Upcoming Major Update 1

As predicted, Line Rangers really will be getting a major overhaul by way of additional game modes. These updates will be live on June 19.

In the splash screen it seems to be saying that the team battle mode is the player vs. player mode that was mentioned, but in the notice, it treats Team Battle and Friend Battle differently. Perhaps we will get to pick random people as well as battle our friends (in case some of us out there don't have any friends to play Rangers with!) So I think there is probably a random vs. random and a friend vs. friend mode.

Endless mode is pretty straight forward and I think it will add to giving people something to do while there are no new zones out. I think it'll be something like 1-3 stages for each zone where you battle with that area's set of enemies in a preconfigured formation. It should be interesting and challenging in its own way. What I think will be a nice twist is that Endless Mode will likely diminish the importance of splash rangers. Endless mode by definition does not have an end point, therefore splashing down a tower is a utility that we will not need. And when dealing with a continuous stream of enemies sometimes it is better to focus down on one enemy and get rid of it with a single target nuking ranger (such as Alice, Dumpy, Dwight, etc.) Splash rangers will still be very useful, of course, but maybe just less so.

And finally, items are changing! Following in suit of many other of Line Games, Rangers will soon get the option of an experience booster item. I really hope that it can be bought with a lot of coins and not a lot of rubies because I fail to see why anyone would sacrifice rubies for more experience. It will give the coin currency (especially those out there with millions sitting idle) some more purpose.

The tower repair item will be changed from a healing + temporary invincibility item to just a temporary invincibility item. I guess we better alter our strategies if our tower remains at the health that it was prior to item usage. This brings to light something important though: now you should probably start upgrading that tower health category that we've all been ignoring. Previously, tower repair really did make having loads of tower health unnecessary. You could practically get twice the tower health with this item. After the update, your tower is as healthy as it ever will be and you will just have to protect it fervently the first time.
[Edit: Although now that I think of it, what good will temporary invincibility do if the enemy is already at your front door? As soon as invincibility ends, they are still there killing the 1-2 rangers you can deploy at a time. You would pretty much have to pair invincibility with tornado to give yourself any hope of continuing combat, right? Unless it is invincibility for your rangers...? The verbiage of the notice leaves much to be desired.]

I don't know what "Friend's Home" feature is but if I had to guess, it might be something that gives us a peek into which rangers our Friends have left for us to use when we summon them. Right now it's a crap shoot whether we get 3 good rangers or 3 lowbies. Maybe this feature will tell us things like ranger name, ranger level, friend's playing progress, etc. That would be so helpful, so we can receive the most applicable set of rangers for the stage we are facing!

Anyway, that's all I have for now. This is all the information that was hinted for us. Will update more when I know more.

In the meantime, to prepare for the new modes, maybe we should all brush up on our strategies and plan our defenses for the new game modes! Maybe the new attack speed post will be useful because in PVP, speed does matter! There's plenty to read and learn on this blog. Please use the search bar at the upper left corner or the right sidebar if you're having trouble finding topics. You can also click on the labels at the bottom of each post to find all the posts that relate to that label name.

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.

Attack Range: A Picture Story

One of the finer details of the game which I quietly pointed out in my "Did You Know?" post months ago is that the attack range of different rangers vary. In my own gameplay, I mostly memorized their ranges in relation to each other, and that's how you'll find I described them throughout most of my posts. But our Taiwanese Line Rangers friends have now unmistakably shown us how ranges differ by putting 39 rangers on display! (Valid as of the time of this writing.) Contained within the box is their article interpreted in English.

    This article comes from: LINE Rangers台灣社團
    Authors: 黃郁弘，小為
    Photo Editor: 黃郁弘，小為
    Revision: 小為
    Testing Team: 鈺，楊濟安，Hsingju Wu，ShawTim Liu，黃名揚，標準兔，黃郁弘

In their article, "Attack Distance Measured: 39 Team Members," they took 39 4-star and 5-star rangers and with a ton of time, feathers, and screenshots later... lined them up in one incredible picture of ascending attack range. I'm not going to say anymore -- seriously, just click on the link! Scroll down and look at the picture. It tells a thousand words. Note: the testing group all have 100% treasure achieved in Skyscraper zone's Far-reaching Insight which increases attack range. 

Picture below is a translated table of the rangers quantified by range. Click to enlarge view.

Ok, cool, right? Of course. They also shared one really keen finding. Honey the speedy bee ranger has the same range as Sol. But she has an interesting attack animation: she arches back and then lurches forward to sting the enemy. They found that when Honey arches backward, it's not "just" animation; her position actually shrinks backward, taking her out of immediate enemy hit range. When she swings forward to sting, she is back in melee hit range again. So it is possible for Honey to avoid being the first target to be attacked when she swings back and forth! Weird. I wonder if the same sort of swinging motion applies to Dwight, whose attack animation is quite a lot of space. 

They also pointed out that Songster Cony is actually a pretty good ranger because her long range (quantified at 11) gives her a lot more survivability over other choices like Opera James. At max level, Ola Brown's DPS-to-cost ratio is almost identical to that of KSM (140 vs. 146). But Ola Brown's attack range is unprecedented for splash attackers and his attack speed is incredibly fast, making him a truly great asset to the team. 

The set of pictures at the bottom of their article show the difference in various rangers' standing distance between having the Skyscraper area treasure at 0% and 100%. They used Friends' rangers to illustrate the difference. (Edit: By the way, this means that when you use your Friends, no treasure benefits apply to their rangers.)

Range is really quite important to keep in mind as you progress through the more difficult stages. Sindy makes herself invaluable as a freely available ranger in so many stages because of her ability to out-range enemies. In the same way, Witch Cony is also a very good choice but with less DPS. Ola Brown can reportedly solo the first 80+ stages due to both his very far reaching ball and his high attack speed. Why is Dumpy such a high impact single target unit with such a low cost? Because he is relatively short range with relatively little HP, making him vulnerable to death. Clara and Opera James are two of the most closely related free rangers, but why does Clara cost so much more while doing less damage even though Opera James has longer range? Clara's value lies in the fact that she is obtainable 72 stages before Opera James and sometimes move speed is more highly valued than sheer DPS (Players who were around for the original version of stage 84 will know what I mean!).

In almost every ranger vs. ranger comparison, there is a reason for why one stat is low and another stat is high, justifying their various cost and cooldowns. Attack range is one very relevant stat to compare. Hope that this was illustrative and useful.

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!

Player vs. Player Mode?

This afternoon about 200 files were downloaded to the game. A bunch of updated pictures to the area maps and... something about ladders and ranking. Could this mean that a brand new player versus player mode is coming? Will we be able to go head-to-head with other player's teams very soon? This is going to be a huge new thing for the game. It will change the entire landscape and the way that we interpret strengths and weaknesses of our rangers.

Below: Pictures of badges and possibly the scenery for battles between teams?

This comes at a very interesting time in the game. We have a huge exhaustive list of rangers with a wide variety of attributes. And as such, the stages in the game are no longer much of a challenge if you have the most powerful rangers in your possession. I do believe that at this point, Line Rangers is one of the most profitable games in the LINE family, so clearly many people are shelling out the cash for KSM, Ola Brown and friends. Perhaps we only got 1 new area in the last release because development effort was put into working on a ladder mode where the best of the best can match up in a game of skill using those powerful rangers.

Any time a multi-player 1v1 type of play is introduced, my first question is how the matchmaking will be done. Will it be based on player level? Ranger levels? Do we get to pick our team? Do we get to pick our opponent? Then there is the question of rewards. What will be the incentive for players to submit themselves into the pit? Coins? Or some other currency? (Rubies, please!)

One of the things that I think will have to be addressed is team composition for multi-player. It would not be fair if players simply picked a team like Level 80 Hip-Hop Brown, KSM, Dwight, Dumpy and Sorcerer Cony. Maybe it will be an offering of choices, like if you want to do a [5★ vs. 5★] full team battle, or a [two 5★+three 4★] team battle, or pick one of each star rating, or maybe even a 1 ranger vs. 1 ranger solo brawl (lol). Will they normalize the rangers, i.e. if you have a level 70 Warrior Jessica, it will be knocked down to level 50 Warrior Jessica stats, so that anyone with access to that ranger will be battling at a level playing field? Maybe they won't; perhaps they will just take your rangers as-is and let you knock the teeth out of some unsuspecting challenger!

And will items, Thomas and missiles be disabled? Will minerals be regulated to some preset level?

Will there be one ladder ranking for all players internationally? We don't know!

Side note: I wish we could use the NFC-enabled devices to somehow create a cooperative play mode. Your team + a friend's team in a 2 vs. 2 brawl. That would be fun, but I might just be dreaming :(

By the way, before I get too carried away, I want to reiterate that this is speculation based on the files that were pushed down today. It might be this, or it might be something else entirely.

More to come soon...!