Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-67.190.213.217-20130522214155/@comment-67.190.213.217-20130524030238

50.74.32.202 wrote: Question: this is my first week playing the game I have quickly learned to not trans-scan too early, as it will destroy the card. for the long haul.

Any suggestions/pointers? how do i figure out which card to toss or to keep? is there any apps out there to put you inventory into?

Best suggestion/pointer is to read this forum. All of the new user questions have been asked and answered many times and you'll pick up the rest as you bump into things along the way of gameplay.

As for which cards to keep or toss, soon enough you will be at a point when R1 cards, that is to say Common cards, are almost more of a hindrance than anything. They suck at fighting, aren't worth upgrading, are too weak to do much good when using them to upgrade others, and sell for peanuts. The only thing to do with them is sell them so they don't clog up your inventory. Just think of them as the jar of spare change you eventually cash in for dollars. They get you green points, which you spend when you want to upgrade anything.

R2 cards, that is to say Uncommon cards, are useful for either upgrading OR selling. They pack more of a punch as upgrade raw materials for other cards and sell for more. Not as much as R3 or R4 cards of course, but you typically want to use your R3s and R4s in your deck, at least earlier on in your game career. Keep as many R2s as you need for upgrade raw materials and sell as many as you need to get enough green points to pay for those upgrades. Get as many free R1s and R2s from the space bridge as your medals allow and sell/process them. Once in a while you'll get an R3 or maybe even an R4 card in there, that is to say a Rare or a Super Rare card.

If you're not planning to spend money on the game, you'll want to hang on to the better R3 cards initially such as Grimlock, Starscream, Optimus Prime, Shockwave, etc. You are right that you want to max out both their robot and alt forms first, then transscan them, then start over and maximize that unified form. This is called MTM'ing them. Max-Transcan-Max. This gives you the highest possible final stats for that unified card. Look at the following link for a table of all cards' initial, maxxed, and MTM'd stats:

http://transformers-legends.wikia.com/wiki/All_Character_Card_List

This will help you know which cards are the best attackers, defenders, hitpointers, and all-rounders, and which ones sell for the most. You can choose to farm particular missions if you find they give cards that sell for the most. Might as well be efficient.

After a while, you'll have built up enough strong R3s and R4s that you'll be able to sell weaker R3s or use them as upgrade raw material if needed. Otherwise you might consider hanging onto them and MTM'ing them as you have the luxury. For this last event, you got a nice bonus if your whole deck was Decepticons with Decepticon weapons. That meant that, depending on the overall math,  you might have included some Decepticons in your deck that were weaker than some stronger Autobots you had handy. So it can't hurt to have a full squad of both Autobots and Decepticons going forward in case this happens again, which it surely will.

If you're going to spend money on bots, you might as well buy the x3/x5 raid cards offered in each episode. Like this past time it was Cyclonus and Scourge. They will lose that multiplier after the episode but should still be fairly strong afterwards by virtue of being Episode versions of those bots (which have higher stats than their standard versions). Just make sure you get both halves and MTM them. It's best to get their signature weapon too.

There are also Elite versions of some bots, but I'm only a couple episodes older than you and don't know where those come from yet - presumably one of the premium space bridges that cost MobaCoins.

If you do well enough in a given episode, you'll also get one or more premium Episode boss cards as rewards, such as Cosmos, Sky Lynx, Jetfire, and Omega Supreme from this recent episode, plus their weapons. Depending on your final rank, you may only get one half of one of those cards, which winds up being a pain since you can't MTM them. MTM any that you can and they will likely become part of your strongest 9.

Weapons are a pain in the ass. It takes a while to accumulate the ones you need, the signature weapons that match the robots, and maxxing them can be a really expensive proposition. From what I've seen here, the thing to do is spend your green points and upgrade materials on MTM'ing your bots and their alts before you spend money upgrading weapons given that you can crank your stats higher with bot upgrades than with weapon upgrades. Both are good but do bots first. In both cases, using transmetals to upgrade works a lot faster than using cards.

During episodes, try to kill as many bosses with a single battle cube as you can. Because when you finish a boss, you get a battle cube as a reward. So if you one-cube a boss, you haven't lost any stored cubes. If you come across a boss while out exploring and swatting missiles, try to one cube it, because you'll get all the rewards - starter, MVP, participant, and finisher. If you can't, call for help. If the boss gets finished, you get the same amount of episode points either way, which determine your final ranking, which determines your episode reward level. Likewise, hang out in the boss help queue and see if you can one-cube-finish any bosses someone else has started. That way you get the points and the battle cube and have lost nothing.

As the episode progresses, start using your stored cubes more and more to help take out bosses. The higher your rank and the more days that have elapsed, the tougher bosses you'll find, and the higher the bounty payouts will be. It is tough to know whether a given boss will be taken out at all since you don't know whether enough other available players will jump in to help or not, and it's tough to know when to jump in yourself. You want to be the finisher and so want to wait until the boss is down to few enough hitpoints that you can one-cube finish it, but ultimately you need those points, so you will start simply investing/sacrificing cubes for episode points even though you won't be the finisher or get the finisher's blue cube reward.

Be sure to take advantage of all the automatic, free, "natural" blue battle cubes that regenerate every hour. You can only hold a max of three of these at any given time and they don't turn into stored cubes if left alone, so you're wasting free cubes any time you have a full plate of three cubes and don't use them for an hour.

Also take advantage of the free natural blue cube full refills you get when you level up. You get a little bit of XP every time you take an action while out scanning/exploring. once that blue XP meter at the bottom fills up, you move up a level, and all of your natural pink and blue cubes are refilled to full. It's tedious to level up just for that, but battle cubes are scarce, man.

Pink energon cubes (explore energy) are easier, because you get for being the starter in a boss fight. Eventually you'll have way more of these than you can use, which is good since you spend one every time you scan while out exploring. So when you're out trying to level up, you're effectively converting pink cubes into blue cubes. It takes a lot of pinks to get you up one level.

Winning PVP battles gets you small rewards consisting of XP, battle points, and green points. XP is good, green points are good, and battle points are fairly lame. Battle points, once they've built up to 500, which takes a long time, allow you to use a particular space bridge to get weapons. If I recall the weapons aren't anything special. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong there.

Speaking of lame, Bronze anything in terms of medals is lame. It takes more time to fire up the space bridge and get these bots and weapons than they're worth, and they tend to only build up slowly in single digits. Do it anyway and sell them but after a while they're an afterthought. Silver is fairly lame too. Gold isn't even that great 95% of the time but is the best of the free stuff that builds up.

Speaking of lame, the Allies feature is pretty lame. You can keep sending out invites (and cancelling pending invites that don't get accepted) until you have a full complement of allies. Each day you can "cheer" them, something they never see as far as I can tell, and that gets you Ally Points. Build up enough of those and you can use a space bridge to get a few lame-ass bot cards. Whoopee. You'll start forgetting it's there after a while because who cares.

The Recommend feature is supposed to put together the optimal deck for you, but you may find that doing it manually works better in some cases. Experiment with putting different cards and weapons in different slots and seeing what works best with the different multipliers in the different rows. Don't just think of attack power, but also defense and HP.

If you get a message from Mobage offering to give you free MobaCoins for installing some other game, do it and build up your MobaCoins to buy stuff from the space bridges, particularly the episode space bridges. It appears that this gravy train is minorly lucrative for a short span but then mostly dries up. Hey, it's free stuff and gives you a taste of the good life. After that, you'll have to pay if you want good stuff. It works just like in those after school specials about the teenage neighborhood drug pusher that uses initial freebies to get the kids hooked and then starts charging them!

Okay that's all I can think of for now. Get out there and start tapping.