Difficult Stages - Stage 53

The original inspiration for this blog was born from the really difficult levels of LINE Rangers. The game starts off very easy. I remember laughing my head off at how funny the rangers were just bouncing across the screen, then somewhat violently dispatching the enemy units. The first 25 levels are quite doable as long as you follow the basic rules: Upgrade your minerals, deploy your rangers as soon as you have enough minerals, and keep repeating until you win.

From stages to 30s to 40s, the stages vary a little. Most are quite doable. A couple are challenging and start to tune your head into thinking how to best deploy your team lineup, how to best use the critical first bunch of minerals, and whether your team's ranger types are best suited for the enemies you are facing.

In the 50's stages, you really start to hit a wall. Most people will likely grind some levels to upgrade their mineral production, max minerals, etc. as well as farm some more useful rangers to put in their team, or simply raise the Exp of their existing team. The further you get in the stages, the more the game will vary for you in difficulty based on your own team members. If you've been lucky with the GACHA machine, you may have some very useful rangers that may trivialize some stages. If you are playing with very standard rangers, it won't be impossible to proceed but it will take some practice, some grinding, and sometimes a little bit of luck.

I honestly don't remember the first level that I found hard but I do recall the first level that really stumped me and that is without a doubt Stage 53. What I describe below is how I would personally attempt this stage. It is not the only way, but hopefully gives you some ideas to chew on.

Stage 53 starts off slowly and the pathway is quite long (picture is zoomed out to show the entire path). You certainly have enough time to spend your initial set of minerals on upgrades and doing so will make the next part of the stage much easier to manage. Just allow the enemy zombie kid make its way to your tower until he is about 3/4 of the way there. Depending on how far along you upgraded your max minerals and mineral production from the Upgrade screen, you should be able to get 4-5 mineral levels before the zombie kid gets too close. Deploy your first health unit as soon as you have the minerals to do so.

This stage has 2 main problems for you. One is the continuous stream of zombie kids. They do significant damage to anyone in melee range and when they start to stack up in front of your tank/health unit they can destroy your health unit in mere seconds. The second problem is the blue mage in the back. They fire from range so you can't deal with them until you kill all the zombies. They deal pretty heavy damage too.

So with your first health unit out, and several zombies coming at him, you need to deploy some attacks to take them out before they overwhelm your tank. The reason you want to deploy the tank out when the zombie is 3/4 way to you is to leave yourself room to deploy your ranged attackers. Don't bother deploying any melee or close-range splash rangers. If you got a Pew from Stage 51, I wouldn't bother with him in the beginning. Your best bet is to get some rangers out (like Cony or Manager) so they can fire at the zombies from a safe distance. If you happen to have a fantastic melee unit (such as Honey from the 100 invite reward), she can help, but she's costly to make and she may die very quickly. When your missile is ready, don't hit it right away. Make sure you get 4 or 5 zombies bunched together and make sure that the blue mage in the back has stopped moving. That way, your missile will hit them all. With any spare cash, continue to upgrade your minerals. Continue to deploy health units in a steady stream and send your rangers out. If you need to use a tower repair, ice, or tornado item, now is the time. Anything that will buy you time to deploy your attackers will help here.

Once you break through the initial pack on your doorstep and kill the first blue mage, continue to deploy health units, ranged attackers and if you have any balance, splash or speed rangers, you can deploy those, too. You need to battle the rest of the stream of enemies about midway down the road, so supplying a steady stream of health units is important to keep pushing.

 By the time you make it past the 2nd blue mage, you're just about home free! Keep doing what you've been doing and you should have the tower down in no time.

Some of the difficulty in Stage 53 is that a lot of people soar through stages 1-52 with not much issue, and it isn't until this stage that they realize composition of your team matters.  I won't say you can't, but if have an all close-range attacking team, you will run into a lot of problems at 53 and beyond. It's time to invest in a very good ranged attacker, and farm the older levels to get one if you must. Magician Cony is ok for this, but because her attack speed is Slow, she's not ideal. Having both Cony and Manager is a better bet. Ballerino James is a balance unit but he does attack from a decent range away from the melee fray, so in a pinch, he is alright, too.

Comments & questions welcome!
More to come.... Stage 57 next time.