Mechabellum

I'm reading Titandeath and felt inspired to do some mech stuff. Mechabellum is an autobattler that just left early access, so I picked it up for $10 to check out.

It's fun! This might be my first autobattler, so I wasn't really sure what to expect coming into it. But it's like a card game: you get four picks for a hero at the start. The hero has some kind of bonus, like giving you an free extra unit on turn 4. And then it has two units unlocked as your initial army.

Every turn, you pick from four cards. The cards might be an item to equip, a reusable power, or a buff that changes unit stats or costs. You and your opponent get the same choices, so you can try and predict what they're going to do so you can counter it.

From there, it's all about buying the right units, and positioning them correctly. There's a couple things to manage, but the gist is, you gotta counter your opponent's unit composition and formation. You can do this with different units, or you can tech your existing units to counter.

It's got a couple modes: solo survival & duo survival, for co-op PvE. There's a 4-way competitive FFA where you fight random spawns of computer foes, before spilling into the opponents' areas. But the bread-n-butter is the 1v1 & 2v2¹ competitive PvP mode.

It feels very satisfying to play. The graphics and sound design are great. It scratches the same itch as Beyond All Reason: seeing a ton of mechs clash in cataclysmic battles and explode all over the place. All that, without needing the amount of intense, sustained focus that an RTS requires².

Progression

As you complete matches, you get (or lose) points for the season pass rewards. It seems ... fine? There's no "buy this for the actual season pass" mechanic, and it's giving you cosmetic stuff.

There's MMR that you gain/lose too. It looks like it might be the same rating for 1v1, 2v2, and 4-way FFA. That usually doesn't work well, so that's kinda meh.

There is a real progression system too: you get tech points as you play, which lets you change the available upgrades for each unit. So the tech choices you see in game #1 aren't necessarily what you'll be working with in game #69³. I've already seen marksmen acting like arclights, which I didn't know was possible and wrecked me immediately.

I have not engaged with the progression stuff, beyond seeing Number Go Up. I should start looking at my tech soon, but so far, the game is just Fun and I don't need to worry about spending any points.

Thoughts on Battles

I've had a couple winning strategies so far. My go-to when I've got steel balls available as a starting unit is to tech range and the heal-a-portion-of-damage thing. These tanks fire a laser that amps up its DPS the longer they channel it, so when they're focusing down heavy targets, they're basically un-killable. They don't do so hot against massed chaff and medium units, so depending on your opponent's moves, you gotta get them the right support.

I had some success with chaff + stormcallers, which are long-range rocket artillery. But somebody put anti-missle tech on their chaff turn one and hard-countered them, which puts me off wanting to start with them. I had great games where they destroyed everything with the range tech and some promotions -- but it seems like it's too easy to shut them down once you know how to play?

With the medium units, I try to shift into fortresses with shields, and maybe the anti-air tech. These do decent damage, but they're really helpful as support to keep everthing alive through the initial volley.

There's a screenshot of the last turn in the gallery, but I've had some small success using hackers. These deal hacking damage, which fills up the HP bar of an enemy unit with your colour. They only need to get up to the current HP, and when they do, the unit flips to your side.

I had a card pick that let me recruit rank 3 hackers, so I put down a couple and covered them in shields against an opponent with a couple front-line vulkans. The hackers consistently connected with giants, and they won the game for me easily. That doesn't work most games though -- it seems like the stars have to align for that to work.

And a cool thing is that all the air units have a relatively-cheap tech option that lets you reposition them. Most units are fixed once you purchase them and put them information -- but a unit of wasps moving between the flanks forces the opponent to have some kind of response. And then you can move 'em to your backline once they've committed a bunch of anti-air to the sides instead of their front line.

Gettin' Gud

I've mostly been figuring the game out on my own⁴ so far. I'll probably want to start watching some tournaments soon to see how the game is actually played.

One resource I am using a lot is MechaMonarch. It's got tier lists for cards, but most crucially, it's got a lot of info about units: what counters them, what tech is good, and what situations are certain tech builds applicable to.

And it's all written down, as words on a web page. They have some video tutorials, but all the information I need is available with ctrl+f during a game. Which is very much appreciated! 🙌

If anyone has some good (commentate'd) tournaments to recommend, please send 'em my way. And if you wanna play some time, add me!