Hero Academy: Late Game

Posted by james m. toburen in iOS

Many Hero Academy matches are going to be neck-and-neck races to shatter your enemy’s gem, or a brutal exchange between units, leaving a definitive victor and a loser. But sometimes, that doesn’t happen. Let’s say you’ve managed to get most of your army on the field, upgraded the right units, placed your healers to provide good coverage of all your tanks and offensive units, and shielded your gems from enemy fire. While you’ve done this, your opponent has assembled an impressive army of his own. You’ve probably burned one of your x3 damage scrolls, if not both, and thrown your fireballs or life leeches at packs of enemies, hopefully doing some damage in the process. You’ve got two huge armies, staring at each other from across the battlefield. So, now what?

Late in the game, you’ve got two ways of winning. The first involves a battle of attrition in which you methodically plan exchanges between units, leaving you with a superior force (these games tend to last a LONG time, 45-65 rounds). This second relies on the application of brute force to destroy their gem. Today, I’m going to talk about exchanges between two large armies, and how to ensure your forces succeed in these situations.

Things are looking a bit crowded...

Winning the Long Battle

When both you and your opponent have more than half-a-dozen units on the board, it can be difficult to tell who’s winning. Time to count cards. What? Card counting isn’t just for poker and blackjack. Tally up the number of units you have in play (one for each of your units, and one for each applied upgrade); add to this the number of cards you still have in your deck. Compare this to your opponent’s units and remaining reinforcements. If your sum is higher, there’s a good chance you’re winning. After a tough exchange of units or a bad round, you can fool yourself into thinking your situation is worse than it is. If you’ve been picking off upgraded units and effectively healing your own, you could be in pretty good shape. You’ve still got more units waiting to arrive on the battlefield, while they’re completely empty!

Tallying up your army and reinforcements.

However, don’t get discouraged if your enemy has more resources available than you. Numbers don’t win games. You might have more units on the field, or a better position. Having several units waiting to arrive won’t help him if you apply immediate pressure. Getting units from the deck to the field takes actions, and every action used to reinforce is an action not being used to attack.

Exploiting a weakness in healing ensures an easy victory. If you kill two of your opponent’s healers, you’ve put them in a terrible place, especially if the remaining healer only has a heal range of two. Imagine covering both sides of the battlefield with a single healer. No fun, right? Now you have the ability to inflict damage on the top and the bottom of the board. Watch their healer run back and forth; it’s only a matter of time before you find an opportunity to pick off a valuable units, or the final healer! An army with no healing inevitably falls to an army with healing. The exception to this rule would be the Dark Elves. A single priestess can effectively heal a circle roughly 5 squares in diameter; couple this long distance healing with the life-leeching attacks of attackers with soulstones, and a Dark Elves player can hold up surprisingly well with only a single healer.

This battle may look close, but the Council has no healers left. Game over.

Keep your eyes out for another critical weakness: a lack of damage-dealing units. Each faction possesses only two high-damage units in the late game: Wraith/Ninja and Impaler/Archer. A necromancer or a wizard with a sword upgrade also deserves paying attention to. These are the units that can reasonably K.O. and stomp another unit with 5 actions. If you take them out,  your foe lacks the ability to inflict enough damage during a turn to kill a unit. In the late game, you often will only have one or two hard-hitting units, as they tend to be glass cannons, fragile and vulnerable to counter-attacks. So protect your damage dealers and focus on picking off your enemy’s.

Another game that Council can't win. No hard hitters remain.

In my previous articles, I stressed not applying suboptimal upgrades to your units. However, if you’re reduced to a single healer or a last hard-hitting attacker, throw every upgrade you can on it. Protecting a unit critical to the survival of your army supersedes the normal rules about upgrades.

Once tanks (knights or void monks) are out with the proper upgrades, they can be difficult to kill in one turn, especially if you’ve spent all of your x3 damage scrolls and fireballs. Without the ability to inflict massive damage in a single turn, you may feel tempted to completely avoid hurting these units. What’s the point? Their healers will just fill them back up to full. But sometimes you can kill a unit in two turns. If you take a shot or two, lightly damaging a unit but not severely wounding it, the other player might not take the actions to heal the unit back up to full. If so, pounce! Even better, scatter shots across several units with your archer or necromancer. Your superior range means you can injure several units without spending actions on movement. This forces your opponent to spend several actions healing several units, limiting their ability to go on the attack.

If an exchange of units becomes inevitable (and it will), keep your objectives in mind. Identify a unit or two on the opposite side that you’d like to see dead, and make it a priority to kill these high-value targets. Losing a few unimportant units won’t bother you if you can kill their last healer, or that huge damage-dealer.

Ending it fast

Don’t like the grind? You’ve got another option: destroy their gem. The gem is surprisingly fragile in the later stages of the game. Several turns of pressure against their gem will leave your opponent scrambling to cluster his units around the gem, fearful of where your next attack will come from.

First off, for this strategy to work, you must seize the assault boost square, or both of them if the map has two. Utilize a forced movement attack to remove your opponents from the assault boost and take it for yourself. Impalers and knights excel at this sort of thing. Make sure to protect your unit from the same sort of maneuver, as well as you can.

Take the assault boost squares to inflict massive damage to the gem.

Seriously. Take the assault boost squares and you can end the game in a turn or two.

If the assault boost square is within range of a powerful attacker on a power boost square, you may need to “hop on and off” the assault boost square: moving a unit on the square, taking several shots at the gem with a long-range attacker, and then retreating your unit. This isn’t ideal though, as you’re wasting two actions every turn on movement instead of inflicting valuable damage. Instead, try moving a junk unit to the assault boost square and letting your opponent think he’s won an advantage by killing it.

The x3 damage scroll gives you less of an advantage against an enemy gem than you think. More often than not, attacking repeatedly with the bonus from an assault boost square equates to the same amount of damage inflicted by using a x3 damage scroll. Save the scroll for when your opponent, desperate to protect his gem, leaves a valuable unit within range of your attacks. Kill the valuable unit, and then resume your assault.

Use mobile units, even with low damage, to attack the gem. When you control an assault boost square, even a lowly phantom can inflict significant damage. If you have enough units, and your opponent’s gem is damaged enough, it becomes possible to throw your units away, inflicting 1000-2000 damage before being destroyed. They’ll be so busy killing each unit that marches to its doom that they won’t be able to mount an effective counter-attack of their own. Keep the pressure on, and that gem will soon fall.

Once your foe realizes your target, they’ll surround the final gem in an attempt to protect it. But piling body shields around a gem isn’t really keeping it safe. March all the way to the rear if you must; any hole in his defenses could be your window to victory. And area-of-effect damage will quickly whittle away a gem’s hit points, whether it be from a wizard, a fireball, or even the lowly life leech spell (with an assault boost square, life leech will inflict 400 damage, or 700 with both squares).

Pay attention to your army. Recognize when something happens that prevents you from winning a war of attrition, such as losing your last healer or attacker. If that happens, go for broke! Switching from a prolonged battle to a gem-killing race can catch your enemy off guard. And once you commit to destroying the gem, you can’t quit halfway. The game has changed, and you need to do everything in your power to finish those gems off. If you destroy the last gem with a single crippled unit remaining, you still win the game. Don’t mistake a rout for a defeat until your last unit has been stomped.

Even a single unit can destroy the gem and win the game.