I didn’t notice this on the first stages of war, but now that my adversaries are more proficient in the game, I’m feeling a huge handicap on the Levyr race. The reason is simples: it’s easy for Utopians and Renegades to build a cheap fleet that will cause great damage on a strong Levyr fleet.

• If you are Utopian, take a fleet with lots of Samurai and Raptor and clean up the very week Levyr light units. Without cannon fodder, you’ll only need some other unit to take the win. Build lots of Krill (cheap and with no rare resources) and if you don’t win you’ll surely cause huge casualties
• If you are Renegade, build lots of Toxic. Toxic are an easy to get light unit and I usually go against fleets with 500-1000 toxic, that will easily obliterate any Levyr unit. Combine with panther to remove cannon fodder and another unit for zone control and you’re done

There’s no harm on having this kind of behavior, the problem is that the game is unbalanced. Utopians and Renegades can’t build a fleet specially designed one for another. And Levyr can’t build a fleet specially designed for any race. I believe that we need some adjustments on the Levyr race… we have to think about it.

It seams that although some have predicted the supremacy of Death Squadron, things are still quite on dispute. Relic Wars is on a new stage, no rest for Orion’s Belt troops out there. It seams that a major coalition had being formed to attack Death Squadron. A major fight is being held at a relic:

Death Squadron still hold the 12 relics, but how long will it take for them to loose one? One of the major strengths of DS is their ability to organize themselves. I have never seen other alliances with this degree of organization. I believe that the main reason is that managing war takes time, and the majority of players want to play the game at a slower pace. They want to participate, but want others to manage the logistics. I’m one of those.

There may be a lack of management, but I still want to help. I’ve made several attacks on DS on the past, but I’ve been left alone for a while, and that was great for rebuilding my armies. Now I want to help the resistance, and with some degree of success. I may play well on the board, but my latest offensive was futile, and made little damage. New war tactics are forming up each day on Orion’s Belt, and I didn’t adapt. My armies were crushed down by simple fleet combos and devastation.

Well, I won’t make that mistake again. It’s clear that it’s not a good idea to be on the universe with a big fleet. Big fleets can be slowed down, have their light units destroyed and fall down without handing damage at all. They may also be intercepted and target with a devastation. My strategy will now be different: I’ll create several small to average fleets. I’ll be a dangerous opponent with any of these fleets, but I may be crushed against a bigger fleet. Even so, instead of one opportunity I now have the ability to target several opponents.

And while doing that, even playing solo and not following the main war, I’ll give DS just another problem to solve, and more resources to allocate to another front. Time will tell if my brave legions will be successful or not.

We all know that every unit destroyed in a battle is stored in points for that battle. But I noticed that few give importance to these points, which count towards the overall ranking in the event of a battle in the universe, and tournaments both TD and regicide, mainly regicide, where the goal is to destroy the opponent’s flag, usually without getting many points.

An example is the group 6 Tournament Training day.
I lost my battle to JBarata and tsousa. But managed to eliminate their strongest units, with the points won at these battles I lost I managed to stay above them in the classification.

About the points of each unit destroyed, they vary from 0 to 100, where stronger units haver greater value than the weaker units.  So a tip: if the battle is lost, try to destroy as many enemy’s heavy units, this may help in the final classification.

I will not do a great analysis, just notice the last movements. When you attack don’t see just if the opponent can hit you in the next turn, but what he can do to hold your units in the same place. This is particularly important if your unit is in the limits of the board or if you are playing against units with paralyze.

I’ve been building up a master fleet to attack my enemies on the Relic Wars. I had a Queen and I spent a couple of weeks building the following fleet:

• ~550 Spider; 1550 Worm; 200 Stinger; 105 Heavy Seeker;  350 Seeker; 70 Raptor; 36 Eagle; 35 Vector and of course: the Queen

This is a very powerful fleet, even more powerful at my hands. As you can imagine, I bought at the auction house the Vector, Eagle and Raptor, to balance the fleet (considering Levyr weaknesses). They were supposed to give me the zone control I needed to open ways for all the raw power that I had.

When I started to move it, I made the error of bragging about it to an admiral of Death Squadron. I said to him that this fleet was unbeatable, no one could win against it, or at least I tought so. Death Squadron are a really organized alliance and they played very well their cards against my super fleet. First, they detected it under their radar when I was a system way from their relic. They started a combat with a dummy fleet to check me out. Then they gave up and fired a Devastation on my Queen. I suffered losses, but I had so many units that my Queen was still very strong.

Then they allocated one of their renegade warriors to battle my fleet face to face. This warrior attacked me with the following units:

• 53 Kamikaze; 300 Toxic; 137  Vector; 84 Doomer; 1100 Anubis; 550 Dark Crusader

This was a remarkable fleet. Many combat units were lost on this epic battle. I won the battle but with heavy losses. The most important one was the loss of my Queen. At the end of the match I had left:

• 378 Stinger; 432 Spider; 1300Worm

All the rest was lost. I tought about going back to my hot zone and rebuild, but I was attacked the next instance by this fleet:

• 1 Queen; 169 HiveProtector; 1201 Worm; 150 Heavy Seeker; 40 Interceptor; 40 Spider; 400 Seeker

Wow… Some heavy power on this Levyr brother. Without light units to use as cannon fodder I had quite the challenge. I didn’t think I’d make it, because my opponent could easilly bring to life many Maggots that would destroy me. I used Worms as cannon fodder and the fight was balanced until my opponent made a mistake, and then run away. Even so I lost againt many units, and at the end of the battle I was left with:

• 681 Worm; 268 Spider;  278 Singer

At this point I was able to retreat to my private zone. I could hunt down his queen, but my fleet was already very fragile, so I choose to go back and rebuild it. This epic journey was very cool and taught me one thing: no matter how strong is your fleet, it can be taken down! No stronger player can win against a well organized alliance.

On the last days we’ve been presenting the combat units that will fight on the Intergalactic Tournament. You can see all related posts about the units under the Intergalactic Units tag. Here are the unit analysis links:

• The Raptor Unit Analysis
• The Panther Unit Analysis
• The Kamikaze Unit Analysis
• The Eagle Unit Analysis
• The Vector Unit Analysis
• The Spider Unit Analysis
• The Fenix Unit Analysis
• The Taurus Unit Analysis

All these articles will give you a good insight about these units. On the next posts we’ll talk about specific tactics and deploy considerations.

Now it’s time to talk about the Fenix, a royal unit from the Intergalactic Units participating on the Intergalactic Tournament.

The Fenix is a majestic unit that strikes fear and respect on every player. It is very strong and capable of dealing heavy damage. It has a range of 4 squares, and the rebound ability. Both of these features allow the Fenix to possibly strike a unit 5 squares away. There’s nothing better than destroying your opponent’s units from far behind, and the Fenix excels at that. It’s a great unit for zone control and it should always be at the center of the action.

Being a heavy unit, it has movement penalties. Namely, it has a movement cost of 3 and only normal movement. It isn’t very fast but the long range attack compensates for it.  When you target an enemy group, your opponent will have a hard time protecting it. Because of the rebound, he can’t just put a cannon fodder group on the front  to protect. He may put a group one square ahead, this way the Fenix wouldn’t be able to use the rebound. But keep in mind that the intergalactic fleet has the Kamikaze, meaning that players can’t let open squares on front of their units (because of the kamikaze menace).

You should take extra caution protecting your Fenix against the opponent’s Kamikaze, Vector and Eagle. The Kamikaze because a small quantity of them will destroy your Fenix. The others because they have catapult, and that’s very hard to defend. And with the Fenix’s movement penalties, you can’t run away easily. Also, on the end game the Fenix will be an easy prey for the Spider! If the Spider paralyzes the Fenix it may be the end.

There are several players making friendly matches with the intergalactic units to prepare for the intergalactic tournament. The administrators are always a common choice for a practice match. We play well and we accept all friendly matches.

Now, about the match. It’s a challenging fleet to deploy. Normally there are some combat units that we choose to put on the front. This fleet has several of them: Fenix, Taurus and Vector. And there isn’t much space for them. All this units are great for zone control and normally they have to move a square to make a threat. Now, we can’t forget about the Kamikaze. Players usually put something strong on front of the Kamis to protect them. Usually that protection isn’t supposed to move. So, what should we choose for protection? Maybe Taurus?

The match itself was a blood shead! With so many powerful units defense isn’t really an option and players need to focus on destroying more units than the adversary, instead of just defending. I’m guessing that this fleet will provide great zone control challenges.

We’ll start the Intergalactic Units overview with the Raptor.

The Raptor is my favorite light unit, and one of my overall favorite units. It only costs 1 movement point and it has a range of 2, that means that it can hit almost anywhere. Because of the low movement cost and global movement type, it can also be used for protection as cannon fodder. But the major ability of this combat unit is hunting for other light units. It has a major bonus against other light units, that makes the Raptor the best light hunter on the Orion’s Belt Universe!

Experienced players know that the key to the game may be to eliminate all the opponent’s cannon fodder. And for that, the Raptor is one of the best weapons you can use. The Intergalactic Tournament has two light units: the Raptor and the Panther. It’ll be very important if you manage to take out the majority of your opponent’s light units. I imagine that there will be players that will focus their battle tactics on that, so you better prepare for that and properly defend your Raptor.

For the deploy, I’d leave 2 big groups of raptor on each side of the board, the redundancy is for protection. And I’d have several small groups up front to take on the enemy’s cannon fodder.