Alliance War Events | Marvel Church

Intro

Alliance War was introduced into the game on the MSF’s one-year anniversary, and since then it has seen only some incremental changes, improving the rewards a few times, adding practice mode, etc. But recently it started going through some bigger changes in an effort to make the mode more refreshing and enjoyable to all players.

The first big changes came with the introduction of the Knowhere Siege War Event. This event established a new Scoring System, Energy distribution mechanic, Status Effects, and Room Bonuses. Knowhere Siege lasted from May 22 to August 27. The second War Event is called Secret Strike and it will keep all the best changes from the last event and only add some new Room Bonuses.

While we don’t know the runtime of the Secret Strike event we can assume that it will be similar to the Knowhere Siege runtime and that after Secret Strike ends we will get a new War Event.

Secret Strike

The next War Event will start on August 27 at 2:00 PM (PDT). Secret Strike retains a lot of elements from the Knowhere Siege and only slightly improves on them. It will have new Global Bonuses and new Room Bonuses

War Energy distribution remains the same as it was in Knowhere Siege. You get 10 Energy at the start of the War, with an option to buy 4 additional Energy at any point.

Attempt Bonus is getting some changes. Every Room has 10 Points as an Attempt Bonus. For every lost attack in that room, the attempt Bonus would drop by 2 Points. With the Start of Secret Strike, the Attempt Bonus of a room can drop to 0 Points (Knowhere Siege minimum was 6 Points) so efficiency will be even more important in this War Event.

The Exhausted Effect is also staying. After each Defensive victory, that team will have Exhausted applied to them. The Effect will stack up to 4 times, each time reducing the stats (Damage, Armor, Resist, Focus, and Damage Reduction) by 20%. So if the defensive team manages to defend itself 4 times, then by the fifth battle their Stats will be reduced by 80%. This Effect cannot be cleared.

Canceling combat during an attack will decrease the Attempt Bonus (and consume War Energy). That, in addition to the Exhausted effect not applying on canceled attacks, means that canceling combat is NOT recommended.

The Alliance who eliminates the most squads wins. If two Alliances are tied on squad kills, the Alliance with the highest Attempt Bonus wins. If Alliances are tied on Attempt Bonuses as well, the Alliance that full-cleared the opposing Helicarrier first Wins.

Point system for attacks:

Destroying Bridge: 40,000 Points
Destroying Reactor: 15,000 Points
Destroying Other Rooms: 5,000 Points
Eliminating a Single Enemy: 200 Points
Eliminating the Entire Squad: 1,000 Points + Attempt Bonus
If 1 Attempt: + 10 Points (-2 Points for each consecutive attempt)
First to full clear the Helicarier in War: 1 Point

Secret Strike also will establish new Room Bonuses. There are Global bonuses for each room and specific bonuses for the next rooms: Cargo Bay, Hangar, Medbay, Barracks, and Armory.

Added to All Rooms

[ROOM] +20% Primary Stats to ATTACKING War Ready ALLIES.
Extra 20% for Secret Defender ALLIES.

Cargo Bay

[Global] +10% to Primary Stats to all DEFENDING War Ready ALLIES
Extra 20% bonus to War Ready Mutant ALLIES

Hangar

[ADJACENT] +15% Barrier to all DEFENDING War Ready ALLIES.
Extra 15% bonus to War Ready Mutant ALLIES

Med Bay

[GLOBAL] Apply 2 Regeneration to DEFENDING War Ready ALLIES
Mutant ALLIES also receive Safeguard.

Barracks

[ADJACENT] Apply Offense Up to all DEFENDING War Ready ALLIES
War Ready Mutant ALLIES get an additional Offense Up.

Armory

[ADJACENT] +20% Primary Stats to all DEFENDING War Ready ALLIES
Extra 20% bonus to War Ready Mutant ALLIES

Best Rooms Position

With new Room Bonuses added with Secret Strike our Room Placement should change to better make use of the Bonuses.

Deck 1 – Deck 2 – Deck 3
Security – Reactor – Engineering
Bridge – Armory – Hangar
Med Bay – Barracks – Cargo Bay

This is only one of the potential Placements you could come up with, but none of them will be perfect, so you needn’t waste too much time on it.

The goal with this setup is to slow your opponent down in the beginning and lure them into attacking the middle lane. The strongest defense should be placed in Reactor, Security, and Engineering. If the enemy takes the middle lane, they will have to fight through Reactor, which has all the Buffs from the Adjacent Rooms (Stat Boost from Armory, Defense Up and Defense Down on enemies from Security and Engineering)

Med Bay and Cargo Bay provide Global Buffs, so the longer they are functioning the better. That’s why they are at the bottom.

If the enemy avoids going through the middle lane, they will have to fight through the Flight Decks that will have Buffs from either Security or Engineering that should hamper their progress slightly.

While Reactor and Bridge are awarding the most Points for clearing them, it’s not uncommon nowadays to have your Helicarrier full-cleared anyway, so placing them closer to the Flight Decks will mean that your enemy will likely focus on them. That’s why these two rooms can serve as good traps early on, so your defenses there should be formidable.

For alliances that are in lower leagues and don’t full-clear Helicarriers often if at all, it might make sense to move Reactor and Bridge down, and do something like this

Deck 1 – Deck 2 – Deck 3
Hangar – Armory – Cargo Bay
Security – Reactor – Engineering
Bridge – Barracks – Med Bay

But then again, Room Placement is not the most important part of it all, so you can experiment with it and even change it for each new War. The most important is having proper Defensive and Offensive teams.

Best War Defenses

in terms of Room Defenses, there are 2 important things to keep in mind:

Placing teams that have callouts to War Defense in their kits (Heroes for Hire, Marauders, Hero Asgardians, etc.)
Making use of the War Event and Room Bonuses (Mutants this time)

The first thing is important but fairly simple, we will provide a list of the best War Defensive teams below.

As for the Mutants, they gain additional benefits on Defense. Extra bonus to primary Stats and Safeguard are global effects, meaning they will be applied to all defending Mutants as long as the Rooms that provide the effects aren’t destroyed. Additionally, Mutants can get more Stat bonuses, Barrier, and Offense Up when Adjacent to the rooms that provide these bonuses.

Players assigned to Armory, Hangar, Barracks, or adjacent Rooms should focus on placing Mutants of defense. Such as Unlimited X-Men, Marauders (with Emma Frost), Weapon X, Death Seed, etc.

Players assigned to Rooms adjacent to Hangar should try using teams with Barrier as their main Defensive options. Those are Darkhold, Unlimited X-Men, Bionic Avengers, Marauders (with Emma Frost)

Optimal Defensive Setup

Taking everything into account, here’s the optimal War Defensive setup:

Unlimited X-Men
Infestation
Heroes for Hire
Young Avengers
Marauders(+Emma Frost)
Darkhold
Death Seed
Hero Asgardian
Uncanny X-Men
Astonishing X-Men

If any of those teams aren’t strong enough here are some alternatives:

Infinity Watch
Invaders
Rebirth
X-Force
X-Factor+1 (only in rooms with Barrier Boost)
Black Order

Plug-n-Play characters – Dormammu, Doctor Doom, and especially Apocalypse may be slotted in some of these teams to increase their defensive capabilities. But only if you are focused on Defense. Apocalypse will have increased value in this War Event so keeping him on offense is a better choice.

The full list of Defensive teams can be found HERE

Counters

All Mutant teams will benefit from new Room Bonuses, and it will affect the counters to them in varying degrees. But none of them will have as big a jump in defensive potential as Black Order had in the last War Event, so the counters won’t change drastically.

For example, War Dogs were a great counter to Unlimited X-Men, because you could apply Disrupted on Rogue before she takes her first turn, that way she won’t gain Taunt and you could easily focus on Gambit. That won’t change, the only difference is that Unlimited will have Safeguard, but War Dogs will copy the Safeguard so as a counter they should still work, but won’t be able to do big punch-ups.

Eternals on the other hand will no longer be viable against Unlimited because Ikaris won’t be able to flip Buffs and the damage won’t be enough without that.

That all changes if you bring in Apocalypse since he will prevent them from spawning with Safeguard.

Additionally, Black Order is no longer going to be a strong Defensive team since they willl lose all the benefits they had previously, so the options for counters will increase.

Once the Secret Strike event starts our AW Counters page will be updated to reflect all the changes. And you can find it HERE

Conclusion

The new War Events are a welcome change to the game mode that will allow us to experiment more and to keep changing our Offensive and Defensive tactics. Secret Strike is only the second iteration of that and new Room Bonuses might not affect us as much as the first event did, but it does change things and that should make playing this mode much more interesting.

If you have any questions, want to share your best War strategies with the community, or just want to chat with like-minded people visit our Discord HERE where you will find all the latest news and information about MSF.

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