Since nobody asked it: Any Deck building tips?

[Heroine Nisa]

I have beaten Chapter 8 finally and got a lot of cool units and waifus. However making a faction-based team with only high costs characters obviously doesn't work.

Any recommendations on how to spread High HP units, Range damage units, artillery etc over the 10 slots? Doesn't really have to belong to any one faction specific, just general guidelines. I literally can't find much on the internet...

I didn't really play the original MSA that long but I liked it as a weird spin off on Metal Slug making your cool squads.

[William Shakesman]

The faction bonus is just 10% HP which isn't going to be that huge. There's not much point in focusing entirely on it if you have useful cross-faction units you can splash in your deck.

I am nowhere near good at the game but with the gacha tier 1 and tier 2 pools you are probably still going to need some cheap N tier opener units. Clone Tarma is really good at this, as he has a lot of health and can apply skill seal at a fairly low chance to give you time to push. Marco with the skill 3 can also open pretty cheap but he doesn't take a lot of punishment. There used to be SR tier cheap openers in the phone game but I don't see a lot of them now, the game seems to be focusing on the early era less stupid balancing where the waifus actually COST a lot. You should probably have a couple people in the 80-120 cost range who you can throw out who won't die, and for my decks that's been Clone Tarma, Mummy Warrior, and Aisha. Aisha is a lot better if you can get her evade skill but she won't have that until you clear world 8 for better mats I don't think, so she's probably not the most reliable way to beat that stat wall.

That said it's been tough for me to find cheap units that don't just die immediately. Shield Soldier doesn't tank for you half as well as he does for the enemy, for instance, and Sandbags are likely to soak one hit tops. Most of these units kinda suck without their skills and so you'd either need to grind a ridiculous amount of items to buy their skills or keep trying to find something that functions at low level.

[Heroine Nisa]

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

The faction bonus is just 10% HP which isn't going to be that huge. There's not much point in focusing entirely on it if you have useful cross-faction units you can splash in your deck.

I am nowhere near good at the game but with the gacha tier 1 and tier 2 pools you are probably still going to need some cheap N tier opener units. Clone Tarma is really good at this, as he has a lot of health and can apply skill seal at a fairly low chance to give you time to push. Marco with the skill 3 can also open pretty cheap but he doesn't take a lot of punishment. There used to be SR tier cheap openers in the phone game but I don't see a lot of them now, the game seems to be focusing on the early era less stupid balancing where the waifus actually COST a lot. You should probably have a couple people in the 80-120 cost range who you can throw out who won't die, and for my decks that's been Clone Tarma, Mummy Warrior, and Aisha. Aisha is a lot better if you can get her evade skill but she won't have that until you clear world 8 for better mats I don't think, so she's probably not the most reliable way to beat that stat wall.

That said it's been tough for me to find cheap units that don't just die immediately. Shield Soldier doesn't tank for you half as well as he does for the enemy, for instance, and Sandbags are likely to soak one hit tops. Most of these units kinda suck without their skills and so you'd either need to grind a ridiculous amount of items to buy their skills or keep trying to find something that functions at low level.

Thank you for your input. I personally just go with single army decks because I like being thematic (though most waifus could really belong to any faction).

So I should have like 2-3 units on the 80-120 range, then a few above and 1 or 2 on the 500+? And make sure I have high HP shields on both low and mid range, right?

I mean I have not been struggling that much, however I noticed that low cost units such as the basic Ptolemaic Tank having quite a big HP pool for its low cost (I think around 15k HP for 140?), meanwhile when using the Regulars only some of the waifus and the Metal Slug have enough HP to take punishment, heck not even Tarma who has a shotgun has enough HP!

[William Shakesman]

I love making faction and thematic decks too but the game is a little tight early on and you'll have to compromise. A lot of what makes these units valuable comes on their skill 3 and 4 (Like Marco gives a PF faction buff at skill 4) but you are hard gated on the items needed to see those skills until probably about 10 hours of play minimum, so there's a lot of scrambling to try to make these guys barely work. Because of these scaling issues, it's going to be a COMPLETELY different game once you reach late game versus where you are now. Hell, even just getting to player level 50 (The cap for unit/base levels) and getting a level 50 base would make a trash deck a total winner, and you could reach that grinding items if you were bored. So many of these questions change completely based on how much you've played and built up and almost every early game problem can just be ignored totally with enough grind.

But the problem now is where we're all at: the PF low cost units all basically dying the second they get sneezed on when all we have is gacha tier 2 to work with. You gotta get an opener SOMEWHERE with your problems now. I've not built thematic decks enough to find equivalents for every faction. (Even the alien faction is probably going to need to splash some Invaders even though they technically eat Mars People, and that's even if you can tell which alien faction waifu is aligned with which story faction).

Back to actual advice, the usual dichotomies you need to cover are cost gradients, cheap to expensive, frontline tanks vs backline DPS (Remember how all the laser drones would be irritating when you were fighting the subway train, people who can sweep from the backline behind frontline tanks are nice when your frontline holds. MS.Alice is good at this backline game for instance, and Hi-Do is a perfect example of a backline high cost cleaner.). Evasion is typically a good ability too: In the phone game, if a unit evaded and triggered an animation, they were immune during that entire evade animation to all damage and effects, which means a 33% evade chance punches WELL above its weight.

EDIT: A lot of deckbuilding advice will also vary between versus and story as story spams so many enemies at you that, if you can sweep them, you can drop some really high DP cost units way earlier than you would in versus. Midori for instance is fires basically perfectly to wipe out swarms of spammed fliers which would turbocharge your econ but she's probably less busted in a versus context.