Star Wars Commander: Tips for starting players

Feel free to add stuff, I am more than likely to give up adding tips halfway through

General tips:

• Save your starting crystals for a 3rd construction droid. Many players (including yours truly) wasted the starting crystals on things like speeding up production. Any other use of the crystal apart from buying a 3d construction droid (which allows three structures to be built or upgraded simultaneously) is counter-productive. Save for your 3rd droid, seriously.
• Like any base/resource management strategy game: Be sure to maximize your resource output. In the case of SWC this means always having the maximum amount of Credit Markets and Alloy Refineries. Also be sure to keep upgrading them to ensure a steady flow of cash and materials. Alloy Depots and Credit Vaults increase your storage capacity, you will want to build these early on and also keep upgrading them, since the cost of later upgrades will easily exceed the Credits and Alloys in your standard storage capacity.
• Visit other players often to see how they manage their base layout. There are a lot of succesful layouts to be used in the game. Generally it is a good idea to cluster your important buildings (HQ, Alloy and Credit storage), surround them with turrets (At the moment Mortar Turrets are the jack of all trades which handle most forms of attack pretty effectively), protect with walls and later with Shield generators. Also, keep upgrading walls, turrets and shield gens.

Maximizing unit output:

Succesful PVP will earn you credits, alloys and a higher battle rating in the form of medals. At the moment battle rating does not offer any rewards apart from bragging rights and an increased chance of attracting attackers of a high battle rating. Before you initiate a battle you can see how much credits/alloys and medals are to be gained from a victory.
People interested in PVP with the sole purpose of gaining resources should target Alloy and Credit storages and Alloy Refineries/Credit refineries. Typically in that order. People interested in medals foremost should target the enemy HQ, then go for 50% damage to the enemy base, then 100% in that order. Each tier will earn you 1 star, for a 3 star max. Failing to gain atleast 1 star will deduct medals from your battle rating. Regardless of your intention to PVP, maximizing assault unit outputs is important if you want to speed up your battlerating or your resource income. Here are a few quick tips:

• Build multiple Barracks and Factories to build units simultaneously, upgrade them to unlock heavier units
• Build multiple Unit Transport Pads to increase the amount of units you can put on the ground in PVP, upgrade them to further increase your unit capacity
• Find a strike package that works for you. Some like to overwhelm bases with dozens of infantry troops, other like to maximize their damage with larger assault units.
• If you know the makeup of your strike package and go into a repeat to build another one after you come out of a PVP battle it will save you a lot of time to queue your units beyond the max of your factory. Even if production claims to have stopped because you reached your unit cap on the unit transfer pads, the actual building time for a unit will still be alloted to that queue. Example: You have reached your unit cap, but build an extra Tank with a build time of 6 minutes. The factory will say stopped! but production will still commence. If you now go into PVP and come back two minutes later, the tank will already be at the two minute construction marker. So if go into battle with an AT-AT, 4 Tanks, 5 repair droids and some TIE Fighters, I can save myself about 10 minutes of waiting time by already having them in the buildqueue (the AT-AT in one factory, 4 tanks in the other, 5 repair droids at a barracks, Couple of TIE Fighters in Starship Command).

These tips are pretty nice to have. Shall we use this thread for game discussion, since the ingame one is kinda clunky and this is much easier?

Yup, I don’t see why not. I can copy any other useful tips in the first post to keep it organised for people who just want to view the tips.

Sounds good. Right now I’m pondering what the best way to arrange my base is while I raid for resources. I want to protect my own markets/rerefineries and storage, but also my HQ, which is hard. I currently just have turrets and HQ surrounded by walls, but that means someone could raid my resources fairly easily…

I’m also not sure what to do with all my credits. I’m currently at HQ3 and mostly using them to clear rocks and replenish my troops if I make an unprofitable attack.

Just had a look at your base, I’m assuming you have the max numbers of walls in place for your level. Here’s a few options I can think of:

• Move your credit storage to the far side of your base, outside of the walls but well within range of your mortar turrets. They won’t have the benefit of walls that cover them, but infantry going for your credit or alloy storage will be in firing range of the turrets. Your alloy storages should be fine where they are now.
• Forego the concept of a fully walled compound. Put your HQ in the middle, surround it by walled-in mortar turrets, use the space inbetween to place your credit/alloy storage
• Rush your way to HQ lv 4 for more walls

Also, use of credits: upgrade your units or buildings (they all take credits apart from walls, turrets and creditmartkets/creditvaults)

If you constantly reach your max of credits or alloys, you should consider upgrading your alloy storage or credit vaults to avoid wasting the surplus.

Indeed

I currently can’t do anything with Alloy for about six more hours until my HQ upgrades. I can only use Credits to replenish troops and to perform research, but I don’t want to research upgrades to things I doubt I’ll use, such as the Scout Trooper and that first Tank you get after the AT-ST, and the speederbike. Right now my raiding force is 8 stormtroopers, 4 dark troopers, and 2 AT-STs, which I only deploy if I’m in danger of not winning a battle. So it’s usually just the troops.

I actually just won an attack with three stormtroopers. They cost me about 270. I gained 3000 credits.1

Anyway, all of my buildings that can be upgraded are upgraded to the maximum level, though tomorrow when my HQ finished upgrading I’ll start using stuff a lot again.

I like the tanks myself, they are a good anti-turret weapon once you break through the enemy walls, especially when backed up by healing bots

Ah, what about this missile-launching walker I’m about to have access to?

I haven’t used it that much. From what I’ve seen so far it’s a good all-rounder which sits somewhere inbetween the vet AT-ST and vet AT-AT. It’s fast, but not as fast as the vet AT-ST. It has good range, but not as good as the vet AT-AT. It usually targets shields first, then turrets, whereas the AT-ST targets closest structures and the AT-AT goes for shields then usually closest structures.

Or do you mean the regular AT-MP? I haven’t used that at all

I meant the regular one. It looks cool, but I haven’t tried it myself either.

I like the missile launcher. Not the regular one so much but the ‘hero’ version does some serious damage especially to those pesky !mortar turrets. Of course can’t really compete with the lvl5 heoic AT-ST though. Gatling Guns FTW!

I love the range of the heroic AT-AT. It outranges a mortar turret of the same level by 1 square. Properly positioned it’ll take out atleast one mortar turret without drawing its fire. It gets tougher when the mortar turrets are in place in front of a shield genny, which takes priority for the AT-AT.

Good to know, I’m a few hours away from having a heroic AT-AT, will have to put this nugget of info to good use.

Wow, I didn’t know about that build queue tip. I wish I’d known that a long time ago… I’ve already completed the story mode with 3 stars, so I won’t get to use that one much anymore.
Something I’ve noticed in my playing is that at a certain point, it didn’t seem necessary to upgrade my resource production buildings anymore because I was producing resources faster than I could spend them. And even when I didn’t have enough, it’s very easy to get tons of resources from PvP. Instead, I made sure to have my resource storage facilities upgraded enough to hold the vast amounts needed to upgrade later-stage buildings, and then I just sit and attack people until I have what I need.
To that end, if you saw my base screenshot in the other thread, you may have noticed I have no medals at all. That’s because medals are absolutely pointless to me. I only attack people for their resources. Generally, I keep searching until I find a base with at least 30k of credits (or alloy, if that’s what I need), and then I just use 2 or 3 AT-STs or just my hero AT-ST to take all of their resources, unless I don’t think I can get them with so few troops. By doing this, I spend very little on troops and walk away with a lot of resources. I rarely do enough damage to keep from losing medals, but apparently once you get down to around 67, they stop taking them away and you just don’t get any instead.
As for my battle strategy, when I was lower level, I would always use 2 AT-STs, 3 tanks, and a couple of scout troopers. The troopers allowed me to go and look at what was in store for me for the next mission if I didn’t have any troops yet so that I could be sure I was making the troops I needed. They also sometimes were useful for taking out buildings placed away from everything else that my other troops wouldn’t have time to get to. I’ve since switched to regular stormtroopers for this task, however, because sometimes those distant buildings aren’t resources.
Now that I’m higher level, I use one AT-AT, 5 AT-STs, if I have more than 4 slots available after that, I have 1 healing probe, and the rest are troopers. I choose troopers over probes. As I’ve said, I finished the story mode, so I don’t have need to take out turrets, so I don’t need tanks for the time being.
As for heroes, I haven’t gotten the hero AT-AT yet, but between the first two, I always go with the AT-ST. As far as my usage has gone, the AT-ST has always done more damage than the rocket one.
I do have a question, though. Are there any others here playing on Android? We got the game so much later than iOS did. I swear I started playing as soon as it was released on Android, but I never saw campaign 1, and campaign 2 came on too early. I was only about level 4 for most of it and couldn’t complete it. So now I failed to get either of the first two special campaign troops. So did Android just get screwed on that? Or did it get released for Android sooner than I thought? And does anyone know if they’ll bring those two campaigns back? Or am I just SoL?

pritty good advise

Yeah It kinda sucked having to wait so long for the Android version I had the same problem with not being able to complete the dandoran campaign. Hopefully next time an event rolls around I’ll be good to go.

Yeah, I play on Android, and started as soon as it was released too and yes we completely missed out on the first campaign. Which is sad because (unless the recycle campaign rewards) there is one (and now two) units we will never have access to.

I hear that the units sort of suck anyways, but it’s the principle of the thing!

Exactly. I’m kind of a completionist. It’s going to bug me if I can’t get them… Maybe we all need to go and complain about it until they decide to give Android users a fair chance to get them.

Thank you

I just stared playing today, and I’m wondering. What would be a good squad that takes on low level guys?