Iron Grip Marauders Getting Started Strategy Guide

Iron Grip Marauders Getting Started Strategy Guide by Belit

Ok, so I’m one of the recent immigrants from Steam, though this is a newer account I stared through the browser, Steam lagged too much and I was getting my ass handed to me with the difficulty bug. Now I’m at 13 wins 0 losses and 8 units lost over the course of my game so I figured I’d post some of the strategies that have been working for me to try and help some of the other new players.

Also, being a new player I’m sure this ‘guide’ is far from perfect. If any of the more experienced players want to chime in and offer suggestions and/or tear it apart I’d love to hear from you. I’m loving this game so any chance I have to improve my play makes me a happy camper.

Also this first post at least is a sort of “big picture” strategy. This is all stuff you do outside of the actual raids to give yourself an edge, and to hopefully avoid ending up in a situation where you have no money, no iron, and no troops. I’ll detail some of my battle strategies later (this took me like an hour to write) but for now I’d recommend checking out Blood Velvets battle video’s here to get an idea of how the rank 1 player got that way. Pay attention to how he plays and your battle performance will probably improve significantly. I know mine did.

1) eggheads are expensive!
Have you looked at the costs for research? You’re dropping at least 500 gold to research a new unit or to upgrade an old one. That’ll drain your starting finances right quick and if you blow all your money researching gee-gaws then you won’t have fallback funds to recover with if a raid goes tits up. For example, I have yet to research either Assault Archos to level 2 or Ambulances. I haven’t found the need for them yet, though I’m thinking an ambulance might be useful in the near future so I might pick that up, but still, take your time, and check your finances before committing to a research project.

2) it ain’t pretty, but it’s paid for
I also haven’t upgraded my ship at all. You’re looking at 1500 of both gold and iron to upgrade your research/training/manufacturing capacity by 25% and 2500 gold and iron to upgrade your storage space by 15% or so… Basic units take such a short time to train though that this is a nonissue. This isn’t an RTS where you need to be able to spam units to stay ahead. Build what you need, as you need it, don’t stuff your hold with units that will never see combat, and take your time… At the extreme end my elite destroyers would take 2 hours to rebuild if I lost one but if that happened I’d probably just set it to manufacture overnight anyhow.

3) Life is cheap, battlemechs are expensive!
Ok, so that’s the wrong universe, but the principal holds. A level 1 Savar costs 15 gold and 135 iron. A level 2 bazooka costs 60 gold and 60 iron. Since iron and gold are about equally difficult to acquire that means that Savar costs 150 resources while a bazooka costs 120. An L1 Archos costs 70 resources, an L2 milita costs 36 and, a L1 Trooper costs 66. At the extreme end my Elite Destroyers cost a whopping 830 resources to replace. If you’re fielding all tank armies, and things go wrong, it’ll cost a lot more to replace the units than if you field an all or mostly infantry army.

4) Planning starts in basic training.
The other advantage of infantry is that you can bring a lot more along for the ride than you can tanks. Milita, Troopers and Bazookas all cost 20 deployment points. Archos cost 30, and Savars cost 35. That means that for every 2 Archos you deploy you could deploy 3 troopers. For every 4 Savars you could deploy 7 bazookas! This is not to say that vehicles don’t have their uses. I will typically take one or two along to serve as a mobile reserve, and to cover my ass if the enemy has fielded a whole ton of Archos but they are not the core of my army.

5) If Polish cavalry had been this badass WWII would have had a different start
Ok so this is gonna be a bit long winded, but the Mounted Bomber is probably one of the most valuable units you will build. It’ll also die the most, but hey that’s what the cavalry officers deserve for prancing about in their fancy uniforms and looking better then the footsloggers. Mounted Bombs do 2 things very very well, and 1 thing exceptionally badly. The first thing they’re good at is scouting. If you can use them to spot enemy positions and then deploy the rest of your army out of range so that the enemy units have to come to you then you’re well on your way to winning raids. I’ll get into that more later though. The second thing MB’s are good for is they absolutely destroy artillery and support vehicles like ambulances and repair trucks. They laugh at artillery shells (seriously I had the artillery hero spend 4 turns desperately trying to kill one of my cav to no avail) and one or two shots from them will destroy any early game artillery unit or hero. The artillery AI also has a serious hate on for them, and every turn they spend shooting at your cav is one turn they aren’t spending it lobbing shells at the big cluster of infantry you have nearby. As for what they are bad at… well anything that shoots bullets really… Militia, troopers, archos, machine gunners ect. will shred your MB’s faster than you can say ‘charge of the light brigade’. Fortunately the MB is damn fast, so if you run the hell away any time you see a ‘good against infantry’ unit then you should do OK.

6) All well and good, but what do I pack?
Ok, so you’ve been training up infantry, stuck your Archos in mothballs, now it’s time to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women! Ok, so you’re almost there but what sort of ratios should you be looking at? Well I start by looking at which hero I’m bringing along. If it’s Emilia then it’s a bit easier, she’s by far the better of the two starting heroes in nearly every aspect except survivability. Vancer’s tank is a bit on the obese side so it needs to buy two seats on the airplane which cuts down on space for the goon squad. These points are also assuming that you have level 2 heroes and therfore 280 DP’s. Regardless of which hero I’m using I bring 3 mounted bombs. Remember what I said about how awesome they are? Yeah, bring 3. More than that starts cutting into deployment ability for other stuff, but if you only have 2 I can garuntee that one will get shot to pieces and then you’ll loose your eyes. After this the core of my army is infantry. I will take 6 assorted militia and troopers typically 2 militia and 4 troopers. They’re both good all rounders and troopers can even do reasonable damage to lighter vehicles if they have to. Then I take 3 bazookas. This gives me a solid anti vehicle core. It can be a little on the light side if the enemy deploys a ton of tanks, but the flip side to this is that most AI tank armies have a lot of Savars and those things aren’t even going to mess up your troopers uniforms. Archos can be a problem, but to deal with them I will bring a couple of vehicles along. If I’m fielding Vancer this will generally just be an Archos to serve as a mobile reserve Vancer does just fine in the AT department to keep any enemy Archos in line. Sometimes I’ll even ditch a trooper to get a second Archos depending on how the points are working out. Emilia gets a pair of Savars, or more recently my Elite Destroyer. She needs the anti tank support. No matter what though I try and get to within 5 points of my maximum deployment capacity. Even if this means ditching an infantry to get another vehicle.

7) Idle hands are the Devils plaything
Yes, just like your grandma used to say (typically before she’d make you go do something like clean the garage) your heroes need to be kept busy. Always keep one of them doing smuggling runs. At lower levels before you get Harold you’ll want to alternate between your heroes. Smuggling runs don’t earn that much XP so if you raid like a madman while one hero is busy for 6 hours and then alternate you should be able to keep both heroes at about the same pace of advancement. I tend to just send them on 1 shield runs since I don’t want to bother with defending my convoys but even 1 shield runs can provide a decent boost of ‘found money’ every few hours. If you’re going to be away for a while then try to find something for the other hero to do too. Training is an option, though this costs money (or gems) so make sure you check your finances first. Also right before logging off for the night or to go to work is a great time to start that big research project too. That way you have shiny new toys waiting for you when you come back.