Tactile Wars is a new strategy game for mobile devices. The game finds players in the roles of a disembodied finger commanding their troops in an attempt to paint their enemies with the player’s color. The game is a mixture of several other mobile games with elements of tower defense, defending your base from attacking enemies, and laying siege to your foes.
New to the game? Fret not! These tips will help you out with commanding your troops, attacking your foes, and of course, defending your base. Let’s get started, fellow mobile generals.
Attack often!
First things first, you need to be aggressive in Tactile Wars. If you aren’t tweaking your defenses and maximizing your defense potential, you should be attacking. The game has no energy or stamina system, and in my experience, you seem to able to attack numerous times in a day. I have yet to hit a point where the game forbids me from attacking.
Because you get coins from attacking, attacking usually achieves quests, and attacking grants you experience which allows you to unlock better upgrades, you want to attack as often as possible. It pays to be aggressive.
Keep your troops clustered in battle to optimize the rate of fire.
Tactile Wars allows players to draw formations for their troops to take shape. You can draw shapes to allow you to face attackers form all sides. However, spreading your troops out is not effective at eliminating enemies and keeping your troops alive. The best shapes in my experience are clusters. Squares and such allow you to face enemies from multiple directions as well as being grouped together to provide a faster rate of fire while keeping your troops safe. By keeping your troops clustered, your rate of fire will increase, allowing you to mow through your foes faster and hopefully get higher combos.
During battle, change your formation to best combat your foes.
While staying clustered is usually more effective for keeping your troops alive, you will want to adapt your troop formation to whatever you encounter. For instance, a cluster formation is not as effective when facing a turret. When facing a turret, I usually go with a line type formation to ensure the turret remains under fire while my troops maneuver around and avoid its shots. Otherwise, I go with a tight grouping in order to reduce the target size.
Adapt your formation for your current situation, and nothing will be able to withstand your onslaught!
Focus your fire on enemy flagbearers.
All groups of enemy troops except for trackers will have a flagbearer among them. Eliminating the flagbearer will destroy the rest of the troops in the squad. As such, you want to focus your attention on them as much as possible. Whenever you see the indication of new troops, pay close attention for the flagbearer. Once you determine his location, you want to adapt your formation to ensure the flagbearer will receive the brunt of your troops fire.
Try to combo flagbearers.
Higher combos will increase your rating in that category and bestow more experience and gold at the end of an attack. Wait until flagbearers are close to your troops and to each other before eliminating them to ensure you net a high combo.
Refrain from going to the enemies when you are capturing an enemy’s territory. Wait for the enemy squads to get close before unleashing your fury. While your troops fire automatically, you can maneuver your troops and formation to allow the enemies to get as close as possible before annihilating them. In doing so, you have a chance to achieve higher combos and net better rewards.
Reinforce whenever you can!
ALWAYS reinforce! Whenever your reinforcement gauge in the top right is full and pulsing, tap it to call in reinforcements. Enemies slain while the gauge is full do not count towards gaining reinforcements. You want to make sure you call reinforcements whenever you can to ensure the enemies you destroy go towards gaining more troops. Never let your reinforcement button go untapped; it could cause you the mission.
Go for the gold in medals!
At the end of each stage, you are rated in four categories: medals, survivors, combos, and time.
Medals are granted by demolishing enemy flagbearers in combos. Once they drop, you want to tap to collect them as soon as possible.
Survivors are simply how many troops you have left at the end of each attack. The more you have, the better your rating will become.
The aforementioned combos are made by slaying enemy flagbearers in quick succession. In order to gain a higher rating, you want to slay as many generals in a short span as possible.
The quicker you complete an attack, the better your time rating will be. In order to achieve an excellent time rating, you will want to mow through your foes as quickly as possible by focusing on enemy flagbearers.
Use your entire defense budget!
When you are setting up your bases defenses, you have a budget. Each piece of defense tech you install cost a set amount which is deducted from your budget. Your budget will increase as you level up, but you want to take advantage of your full budget and spend everything at your disposal. You want to experiment with the different pieces of defenses at your disposal to ensure the best combination while utilizing the most of your budget you can.
If you have more than twenty in your budget after you set up your defenses, you might want to reevaluate your defenses to make the most of your budget. By spending all of your budget, you utilize all of your resources and ensure you have the best defenses you can.
Build your defenses to complement each other!
Comboing your defenses is an effective way to eliminate attackers. You want to ensure your defenses go in tandem and complement each other. While having plenty of turrets is awesome, unless they are placed close together, their effectiveness drops. However if you have tracker troops at your disposal as well as turrets, the ground troops can attack while your foes deal with your turrets.
Once you are happy with your defenses, you can test the defenses out to see their effectiveness at combating attackers. Once you have an idea for a combo, I suggest setting your defenses up the way you envision, and you should then proceed to test the combination. If you have no trouble against your defenses, then it is too easy. Rethink your plan and change it accordingly. By using defenses that complement each other, you can utilize interesting combinations to be the bane of your attackers who will rue the day they decided to attack your base!
Choose your upgrades wisely.
As you level up, you will gain access to stronger upgrades for your troops, defenses, and territories. In my playtime, I have had enough gold to spend on each upgrade I unlocked. Gold will be awarded depending on your performance in each attack as well as completing quests. Further on down the line, gold might become less plentiful as upgrades become more expensive.
At this point, evaluate your defenses, troops, and such. For instance, if you opt to use geyser and turrets in your defenses instead of mines, you might want to consider avoiding upgrades you are unsure about or do not use. Personally, I find the mines not as effective as traps, geysers, and trackers; so I decided to avoid spending my hard-earned gold on mines since I find them ineffective in deterring attackers.
Evaluate your playstyle and the strategies you use and upgrade accordingly. By wisely spending your gold, you will avoid spending your precious gold on upgrades you might consider useless.
There you have it! These tips will get you started and repelling your attackers in Tactile Wars.
TLDR:
- Attack often!
- Keep your troops clustered in battle to optimize the rate of fire.
- During battle, change your formation to best combat your foes.
- Focus your fire on enemy flagbearers.
- Try to combo flagbearers.
- Reinforce whenever you can.
- Go for the gold in medals!
- Use your entire defense budget.
- Build your defenses to complement each other.
- Try to combo your defenses.
- Choose your upgrades wisely.
