Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-10947222-20130616225238/@comment-67.190.213.217-20130617181105

OP, you have to look at your blue battle cubes as money. Money is made for spending but you want to invest wisely. Your goal is to use your "money" to make as much more money as possible so that you can eventually spend it on things that are worth it.

So in the early days of a campaign, you want to be out scanning so you can get more blue cubes by beating bosses, which gives you episode points, which reward you with stuff including blue cubes as you hit successive milestone point thresholds; by beating Level??? bosses, which give you back four blue cubes as reward); and by spending your free, auto-regenerating, un-store-able blue cubes beating bosses that pay you back a store-able blue cube. You want to one-cube kill bosses that you scan until you're no longer getting bosses weak enough for you to one-cube.

Meanwhile as you beat bosses, you're earning episode points that move you up the ranks, which hopefully earn you some powerful cards as rewards if you get high enough. That's the goal of the episode.

Once you can't one-cube kill bosses that you scan, still be out there grinding and leveling up, but hang out a lot in the boss help queue to selectively fight bosses.

Snipe any boss of any level that is within your one-cube kill power. That varies with how powerful the boss is - you'll do less damage against more powerful bosses. You have to spend a blue cube to do that, but you get a blue cube back as the finisher, so you haven't lost anything, and meanwhile you've gotten episode points and medals as your other rewards.

Aside from sniping, be willing to invest a cube in a bigger boss. Wait for bosses at the higher bounty levels in the range of bosses that you are seeing in your queue. This is where you start to spend cubes. Normally you don't want to spend a blue cube unless you're going to get one or more back. But bosses with higher bounties give you enough points that they are worth the investment. This moves you up the ranks quickly.

But "high" is a relative term. In my experience it's best to hold off on investing cubes in earnest until the last 24-36 hours, depending on how frequently you play in that period. Because as you and the people who send you boss help requests move up the ranks, you get higher and higher level bosses, which pay more. Maybe on Day 3, a boss that pays 5,600 seems like a big baller that's worth spending a cube on that you won't get back. But on Day 6, when you may be seeing big L6 bosses paying 50,000 or more, that 5,600 boss will seem like less of a good investment and you'll wish you had that cube back to spend in the final hours. But it sort of depends on your level and your allies, so who knows what you'll be seeing on that last day. So it's just a bit of a wiggle to figure out when it makes sense to spend cubes that you won't get back. You'll get a feel for it over a couple or three events.

I just know that I spend about 80 cubes in the final hour last time, and would have spent more if I didn't encounter a 10 minute dry spell in the boss help queue. I spent all I could.

Another thing you have to be strategic about is which big bosses to spend your cube on. A guy paying out 50,000something bounty may seem like a great idea and you jump on it as soon as you get the help request, because you don't want to miss it before it gets killed. But then sometimes it just sits and sits for the next half hour and withers on the vine. That sucks. You were fine to invest a cube and not get one back as long as you got the episode points as reward for adding your meager assistance to killing the boss, but now you don't even get that. So all you've done is waste a cube.

Nobody really knows whether a given boss is going to get killed, because we don't know who else got the help request or how powerful they are or what other opportunities they have or whether they have any cubes left or whether they're even online. So we all employ varying strategies to decide whether to jump in. Some wait to see if it can make it to, say, 50% and balance that against the time remaining and the number of people already helping and the number of people left on the help request who haven't helped. Another factor is when in the episode this is happening. There are peaks and valleys in people's willingness to help in general. I've been seeing so many bosses withering on the vine in the past day, but that's going to pick up as the end nears.

In the final few hours, a mix of things is happening. Lots of people are out of cubes and can't help with any more bosses. So they're out but might still be getting help requests, which can leave bosses hanging and waste your investment. But meanwhile others have stockpiled or bought a lot of cubes and are spending them like mad, both to start off bosses from scanning and to help kill other people's bosses. So bosses typically get killed at a higher rate and faster as people desperately claw to beat the clock. So it's just a crapshoot as to what you'll have available. But I've found that for the most part, if you have cubes in the final hours and are willing to spend them, you should see a good amount of big bosses come down the pike. It's agony when they don't.

If you're happy with your rank and the prizes you'll get for that, you may just want to be miserly with your cube spending in order to just hold your rank position under the necessary threshold rather than try to hit the next rank milestone. Because you can bank those unspent cubes for the next episode rather than risk blowing them for nothing if you fall short in this one. If you think you can hit the next milestone in time and you want those prizes and your stream of boss requests has been pretty steady, go for it. Spend two cubes on a boss if you have to, if it's going to expire if you don't. Just depends on where you are, what you've got, what you're seeing, where you're trying to get, and how much time is left.