Catching up to the long term players

General Discussion
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Hello there

I have been playing for about a month and this seems a fun game, with a nice motivation added to a match-3 game. One thing I am concerned about is that I have a huge catch-up to do if I ever want to fight in the big leagues or appear at the top of the charts. Even if I am ready to drop money, it will take a lot of playtime to get the materials to level up my heroes and to get the buildings up. There seems to be an inherent advantage to people who started playing early, and there is no way to catch-up to close to their levels.

I don’t mean it as a complain, just want to invite your views on whether I am missing something in my thought process or is this how the game is supposed to be. I will continue playing because the game seems fun, but want to set realistic expectations about what I can achieve here.

Thanks in advance.

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This is a long term game. Oldtimers leave and a new generation takes the lead. When I started, over 15 months ago, I thought I would never get there, and there were those who had been playing longer. Yet here I am, in the big league :). Just have fun among those same strenght as you andkeep growing. You will get there

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You wont catch long term players without dropping loads of cash and even then you have to get passed the ascension mat walls

Already seeing players spending thousands trying to catch up to veteran players and they’re hitting wall after wall but optimistically none the less

This situation will continue to grow with 2019

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That’s encouraging to know. Thank you.

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When i say long term i mean like the top players of the game. You’ll still be competitive amongst the top 1000 after some lucky pulls in the summons gate and strategic grinding/gameplay though

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even the top 100 I will add. It will take a while but it is entirely possible. Just very difficult to stay in the top 100 but you will see even the “top” players get booted out of the top 100 as well. I think I stayed in the top 100 for 30 minutes total on a few occasions.

That is what makes this game good in my opinion. The leaderboard changes every second it seems.

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Cracking the top 1000, 100, 10, whatever is doable in the short to medium term. Staying there is a whole other story. You need a top defense and lots and lots of talent and dedication to stay on top of the ever changing hero content. Not an easy task at all.

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Eh we have different meanings of competitive lol

Sure cracking the raid ranks makes you feel competitive

Visit a top 5 alliance and you’ll feel like the size of a pea and those 5 alliances are really the top players. Anyways there fixed it lol

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This is a game for the diesels. You will catch up to the main bulk of the players, as long as you keep playing, and playing a lot.

And then there is the very top of the game. That you can only reach by paying.

Your realistic expectations, unless you pay a lot, are that you will progress over time, but it will be slow, babysteps. And that it will take a lot of playing, never missing a titan, an alliance war, a special quest. And a lot of building to get those training camps at lvl 20, so you can train with a small chance of recieving a 5* hero.

Initially you will think that summoning 4*/5* heroes is your bottleneck. Run your TC20’s hard enough for a long enough time and time will reveal that this is not the case.

Then you will think that obtaining unfarmable ascension mats is your bottleneck. As long as you play consistently towards maximizing your grabs at these mats, time will reveal that this is only partly true, depending on the distribution of these mats in color and the 5*'s you summon. For me, I’m only bottlenecked by these in yellow.

And finally you will learn that feeding your heroes to max level is what is truly stalling your race to power. It’ll keep you busy long after you’ve obtained sufficient lvl 1 5* heroes. It takes a lot, a true lot, of feeder heroes to max a 5 star hero.

What helps is that, while this dieseling will wear you out, it will wear out the current veterans even more, because they’ve been at it much longer than you. You can catch them up by mere attrition. By the time you will approach their strength, probably a considerable amount may have reduced their playing or even quit the game.

Also don’t give in to the Gacha too much. No, you do NOT need the current HOTM. You do not need Guinevere. If they drop for you, consider yourself lucky, but you can still wreck stuff with plain old TC20 heroes. Just play smart, get the right team, and play the match-3 like it’s meant to. Underneath all the ‘get this hero, fire that special’ is still the puzzle, the board with tiles, that you can ‘solve’ by getting it color sorted so you can move a tile and watch a long cascade of killer combo’s raining rainbow death and destruction on stuff.

The true inherent advantage of the early players might just be that they learned to get by without HOTM heroes.

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Thanks for the detailed reply and thoughts. It’s especially heartening to read the other side of thoughts about HOTM given the forum seems full of posts about who got them - made me feel missing out, but your reply helps.

You are right and I hadn’t thought about attrition. I have done that with other games and now thinking about it makes sense.

Also helpful to know about the third bottleneck - feeders for heroes. Haven’t seen this point being mentioned a lot, and I am having difficulty even leveling up all my 3-stars. 5-stars surely will be surely hectic.

Thanks once again for taking time to type out your thoughts.

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Dont worry about chasing veterans.

Just play at your own pace and visit this forum often.

Learn to play it well before dropping loads of cash into this game. Recommended to at least buy the VIP pass and if you can drop some cash for summons, wait for Atlantis towards end of the month.

Do 30-90x pulls to have chance to get good heroes + ascension materials. Every 10 pulls gets you a chest with an ascension mat. Max 9 chests per month. This will get you closer to the rest of us. Also, those offer packs with 4* ascension materials are also not too shabby.

However, all in all, you still need to grind alot in this game.

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This basically sums everything up for new (non-paying/minnow) players.

If you need a time span: You’ll need approximately about 10 - 14 months, depending on your luck, to get your first 5* full ascended (drop from TC20/mats).
The only advice I would have liked additionally as a F2P back then player is: save the free gems not for some 5* super-special heroes with a low drop chance, but for 10 x troop summoning. Took me a long time to get a full rainbow 4*, because they are (afaik) summon (gems/(very) rare coins) only.

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If you’re ready todrop a few hundreds $$$ in the game, you should climb pretty fast.

I started playing at end of august, I’m now at 3 667 power (with two 5* to up still), fighting in diamond tier.

Money makes it faster. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Thanks for the advice. Happy to grind my way up, just wanted to hear from experienced players if they think thats what the game expects one to do. Got the VIP at the Christmas offer and been happy with that (would buy atleast one more month).

What do you mean by “every 10 pulls”? Is it the 10th pull, done one by one, or the 10x pull which I see in the summon screen and shows a discount.

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Thanks for providing a time frame, really handy to have as an estimate. Looks like an year worth of effort, I should be able to do that, I guess :slight_smile:

The troop summon is something I have never used yet, and haven’t read about much on the forum. I thought that’s what people did once they got their desired heroes :slight_smile:

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Wow, great progress from what I have learned from other comments. Unfortunately, few hundreds $$ are out of my budget. So, I might have to stick with the grind :slight_smile:

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Tbh, the key is just evolution stuff.

Get some & you’ll climb. Heroes will pop from C20 or lucky summon

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Evolution stuff means materials for ascending heroes?

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Yep sorry, my english kinda sucks :blush:

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Yipp, I made the same mistake back then. Problem is: With a 5* rainbow and just 3* troops… you’ll hit the ceiling pretty fast. As Bertus said: You think getting 5* is hard, you think getting ascension mats for 5* is hard…

… and then you spend months not summoning any useful 4* for your setup. :wink:

Just read you got the VIP x-mas as well. That’s the only thing I bought (twice) so far and that I think is really useful (double build slots) to catch up quickly. As soon as you get TC20 and can afford to keep it running 24/7, you’ll have pretty fast some 5* heroes. (My) TC20 droprate is about close to 1 % and now I’m “drowning” in Khagans, Joons and Obakans, same with ascension mats (if you don’t miss the special quests/events).