Introduction

Mobile Strike is a war game, but it is much more than just building some troops and selecting an opponent to fight with. Making your troops strong is a very important part and a lot of time in the game will be spent on this, for example via research projects, manufacturing the right gear for your commander, and (re)setting your commander's skill points. Players work with each other in alliances, offering help, exchanging resources, tips, and fighting together. The game is not just similar to Game of War, but largely identical. At the end of this article we will briefly discuss the comparison.

Tutorial

A new game starts with a tutorial. For first game players it is good to walk through this slowly as the game can get complicated because of its many different features. The tutorial does a good job of explaining the absolute basics.

Alliance

An important step is to find a suitable Alliance. Via the Alliance menu you can apply to join an alliance or join one of the alliances that are currently open. The open alliances might not be the best and it might be good to shop around a bit. You can just look on the State Map, but it might be better to look at the leaderboard to get an idea what the large alliances are. Most alliances have stated their rules and entry requirements on their alliance wall, which you can access by selecting a base and clicking the Alliance button. Find one that you feel comfortable with. If you are in the game for the long run it is important you find some likeminded people in your alliance. Give an alliance a serious chance, but if you don't like it, do switch to another one.

Beginner's Teleport

When you start the game you get two beginner's teleports that you can use as long as your headquarters has not exceeded level 5. If you have found an alliance to your liking before you upgrade your headquarters to level 6, ask where most are located and teleport to that location as well. It is appreciated and doing it after the upgrade requires an advanced teleport, which is costly.

Research Facility

One of the buildings in your base, inside the city walls, is your research facility. Basically you should try to make sure you always have some research project active and you should make your research speed as fast as possible. Unless you are planning to go to war right away, it might be good to focus on the first research tree first, Economic. Here are a number of projects that allow you to increase the production of resources and speed up gathering resources via increasing your gathering rate, troop load and deployment speed of your troops. Researching these will help you not getting into resource problems early on in the game.

Training Grounds

The training grounds are the building you can use to training troops. Also best to always train some troops here. If you are not planning to go to war soon just training tier 1 troops is fine. They are trained fast, cost little resources and are good for gathering resources.

Upgrading Buildings

The game suggests some order of building and upgrading buildings, you don't need to pay attention to that. For some of the buildings (the ones outside the wall and the training grounds, hospitals and banks) you can build multiple. There will be another article on considerations on how many to build of which. Unless you are an experienced player and follow a specific strategy of your own, for beginning players it is best not to focus on getting your headquarters to an as high as possible level as soon as possible, but focus on upgrading the other buildings, including the ones you have many off, and research projects as well. It is also recommended to always have an active building upgrade, unless you have everything upgraded to a certain level and consciously don't want to increase the headquarters further yet.

Wall

Traps in the Wall will give defense against attacks. On the long run it might not be worthwhile to put a lot of effort on wall traps, because if you have comparatively very large amounts of troops the wall traps will add little value. However it early stages it might make quite a difference. The idea is if you have 20000 wall traps and 10000 troops when your base is attacked one third of the incoming troops will fight with your troops, two third with your traps (based on the ratio of wall traps and troops you have). Even if you only build sand bags, which are easily destroyed and don't do damage, your troops have a much better chance of surviving. Traps are costly to build when it comes to resources and time, and if you are hit by a much stronger player or even rallied, traps are easily completely destroyed, so don't feel like you have to place the wall full with the highest available tier traps.

Helping Alliance Members with Research and Construction

Often during the game at the right bottom corner of your base view you will see a Help icon. Selecting this allows you to click Help All which helps active research projects and constructions of your alliance members. This will deduct for each the maximum of 1 minute and 1 percent of the remaining time. The amount of Helps you can receive depends on your headquarters level (headquarters level + 4) and upgrades and especially research projects are going to take a lot of time later in the game. Giving and receiving fast Helps will be an important part in growing fast as a player and as an alliance.

Using Gold and Speed Ups

During the game there are various ways to get gold and speed ups. Once your times start to be more than just a few minutes you might get tempted to use these to speed up research, construction and troop training. Our general advice is don't just use these, only use them if you can get something back by winning prizes in the active Challenges. Saving up some gold and speed ups is important so that it will be easier to win the prizes of those Challenges.

Power

Although the power of a player has no direct meaning for your strength in combat, it is often used by players as a quick measurement of strength anyway. Typically alliances will set certain power requirements for their players which increase over time. As such it is important you get your power up as well. There are five basic categories of power, research, building, troop, commander and mission. It is an extra reason to always have active research projects, building upgrades and troop training. Your commander power increases by leveling up your commander, and one of the easy ways to receive the necessary experience points for that in the beginning is completing missions which give some power as well. We will write a separate article about beginners's power up tips.

Commander Skill Points

After each level up of your commander you can assign commander skill points and commander rebel skill points. In the commander skill point tree there are two sides. The left side is focused on combat, improving e.g. the strength of your troops and training speed, the right side gives economic boosts, improving e.g. construction and research speed and increasing the resource generation. Unless you plan to go to war right away, it is best first to focus on the right side. Spend your commander skill points to max out Research and Construction I and II, only spend minimal points in the tree to unlock these. Experienced players typically reset the points (there are items for this available in the general store and alliance store) to focus on combat before they go to battle. The commander rebel skill points have less choices. As a beginner I suggest to focus more on getting as many hits as possible to maximize the goodies you get and the points you might score for Rebel related challenges, rather than doing as much damage as possible. This means maxing out the Energy Cost Reduction and Maximum Energy Limit.

Rebels

About three times a day Rebels appear at random places on the map (and once killed new ones will appear as well). The type of Rebel will change, the game gives announcements on which rebels will be active. Rebels are associated with certain events and hitting rebels will give you a chance to win materials associated with the event, although the chance is large you get something else or one of the standard materials. Killing a rebel will result in a gift for each alliance member. You need to unlock being able to hit rebels in the Commander research tree. It is worthwhile to at least research the project to unlock hitting level 1 rebels. Each time your energy bar is close to max, consider sending your commander out to do a max hits on a nearby rebel. If possible work together with alliance members so that you don't only get the goodies from the hits, but also give a gift to your alliance by killing the rebel.

Alliance Gifts

At the right top of the Alliance menu there is a gift icon. If this is active on the alliance menu there are new unopened gifts. If this is the case always go there and open the gifts. Your alliance receives gifts when an alliance member kills a rebel, when an alliance member buys a pack, or when your alliance has won one of the stages in an Alliance Challenge, or makes it to the leaderboard for an alliance challenge.

Materials and Gear

Materials are used for manufacturing gear for your commander. Gear can give your commander all kind of different boosts and further on in the game you will likely have different sets of gear for different activities and your commander will wear gear based on what you are doing, e.g. research, construction, troop training, attacking. As a beginner it might be best to not manufacture anything at the start as it is easy to make mistakes and waste your valuable materials on useless gear. Also the best gear tends to only be available for the higher Commander Levels. An exception might be the materials you get when gathering on the standard resource tiles, namely Army Camo Cloth, Iron, Multi Tool and Screwdriver. These materials can at this moment only be used to manufacture special gear in the Economy Gear category that decreases the construction time. This gear will only be useful at the early stage of the game, as later on gear to increase the construction speed will be much more effective than gear to decrease the construction time, so it might be worthwhile to manufacture some of it early on. When manufacturing gear you should be aware of the 6 quality levels of materials and gear. If you have all materials of the same quality level, e.g. 4, the gear will also have quality level 4 and the corresponding boosts. If you use a mix of materials with different quality levels the outcome is not guaranteed and it might prove costly if you gamble wrong. Our advice is to wait and combine until you have all materials of the same quality level. It is a choice what level to go for. For the early construction time reduction gear quality level 4 should be easy to get if you are an active resource gatherer. In the Armory you can Combine materials to a higher quality level and Manufacture gear. Besides the chance of getting a material when you gather on a resource tile, you can also get materials when hitting a rebel, when you complete a Daily, Alliance or VIP Mission, and from crates.

Challenges

You can win prizes by completing various stages of Challenges. You can find these challenge via the icon in your base view at the middle right side. There are various challenges, most important for beginners is the Basic Challenges and the Extreme Challenges. Each of those have 3 point targets with associated prizes and an explanation how to score points, typically one or more of the following: research power, building power, troops trained and rebels hit. These Challenges are an easy way to get gold, speed ups and all kind of goodies. Make sure you pay attention to the active challenges and consider using speed ups or gold to complete research projects, buildings and troop trainings, especially if you can win more than you spend. Currently in our Tools we already have a Research Extreme Challenge Planner that can help you win these, and we will extend that later with troop training as well. You can also do it yourself, you can find on our website the exact power increase of all research projects, which you find in game as well, so that you can know whether you will meet the prize targets before you decide to speed up a research.

Daily, Alliance, VIP Missions

Each 6 hours you get a number of Daily, Alliance (if you are part of an Alliance) and VIP (if your VIP is on) Missions. The number depends on your VIP level. While online you should start and collect as many as possible. If you feel you can't do all, pick the important ones based on material drop (you can open up the missions before starting to see what you get) or based on level (they use the same 6 color levels as materials), better gives more Commander XP and resources.

Check List of What to Do When You Log In

Most of the things in this section we already mentioned, but it might be good to have a reminder of what you should look at as a minimum when you log into the game:

• Click on Help to Help all alliance members with research and construction
• Collect the supply crate at the left corner of your base view if the timer has run out
• Collect and Start Daily, Alliance and VIP Missions
• Hit a rebel if you have enough energy
• Look at the Challenges, see whether you can win gold and speed ups by completing your current research, building and/or troop training
• Start a research if none is active
• Start a building upgrade if none is active
• Start a troop training if none is active
• Send out your troops to collect resources
• Open all gifts
• Read your e-mails and PMs

If you have more time consider:

• Opening any unopened crates in the Items – Crates section
• Use Gold and Ammo items in the Items – Resources section
• Use VIP points and Commander XP items in the Items – Special section (or from the Commander XP and VIP windows)
• Combine materials (suggest to not combine above quality level 4 as you might want to make quality level 4 gear in the beginning)

Compared to Game of War

If you have played Game of War before you will find this game very familiar. It's not just a similar game, it is built on the same game engine and uses a lot of the same concepts with only different names. If you look for example at the research projects and buildings you will see that everything (resource requirements, time, boosts) are exactly the same, only named differently.

One major difference is that Mobile Strike doesn't have all of the later added functionality in Game of War, e.g. there are only 4 research trees, there are no cores and pieces to name a view.

Another is that the setup of materials and gear is different. There is not only no one on one mapping between gear and materials in Game of War and Mobile Strike, but also the way important materials are acquired via gathering in Game of War is missing in Mobile Strike. In Mobile Strike you (currently) only get a chance of 4 materials that can only be used for very limited gear while gathering on standard resource tiles.

Also the association of one specific standard material with a specific boost type is missing in Mobile Strike.

Contributed by: GamesGuide on February 8, 2016