Greetings Captains! Today we’re here to dive deeper into Arena strategy and discuss some of the winning combos that players frequently use to rise up the ranks.
There are many ways to win in the Arena, but as with any competitive game, some meta trends develop. These will fluctuate depending on updates and season features over time.
Below, we’ll walk you through some of the strategies that can lead to Arena success, but you’ll need to experiment to find out what works best for you.
Val Speed
This is by far the most popular Arena strategy at the time of writing this article. Valentine is a Mercenary that can only be achieved in-game through the end of season rewards based on HQ Level. She’s fast, hits hard and has two area of effect skills that blast the entire opposing team with tons of damage.
Valentine has one weakness though… she’s often so fragile she crumbles as soon as she’s hit! If you have a fast, high enough attack Valentine though, she won’t need to do anything beyond that first devastating hit to win.
That brings us to one other key component of this strategy… Akari! Akari’s Leader Skill is Blade Unleash: “In Arena combat, increase ally ATK by 20% and ATK SPD by 10%.” Regardless of Akari’s level, everyone on the team will receive these bonuses. This is great for Valentine, which is why you’ll often see a very low level Akari at the head of an opposing team. She doesn’t need to do anything but lead at the start to be a game changer.
Big Boys
This strategy has been growing more popular in response to the previously mentioned technique. In this strategy, you prioritize bulk on your team so you can survive Valentine’s match-starting nuke. You don’t care as much about going first. Your game is to survive the first wave and knock them down one by one.
Perhaps the most fun part of the big boy strategy is that occasionally you run into another team of big boys. Epic battle ensues.
A usual staple of this team will be William and/or Lucas. Their ability to create shields and defense boost while also soaking up a ton of damage can’t be overlooked. Most of these Mercenaries will feel like Val’s first hit is a scratch at best.
You still need to do some damage though, which is where Mercenaries like Torsten, Alex or Zahra could come into play. Torsten’s Berserker Rage deals more damage the more damage he’s taken… so if Valentine hits him early, she could be signing her own death warrant! Alex’s AOE bombs finish the battle for you if you can just stay alive long enough. Zahra will take extra damage from Valentine due to type advantage, but she’s bulky enough to survive and she claps back with some powerful hits.
Torsten big. Torsten hit HARD.
Perhaps the most crucial lynchpin of this strategy is Jin Ryu. In the leader spot, he’ll slap a stun on the entire enemy team when they first hit you. This may miss a few, but often you’ll absorb that first hit then find the entire opposing team sitting ducks. It also doesn’t hurt that Jin Ryu can deal MASSIVE damage with his Dragon’s Might Skill – this will hit three times, remove all the enemy’s buffs AND call a joint attack with two allies. Between this and Torsten’s Berserker’s Rage, you usually have two one-shots to toss around.
Debuff to Death
This strategy isn’t quite as popular as the two above, but it has some definite merit if you can build your team right. It won’t KO people as fast as the above options, however, which means you’ll have to work harder to hold that top spot in the last moments of an Arena Season.
To make this work, you’ll need to employ Mercenaries that specialize in debuffs. Think Laction, Emma, Zarkhan, Wang, etc. You’ll use them to paralyze the enemy and easily walk to victory.
Zarkhan is big here. His ability to slap sleep, heal blocks and damage over time on all enemies simultaneously makes him a great choice for an opening salvo.
Behold, the king of debuff stacking!
Emma can also play a critical role. Her attacks deal more damage per debuff on the enemy, making her absolutely deadly single target damage once you’ve stacked a healthy amount of status effects on the opposing team. Perhaps most enticing, her Taboo Wave can spread debuffs from the target to everyone else. When pointed at sleeping or stunned enemies, this can be game-changing.
Some less often thought of debuffers that can round out your team are out there too. Camilla’s Boulons Multiple AOE can silence everyone. Alex’s bombs can tick away while the enemy is sleeping before explosively finishing them off. Feeling too squishy? Wang’s Judgement Day is one of the most powerful stunning attacks in the game, and also has the potential to revive an ally.
Awwww, Akari didn’t get any bombs 😢. We can fix that.
Tons of Ways to Win
The arena is a bit more nuanced than it seems at first glance. Just because everyone is using one set of tactics doesn’t mean you have to. What’s your winning formula in the arena?
You never need to lock into one style. You can always switch your team up in the arena… and indeed you should based on who your opponents are in that match!
We’ll be back next time to focus on the Guild Arena. Until then, get out there and fight for that rank! That God of the Arena title isn’t going to win itself!
Alright, you’re all shuffled up and the cards have been dealt. You’re a master of reading other people, so you know you’ve got this. Suddenly, you realize that your powers of observational deduction don’t work quite right in online poker… whatever shall you do!?
I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to math harder than you’ve ever mathed before!
Odds and Playing the Math in Hold ‘Em
So we all know the poker player who plays with their feelings – “I’ve got a good feeling about that turn,” or “I can feel that he doesn’t have it.” That’s fun for tossing plastic chips around in your cousin’s basement over some beers, but I wouldn’t exactly call that a solid strategy when there’s real stakes.
Like most games, poker is based around complex systems of relatively simple math. What distinguishes poker from other games is the incomplete information factor. This is the main mechanic of the game. You know what you have, but everything else is a variable.
Think you can “feel” what other people’s cards are? Let’s review some facts from our last edition to dispel that illusion:
There are 1326 different possible combinations of hole cards you can be dealt in Hold ‘Em
There are 2,598,960 possible combinations the five cards on the table can be in as they are revealed
There are 9,122,409,676,719,740,029,270,368,190,464,000,000 (9.122 undecillion!) possible combinations for how the entire 23-card board could play out for a game with 9 players.
Still think you can play with your feelings? You’re playing the math whether you like it or not… embrace it!
Poker doesn’t have to be undecillion-level complicated though. With just a little learning and practice, you’ll be automatically weighing the chances of any hand you have with a surprising level of human-quality accuracy. The key is to always remember that there are waaaaay more ways that your hand can go wrong than it can go right.
Miss our last Thinking Poker? Check it out to have your mind blown by the not-quite-so-simple, traditional deck of cards.
Base Hand Odds
So you’re at a table with five other players in the hand. Your decision to fold, call or raise to see a flop. You’ve got A/K of hearts. Pretty confident about that? Let’s see where you’re at from an odds standpoint preflop:
Your A/K suited has the following chances of making a hand by the end of the river, not accounting for any other players:
High Card : 17.8%
One Pair : 44.1%
Two Pair : 22.3%
Three of a Kind : 4.2%
Straight : 2.9%
Flush : 6.2%
Full House : 2.3%
Four of a Kind : 0.1%
Straight Flush : 0.0%
With this hand matched against five totally unknown opponents, your hand has a 31% chance to come out on top. That is better than the 16.66% that would be an even distribution for you and 5 opponents..
A few things to note… That straight flush is at 0 from rounding. Keep in mind that a royal flush is just the highest straight flush. Yes, you have a gutshot royal flush draw – only if the 10 of hearts, the jack of hearts and the queen of hearts all hit the table. That’s a less than 1/1000 chance. The suited feels like it helps your odds a lot, but in the end having those matched suits is less than a 7% bump to your odds to make a decent hand.
In the above hand, you’ll be getting one pair or less in the likeliest circumstance. Think hard about how much that’s worth paying to see a flop.
Let’s look at the above hand again, this time in heads up play. There’s only you and one other player in the game and it’s your call whether to pay to see the flop.
Against a totally random hand in this circumstance, your A/K of hearts has a 66.1% chance to win. That is better than half, but it’s not quite the +11% over even odds that you had against 5 opponents.
You’re also not playing against a “random” hand. A player has filtered their cards to a degree. They’ve bet and called, so they are at least signaling they don’t have junk.
Pot Odds
Above, we were talking about straight odds to win. There is, however, another limited information mechanic in poker – the price. Throughout the game, you are put to a decision to add to the pot to stay in the hand repeatedly. This can be looked at as a price to stay in the game. Pot odds are what we call it when we weight this price versus hand equity or expected value.
Say you have a pair of 7s before the flop. There’s two other players in and there’s 800 chips in the pot. The decision is on you, and you can call for 200 chips to see the river. That means you’d be putting 20% of the value into the pot that you could prospectively win. There’s a table pair, and no possible draws on the board. There are two larger cards than your pair on the table.
Against two random hands, you have a 39.1% chance of taking down this pot after the river. You cannot, however, win if you don’t make it to the river or make everyone else fold.
You know from your cards and odds against a random hand that you are likely to have the best chances of anyone else, unless someone hit that low set on the flop. You’re paying 20% of the potential hand winnings to get into the river, and you’re roughly sitting at a player equity of 6:4, or 40%.
This means that you’re paying less than the perceived value of your hand to see the river. With your mathematical likelihood to win, you could conceivably call bets worth around 500 chips and still be on the right side of the numbers. Keep in mind, the pot gets bigger as you add more, thus diluting the pot odds argument and “pricing you in”, so to speak.
This is a good time to mention that “pricing you in” is an illusion. Remember the pot odds. Let’s say you’ve already paid 1000 chips to stay in a hand and there’s 5000 chips in the pot. The river has come, and you know that you have less than a 5% chance to win against random hands. Someone makes a small value bet of 400 chips (to puff up their pot probably!). If you have a 5% chance to win, paying 400 chips to see it through is a bad choice with only 5000 chips in the pot. You’d need ~8% chance to win to square those pot odds.
Already putting money into the pot does not mean you are priced in. Beware sunk cost… it’s the biggest weapon that the person with the winning hand has at their disposal to make you keep pushing over your chips!
Implied Odds
Let’s take this a step further. We know that pot odds are when you take the size of the pot into account versus the price of continuing in the game. Let’s move into something more abstract – implied odds.
Implied odds don’t only look at the pot and your chances versus a random hand. They are looking at the potential throughout the rest of the hand. Let’s look at another example.
You’ve got 10/J suited versus 5 opponents before the flop. You’re at about 24% chance to win… better than even 20% (1 of 5) odds! But wait! Someone’s going hard pre-flop… made hand? They throw down 900 chips into 100 chips of blinds. 3 callers, your decision. You’re now being asked to pay 900 into a 3700 chip pot to see the flop. This is less relative price than your chance to win to see three more cards, so you jump in and call. But… the player on the button raises to triple! Only one caller. It now comes back to you at with another 1800 into a 9100 chip pot. You’ve got the odds on your side in isolation… but this is starting to feel like sunk cost.
…or is it?
Let’s freeze in that moment. Someone made a ridiculously high bet off of just blinds… usually meaning that they have (or are representing they have) a medium pocket pair. They know they likely have the best hand preflop, but after more cards come out they probably won’t. That first player was probably trying to just buy the blinds, plus maybe some sucker that jumped in with trash.
The second player, however, made a value bet. While their raise was high compared to previous bets, they knew that at least one or two players would feel obligated to call after already putting so much money in. This player is intentionally growing the pot bigger instead of trying to elicit folding. This usually means they think they have the winning hand, or it is very likely that they will be the time the river is flipped.
They are trying to price other players in with pot odds… make it so they simply can’t fold over such a small amount of chips relative to the size of the pot. If you call, you’ve paid 2700 chips to access around a ~10k chip pot. While it’s likely that this is worth it to see a flop with your upside chance of almost quadrupling your chips in the middle of the table, tread lightly. If your opponent understands pot odds, they may be keeping you on the hook and just building up their pot without scaring you away.
It’s important to keep in mind here that there are three cards on the flop. With a hand like 10/J suited, you’re likely to know whether you have a real hand or not after the flop. With the turn and river only being one card, be very cautious about following value bets to those cards. If you haven’t gotten a hand worth playing in the first five cards, it’s unlikely you’re going to make one with those last two. A good player who knows they have you beat will just bleed you the rest of the hand to grow their pot.
Simple Gameplay. Complex Nuance
Poker overall is a very simple game in concept, but the combination of playing card randomness and incomplete information makes it so a lifetime of playing poker would still not be enough for anyone to totally understand the nuance and intricacies of the game.
In this article we’ve only scratched the surface of quick odds calculation in poker. Even knowing these few things though, you can estimate what’s worth it to you much better than just playing blind. Poker is about incomplete information… the more information you know about the game and theory, the less disadvantage you take from not knowing what’s in other players’ heads.
That’s all for us in this week’s Thinking Poker. We’ll be back in a few weeks to talk more about the fundamentals of all things poker!
Practice makes perfect… hit the tables today! Play Now
Have you tested your battle skill in the Champions Arena lately? There is honor for the taking, glory for the worthy, and rewards for those who find triumph.
Gala warriors are called to play this RPG battle strategy game on either mobile or desktop, completely free. With a treasure trove of rewards that come in all shapes and sizes, Champions Arena is a non-stop strategic challenge for anyone who loves RPG combat!
The wisest of my wimpy enemies run when they see me coming, knowing they’ll get a taste of my ax if they don’t.
Hands down, I’m the most powerful Orc around. I have bested all the other Orc Champions so many times that the thrill of Orc-on-Orc battle lost its thrill for me. Now I’m ready for a new challenge, which is why I’m ready to serve as your Champion in the Arena.
Where you go, I’ll go. I don’t love the idea of subservience to some interdimensional puppetmaster playing a game, but Gaimer tells me that’s the only way to unlock the secrets of the dark Rift of Chaos. Gainer is the glowing skull that sits atop my left shoulder. He loves the blood of enemies, and he insists that if we can reach the dark Rift, we will both grow immensely in power. Then the Champions Arena will be ours!
I suppose you want to know about my Skills!
My Normal Attack deals damage proportionate to 120% of my max HP to the target enemy, and with a card match, also has a 60% chance of Taunt.
My L2 Attack is called Grand Whirlwind, dealing damage proportionate to 135% max HPwith an automatic 60% chance of Stun. With a card match, the damage is increased, along with the chance of Stun!
My L3 Attack is the Durax signature, Death From Above, dealing 110% max HP damage to every enemy and increasing the damage to 130% with a card match!
My Passive Ability isn’t passive at all, but deals horrific damage to the entire enemy team whenever one of my allies falls. It’s called Slaughterfest. Basically, when an ally dies, it makes me really mad. I automatically perform Death From Above (out of turn), and I gain a nice stat boost with Extreme Fury.
Think about it. If I’m the last Champion standing on your team, I most likely have performed Death From Above three times out of turn, smashing through the defenses of even the most accomplished enemy teams!
I know it’s tempting to want Champions with friendlier smiles and more charm, but I can tear a whole in every opponent you’ll face in the Arena.
Jesus is resourceful, sly and incredibly loyal to his friends. His morality and humanity helped restore a small sliver of civilization to the broken world – a compassion that strengthened all the survivors around him.
That’s the kind of survivor you need on your team to build a new empire out of the ruins of the old world. And starting tomorrow, you can purchase Jesus directly in our next Hero sale!
Sale Details
The direct sale for Jesus kicks off on Friday, July 12th at 9pm PT. All rarities will be available in limited supply for this sale. Pick up any Hero Card to start playing as Jesus in The Walking Dead: Empires today.
This sale will continue until the supply for these Hero Cards has run out, or it is removed from the store to make room for other Heroes. In the case of removal, we’ll give you plenty of notice beforehand!
These Hero Cards fulfill directly to GalaChain once purchased.
Build the Future
The crafting event just started a few days ago. Plenty of time left to manufacture your empire. How high will you climb the leaderboards?
An empire doesn’t build itself… get out there and get crafting!
Survive and Rebuild
Jesus could be an important ally as you navigate the apocalypse. While many of your favorite Heroes are focused entirely on survival, Jesus thinks about community and building a society… small actions that lead to big change over time.
You, too, will need to think about the future and your people to build a successful empire.Build your empire with Jesus. Visit The Walking Dead: Empires Store tomorrow to recruit him to your team before it’s too late.
Hey all! Let’s take a break from our meet the team entries to chat a bit about crafting.
Yes, there is a reason you are collecting all those resources in V0.5! It’s not just about who has the biggest pile of wood and stone.
The Crafting Hall
First we’ll take a look at our crafting space. Our little friends needed a place to put all their trinkets together so we built them a crafting hall. Unlike fantasy games with a “Ye Olde Blacksmithy”, we went a bit more modern with 3D printing machines. We figured that if VOX can have teleportation tech, 3D printing seemed like the way to go.
We have a new friend that lives here–Nuts McBolty– who will help players with the crafting process, overseeing any VOX or ProtoVOX that are spending their time here.
Why build a 3d environment for crafting? Well, we needed to start testing out crafting on landscape for V2. Being a small team we needed to do some R&D work around that, so we might as well combine it with the crafting development that was already happening. This allows part of the team to work out the 3D aspects for the next phase of the project– creating buildings and decoration– without affecting the current development of crafting.
Crafting at its Core for Project Cerberus
In short, crafting is the ability to create items and eventually rooms, decorations and more!
Each Account will have a crafting button available in the Main Map UI that opens the players 3D Print Farm.
1 Printing Station will initially be unlocked for each account.
Additional Printing Stations will be available to unlock.
Each station will have a level from 1-5.
Each station can craft 1 recipe at a time.
A worker slot will require that 1 worker is equipped in order for the Printing Station to function.
Those are the rules, so what can I make? For version 1, the list is limited, and we need your help to make sure the process works before we open up the catalog. Over time we will add more and more items to craft over time– some you can learn, some you can get as rewards and some you can purchase through the store. We will talk about the store in a later dev blog.
With the game’s initial crafting system, you’ll have the ability to craft everything from powerups to more advanced crafting parts and even some surprises.
So How Do I Craft?
First you go to the 3D room and Select a printer and add a VOX…
Select a recipe…
Print!
Collect!
It’s that simple!
Two other systems fold directly into crafting: The store (buy items needed for crafting)
and account leveling, which will allow players to unlock more advanced recipes.
We will talk about those features in a future blog real soon! – The VOX Populi
