Team Battle Mode: Basics

Team Battle Mode can be a lot of fun and challenging but it can also be a real pain sometimes. If you are new to the game or new to the latest update which introduced Team Battle Mode, please read the basic premise of it on my first post.

This post will strictly be about the goings on of the battlefield itself. The objective of this post is to give some guidance to players who are just starting out in Team Battle (or Friend Battle), so I will make a lot of generalizations. It will most likely be irrelevant to players who have already pounded their way into the top 1000 global ranking. The very nature of going head-to-head against other player teams is dynamic so there is no way to lay out flawless game plans. The only thing I can do is call attention to some general guidelines and ideas to help you formulate your own battle strategy.

By the way, for the people who are copying/translating my content (this post or any other post) for view somewhere else: I don't mind that you're sharing the knowledge to a wider community, but do me the courtesy of linking the info back to my page, please. I spend a lot of time writing this stuff and would appreciate the link back for acknowledgment. Thanks.

Rank

When the global ladder is reset, you will not have a rank and it will just show you as --. Your first battle game will determine your rank and your score (which always starts at 1000). If you started playing team battles very late after the ladder reset, you may be "--" rank for a long time before you fight your way into the top 50,000 ranks. You only get a number rank if you're in the top 50,000.

Ranks update about once every 5 minutes so if you don't see your rank change right away, wait a few minutes and check again. Your rank will reset every Monday at 06:00 Japan Standard Time. You can see both the global rank on this screen and how you stack up against everyone on your Friends list. Your badge type/icon will change according to how many points you gain throughout the week (click on the ? button to see the ranking badges). Ranking matters a lot as it affects the opponent you will be up against.

The Opponent AI 

The opponent player that you face is determined in part by your global ranking and in part by your score, though the exact algorithm I cannot say for sure. If you are just starting the week's ladder unranked, the server may put you up against some opponents of variable difficulty because they don't exactly know where you stack up yet. It's still very early in the game so I don't have any solid details to confirm this but in my own game play this appears to be the case.

From what I can tell so far, the difficulty of your opponent relies on 2 things: (1) the ranger team and the ranger's stats, which is obvious, and (2) the opponent's AI, or artificial intelligence. At low ranks, when you are going up against other low ranking players, the AI will be quite easy, simple and predictable. They'll use fewer items, upgrade slowly, and deploy rather slowly as well. I'll update when I know more definitively, but for now I will generalize that as you gain points and break through to new badge levels, the AI steps up its game. The AI seems to tune higher and sharper in terms of its decision making. You'll find that at higher ranks, the computer will make marked determinations on how to open the game based on the layout of the path and what you are doing. When it decides to upgrade minerals and when it determines is the time to rush in to attack you are active decisions, not predetermined steps. One of the things that will make or break the game is timing of item usage. At very high ranks, the AI will accurately determine when to unleash items on you to maximize utility and ruin your day. At lower ranks, the AI uses items pretty poorly, and you can turn that into an advantage.

As dinky as the game may seem at times, I must applaud the developers on their tuning of the AI for Team Battle Mode. It's really well done and it plays impressively. So far, I haven't noticed any glaringly obvious robot moves like "if this happens then the computer always does this."

Path Length

The battlefield length varies from battle to battle and the one you get is selected at random. The length of the path affects your entire strategy. In the long paths you will most likely be able to safely upgrade minerals 2 or 3 times before you have to deal with any serious onslaught of enemy units. In the short path, it's much more of a gamble. If you get units out first, you might be able to snipe the enemy tower before the opponent AI has a chance to react. If the enemy immediately deploys units but you are upgrading minerals, you could be dead before you know what's happened. 

The long paths favor faster moving rangers as well as rangers with a very long attack range. You have the opportunity to spread out your team over a lot more space so that your back row units are less vulnerable to enemy splash damage.

On the other hand, short paths tends to allow slower moving power hitters to shine more. Long range units are still valuable, but the slow, hard hitting rangers get a chance to do some serious damage in the short path. It is important to keep this in mind because for short paths you'll most likely want to apply a lot of offensive pressure on the opponent so that they are forced to spend their minerals defending rather than building up a lot of minerals to deploy big hitters like KSM. By the way, you should always be wary of enemy splash rangers on ultra short paths. The splash radius can be bigger than you thought and your tower may be taking damage even if you're not standing right outside of it.

Short paths lend themselves to really fast tower sniping. If you are quick and your team runs fast, you can also do it with long paths, but short makes this obviously easier. You can strategically plan to use your items in quick succession to overwhelm and obliterate your opponent on a short path.

Like in single player mode, in every PvP team battle you must make a decision on whether you want to battle near your tower, in the middle of near their tower. The length of the path and the composition of your team's rangers will help you determine that.

Item Usage

Supposing all rangers, treasures, upgrades, and friends are equal, only 2 things set you apart from the opponent AI: the timing of your deployments and the timing of your items. Items can give you an upper hand if you use them carefully. If you have not read the quirks I found out about Ice shot and Meteor, check them out here. The kicker about items in team battle is that the opponent can use them, too, and now we will have to consider how they can be used both offensively and defensively.

Ice Shot 

If you thought ice shot was strategically important in normal single player mode, it is even more critical in team battle mode. While the opponent is frozen, gauge your team's status. At its current state, will your forces be able to overtake their front line? When the thaw happens, will your front line be safe? Should you upgrade your minerals to prepare for a huge push after the thaw? Or do you want to continually deploy more units to directly push your way through? This is likely to be the only few seconds you have to reconsider your strategy and make big changes if necessary.

Offensive: 

  - Combine tornado with ice shot to freeze the opponent right at their tower to maximize on splash damage. This is a very strong combination to use when both teams are equally matched to push things in your favor. This is also a "rush" tactic you can try to use at the beginning of a match to stunt the opponent's army and try to snipe the tower. After you tornado and ice shot, your rangers will camp outside the foot of the enemy tower. Splash rangers will splash the tower down if you can hold that position. 

  - Used alone, you can optimize by deploying a lot of splash rangers to quickly clean out the opponent's front line defenses. Ice shot is great when the opponent has a lot of rangers sitting clumped up at the front, less ideal when their army is all spread out.

Defensive:
  - If the opponent has slaughtered your front line and you need to regroup, you can use ice shot to buy you a few seconds, but only do this if your back row attackers are healthy and plentiful so you don't waste this precious item without doing any damage on the opponent.
  - If you are desperate to get back in the game, you can use ice shot to try to tear down the opponent's tanking rangers, then when ice shot wears off, follow up with invincibility to buy yourself even more time to keep building up your army.
  - When your opponent uses invincibility, you may want to consider using ice shot if your team is not looking healthy enough to survive through it. It will prevent the opponent from scoring kills while they're unkillable but it will also mean that you cannot maximize on damage. Use this time to rally more forces or upgrade your minerals to face them again once invincibility wears off. This is a sort of desperate measure, though.

Reactive:
  - If the opponent uses ice shot on you, in most cases the appropriate response is to use invincibility. In fact, I personally use invincibility when the ice shot duration reaches about half (few seconds in). Your tanking rangers likely won't die just a couple of seconds into an ice shot, and then you gain the advantage of using the last few seconds of invincibility once you thaw. This way your rangers don't die and they will stick around to help return fire while reinforcements arrive after the thaw. Remember, a front line ranger even with 1 HP + invincibility is still unkillable for the duration of the item, so why waste it being frozen and unable to attack? In fact, you need those rangers post-thaw more than ever because the enemy army is bigger after the ice shot.
  - When your opponent uses ice shot on you, should you use ice shot back on them? This makes for a few frozen seconds when no one is attacking anyone, and the only viable things you can do while you wait are deploy more units for later use, upgrade minerals, deploy friends, or use meteor. My opinion is that ice shot is better strategically used when you can deal damage. There are other ways to defend against being frozen, like tornado (for long paths) and invincibility. Or if you're feeling confident, just let them have at your front line for the few seconds and keep doing what you are doing without wasting any items to defend.

Meteor
Meteor does damage to all enemy units in an area-of-effect, so be sure that the enemy is in a position where the meteors will land on them. By the way, from max distance, meteor will completely miss Dancer King Boss, so that's pretty cool.

Offensive:
  - Try and avoid using meteor early in the game because with fewer units on the field, you're kind of wasting the potential damage that meteor can do. Later on in the game when there are tons of enemies on the screen, meteor can really do enormous damage.
  - About a second after the opponent uses tornado on you, meteor is performs amazingly as all 5 of the meteors that come screaming down are guaranteed to hit some of the enemy rangers passing by. After you are swept backward, the opponent's rangers will start to move forward and that's when you should unleash meteor to hit all of them.
  - Don't use tornado on the opponent then unleash meteor. Doing so will likely result in the enemy only getting hit by 2 out of 5 meteors, wasting 3. If you hit tornado and then immediately hit meteor, your meteors will hit 0 units. :(
  - Combining meteor with invincibility can make a very successful push because it would have weakened the opponent and make them ripe for taking with your unkillable army. If you are having a standoff in the middle of the road, a move like this can be decisive.

Defensive:
  - Meteor isn't the most helpful for defensive plays, but if you combine it with a well-placed ice shot, you could weaken the opponent's rangers.

Reactive: 
  - When the opponent uses meteor on you, you have a split second to decide whether you want to use invincibility or not. If you do, you can save low health rangers in the back of your team. This is particularly helpful to players who use rangers like any of the Cony series (except maybe maxed SoCo), Opera James, Sindy, Ola Brown, etc. They're too scrawny to survive 1-2 meteor hits. If the bulk of your attackers are low HP and long range, you really should try to protect them with invincibility before the last couple meteors descend on them.

Tornado
Offensive:
  - To truly use tornado offensively, you will likely use it in combination with another item. However, you can use tornado to "re-stack" the enemy rangers to maximize your offensive splash damage. This is particularly useful against opponents with a bunch of KSM, Abdula or Sol (heavy hitting, slow attack speed, short range). If your rangers are fast moving or the path is short, after you tornado they'll all be stacked up and you have the opportunity to hit them. If the enemy front line rangers are fast moving (like Hip Hop Brown) and it's a long path, then their front line will burst to the middle of the path with no backup support so you'll have the opportunity to snipe their front rangers and then deal with the heavy hitting back row alone. You must time it appropriately!
  - As mentioned above, when the opponent uses tornado on you, it's a very good time to use meteor to hit the most number of enemy units. Resist the urge to tornado the opponent when they use it on you unless it is really absolutely necessary to survive.
  - Using tornado and following up with invincibility right as the teams are about to meet again is a strong move that will take advantage of "re-stacking" the opponent team.
  - You can do funny things that are a little bit offensive and defensive by timing it so that the tornado will blow them back at the same time as a big hit landing. If you're lucky, you'll hit them at half health and maybe buy another second of knock back.

Defensive:
   - Used alone, tornado by itself is a stall tactic. You buy yourself a little bit of time while the enemy walks back over to you, but if they have you cornered at your tower and splash is hitting the tower, blowing them back is a good option.

Reactive:
  - When the opponent uses tornado on you, should you use tornado on them? Maybe; it depends. If the opponent did it because you're getting close to their tower, you might be better off using tornado because you have the better army and you are pushing forward at that time. You don't have to, but it is a viable option if you think you can finish them off by doing so. If you are fighting a losing battle and the opponent pushes you back, then tornado against the opponent might save you. Whatever you do, don't tornado as soon as they use it unless you are purposely doing so for a reason. Especially if you are doing it to stall -- tornado the enemy when they are about to reach your front line to give yourself maximum time. If you both use tornado at the same time, all you have achieved is equalized both your positions to meet in the middle, which doesn't really gain you any advantage.

Invincibility
Offensive:
  - The benefits are obvious for offensive moves. The few seconds that your troops are invincible can make it very easy to push through a tough front. The added bonus of invincibility besides retaining your army for a few seconds is that you will likely kill quite a few enemy rangers and you'll acquire a lot of minerals for the kills, which enables you to deploy more rangers :D
  - Used at the beginning of a stage, you can quickly overwhelm and snipe the enemy tower
  - Used near the end of the game when you have amassed a huge army, you can use it to attempt to overwhelm the opponent. The only thing I must urge players is to practice keeping track of which items the opponent has already used. If you are using invincibility as an overwhelming offensive tactic, make sure that the opponent has already used their ice shot and their invincibility otherwise you may shoot yourself in the foot by using yours early.

Defensive: 
  - As mentioned above, invincibility is fantastic to use when you are in trouble, or when meteor is going to rain on your scrawny back row, or when ice shot is used on you. Of the three situations, I think using it during ice shot is the best defense because the potential to break you is highest during ice shot.

Reactive:
  - When the opponent uses invincibility, should you also use invincibility? I generally dislike using invincibility when they use it because I like to use invincibility to my advantage whenever possible. I also don't like to use ice shot as a defensive item because ice shot is also such a fantastic offensive item. When the opponent uses invincibility, I try to do one of two things instead: (1) use tornado if it's a very long path as a stall tactic. (2) Spam deployment of tanking rangers to hold the front. All invincibility means is that the opponent is unkillable for a few seconds. If you reinforce your front line, then there's nothing to fear. Once their invincibility is over, you can even retaliate with some items of your own to hit even harder.

Other Considerations

Should I upgrade minerals during a Team Battle? 

    This greatly depends on your production upgrade status. At level 80 and above, you can surely get by without upgrading minerals for many, many of the matches. For most of the lower AI matches, the computer is busy upgrading minerals and deploys nothing at the start. You can easily gain an advantage by deploying first. In the higher AI matches, the computer does not upgrade minerals and goes straight to deployment 9 out of 10 times in my experience. You are forced to defend if you upgrade minerals. 

    I found much higher success in not upgrading minerals at the start, and instead doing it when it is safe and I have minerals to spare during the match. Just don't forget to upgrade because the longer the battle drags on, the more advantageous having faster minerals will be.

Should I mimic the opponent's actions?

    No, you really shouldn't. By doing so you are doing everything it does except slower, and thus are at a disadvantage. Besides, the AI does not have to show you all 5 of its rangers. It is possible that (and I have personally seen) the AI deploys 4 rangers for most of the game, then later in the game suddenly deploy a 5th ranger to surprise you. You should go in with your own game plan, not follow the computer.

How is the opponent able to deploy so many rangers so fast? 

   If the computer does not upgrade minerals at the start, they will spend the initial set of minerals on 2-3 rangers right from the start. In addition, if they kill any of your units, they will gain minerals for the kills. And finally, the mineral max limit of the opponent player may be higher than yours and they might have started with more. The opponent may also have their rangers mastered, which means the ranger's cooldown is halved.

Ola Brown is killing everything. What can I do? 

   Ola Brown is very good and he tends to pop out super early in the fight because he's so cheap to deploy. But luckily, he's so scrawny that if the wind blows, he dies. You must take to the offense early against a team with Ola to prevent the opponent from forming a good defense for him. Tornado is also a great way to "re-stack" the enemy units so you can splash him to death. Also, from max distance, you can hit Ola Brown with the meteor item, so if you are planning on a big push, use meteor to weaken the Ola Brown troupe first, then push in. Not gonna lie, Ola Brown in any team makes things tougher. Ola Brown together with Hip-Hop Brown is a very rough combination to break, too. There's no silver bullet, I can only offer you strategy advice.

KSM is killing everything. What can I do? 

   KSM costs a lot of mineral to deploy and his cooldown is long, so the best defense against a team with KSM is a fast offense. Keep the opponent from deploying him at all by forcing it to defend as early as possible. If you let them deploy a whole stack of KSMs, then you're in trouble. If you have to fight your way through to him, remember that KSM has a rather wide hit radius but it's up in the front where your tanking rangers are. His hits will not be able to touch longer range units like Opera James, Sindy, Cony and Boss. If you must abandon your strongest short range attackers (like Dwight and Dumpy) in favor of long range attackers (like Cony, Opera, Alice, Lia, Boss, especially Dancer King) midway through the fight just to deal with KSM, do it. Strip your deployment down to only your tank ranger and your long range attackers and you will not have to fear KSM's frontal assault. Just like in single player mode, you can also stall with a couple of lowbies if you deploy them in a continuous steady stream while your long range attackers have a killing spree. Need to review which rangers have a long range? Check this post for details.

.............................

This text-filled post has gone on long enough. I may add more as it comes to me, but as far as basics, I think that covers it! 

New Battle Modes Available

After an extra hour of extended maintenance to prepare for the new battle modes, we are finally able to play the game. Unfortunately, the Versus Battle mode is currently plagued by network and ranking server connection errors. Practically every time you try to get to a new screen, or if you finish a game and try to get back to the battle screen with ranking info, the unable to connect error rears its ugly head at us.

Nevertheless, I persisted along with many, many other players to try to get a head start on the global ranking. Many of my questions were answered!

The Versus Modes

Ranking:

Everybody wins

• All players who participate in the ranked Team Battle mode will receive a ranking. Your points/score determines your global ranking. [Note: battling your friends will not help you in the global ladder.]
• Players begin at a score of 1000.
• If you win the battle, you will gain points and your rank will rise.
• If you lose the battle, you will lose points and your rank will fall. 
• The amount you gain/lose depends on the ranking of the opponent you battle (pretty sure), and in small part your winning streak.
• The global ranks are reset on a weekly basis (on Monday 6am JST) 
• The rewards are really worth it to play this battle mode. Top ranked first place, second place and third place receive a whopping 1000 rubies as a prize. Lower rankings aren't bad either. 
• You will also gain experience (for your rangers, not for the player) and coins when you win battles. 
• Note that battles against friends on your friend list will not affect your score and therefore has no impact on your global ranking.
• The bottom of the Team Battle screen will tell you how long until the global ranking will be reset and winners will be determined. 

Team Battle Mode 

• Your "real player" opponent's rangers appear to be AI (artificial intelligence) controlled. There is NOT an actual person playing and controlling the opponent deployments in real time at all. (Boo...)
• Team Battle requires "Special Feathers" which are the rainbow colored feathers. You regenerate 1 special feather every 30 minutes. You can purchase additional feathers with rubies. As with the regular feathers, you also get a new set of 5 each time you gain a player level.
• Somewhat fortunately or unfortunately depending on which point of view you take, you are free to take whichever rangers you please into combat. I'm pretty sure that your opponent's team is based on who that player has chosen in their team at that moment in time, too. 
• The length of the battle path is determined at random.
• Pretty sure that whatever treasure your opponent possesses will be applied to their rangers in battle.
• Whatever upgrades (mineral, max limit, tower health and missile strength) you have will apply in battle mode. 
• You may use items and friends/sidekicks in battle mode. 
• It is possible to hit Hurry Up mode which will just cause the lightning bolts to happen. I believe it also causes all units to become half health to speed up the fight. I don't think it makes the opponent deploy like crazy the way single player mode does, though. 
• So far, I don't believe you can trigger Thomas in this mode. I also don't think you can trigger Gold Brown.
• There is no clear bonus roll when you win a team battle. 
• When you win more than once in a row, the game will tell you what your winning streak is. A low streak gives you no bonus points, a high streak (10 or more) gives you a 2 point bonus. But most of the points depend on whether you were matched against a player who was close to your rank.
• You may only battle each Friend once per day. But you can farm up as many Friendship Points as you have Friends. 

Battle with Friends Mode

• You can access Battle with Friends mode by clicking on Friends in the main screen, then click on the Friend's picture, then click on the Battle with Friend button. 
• Your Friend also appears to be controlled by AI, so it's not your friend actually playing on the other end (Boo.)
• The length of the battle path is determined at random.
• Whatever upgrades (mineral, max limit, tower health and missile strength) you have will apply in battle mode. 
• You may use items and friends/sidekicks in battle mode. 
• You win 50 Friendship Points and personal bragging rights when you defeat a Friend in this battle mode. 
• There is no clear bonus roll when you win a team battle. Battle with Friends is considered a practice for Team Battle. 
• You don't need any feathers to battle your friends.
• If your friends choose to battle you and fail to be victorious, congratulations! You will receive 50 friendship points in the mail for doing nothing other than being absolutely boss mode. Too bad it doesn't tell you in the mail whose pride you hurt today :) 

My Current Impressions

First of all, from the ranking rewards, it would appear that everyone will get 20 rubies for the weekly global ranking system so it would be worth it to buy some rubies because you'll get 20 at the end of the week anyway. It doesn't hurt to participate! You mostly battle people close to your rank score, so you won't immediately be pitted against people who have insanely good rangers; but that said, ranking is no indication of how good that person is because "they" are not playing live on the other end, it's still AI. 

It would appear that in these new battle modes, long range units are incredibly powerful (Ola Brown, Dancer King Boss in particular). Once you get some meaty rangers to tank your front line, you need some nice long range units to stand at a distance and bomb away at the enemy. The opponent AI may decide to use items on you, so you should be prepared to respond. The one that is particularly dangerous in my opinion is enemy Ice Shot. Pretty much if they use Ice Shot, I respond with Invincibility almost immediately so that it negates whatever damage they will try to do while my units are doing nothing. You can deploy while frozen but your units will just sit at the foot of your tower until the Ice Shot wears out. 

Additionally, I would strongly suggest you go ahead and start upgrading your tower health if you have previously been neglecting this upgrade category. Since they took away Tower Repair, your tower is as healthy as it will ever be and there are no take-backs once you enter combat. 

While it's kind of disappointing that it's all AI controlled opponents, it's still kind of addictive because of what's at stake (glory, ranking & rubies). Mostly the fun of these battle modes is in checking out what you can do to respond to various team compositions and enemy formations. I haven't gotten bored with it yet. Try it out! It's pretty fun (when the server behaves). 

Endless Mode

• To get to Endless Mode, you hit the Start button the way you usually do on the main screen. Then instead of selecting a stage, click on the swirly portal on the map where it says "COMING SOON". 
• To play an Endless Mode stage, you must spend a "Special Feather" which is the new rainbow colored feather. It regenerates once every 30 minutes. You can also buy feathers with rubies. As with the regular feathers, you also get a new set of 5 each time you gain a player level.
• In Endless Mode only, it appears that non-speed type rangers incur a 50% longer cooldown "tax". Dancer King Boss who is normally (unmastered) on a 7-second cooldown is now just over 10 seconds in Endless. Ola Brown who is normally (unmastered) on a 8-second cooldown is on a 12 second cooldown in Endless. My Lia is mastered, and her mastered cooldown is 2 seconds, but in Endless Mode her cooldown is 3 seconds. My mastered Xan's cooldown is 4 seconds but in Endless Mode his cooldown is 6 seconds. I believe that the cooldown of speed rangers remains untaxed, but it's pretty hard to tell since the CD is so low for speed rangers anyway. It's noticeably longer for the others. In my recordings, my mastered Hip-Hop Brown is roughly on a 1-2 second cooldown which seems normal for master level. This is a very important consideration for Endless Mode team selection. 
• Unfortunately, I haven't played much yet. It has a similar ranking system, though not a global ladder, with rewards like experience and coins, based on how long you last in battle. It's not a bad way to level your rangers if you have no interest in using special feathers for Team Battle.

New Stuff

The update gave us a lot of nice enhancements that we've been asking for as well as other shiny new things. They've greatly improved on some "quality of life" type of features. 

• When you log in every day consecutively, you will stack up and gain rewards for your good attendance. This is a weekly event and replaces our old "daily login bonus." You will be rewarded once you get your "clear" stamp for that day.
• Experience Booster item will grant you 50% more experience for some time duration (3 hours or all day, d pending on which you buy.) I expect most people will be using 500 Friendship Points to buy the 3 hour one. I don't know yet whether it stacks with Double Experience Day, but I would expect so. Once you buy it, you'll see the timer ticking away in the main screen.
• Player max level has increased to 99 from 80.
• Little banners now tell you when something "new" has been added to your game or if there's an event happening to make sure you don't miss anything.
• The Friend home screen is accessed by hitting the Friends button on the main screen, then clicking on your Friend's picture. It'll show you what rangers they have and what level they are as well as their Collection progress and Treasure progress. 

• If you click on your Friend's portrait in the stage selection map, you can access a list of your friends currently stuck on that stage, send them help and click to go to their friend home page.
• They finally fixed the display of tower health to be the actual tower health rather than maximum of 999999. Unfortunately, they have also taken away the indication of exact health on the enemy tower (likely because we were exploiting it to find out info they didn't want us to know... lol. Boo). 
• When your ranger has reached its absolute max level, it'll say that the ranger is "Master". It's not just a vanity title: Master rangers' cooldown is half of an unmastered ranger. This is a newly added bonus of reaching max level, and naturally more incentive for players to want to play more Gacha. 
• Friendship Point capacity has been raised from 990 max to 2000 max. 

• Ranger storage capacity has been increased from 100 rangers to 150 rangers. 
• The new "Invincibility Item" gives your tower and all of your rangers temporary invincibility (approximately 8 seconds by my count). 
• Auto Mode should make your life a lot easier grinding levels. Once you enter battle in a stage, you can hit the Auto button (located under the Pause button) and the AI will take over your deployment. You can still take over if you wish, or turn off Auto if you want to play yourself again. You must switch Auto mode on for every stage you enter, though. I'm not sure what the AI does to determine which ranger to deploy, but I guess it'll take some time to try and figure that part out.
• Under Settings, there's a new "Coupon" button but not sure what it is for yet. Maybe some localized promotional things will be placed here in the future.
• When you click on a team member on the main screen you'll be presented with its profile and the option to go to the level up screen. 
• There's a Skip button on the Gacha now. Yes, my prayers have been answered! Now we don't have to waste so much time spinning that dumb ball!
• We no longer get 10 friendship points if someone selects you as a friend so people with symbols prefixing their names can more or less drop that style. The mailbox now allows you to kindly reciprocate sending "help" troops to up to 50 people. 

Anyway that's it for now, I'm going back to furiously try to climb the global ladder. Competition is fierce so far. Leave some comments if you have something cool/neat/interesting to add. I'm going to say this right now because I know some of you out there are burning up about it: If you are commenting only to complain about how unfair the Team Battle mode is without any sort of constructive criticism, I will delete it. 

That said, I do hope that the new updates to the game has offered everyone something to do while we wait for more new areas. 

Fists of Fury: Attack Speed and Damage

Following on the heels of the attack range article, LINE Rangers台灣社團 members have created more great reference tables on attack speed to aid us in ranger comparisons. We have had this discussion before when we explored the Attack Speed & DPS differences and the treasure effects of Castle in the Sky. If you followed me through those posts, the math below will look familiar. The text below is a translated interpretation of the article, Attack Speed Measured: 40 Team Members.

    
    The article comes from: LINE Rangers台灣社團
    Authors: 小為, 楊濟安
    Revision: 小為
    Testing Team: 黃郁弘，楊濟安，小為，鈺

Contained within the box below is their article interpreted in English. 

The team at LINE Rangers台灣社團 worked to get the exact damage numbers for each ranger and was able to calculate the precise attack speed. If numbers are not your thing, then check out the link to the article for a pictorial representation of the rangers' attack speed. (From left to right, the ranger attack speed goes from slower to faster.) For more detail, read on.

Note: All data below are based on max level rangers and stats as of June 11, 2014.

  Column 1 is the ranger profile listed DPS in game

  Column 2 is the actual DPS once you account for the treasure bonus (Column 1 * 1.454546)

  Column 3 is the actual damage dealt to enemy tower in battle in a single hit

  Column 4 is calculated attack speed, explained below

  Column 5 is the ranger profile listed attack speed

Attack Speed Calculation

To explain how these numbers came about, let's take the example of Masked Moon:

  - Take Masked Moon to an enemy tower and recorded that one hit against the enemy tower produced 162,305 damage. 

  - Masked Moon's listed base damage in his profile (which is his DPS, damage-per-second) is 51,500.

  - Take into account the 45% increase in damage benefit from Castle in the Sky's treasure, which multiples base DPS by 1.454546. His actual DPS is 74,909. 

  ⇨Since we know his one-hit damage is 162,305, then we simply divide: 162305/74909 = Every 2.16 seconds, Masked Moon hits one time. This is the number we achieve in Column 4.

The authors comes to the same conclusion as I did: faster attack speed rangers are a bit more advantageous. The reasoning is as follows: Suppose you had 2 rangers' whose DPS is 100,000. The first one attacks once per 1 second, the other attacks once every 4 seconds. If both were attacking an enemy with only 50,000 HP left, the first ranger would kill it after one second and only waste 50,000 damage. The second ranger would hit it after 4 seconds, cause 400,000 damage but waste 350,000 damage. 

Damage Per Minute

Taking our understanding of DPS a step further, the authors have created a table which displays the accumulation of damage by a ranger over the span of one minute. Bear with us, all will be explained.

  Column 1 is the ranger profile listed DPS in game

  Column 2 is the actual DPS once you account for the treasure bonus (Column 1 * 1.454546)

  Column 3 is the latest cooldown for each ranger, in seconds. Cooldown is the time that must pass before you may deploy another ranger.

  Column 4 is the total number of seconds of damage that can be inflicted per minute. To illustrate, let's take KSM as an example. You can deploy KSM once every 15 seconds. 

     First deployed KSM may attack for a full 60 seconds

     The second deployed KSM may attack for 45 seconds

     The third deployed KSM may attack for 30 seconds

     The fourth deployed KSM may attack for 15 seconds

     ⇨60s + 45s + 30s + 15s = 150 seconds

  Column 5 is total accumulated damage per minute: Column 2*Column 4. For KSM, that's 188,363*150=28,254,450 damage.

  Column 6 is the total cost to deploy possible units per minute. 4 KSMs amounts to 890*4 = 3560 mineral

The objective of these tables is to show us the rangers with the highest continuous damage accumulation. It is now quite obvious that Dumpy wins in this category, inflicting 228.9 million damage per minute. 

To give you an idea of what 228.9 million damage can do, consider this. Stage 108's enemy tower has 15 million HP. In 60 seconds, Dumpys can destroy about 15 of those towers -- assuming that there is no travel time from the point of deployment to the target. 

The reigning splash damage accumulation goes to KSM (28.2 million per minute), followed by Abdula (21.3 million), then Ola Brown (18.2 million). Sorcerer Cony is fourth on this list! 

What's the point of the last column? If mineral regeneration is about 200 mineral per second, then you can generate roughly 12,000 minerals -- take into account some extra, because you recover some minerals every time an enemy unit is killed -- and you can use the last column data to pick out the appropriate team for your needs. 

Deep Breath!

That's a lot of numbers! I found the information contained within the attack speed tables (particularly the actual DPS column) to be really nice. And the amount of time necessary to record the damage per actual hit must have been tremendous. 

The damage done per minute is a really interesting way to apply the DPS concept for a bigger picture. Take it with a grain of salt, because in reality there's no way for short-range rangers to spawn and immediately begin attacking, and most of us won't be able to deploy rangers as soon as they come off cooldown with 100% precision. But the damage per minute exercise gives us some insight into how DPS and cooldown can play into amount of total damage we can be dealing. This is the first and only place I've ever seen this abstracted.

P.S. Why is does attack speed article contain 40 rangers while attack range only 39 rangers? Red Brown was added as a consideration for the attack speed article.

Mineral Upgrades Explained (Updated)

First of all I wanted to say that the Line Rangers community is pretty awesome. I met some really nice people over the course of playing this game and running this blog. Some of my posts were inspired by the things they've said or questions they've asked.

In addition, I am pleased to say that after contacting some extraordinary players who reside in Asia, they've given me permission to bring their research and analyses to the English-speaking Line Rangers community. These guys churn out content faster than I can attempt alone here. It's happened about twice already: I'd think of something I wanted to test and a day later they've already finished and published it. I'm sure you will agree that their findings are relevant and extremely well done.

Upgrading Minerals

When talking about mineral upgrades, we must first differentiate between:
    (1) mineral upgrades that are available with increasing player level, and
    (2) the mineral upgrades that are done during battle in a stage
For clarity, I'll be referring to the player level upgrades using coins as "production upgrades" and in-stage upgrades as "mineral upgrades".

As I mentioned in my basic battle strategies post, what you do with the first set of minerals at the start of a stage is crucial. When and how you upgrade your minerals can make or break your performance. Why should you upgrade minerals at all since it costs you precious minerals? Doing so does two distinct things:
    1. Increases the rate of your mineral regeneration
    2. Increases your maximum capacity of minerals

If you've ever wondered whether upgrading minerals was worth the time and the investment, then read on for the answer! Here we discuss the break even time for individual mineral upgrades, and for quick powerlevel-to-8 upgrades.

Or... TL;DR, if you read nothing else, read the 2 red bold texts within.

[Updated June 9, 2014: The original author has a supplemental article to address additional mineral upgrade possibilities after the issues raised in the Comments section.]

The Numbers: Pay As You Go

The information below is brought to us by members of LINE Rangers台灣社團 who created this article, entitled "Should you upgrade minerals to Lv. 8?," on AppGuru. These numbers relate to the "pay as you go" type of mineral upgrading during stage battle. Please click on the link if you wish to follow through the numbers and tables below. 
    Author: 楊濟安 
    Editor: 小為 
    Research Participants: 小為，尤俊杰，陳安安，ShawTim，楊濟安

The data collected is based on a player level 80 with fully upgraded mineral production. 

The first table shows the following data:
    Column 1 (black color): mineral level
    Column 2 (red): amount of minerals regenerated per second at that level
    Column 3 (blue): regeneration rate (minerals/second) increase per level 
    Column 4 (green): minerals gained per second between that level and mineral level 1

Interesting side note: The increase in the regeneration rate is not the same for each level. If it were, the blue column would all be the same #. Why must Line make things so complicated?

So from this table you can see that the amount of minerals you gain after you upgrade to level 8 is approximately 34 minerals per second, bringing the amount of minerals you can regenerate in 1 second up from 164 to 198. If you get 198 minerals back per second, how does that affect our deployment choices? 

The author figured out that if you pick Sol, Macho Moon, Xan, Opera James and Alice on your team, the amount of minerals you would need to generate per second in order to deploy all of these rangers back to back (as soon as their cooldown is over) is 275. Essentially with this team, you require more minerals than you can generate, resulting in times when you cannot deploy your rangers. Conversely, if you pick Glenn, Scott, Bella, Opera James and Alice, the minerals you need per second are 194, which almost fits perfectly. But when you consider also that you gain minerals each time you kill an enemy unit, you will eventually find that you have more minerals than you can spend, resulting in wasted minerals. No, I'm not suggesting that you punch in some numbers every time you make a team change, but it's something to consider if you are running into inefficiencies on a difficult stage. 

The second table shows the following data:
    Column 1 (black): mineral level
    Column 2 (red): mineral cost to upgrade one level
    Column 3 (blue): accumulated mineral cost to upgrade to that level
    Column 4 (green): seconds required to break even on cost of mineral upgrade for that level

This table shows that at level 80 if you upgrade minerals to level 8, it takes 3 minutes and 27 seconds to recoup the cost of the upgrades (3380 minerals). This is a significant finding because the cutoff for the Hurry Up phase is 3 minutes. If you do not expect to hit Hurry Up, then upgrading to level 8 has wasted more minerals than you have had time yet to regenerate. At mineral level 6, it takes just under 3 minutes to break even. Most stages take less than 3 minutes to clear, so you can safely conclude that you need only get up to level 5 or 6 to get the most out of your investment. 

Remember, this data is based on level 80 mineral production, and the rates may differ if you are lower. But the concepts highlighted by the study still apply. 

This is why knowing your strategy before starting is so important to winning a stage. For example, there are stages where you can afford to start off slowly and produce just what you need to hold the enemy off. You are upgrading minerals slowly in order to overwhelm the enemies later in the stage (such as stage 97, 98, 100). There are stages where you are just stalling, waiting for mini bosses to group up (108, 120) or biding time to a Thomas or otherwise strategically saving up your minerals and rangers to unleash at a critical point. If you want to optimize your use of minerals for that strategy, then you should definitely consider how much mineral you need and how much you can afford to invest in upgrades at any point in time. Every time you invest in a mineral upgrade, you are temporarily cutting production of rangers. If you want to get the most you can out of it, you should determine the safest time to pull this trigger, and how much time you will have to reap the benefits of the upgrade.

Supplemental Article: Powerleveling Minerals

Shoutout to reader Chun Lok, whose astute observations sparked the authors of the article to write a supplemental article. The addendum is here: Should you upgrade minerals to Lv. 8: Continuous Upgrade Edition. Please click on the article if you wish to follow along with the data in the new table. This method of upgrading is what I generally refer to in my blog as "powerleveling minerals."

The previous article described the situation where a straight upgrade to level 8 was not possible. The assumption of that piece was that the initial 1270 starting minerals were not used to upgrade minerals, therefore they isolated each upgrade as an independent consideration during battle. The new article, however, addresses specifically the situation where the player will power-level their minerals from level 1 to level 8 back-to-back at the start of the stage. The condition of the experiment is for level 80 mineral production and level 80 mineral max limit.

Table columns 1, 2, 3 and 4 should look familiar as they were in the first article. They are: 

    Column 1: mineral level
    Column 2: amount of minerals regenerated per second at that level
    Column 3: minerals gained per second between that level and mineral level 1
    Column 4: accumulated cost to upgrade to that level 
    Column 5: time to pay off cost of that level, in seconds (Column 4/Column 3)
    Column 6: upgrade time to that level, in seconds. Note that level 2 and 3 require 0 seconds because it is sufficient to use the initial 1270 minerals to upgrade.
    Column 7 (highlighted yellow): total play time required to break even (Pay off time + upgrade time)
    

From the last column's numbers, you can deduce that if the stage requires less than a minute to clear, then not upgrading at all is the most efficient. For stages taking longer than 2 minutes, you will reap gains out of upgrading to level 8. 

The author stated that in practice even with nonstop tapping of the upgrade button, level 1 to level 8 took him 16 seconds, not the 10.98 seconds that was predicted in the table. (It took our reader 11.77 seconds, which is closer). There is some loss of efficiency between the reality of gameplay and ideals with which the table was calculated (assuming you could hit the upgrade button as soon as you had enough minerals, which in reality would be very unlikely). So there are obviously going to be some discrepancies in the break even points of both this article and the first article. We should treat them more as a reference/guideline, not hard rules. Armed with this information, you'll ultimately have to decide for yourself which strategy is most effective: 

1. Don't upgrade, directly deploy rangers
2. Upgrade a level, then deploy rangers
3. Upgrade all the way to level 8 before deploying any rangers

Player Mineral Levels

Finally, I wanted to just mention that if you upgrade your mineral production rate with coins, you are effectively increasing the rate of mineral regeneration outside of battle. Let's assume for example that you're player level 75 and that in battle your mineral level 8 gives you 185 minerals per second, meanwhile you have spent 2500 minerals in order to get to level 8. If you spend coins to upgrade your mineral production once, you will regenerate 185 minerals per second at mineral level 7, effectively saving you from spending a bunch of minerals to upgrade that last level while in battle.

Many players say they don't think that spending coins on increasing the mineral max limit is important, or not as important after a certain level. That's a little bit true and false. Consider Bernard, who costs 1000 minerals to deploy at level 80. He's a tanking ranger, so unless you start the stage with 1000, you won't be deploying your tank! Yes, you can get by with less and then upgrade minerals in the stage to eventually raise the max capacity. But let's not forget that you always start the stage with a full set of minerals. If you had the choice of starting the stage with 1270 minerals instead of 900 minerals, wouldn't you want to start with more? If you start with more, you can either get a head start on mineral upgrades or you might be able to deploy rangers. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide whether it's worth the coin-sink to raise the starting maximum. If you twisted my arm, I'd say put your coins into production first, then mineral max, but I certainly would not ignore the mineral max limit category.

This was a lot of text. Hope it was helpful information to everyone! Special thanks to contributors to the discussion & article authors!