Bot War overall tactics – List Building

So, while I am waiting for a delivery I thought I would get away from the rigours of social media and return to the trustworthy Traders Galaxy Blog. A few people over the last year have asked for a run down of tactica for various factions. A couple of people have already done some of this over on fb group. But with this first article I would like to do something a little different. Id like to talk about overall tactics in the game of Bot War. Starting with list building.

List Building.

List building in Bot War is extremely important. The game rewards players that can match their list composition to their playstyle. When building a list in Bot War you have most of the criteria that many other games have. Criteria such as points total, damage output, damage capacity etc. I wont go into these today as I assume everyone is reasonably well versed in stocking to points limits etc.
But you have two of the most important criteria for Bot War list that are not in many games. These are Strategy Rating and Energy Points. Strategy Rating determines when your unit will activate in the game, regardless of which side its on, and Energy Points determine how powerful attacks or defence can be and how easy to perform they will be. On the extreme end it can even determine if your unit will get to activate at all! So, yeah pretty important stuff 🙂

Strategy Rating.

Lets look at Strategy Rating first. In Bot War the lowest Strategy Rating activates first and then units activate in ascending order. So a SR of 1 will activate first and an SR of 10 activates last. It does not matter which side a unit is on and players in Bot War move up the SR order together. “Do you have any SR1?” is a common Bot War question for starting the game :). Tiebreakers are determined by a single priority roll at the start of the game and this roll can sometimes carry a heavy weight on the game if both players have key units with identical SR.

But activating first in a turn is not always desirable. Its all in the difference from being proactive to reactive. Your unit may like to react to some new development but you have already activated so not must wait the turn. But not only is SR important against the enemy, but its also important to your own force. In Bot War, many units synergise with other friendly units in order to get the most out of their abilities and these all require the correct orders of SR to do successfully. For example, Living Weapon is a Super Ability that requires another model to work and if timed right in the correct SR order could allow the Living Weapon to fire 4 times in a turn, a pretty nasty surprise considering the units that have living weapon have strong ranged attacks.

Energy Points.

There are 4 energy types in Bot War. These are Pink, Green, Red and Blue. But the last 3 are pretty rare so I am only going to discuss Pink energy today as its common to nearly all factions. Energy is how everything works in Bot War. Whatever you wish your units to do will have an energy cost associated with it. Therefore having enough energy to power your force is quite an important part of the game. Each unit you select for your force brings with it an amount of energy to the force’s pool. This pool is then distributed throughout your units at the start of each turn in the Power Up Phase.
This of course all sounds very simple but players of Bot War know that its not as easy as all that. There are a whole host of tools that opponents can use to mess with your energy plans for that turn. On top of these hazards, usually, its more costly to put more energy into your force. As far as I am aware there is no hard and fast practice of how much energy is too much. I personally try to sit around the 3-4 surplus energy once every unit has 2 energy each. To me this is a good number. More than this I find I finish a turn with energy still on models which is not as efficient. After all that energy not used was paid for in points most likely.

Summary.

So my advice to beginners is to make a list with a 3-4 energy surplus and a good spread of strategy ratings across the force.
As you get better at the game you may wish to skew that into a totally different force based on how you like to play. For example you may want a force with some powerful early activations then maybe a back up last activation? Or perhaps you are finding that your force is energy hungry and you need more surplus. This could be the case if you have a lot of units with Jetpacks or maintained Super Abilities or perhaps a weaker force that requires more shield boosts.

Anyway that’s all from me for now – Happy Gaming