Iron Grip Marauders New Player’s Guide

Iron Grip Marauders New Player’s Guide by LaneH

The last patch removed bases from the games so the following newbie guide if for those players that have just joined the Marauders community and want to get their feet wet.

There is a tab for QUEST missions. Currently there are two quest lines. The FARLIX tutorial mission and the trader mission. Play thru as many missions as you can. As you perform a mission you will use energy. If you run out of energy you will need to wait for it to rebuild over time or you can spend some gems to rush the replenish. I’d suggest using some of your hard earned gems from the missions to open a mystery box. This will give you some new units to try.

The trader missions are level dependent. If you can’t start one you should try to get the quest again after you gain another level.

You should now have an idea of game play. Click on Anchorpoint and look in Jasmine’s Gentleman’s club. It will offer 4 Raids and 4 smuggling missions. Raids will allow you to get into a battle using one of your 2 starting officers. Vancer is an amor unit leader and Emillia is a sniper infantry unit. I love Emillia. The 3rd officer you will aquire in the Trader mission line. His name is Harald and he is basically a big truck for doing the Smuggling missions.

If you feel you have adequate gold supplies do some research. You will be able to command more units and build more advanced units as you develop them in your research labs. Research can take a long time. Fortuantly you can purchase upgrades to your ship to speed things along, but for now your limited funds should be used to do some basic research and buy an army.

Raids VS Smuggling. Raids allow you to immediatly choose a leader, choose your units and get into combat. They cost more energy than Smuggling missions and usually provide a nice reward. The PREMIUM mission is difficult and you probably shouldn’t play that until your more familiar with the game. More shields equates to more difficulty usually in the form of elite enemy heros.

Smuggling missions require you to have smuggling trucks. Once you choose a leader for your smuggling mission (Harald comes to mind), you can add more trucks for more potential reward in addition to the offensive and defensive units to guard the convoy. The misssions usually take about six hours to complete and MAY or MAY NOT be attacked. The more difficult missions have a higer chance of being attacked. You need to figure out how many trucks your willing to risk and how many units you need to defend them. I’ve been using Harald and 4-5 trucks with other defence units and have been able to defend them with minimal losses.

Some players have been sending 12 trucks and no other units and hopeing that they don’t get attacked. I wouldn’t reccomend this for starting players. Rumor has it that one shield missions = 30% chance of attack.. 2 / 60% 3 / 90%. I can’t confirm or deny this yet, but you get the idea.

Force composition: Your army size is limited at first as is your tech level. You will want 1-2 mobile bombers to scout for you, several bazooka (anti-tank), a few troopers or militia for anti inf and then round out your force with whatever cool units you may have aquired from a mystery box. My boxes had a Elite destroyer mark four and an Assult Archon Mark six so i’ve been useing them to support the infantry. If it has a purple boarder around the unit its “Licenced” and you can rebuild it if lost in battle. If you get a high level unlicenced unit, try to take good care of it. If lost you will not be able to rebuild it until your research level is higher.

AI Tactics: The AI tends to hide behind buildings and trees until you come into range and then will move a group of units toward you. If you move the mounted bombers up half way and look around before moving up the slower units you should have little problem winning your early battles. Happy Marauding!

When you level you will be awarded 24 additional energy, so watch your experience bar. Even researching will provide experence points.

Retreat: Even the best of us get in over our heads sometimes. If you wish to run away to fight another day: Click the small disc icon to save your battle (lower right of your battle options above the 2> animation speed selector. Then on the main interface click on your mission list (crossed swords) and you should see the current battle that your in. One of the options should list retreat. WARNING! Retreating from a smuggling mission will still result in the units being killed. This is to prevent convoys of all trucks and no combat units from exploiting that mission type. Retreating from raids and boss battles will save the remaining units from losses, but you will lose the battle and as a result not obtain the mission rewards.

The AI does not ‘exactly’ follow the same rules you do. For example, they are not affected by the Fog of War that much. Their units are still incapable of shooting you if they do not have a line of sight and their units require it, but there ‘are’ things that do not require line of sight. So dont be suprised if your hidden unit gets a healthy dose of artillery bombardment.

Nifty trick to use with your Mounted Bomber. Mounted Bomber is a scout unit with some very powerful, but VERY upclose attack. It is extremely fragile, but has very far movement and very good vision range. But you do not ‘have’ to go somewhere to find out whether or not an enemy is here. When you will click on mounted bomber, you will see a green area which displays the terrain you can send your unit to. Look for strange empty squares amidst all the green. Those are enemy units. You cannot see them, but you can at least know that they are there, without wasting movement points of your scouts.

It is wise to consider your resources carefully, especially when you’re just beginning. Say you have received A licensed Rocket Artillery from a mystery box. Great! Awesome! Damn you, you lucky bastage. Ahem, but … say you got that artillery. You “can” rebuild it, but because it is such an advanced piece of technology, it will cost you a LOT of iron and gold.

It might be wise to not spend all of your iron/gold on research/airship extensions. This way, if half or all of your army gets zapped, you will have the means to gradually rebuild yourself. This can make or break you, especially on the early stages. Because climbing back in resources via smuggling while not having the iron to build smuggling trucks or troops to defend them … takes time. Lots of time.

To improve your production, go to storage room section. There in the lower right corner, you will see an option for slots in your airship. You can build extra warehousing (more storage on your airship), extra engineering, extra training, extra research. You have limited amount of slots, to increase them you will have to upgrade your airship to a bigger one. A rather … costly endevour. And you ‘will’ eventually run out of upgrades. So slots are limited. Consider your choices wisely. Dont be afraid to ask others opinions in the chat and do not commit all of your slots to some selected strategy at once. It may change as you increase in levels.

It is important to remember that if you improve the production of your engineering of training. Via the Airship improvement, the time AND cost of the units produced lowers. While in the beginning you may not care how long it takes (Low level units do not take too low to build at all), the reduction in price is very very welcome. Improving production of your research teams does not lower the price though, only time. Trust me, as research gets more and more complicated, it takes more and more time to finish it.

Advice for New Players by LaneH

Start with the Tutorial missions. They will provide you with some traning, experience, units and get you familiar with the interface. Build armies that favor your Militia and Bazooka infantry, one or two Mobile bombers and perhaps an armor unit or two.

Use the bombers to scout for you. Move them up about half way, look around, then move your infantry line forward. If you see more than your line can handle run the bomber back behind the infantry troops and organize your defence line. If the enemy comes to you then you can focus fire on the enemy units and kill them before they can do much damage. Otherwise move toward them and get in the first shot.

Useing one hundred percent of your movement in advance without any scouting will get you into bad situations. Fire your militia and troopers at enemy bombers, infantry and later Heavy MG’s if they move to you. Fire you Bazookas at armor but they also do fairly well to clean up infantry in a pinch. Artillary is probably too expensive to use yourself but if you see it keep in mind that it will do more damage to your armor than to your infantry.

Run a bomber up and kill enemy arty if they don’t have much infantry supporting it. You will earn a few gems. I think that opening some mystery boxes for 5 gems is a good deal and will give you some advanced units to try out. If you decide to use the licenced unit you get from the box try not to let him get killed. They are expensive to rebuild. Do some lower level raids and capure a base with some gold.

You need gold for research. Avoid the 4th rank missions with 3 shields for now. The higher ranked missions are more difficult and you probably should get more experience before you play them.

The missions will refresh over time and you will not need to rebuild all your units. Research leadership, Bazooka, and mobile bombers.

Leadership will allow you to deploy larger armies and the Bazooka and bombers are just really nice starting units to have in your early armies. Have fun! ~ hope you found this advice useful.