Military Tier 0-1
If you are here, you must be new around here! Welcome to our community!
Be warned that this game is still in Early-Access and so changes might occur to the current progression system.
Without further ado lets get started!
Warning: This page and other related progression guides are under construction and/or incomplete.
Contents
Tutorial
When you create a new save file, you have the option to turn off tutorials. I recommend you to keep these on as they help with understanding the game, but if you don't, that is okay.
Once you start the file, you should immediately be put into a tower testing run. Tower testing consists of the main game-play loop of the game where you test out clones of your tower against the environment.
The loop (in tower testing only) goes like this:
- Defeat enemies to gain experience
- Use the experience gained to upgrade modules which helps your tower become stronger.
- Each wave enemies get stronger and as such, your tower must also become stronger to defeat them.
- Each enemy killed would gain you a specific amount of Town resources, which would be talked about later on.
- The round will end once the tower's hit points reaches zero or on beating Wave 100.
Enemies and Stats
On the bottom left of the screen here are numbers which indicate enemy's base damage and hit points. These numbers are then manipulated to form different types of enemies. For now you only have to worry about normal, archer, and boss enemies. Normal enemies use the same base stats as shown and attacks melee. Archers are similar to normal but they attack from a distance, meaning that in your first few tower tests, these guys will usually get a hit off before being defeated. The final enemy you will encounter for now is the boss type, which appears every 10 waves and has 10x damage and 10x hit points of base stats. Usually these guys will end the tower test early on because of their high damage output.
Elements
Along with enemy types, each enemy also has an element associated with it. Each element treats elemental damage differently, such as being resistant to other elements or take extra damage from them. For example water damage would do extra damage to fire enemies, but less to electric enemies. For now you shouldn't worry too much about these elements but later on you will gain modules that deals water damage for example instead of neutral damage (which basic attack deals). Any extra information on elements you might need can be found here.
Modules
Read More: Modules
Modules are abilities that you can add to your tower. During your first tower test run, you have 4 modules, 2 offensive and 2 defensive:
- Basic attack (Deals neutral damage)
- Attack speed (Increases speed of attacking)
- Stone foundation (Increases base hit points)
- Basic Regeneration (Provides hit points regeneration over time)
Most of these mods (short form of modules) are self explanatory, but it is important to note that Basic Attack does neutral damage.
Modules can be upgraded with in-game EXP, which upgrades the module's level, making it stronger. For example upgrading Basic Attack will increase the damage you deal to enemies. Every time you upgrade a module, the EXP cost of it increases by 1. It is recommended to upgrade basic attack high enough in order to one-shot enemies and then upgrade attack speed to be able to take them out faster. Also upgrade your defensive modules to have more hp as archers can often get a hit in and bosses can often one-shot you. Upgrading regeneration is good, but should now be your top priority.
Town
Inevitably, you will lose to the enemies due to them consistently out scaling you. Do not fret, for the game has only just begun! In fact, this brings us to where a lot of things would take place: Town.
Construction Firm
Read More: Construction Firm
If you enabled the town tutorial, you will be directed to the construction firm to build the workshop and we go into a little more detail here.
The construction firm is like a town hall; every time you upgrade it, you unlock more buildings that would help you build the perfect tower. However, as you have noticed, it requires brown resources (or construction firm resources). How do we get those brown resources? Remember the town resources from before, this is where it comes in play. You can convert your town resources to brown cubes to use them for building purposes.
Now using those brown resources, go ahead and build your first building, the Workshop.
Before we move on, I will tell you the main loop of this game (up until this point).
- Do tower testing runs and gain resources.
- Go to town and use those resources on building/tiering buildings.
- Use the buildings to upgrade your tower statistics.
- Repeat
Workshop
Read More: Workshop
Here is where we get to the good stuff. You can convert town resources into blue resources in order to upgrade your modules. Here's how it works:
- Convert resources to blue resources.
- You can use the blue resources to upgrade mods that will persist through tower testing (upgrades bought with EXP do not persist). It is recommended you upgrade basic attack first.
- Every time you go in tower testing, module upgrade costs start at 1 EXP, regardless of if you have upgraded your modules beforehand in the workshop.
- Workshop upgrades scale in blue resources the same as EXP costs in a round, so beware and keep in mind that modules cap at level 100, with some exceptions like attack speed.
At this point most of your resources should be going to workshop in order to increase future profits in tower testing.
As you probably noticed by now, the tower testing menu is...different. You can change regions by clicking on the picture of the region and can see the elements under it. Arrows can also be used to navigate through to different regions. More information on tower testing can be found here.
In order to reach a new region you must beat wave 100 on the previous region first (see right).
You can tier up the workshop via the construction firm and be able to add more modules to your blueprint! (3 more per tier, 4 with "Engineering" workshop skill)
You can add module by dragging them from the right into your blueprint. Alternatively, you can also double click modules to equip or unequip them.
Though you should be focusing mainly on workshop and construction firm, other buildings are able to help you.
Mine
Read More: Mine
The mine is an interesting place. You can use orange resources to drill, uncover new layers in order to gain resources and resource shards using orange resources, and unlock more resource shard layers the deeper you dig.
The shards can be then turned into their resource counterpart or be used in factory, which is explained next section. You can upgrade the drill to drill down faster, use less fuel, and increase your maximum fuel capacity. By mining layers, you can also find various boosts like conversion rate reduction from shards to cubes and reduce the cost for digging tiles in layers. Tiering up the mine will give additional shards and resources. It is not recommended to fully uncover layers as they can waste a lot of resources early on.
Factory
Read More: Factory
Factory is one of the best buildings other than the workshop and construction firm and is very complex but I will try to talk about the main points first and talk about it more in depth later.
The first goal in factory is to buy objects using red resources and manipulate them to create machines, which help make more complex components, and producers, which give automatic production even offline! The more you tier up factory, bigger inventory space, more crafting space and more recipes will be unlocked. Later, you will unlock machines to manipulate ingots and ores into all you will ever need. Like using a presser to make an ingot into a plate. You can upgrade the machines for higher efficiency. You will notice in the shop that up until t3 items are sold. In order to get higher tier, you refine your shards from mine to give ore once completed. You can use and upgrade the machine belt to speed up the process. All of this goes back to getting enough resources for higher tier producers.
Keep in mind that when upgrading producer they exponentially give higher resources meaning 1 upgrade can give a massive boost to production so it is important to not ignore this during the entire game.
Back to Testing
At this point you should grind resources in tower testing to unlock more features. However, you may have noticed that you unlocked new modules. This section will talk about what modules to use in general in your blueprint. If you want more info and drop chances and modules in general, click here (The small text next to the module names are their associated drop condition)
By now you should have unlocked Multishot Wave 30 and Basic Bouncing Wave 10 both very good modules as they both get you faster kills, as in theory they make you attack faster by attacking multiple enemies on screen, making it possible to clear a wave without enemies reaching you with enough luck and one-shot enemies. Both are a must have. You may have also been getting different element attacks, bursts and resistance modules. These are not really necessary but good if you have extra space for additional damage or defense. Bursts are like critical hits so same with attacks put it in after everything else.
One exception is Nature's Touch Wave 40. this module not only would do more damage than basic attack but also heals you for a percentage of your damage, which is extremely useful as it is a percent and scales when your damage scales.
Also, Wave Resources Wave 50 is a particularly noticeable module as it gives resources per wave, which is very useful later, so put it in your blueprint.
Other than this, you should be able to complete region 1, forest, easily after enough workshop upgrades. You have now unlocked the second region, desert. Before we move on however, we need to talk about more buildings.
Power Plant
Power plant is like some other incremental games. you use yellow resources to build reactors, turbines, among others to create power. Tiering it up gives access to more components to place. Keep in mind chests of coal for example can run out and must be replaced with another one. Also, some objects like yellow batteries are upgradable if they have a white square background which in case click to use yellow resources to upgrade them. More info can be found here
Laboratory
To talk about laboratory as a whole, it includes Experiments in the form of mini-games to play for new modules. These mini-games explore different idle concepts that take inspiration from other idle games. Tiering up this building will introduce more experiments.
Laboratory experiments are a big thing to talk about, so read more about the Laboratory for help with a specific experiment.
Headquarters
This is an important building, as within it holds the main prestige system in the game, Military Tier (MT). This will help you progress by resetting all of your resources and module levels and tiers in exchange for gems and more features! However, you must meet some requirements such as maximum-leveled modules and regions unlocked. Other than this feature, you can also get software using purple cubes in order to speed up tower testing further. Servers are used to increase the speed of getting software and for another purpose later on, and contracts which can be used to boost your resource gain if you meet the requirements. There is another feature but you won't unlock it in this segment.
You notice in tower testing that the new region, desert, has a new element and a new enemy type, wizard. Wizards have a slow attack speed but can slow down your tower's attack speed by half making them a threat to early-game players, on top of being ranged like archers. Because of this, think about potentially maxing out multishot and bouncing to maximize your clear speed for them not to hit you. Other than that, keep grinding and getting new modules to finally beat it.
Military Tier 1 (Your first Tier Up!)
Congratulations! You have beaten region 2! You now have the possibility to do your first military reset! Like any idle game, you must reset at certain points for long-terms gain, and here it is MT. Once you have 10 modules unlocked and max all of those modules, it is time to do the reset. Some things to note here are:
- ALL of your resources (e.g. white cubes, red cubes, blue cubes, etc.) will be reset upon resetting EXCEPT gems and exotic gems
- Your progress in buildings will not be lost, you will not need to rebuild producers, experiments, or your power plant setup.
- Your modules will be reset to level 1, unless you pick certain military perks. However, you will keep your modules themselves.
- You will gain gems which isn't really compensation but ok.
- REWARDS!
So go ahead and hit that button!
Post MT 0
Alright you clicked that button (not the cancel button I hope) and so now what?
You now have access to so many new features, I'm gonna go through them one by one.
Workers
Workers automate features for your different buildings, then more you rank up, the more workers you are able to unlock! These can range from tasks like always crushing ores in the factory to experiments to mining and so much more! You require gems to hire workers and in order to make them go faster you can also unlock different speed modes which also require gems. In order to change a worker's speed, you can click on the circle thing that turns and it will change speed (provided you have at least one more speed mode unlocked). Without perks, you start with getting 1 more max worker per tier.
Gems
You have probably come across this currency before, you can get it in the mines if you are lucky, but you can also get it by tiering up (which is a really bad way to do so but just saying). Gems are used for workers, an experiment, upgrading with gems instead of exp in-game, and other uses later. It isn't anything special, so I just recommend spending on workers at this point.
MILITARY PERKS!
Now this is an important one, by expanding your military, you gain access to special perks, which can speed up your progress so much that "we didn't have when we were kids". Every military tier you gain access to a military perk. For each set of 3 military tiers, you get to choose one of 3 perks to add to your arsenal, which can impact your playstyle. You cannot reset military perks however you will end up having all of the perks anyway. Basically, if you are picking between perk 1, 2, and 3, and you pick 2 first. The next tier you are picking towards 1 and 3, and whatever you don't choose you get on the last mt of the trio.
After every trio, you can choose to specialize in a building, unlocking a second floor for it. You gain them at mt4, mt8, and mt12.
These 3 buildings are, the factory, the mine, and the powerplant. Each of these 3 buildings correspond to different playstyles, and generally add more complexity to the game. A brief description of each:
- Idle Route Factory: In floor 2, you unlock specialized machine ware which will help create your needed resources even faster than ever before! Use the crafter and scan in resources to be made automatically for you in mass quantities for when the time needs, and it even works offline! Craft saplings to grow trees that will help rain even more resources above your heads! And finally, the fabricator. Dissolve unwanted materials in the fabricator to add mass and use it to fabricate literally any item scanned in crafter for very easy crafting! Upgrade your fabricator to have faster dissolving and fabricating, higher storage of mass, and even automatically produce mass. If you choose this path, you are spending a lot of time in the factory.
- Mixed Route Mine: In floor 2, you aren't bounded by Earth anymore as you reach for the stars and mine asteroids in space! You first scan the surrounding area for asteroid clusters and hints about what loot they have! A quicker scan is possible but will not give detailed hints. you then setup your drill to mine these asteroid clusters to gain resources, artifacts, modules, and more! You can even upgrade your drill for faster mining! If you like the perfect mix between idling and being active, this building extension is for you.
- Active Route Power Plant: In floor 2, you harness the sun's energy to make astonishing adjustments to your tower. You first create drones using resources, launch them and then finally create dyson rings around the sun to be able to lock in your adjustments. You harness your drones to create dyson power in order to boost various aspects of your tower. If not continually powering each adjustment, they will slowly decay. However, using the power of your rings you can lock them in to stabilize the adjustments. These buffs range from resource drop boost, range, module drop chance, and even warping time and space itself to make the 2x speed in tower testing 3x speed instead! If you have the urge to micromanage all of your adjustments and your drone army at once, this path is for you.