always lose too many Cyborgs and can never max out wins and spins. He did not care so much because he was at the level cap, but feared the upcoming grind if they raised the cap (which they did)was going to be painful and slow using this method of play. But he also wanted Tier 5 equipment and maxing out spins each day was the only way to have the best chance of getting the pieces he needed.
My thoughts about this over the coming weeks as I leveled always turned back to the fact that an Arms Race seemed expensive and counter productive and from watching him roll lower players, I quickly realized that if an Uber Hero dies and your Hero lives, then the battle becomes no different than if you are fighting the weak player and that the weak player is only different from the geared player because of gear. The weak players Hero is a non-factor, so the solution to beating the Uber matches is to eliminate the Hero, in otherwords, make the Enemy Hero a non-factor. I would tell him this is the key but his answer was always, it is too risky, it is not consistent, it requires all the best units and you will lose units anyhow, but mostly, in the melee VS melee Hero PVP battle, you simply are too evenly matched to ever win all the time.

I do not like hearing things like "there is no way" and "it is not possible". Instead I want to break down the system to the point that a new tech arises, a new tactic that will work and will produce the results desired. Around level 28 I finally arrived to the End Game and began fighting these totally decked out players, got completely destroyed by them and bought my End Game Spells and gear, Tier 6 weapon and all (I never bought the Tier 4 Chest Piece because I wanted something to aspire to spending my Mojo on, so I am actually at a disadvantage in HP etc because I still wear Tier 2 Chest). And sure enough, my friend was quite correct and going man to man with a Berserker, no matter what I tried would result in a loss and Behemoth VS Behemoth was a crap shoot, but because I still had Tier 2 Armor, I lost those quite often as well. I even contemplated buying Tier 4 Chest hoping it would give me a little more edge VS Behemoth etc, but I had serious doubts that by doing this, I could win all the man vs man fights. It was just not possible. It was simply a race of who got lucky and managed to crit and land spells on the other faster. Luck was the factor. And I was not going to start wall racing and the few times I did, I realized I needed to spend a lot of $$$ to get to the point of being among the best at it and the system still was not going to allow me to win all the time and as fast as possible each day.

So I went back to the drawing boards and began to draw on my past gaming knowledge to look for the setup that was going to be 99% effective in these matches. I wanted a system that was going to be the foundation of play at this level and one that I could introduce to the Wiki meaning that once again, those who read the Wiki and my articles will have a massive edge on those who do not AND the system of attack is not revealed to any players in the game because it is not like using Trolls instead of Knights, something players begin to see in their own matchups. Because the setup is one the game system would never reproduce in its defense lineup, there is little danger of it being seen and discovered by those outside of the Wiki community.

I perfected the idea, used it repeatedly for a week, and made sure I felt is was a winner even when facing up to a 10% disadvantage in Hero power. I then revised and tweaked the system base to bring it into a time and cost effective measure, meaning that it could be used faster and easier in order to maximize my fights each day. Right now I face from ZERO to 2 Uber Battles per hour when hitting the refresh wall. I am able to keep pace with it. I am able to win 95% to 100% of all Arena battles even if the player is level 35 while I am level 30 only.


We are Not PVPing, We are Boss Killing
This was the biggest concept to realize in the End Game was to stop thinking of these battles as a form of PVP. There is not another player fighting you when you are doing an Arena battle. There are his units and a game system that organizes his units and casts his spells as fast as they come up based on some loose decision factors that tend to launch spells that are directable at your Hero or the area of best effect. Because the defending player does not get to react or setup his troops, you really are playing the same game over and over VS the system, not against another player and therefore the deciding factors or advantage you have is being able to prepare in advance based on the situation and react during battle specifically to the situation and the defender is not. His skill is not a factor. Your skill is.
What is the goal of these battles for us? To kill the other Hero. No matter what, the first step is to kill him every single time as fast as we can. He is not another player in this sense, he is a Boss. Drawing back to my World of Warcraft days where my guild and I would always be at the top of our server for farming Raid Bosses, we were unable to rely on "How to" guides for new Boss battles. For most raid dungeons and raid bosses we were some of the first players to ever attempt bringing down and many times, the first guild to kill those Bosses. And we needed to always think outside the box to dream up the most effective ways to take them down by ourselves with no outside information. This led myself and a few others to hours of math, logicistics and theory about effective setups and systems to beat them. I used my thoughts and past knowledge about killing Bosses in other games to begin to craft a system to beat the Bosses in this game, that being Uber Behemoth and Uber Berserker. I wanted a method to always put the Enemy Boss into a situation where I could effectively out DPS him and burn him down before he could do this to me. I knew we were almost equal and that the only factors that can change are my setup and other units I have.

Now in World of Warcraft, a Raid group was composed of various class types of players. I began to think of my lineup as a Raid group, each with specific features, advantages and negatives in the battles. I knew my units only mattered for my single goal of killing the Enemy Boss because once he dies, the rest of his units are Noob Toast. In WoW, we never took a 40 person Raid group and all charged into a Boss fight like a bunch of maniacs. Although often the Tank of the group would charge in blindly sucking up damage, he would need to be supported by healers, and we simply do not have healers in this game capable of counteracting the kind of damage our "tank" is going to take in these battles. So what is bad for our tank Hero, is going to be equally as bad for the Enemy tank Hero. I knew this from my Behemoth VS Berserker man to man fights. Attacking like this always caused my Behemoth to step into the Enemy Hero which means that the units behind him and in the rows above him and below him would begin to DPS me, causing my chances to beat a Berserker to rapidly fall. Furthermore, the decision skill I had to cast Demon Blast on him instead of other units like the game system would often force him to do, was never enough to catch up to that extra damage because the Spells take time to initally charge up as the battle begins, often meaning I can cast them once and then die before they are ready again. What I needed to get more of an edge was to be able to cast them as we begin battling face to face, effectively having them precast or "readied" for the clash. I also needed to be able to add DPS onto him from my own units while taking zero damage during the fight from his units. The fight needed to be in my zone, not in his.


Pull the Boss into the Raid
We used to do this in WoW so often it became almost the most reliable means to begin a Boss battle. Pull the Boss to us, often isolating him from his lesser companions, allowing DPS to begin on him as he moved into our group and to be sure we had the battle ensue as we wanted it, set up how we liked it, with our various class types positioned properly for the specific battle. I realized that pulling the Boss in this game was going to be paramount to success. I also understood a simple factor that Priests are not effective to back up my Boss and that Shamans were effective in allowing me to heap on more DPS especially if we could negate his own Shamans.
My ideal situation for when the Boss and my Hero should begin swinging on each other would be that my targetable spells, two of which are Mystical Blast and Demon Blast would be charged and used as soon as the fight begins, that I would have Shamans alive and backing me for at least one spell revolution ideally and that he would have taken damage from other units as well as he is pulled. Furthermore, I wanted his Shamans either dead or negated from the start of the man VS man battle and that they would be in a situation where if they were not already dead, by the time they could begin having any effect on the battle, they would be killed by my own units or by my first Demon Blast landing on him and his Shamans. The crafting I came up with, and much of this was devised using units smply that would be "churnable", IE: created at a rate that can keep pace with Boss fights in the Arena. This ruled out Troll Cyborg and Archangels as well as Iron Wheels. They simply do not build fast enough to keep up with the churn rate I want. Using Priests was also ruled out as they simply are too weak and do not heal enough at this level of play to be a factor. Further to this, Demon Blast can kill a Priest in one casting due to HP of Priest being 180 and Demon Blast will do 189 damage to that Priest in one cast. I would only be using Cyborgs, Archangels and Iron Wheels if the system would reliably allow me to prevent their death during the combat. Archangels managed to hang on and be a critical part of my solution.

The setup for Boss killing was finally devised:

Shaman Archangel1 Archangel1 Mage Mage Mage Footman
Shaman Archangel1 Archangel1 Mage Mage Mage Footman
Shaman Hero Hero
Shaman Hero Hero Archer
Shaman Archangel2 Archangel2 Mage Mage Mage Footman
Shaman Archangel2 Archangel2 Mage Mage Mage Footman







Now if you compare the earlier lineup of the Enemy to the lineup we are using, you can see that we are dealing with the situation that he has Troll Cyborgs above and below him. In some cases, he will have Footmen or Knights etc depending on what front line melee units he has on hand. You can adjust accordingly on these flanking sides by changing the Footmen to Mages if it is Knights (4 Mages and an Archangel will kill a Knight so fast it will make your eyes spin) but I recommend that you do not reduce the number of mages ever as far as 6 in each flank especially against Troll Cyborgs. We are still trying to conserve units here and part of this is trying to have the least nunber of mages lost. Absolutely the worst thing that can happen here is by the end of the battle we lose an Archangel, but is rare enough that I tend to be able to keep up the production easily even with replacing lost Shamans.

The Battle proceeds like this. Enemy Hero charges forward because there are NO units for him to fight. As he moves forward, our single Archer prevents our Hero from advancing. The Footmen begin to stall the Enemy front line of Cyborgs, etc. This has the effect of keeping his flanks pushed back so we are taking no incidental ranged damage at all. If the Enemy Boss Hero had Shamans, due to the Movement Speed Increase of all the uber gear he has, he will push ahead of them as they slowly follow behind. He enters into our killing zone and begins to be fired upon by 6 mages and an Achangel, who will shoot at the closest possible target due to the AI of the system. The outside 3 mages on the top and bottom rows begin to soften up the Troll Cyborgs who are killing our Footmen. Because he is being hit by Mages, he begins to slow down a fair bit and the Damage of 6 mages and Archangels, then turns to 4 Mages and Archangels as he closes to the Archer. Yes the Archer does some damage but it is minor and the Archer is simply there to prevent our Hero from charging. He will take 2 full swings to kill the Archer, which causes some healing from Absorb but during that time, along with the slowing effect, he takes damage from 4 Mages and 2 Archangels. Furthermore, when your own Hero is a Berserker, you have the added advantage of pre-hitting him with the 2 range as he kills the Archer and closes the last step to you, often seeing 3 extra attacks for the Berserker in this situation. This adds up to faster damage than his healing does and he is softened up. We have reduced his life to a point that it is lower than our own by a factor that will be an impact in the fight about to ensue. And his Shamans, who have been trailing along are being slowed and fired upon by our two Mages that no longer can shoot the Boss as he passes by them. They are softened up by this as well, to a factor that will become releventin a few moments. They also are slowed enough in the process that they are effectively non-impactual on the Hero VS Hero fight. Now the Archer dies and the two Titans meet! he is softer than you, he is still being fired upon by Archangels and two mages and his shamans are not backing him up yet.

As the Battle begins, you have yet to cast a single spell, nor has he because they were charging up. The spells begin to fly and typically the first spell ready for him is Mystical Blast which he shoots. This causes a delay in attack for him, an attack swing that he is needing badly in order to Absorb heal. The timing could not be better as our own Hero has taken no damage yet, so as we cast Mystical Blast back at him, we did not care about the loss of an attack swing like he does. Furthermore, blast VS blast ends up equaling zero advantage either way as they do the same damage other than two key points 1) We lowered his HP. Since it is a race to the bottom and we are ahead of him considerably in HP at this point, pushing us both deeper towards zero at this rate is desireable to us but not to him. 2) Our Shamans behind us likely survive the Mystical Blast as they have taken no damage yet, but his Shamans will already be hurt quite a bit from our Mages and likely die from our Mystical Blast and if they do not, then they are near death and die quite quickly after the Mystical Blast plows through them. Another aspect is that the Shamans behind our Hero have not been casting their effect on us but instead on the Archangels as we are not engaged in battle so they default to the Archangels which are attacking instead. However, at this point, they focus on our Hero, so typically we have 4 Shamans enchanting us and the Enemy Hero has none.

Now the most effective way a Melee Hero at this level will heal is by swinging his weapon and doing damage. But because his spells just happen to become ready right as the battle between the two Heroes begins and his HP have been lowered and continue to fall lower as we are fighting, casting his spells is the worst thing he can do as he does not swing when casting. But he will cast and his spells are typically either Demon Blast, Deep Purple or Mad Bones. Two of these spells by their very nature are random. Neither of the Voodoo spells are a serious threat to us and likely do very little damage to our Hero and are spread around the field. But as he casts them, he does miss swings of his weapon, misses DPSing us and misses healing via Absorb and this creates a further unbalancing effect of our HP vs his HP. We will fire Demon Blast directly on him and his Shamans if they are alive, but we are making sure that we cast Demon Blast on him as fast as we can. We do not cast Deep Purple as we do not want to miss the swings at this point. All we care is that he dies and we live and skipping the cast at this point on Deep Purple is the smart play. All this takes place in a matter of seconds of course, but literally he is half dead and we are still at over 75% life left and he is continuing to take more damage second after second from us, the FOUR Shamans casting on our Hero and the two Shamans on our Archangels.

Downfield, our Mages on the outside lane have been firing at the Troll Cyborgs who take time to kill the Footmen and begin to work our mages. As the Hero passes the inside Mages, they change their focus to the closest target, the Troll Cyborgs. Typically all 6 mages at this point are firing at the Cyborgs and they are doing 120 HP of damage per second and causing his attack speed to be slowed down by 120% making his efforts to deal 600 damage to the two footmen greatly hampered. He has units behind him helping DPS though, usually Archangels, so the Footmen team is facing about 35 damage per second due to slowdown of the Troll, splash damage, Shamans on the Cyborgs etc. It varies, but Footmen have a collective HP of 580 meaning that even if facing 40 HP damage per second it will take well over 12 rounds of firing for them to die. With the added damage from our Footmen, we are chugging out close to 130 damage per second and this kicks in with about a 12 to 13 round ratio, meaning that when our Footmen die, our Mages will finish off the Cyborg before he has any ability to kill more than 1 or 2 Mages at best. At that point, we have already killed the Enemy Hero and have been slinging Demon Blast at the Cyborgs or his Archangels, one to each one if possible helping to try and keep our Mages alive.

The Enemy Hero will typically die, if all things are going as we planned and we are very fast about timing our spells and get the right amount of crits about the time we cast the third Mystical Blast/Demon Blast combo on him. This actually places his death right about the time his Troll Cyborgs die as well. Now our Hero charges into the field, healing as he goes from about 1/3 HP left, attacking the Enemy Archangels etc., and also flinging his spells as they come ready, making sure to use Demon Blast to support his Mages against the Enemy deep lines, usually Archangels or Iron Wheels. We are simply trying now to burn down his other units before they kill too many more of our Mages. Our own Archangels are practically useless due to range issues but we do not care as they are alive and were instrumental in helping us win this battle in buring down the Enemy Hero. We finish off all his units and win the fight.

Our typical losses are 1 Archer, 4-6 Mages, 4 Footmen and 1-4 Shaman due to Deep Purple, Mystical Blast and Mad Bones during the Hero battle. Only if very unlucky with the spells he casts and fire power accidently got focused on a Archangel will we lose an Archangel.

Now I have expanded the idea further and have found very good success rate with this. See this setup:

Shaman Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel3 Archangel3 Mage Footman
Shaman Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel3 Archangel3 Mage Footman
Shaman Hero Hero Footman
Shaman Hero Hero Archer Footman
Shaman Archangel2 Archangel2 Archangel4 Archangel4 Mage Footman
Shaman Archangel2 Archangel2 Archangel4 Archangel4 Mage Footman







Instead of using the 12 Mages, 6 on each side, instead we are going to expand the idea to include Archangels to replace 8 Mages. I have found that in a Cyborg based battle, we are simply losing too many Mages because of random AOE and Archangels can handle the AOE and still focus on killing the Boss we pull and then switching to help kill the Cyborgs after the Boss dies and not perish in the fight. At most I may lose 1 Archangel doing this and I am losing 2-4 Mages instead of 4-6 Mages. A second addition to our system is an initial stall of the Boss using 2 Footmen facing him. We do this because we do not care about him healing at the start of the Battle, he is already full health. But what happens is that because he must deal with the Footmen and will remain even with his Cyborgs or in the case of Berserker, offset back a spot, then the Top and Bottom Archangels will initially focus on the Cyborgs for about 6 seconds. Then once he kills the Footmen, he races to the Archer and this is when the Archangels will all fire on him and sometimes he will be taking all 4 Archangels even as he fights our Hero. Further to the effect of maximizing our initial DPS to the Cyborgs, then to the Boss, the stall tactic is bringing him into Battle with us exactly as our spells are ready to launch and we open with Mystical Blast and Demon Blast on him and he also spends about 4-5 seconds casting all 3 of his spells. He has already taken some damage from the Angels as he marched to us and now he eats 2-3 spells in a row, plus taking more Archangel damage and is not healing through his weapon use because this is when he stops to cast his spells. I am finding that not only does he die faster, but I have close to half HP left as he dies and all 4 Archangels + 2 or more mages are alive as the Cyborgs die. I can immediately start casting at the top and bottom units that are attacking my Archangels and help them wipe them out before they die. I find this is more consistent than the first strategy I posted, but both Strategies are very valid for beating an Uber Melee Boss.


The Factors That Make it Work
Yes it works and yes it works well. It has a success rate of over 95% VS the Melee Mirror Match. It will even work VS the Melee Hero is even 10% to 15% better geared than you are. But why do we use the units we do? Why not use Troll Cyborgs etc instead of Footmen? Churn rate, pure and simple. We do not have time to lose Troll Cyborgs and typically in these battles, front line units die. We are facing Archangels and Mages too often down field to be using Troll Cyborg that is weak VS magic and that those enemy units will have the range on Cyborgs during the entire battle. Nor do we actually need that front line to stay up and alive for the whole fight. Footmen are fast to build, a complete non-factor. The Archer we use as a stopper for our Hero is also not a factor, losing 1 Archer each fight is meaningless. Because we do not lose Archangels often, we can take one of our 4 Magic Temples and use it to always be making an Archangel and this will keep pace with the loss of one here and there. Remember we anticipate only having to face this fight 1 or 2 times an hour of grinding against the Refresh Wall. Shamans build fast, faster than we are going to lose them provided we are building them on a non stop basis in our other 3 Magic Temples. So they also do not slow us down with the loss of units. Finally, the Mages. Well yes we may lose a few in battle, sometimes even as much as 4 to 6 of them depending on how spells of the Enemy land on our units. But the balance of losses along with the use of all 6 Magic Libraries to always be building a mage each at a 40 minute build time means that we are able to stay ahead of this curve. And we can keep all 6 Magic Libraries churning out mages because we do not use Priests at all in our system. Furthermore, we do not need to keep Iron Wheels, Troll Cyborgs, Trolls, Priests, WolfRiders or Knights in our unit Stockpile and in particular, not needing to have a steady supply of Troll Cyborgs and Iron Wheels means that we can stockpile a LOT of Mages, Shamans and Archangels even without a severe amount of White Columns and Totems etc. We have avoided having to play the Arms Race game for unit stockpiling completely.
The elimination of the Troll Cyborg from the End Game grinding churn seriously reminds me of how Knights were eliminated from the Mid Game teen leveling churn. Before, Knights were replaced by the cheaper and faster unit of a Troll, a good churn unit overall for that point in leveling and Mages were the crutch unit that made it really work well. Now we have replaced the Troll Cyborg with Mages as a Churn unit and coupled it with the Archangel as the backing unit that makes it all work so well at this level. In both cases, however, it is the simple fact that a front line unit is being held in stockpile and defaulted to the front line that has caused this to happen. The Metagame at the teen levels was based on Knights being held as a unit by players and therefore being the front line unit faced by us. Trolls and Mages became the churn solution to this earlier Metagame. Now at this End Game level, the system places the Troll Cyborg whenever possible in the Front line along with the melee Hero and hands us a Metagame that can only be broken once players stop holding Troll Cyborgs in their unit inventory, something I believe will NOT change for a long long time as most players do not handle the Metagame in the same manner as I do.

Heres to You, Mrs. Robinson...Taming the Uber Succubus
There she stands, back of the line with her dark evil looking gear and flipping a red dragon's head in her hands, laughing away, knowing how funny it seems to watch you try and charge through her line, desperately flinging spells at her and praying she will somehow die before you do.
All Uber melee Heroes have been here. And most perish no matter what the equipment. The Uber Succubus has presented an interesting scenario simply because the presiding theory about her was to try and smash our way through her minions and get to the back row as fast as possible and start slicing her to pieces. Meanwhile, as we know from the above article, moving into the Enemy field results in not only taking all the damage of the ranged units but from the Enemy Hero as well. In this case, we are only able to do spell damage to the Succubus during our charge and still be taking the brunt of all her minion damage AND her ranged damage as well which is nothing to sneeze at, yes it is lower than facing the blows of a melee Hero, but given her fast attack speed and the fact we are not even hitting her back, it causes us to fall incredibly fast while healing her from the spells we land on her during the process. We crumble and die and walk away thinking that the Uber Succubus is the best class simply because at this Uber game level, she has such power and advantage over the melee class. This is utterly false and in many ways, she is also just as easy to destroy with the right setup and planning and can be done even by a melee Hero who is not Uber geared. The reason the gear is less important is because of the spells we have and that gear does not effect spells. Further, her HP are low enough that we can use spells to take her down alone. Certainly, no matter what our gear, if we have Shattering Light, Demon Blast and Mystical Blast, she is toast period. But if fully geared ourselves, because of increased spell cool down, we will be able to wipe her with only Mystical Blast and Demon Blast.

The Succubus at this game level will typically have a setup like this:

Enemy Line:

Cyborg1 Cyborg1 Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel4 Archangel4 Shaman
Cyborg1 Cyborg1 Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel4 Archangel4 Shaman
Cyborg2 Cyborg2 Archangel2 Archangel2 Shaman Succubus Succubus
Cyborg2 Cyborg2 Archangel2 Archangel2 Shaman Succubus Succubus
Cyborg3 Cyborg3 Archangel3 Archangel3 Archangel5 Archangel5 Shaman
Cyborg3 Cyborg3 Archangel3 Archangel3 Archangel5 Archangel5 Shaman







There of course will be variations on this theme, but given she will have Cyborgs and Archangels on hand to satisfy the setup, this is one of the more common game system placements we end up encountering when facing her in the Arena. We want an effective means to kill her, kill her units and win the battle while not resorting to using Troll Cyborgs or other extremely long building units. If we used Troll Cyborgs, we would end up losing some, if not all of them in the battle. I do not ever want a situation where this happens. Also, I want a End Game solution to all 3 Uber Heroes that does not use Cyborgs or Iron Wheels as I am trying to avoid using up the popuation count with such pop heavy units. Also, I want to lose as few Archangels as possible. I want to use Archangels in my Succubus kill method because I use them against the other Heroes. Keeping my killing plan similar across all 3 Heroes will allow me to have a slim and efficient stockpile and build cycle of units. The last presiding theory required to be true is that we outlive her no matter what.

The simple matter of fact is that Demon Blast and Mystical Blast from a fully geared player, dumping those two spells over and over on her, will kill her over time as her healing rate cannot keep up with the spell dumps. So provided we have a setup that allows us to continue to spell dump her without dieing ourselves and a system that stalls her own units from advancing too quickly and killing our units, we will kill her and the only other aspect is we must play as she does and stay out of her attack range until she is dead. Therefore, similar to how we fought the Melee Heroes, we are at the back of the pack, hiding from her and effectively becoming...a Succubus. By thinking of ourselves as a spell flinging Succubus, we realize we have the advantage of the game system will not fling all spells at us the way we do, such as Demon Blast. And the Succubus typically has all AOE spells instead of focused spells because of the way the Succubus handles her own battles. Often they do not even have Mystical Blast.

Our setup is as follows:

Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel3 Archangel3 Mage Footman Footman
Archangel1 Archangel1 Archangel3 Archangel3 Mage Footman Footman
Hero Hero Archangel4 Archangel4 Mage Footman Footman
Hero Hero Archangel4 Archangel4 Mage Footman Footman
Archangel2 Archangel2 Archangel5 Archangel5 Mage Footman Footman
Archangel2 Archangel2 Archangel5 Archangel5 Mage Footman Footman







We have already learned how Footmen are more than enough meat to effectively hold back Cyborgs for the magic attack units to pretty much destroy them, and this scenario is not much different except that, since we are not pulling the Enemy Hero into us, they get to focus attack on the Cyborgs. Without a doubt, the Troll Cyborgs will die before really getting into our Mages and they will never get a single shot into the Archangels. To make things worse for them, once they kill the last Footman, they are now taking damage from 2 Mages and 4 Archangels on the outside, so we rarely see all the Mages die, typically the Mages and the Archangel behind them proceed to kill her Archangels and because of the timing of the Succubus death, at this point, we are flinging our own spells at them. If we lose an Angel, it the one at our center position and losing 1 Archangel in these fights is not a big deal. Also, we could sub Mages or Archers or more Footmen etc, because this is the Troll Cyborg who our Hero would eventually kill anyhow. Unit loss could be just Footmen if one really desired. I just never seem to be losing enough Archangels in these fights to ever fall behind in production as I am making 3 per hour and stockpiling 10+ because I never need to use Troll Cyborgs etc and have a lot of population room for the units I do use. I do prefer Archangels over other units because their overall HP allow them to easily survive the AOE that gets cast during the battle, where other units can often be taken down by 2 AOE spells hitting them, such as Mages.

The basic process of the battle will unfold with the Succubus firing off her spells as fast as they are ready, which hurts her in a way because the AOE ones are not serving any purpose towards killing our Hero and stop her from firing her weapon, meaning she loses ground healing by skipping attacks. She attacks our center Footmen with her weapon and our Footmen and her Troll Cyborgs meet in the center for a front line stall battle. We dump our Mystical Blast, Demon Blast and Shattering Light at her as soon as they are ready. If we do not have Shattering Light and we have Deep Purple or Mad Bones, we still cast it as we are not attacking anything, so we might as well cast it as also at her units, and perhaps it will hit her as well. We dump our spells as fast as we can at her and after 4 to 5 revolutions of casting, she dies. We are at full health, the Troll Cyborgs are dead and we quickly switch our spell efforts to killing off the rest of her surviving units, typically her Archangels. Between our spells and our remaining Mages and Archangels, we quickly wipe the entire field out and wonder why this ever seemed to be a hard battle. Instead of thinking how awesome the End Game Succubus used to be, we laugh at her low HP and thank the Gods we are a melee class with high HP and the same Spell access as she has.

Thanks for reading,

I thought this was an interesting read. I haven't yet tried it because I don't use Archangels, but I may give it a try at some point.

Where was this aquired? Besides my summer reading this was interesting >.<

I put a link up at the top. It's from the Little Empire Wiki. Azyle had a bunch of good info about the game. I'm re-posting some of the articles that helped e out when I started. I recommend checking them out on the Wiki.

Oh, the wiki. My friend uses it for the Tasks! LOL noob. I'm kidding, but is the wiki helpful?

Well there are articles like this over there. It was really the only place before this forum where I saw people discussing the game. There doesn't appear to be that many active contributors right now, but there are some good reads especially by Azyle.

You should really post these under the "Guides" subforum

You're right. Unfortunately I can't move them, but if I do happen to post more I'll post them accordingly.

Ohhhh. I may check it out. I usually learn on me own. & let me tell you.. Tasks are a B***h w/o help! Haha. Thank gosh I've done all for my level.