Mechabellum Starting Specialist Guide

Get 1 Lv. 2 Rhino free on round 4

The Rhino lev 2 is an instant power spike. It gives a strong front line for your damage dealers that needs to be answered immediately. Using mobile beacon to move the rhino away from threats or into the enemy tower will steal many rounds for you and give you a good control of the game.

You can play the specialist also passively by using a backline rhino, or even selling it straight away for 300 supplies, or flank with the rhino for 1 turn and then immediately sell it. But don’t do it unless the Rhino is being hard countered by enemy’s unit choices and position from round 1 forward.

Get an extra 100 supply every round, but the ATK of all units is reduced by 13%, and the HP is reduced by 13%

Economy specialist that enables you to react more easily to what the enemy is doing. Don’t waste your money simple because you have extra. Save for future impactful turns.

In mechabellum, the stats don’t play as critical role as in for example some RTS games like Starcraft. There is a lot of overkill on units and the victory is always determined by which units are deployed against which units. So, while the 13% stat reduction may seem like a big deal, it’s definitely not. But this in mind, when facing for example a supply specialist, who has similar resources to you, it’s not advisable to go into a mirror match with the same units. That’s not where the cost control specialist shines.

The power of the cost control specialist is in adapting. You can pick up cards more easily, you can tech units earlier, you can go into early giants and you can easily switch around compositions. Fort this specialist to be truly effective, you need to let the enemy make the first moves and build a hard counter to their composition with your extra resources.

Obtain 50 additional supplies per round

Another economy specialist. It’s not a surprise they are ranking high. With good economy, you just have better turns. The supply specialist is probably the easiest specialist to play. It has no downside and is just stronger than the other ones. Many people would rank this as the best specialist, and for most people, it is the best one because it’s so easy to play.

Giant units no longer consume supplies when being unlocked

Why is the giant specialist good?

The economic advantage of the giant specialist is insane. If you compare it to the supply specialist for example, who has gotten +200 gold by round 4, you will get it with one giant unlock, which you can do by round 2.

I’m not sure if this specialist is this strong because of the power level, or simply because people don’t know what to do when facing giants. If you fail to respond correctly on the following turn, the giants will level and take over the game.

This hero is very predictable in high level play, but you can trick opponents with mind games and clever positions to gain huge advantage. The giants actually counter every unit in the game (see counter list).

The cards will turn in your favor as you can have great benefits from items (the bigger the unit, the bigger the item advantage). Even redeployment module is crazy as you can move something like a lev 2 vulcan anywhere anytime. Orbital bombardments and similar don’t hit you and the enemy needs to shield against them. Sure there’s giant hunter, but it’s really expensive early game and it’s very risky to take late game as the game can end in 1-2 rounds as the giants do crazy damage.

How to play the giant specialist

Your first deployment needs to cover your flanks so you can have more impactful turns later on without running into trouble. You can play this hero aggressively or passively depending on the starting comp of your enemy and yourself. It’s quite flexible as you can drop a vulcan turn 2 or save a bit of money (turn 1 and/or 2) to have a huge turn 3 or 4. Elite recruiting a lev 2 vulcan with +125% attack obliterates everything. Fortresses with barriers counter a lot of different stuff. Don’t ever build an early overlord.

Use field recovery. You can “redeploy” units by selling them and buying them again. Or selling a lev1 giant to recruit 2 lev 2 giants in one turn. Suppose a scenario where you are playing aggressive and have 1 crawler flanking and there is an enemy mustang defending, next turn you drop a vulcan and a phoenix there. Most likely it will trigger a crazy reaction. Before next turn, you sell the vulcan, jump drive the phoenix away and buy 2x lev 2 giants on the opposite side of the map, buy a speed upgrade from the tower and take down their tower.

It is a difficult hero to play, if you make mistakes your opponent can easily force you into a corner. You should always pick up extra crawlers and fangs. Positioning the low cost units is very key to keeping your giants and towers alive. Your army should almost fully consist of giants+crawler/fang (at least in early/mid game). Some phoenix/wasp/stormcaller might be good as well. But don’t go into steel balls, sledges, mustang and what not.

The giants are hard to counter as vulcan clears everything small (including balls and sledges if you keep it same level and upgrade dmg). The vulcan’s counter is fortress and the fortress’ counter is melting point. And melting points counter is a melting point. And the giant specialist gets everything for free. It’s scary to drop a fortress into a giant specialist vulcan as there is a zero cost melting point coming next.

here is an example giant spec game on mine on youtube

Obtain 200 supplies in the first round

This is the specialist that offers the best variety of early game tactics that are yet to be explored.

You can force a powerful strategy out that starts snowballing on round 1 or you can be flexible and counter your enemy on early rounds with your extra resources. A solid specialist.

Start with a free Lv. 3 Marksman

The marksman specialist is usually better with passive starting units, like arclights/stormcallers+fangs. If you don’t value the marksman, you can view this hero as a +200 economy specialist as that’s how much you get when you sell the marksman.

The main problem of the specialist is that the marksman lev 3 gives huges amounts of XP to enemy units when killed. It also steals a lot of experience from your other units, thus slowing down your leveling (3->4 takes much more XP than 1->2). So the starting benefit is not as good as it seems.

Against aggressive line ups that deploy everything on one side, it really feels bad if your lev 3 marksman is doing nothing on the other side. Against this, you can gamble and deploy everything on one side yourself, deploy marksman in the middle or deploy symmetrically and sell the marksman immediately if it’s on the wrong side. Always put an arclight (or similar) standing next to your marksman to clear crawlers/fangs so it will begin shooting at more valuable targets faster.

Obtain an extra 50 supplies in the first round, able to immediately recruit Lv. 2 units.

The elite recruitment benefit is essentially a 100 supplies each turn (as it costs that much to get it from the tower with other specialists). But it also has a huge economic drawback as you certainly wouldn’t like to get all your units at level 2. The elite specialist differs a lot from the other specialists and is a hard specialist to get a grasp on.

The hero becomes really powerful as the game progresses. The question is how are you going to get there? If the enemy keeps you occupied in multiple places on the board, it’s hard to come back as it’s impossible to be everywhere with lev 2 units. For this specialist to work, you need to set the tempo, with aggression or clever units choices. Making a single wrong deployment with this specialist early game will probably cost you the game. So it’s really hard to play.

I suggest unlocking field recovery early, possibly on turn 1. This way you can convert your lev 1 units to lev 2, “redeploy” badly positioned units and generate pressure just where you want to.

You really need to play this specialist aggressively to get the full value. I also suggest forgetting about your flanks and using the tower upgrades to cover them instead. It’s a very hard hero to play and unfortunately even if you shine with it, it doesn’t quite reward you for the pain you endure.

Aerial units no longer consume supplies when being unlocked and increases the range of all aerial units by 10m

The aerial specialist is a bit of a gimmicky hero. It’s a very aggressive one, as all of the air units in this game are better in an aggressive position. You can learn some straight up rush builds like a wraith push or something similar or you can just play a normal aggressive game while being very weak to units that are countered by air. For example you can hard push with a steel ball opening and wait for the opponent to go vulcan or scorpion and immediately switch into overlords.

Increases movement speed of all units by 3m/s

Speed is a very powerful tool in Mechabellum. However, if you compare this hero to supply specialist, the supply specialist gets 50 supply each round and with the 50 supply, you can buy the 50 cost speed bonus for one round (from the tower). How often would you want to buy the speed on rounds 1-4? Late game you can have both the speed bonuses of course.

If you have some good aggressive builds in mind and the starting units fit for that role, the speed specialist is a solid one to force a strategy. If the opponents opening somehow counters your plans, it’s very hard to deviate because you have no economical leeway.

HP of all units increased by 17%

This is basically a do nothing specialist. The most exciting thing is you can replicate your enemy’s crawlers in 1v1 battles.

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