Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus – Beginners Tips & Tricks

Useful Tips & Tricks for Noobs

General Tips:

  • Never do single pulls, always save for 10s.
  • Join the guild ASAP, otherwise you can’t complete the daily mission chest.
  • Spend all of your ads on shop refreshes, it helps both you and gives a coin to devs
  • Your primary BS spending venue should always be energy. Recent updates made it so that the close second are cheap craftables that cost 30 to 150 bs, they have similar energy per bs value.
  • Don’t give up in time limited modes even if you feel disheartened and outmatched. Every try at least means a little bit more experience for you and your characters. And possibly more rewards if you manage to win.
  • Level Incisus. Seriously, just do, because you’re gonna suffer otherwise in imperial quests and LRE’s.
  • Buy Isabella pack the instant you see it.
  • Find a balance between meta and what you like. Sticking to playing only Thutmose can be fun while it lasts but poor performance is gonna detriment it. Don’t overtly chase meta too. Just learn what’s the best rn and go from there.
  • Dont spend all OS dry, because it can quickly get really hard. 1.5 tokens per day would be a decent pace.
  • Focus on the campaigns first. Then when you’re done – build for other modes.
  • You can click on almost everything in the game to get information about how things work. The devs have made almost everything completely transparent. Few other games give you so much information if you just click around.

Short Term:

  • Focus on campaign characters, for regular campaigns prioritize orcs last.
  • Join an active guild, initial guild credits go towards eldryon, archi, gulgortz, then use them on xp books (Optional: not recommended for f2p, but saving credits over a period of time can allow you to unlock a legendary character whose event you missed out on)
  • Gold / exp are the main bottlenecks. Uncommon -> elite orbs will be less of a problem over time. Legendary orbs/badges are always valuable.
  • Blackstone goes towards 50 energy refresh daily
  • During HRE events, you can “bank” your energy the day before the event if you wish for a jumpstart. Spend 50/110 blackstone refreshes daily and you will get epic f2p
  • Tacticusplanner website will help you map out energy usage for upgrades
  • Mirror campaigns have better droprates than base campaigns
  • Use onslaught to farm shards for unfarmable characters. If you get a character to the ascension stage, you may refrain from ascending in order to repeatedly honor it for a chance at orb drops for its ascension tier. Orbs only drop if the honored unit may be ascended.

Mid-Term:

  • Campaign characters upgraded for elite campaigns. These are more efficient farms for rare+ items
  • Try to start focusing on a solid guildraid team. These can be googled but the 3 main ones are multihit/admech/neurothrope. Multihit is most beginner friendly
  • Your roster can go “tall” or “wide.” Tall means having a few select units that are much higher geared and ranked than the majority of your roster. Wide means having a large amount of units at decent ranks but less units fully beefed up. Play how you want, but tall will generally allow for more damage on guild raids, wide will help more with legendary events
  • 50 doom eldryon, staple on most all raid teams

Long-Term:

  • Diamond 3 raid team
  • Build your roster towards legendary unlock events
  • Complete elite campaigns
  • Level what you want, and have fun. This is a game and should be enjoyed as such.

Best Practices for New Players:

  • Always hold off until you have 10 scrolls before sending it. You might want to just pull, but it’s been proven better to wait.
  • Whenever you clear a Character stage in the Campaign (every 15 stages), you’ll get a 24-hour timed quest, so if you have no energy right now it’s probably best to let it regenerate before attempting the battle
  • Upgrading all three mandatory characters for a campaign is usually wrong – you want to push one (ideally up to Gold), get one some amount of stats (up to around silver), and one can just do their best to hide (anywhere from stone to bronze).
  • The best units for you to work on right away are Bellator, Aleph Null, and Eldryon. They’ll do a lot to help you through their campaigns, and have passable synergy for an early raid team together.
  • Building up units gets significantly more expensive as you go higher, but the most expensive faction to upgrade are the Ultramarines. Any factions released after Azrael (Tyranids/Thousand Sons/AdMech/World Eaters/Blood Angels) take SIGNIFICANTLY fewer legendary items to upgrade fully.
  • Rotbone is the lynchpin of most Chaos strategies. Once you’re in a guild and doing wars with your battle brothers, you should be trying to unlock him with your war currency
  • Finally, do not go deep on Varro, it will cost you a TON of time and energy for no real payout. A lot of people do this, and it’s not good.

Prime Guide: Core & Options

Click to enlarge…

Energy Management:

Campaign game modes require Energy. Whether you play for fun or to grind materials for ranking up, it is a VITAL part of the gameplay loop. To sum it up, every hour you get 12 Energy, try spending 288 Energy throughout the day, every day.

For most new players that would be (288/6=) 48 Campaign plays or Raids. What works for me is I schedule my gaming from UTC 00:00 to UTC 15:00. The 7 hours inactivity will refill 84 energy which I spend ASAP (within the hour or two), and spend more throughout the day as it replenishes.

You can adjust the beginning and ending hour, for example start at 07:00 and end at 22:00, just be mindful of when the Daily Cycle reset is in your time zone, and how much Energy you accumulate during the inactive hours. There is also single “free” 50 Energy you can get by watching ads every daily cycle.

Manage Your Total Power Score:

I’m talking about the Level counter on your in-game homepage (top right, on the bar that has your Avatar and in-game Player Name), NOT your individual Character Power rating.

Levelling up by reaching the next threshold of total Power Score gives you bunch of stuff, most importantly Tokens and Energy. When you’re at the level you want to plan out when to play (for example on Saturdays or Sundays with Double Gold and Double XP respectively, OR during the opening of a non-Legendary HRE), it helps you have more energy in reserve, so you can play more (and earn more points).

You do this by delaying putting in your upgrades, postponing abilities upgrade, and even postponing equipment upgrade (anything that raises your Character Power).

Don’t Be Afraid of PvP Events:

Because of level and gear equalization, it is mostly skill based and even if you are losing, you will pick up some rewards and learn a lot about characters and how good they are.

You will eventually run into a very common team of Ragnar, Celestine, Kharn, Aunshi and “flavor” which will be unpleasant to play against but it is possible to win even against those teams, as just owning those characters doesn’t bestow skill to the player.

Jan Bakowski
About Jan Bakowski 325 Articles
A lifelong gamer Jan Bakowski, also known as Lazy Dice, was always interested in gaming and writing. He lives in Poland (Wrocław). His passion for games began with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 back in 1998. Proud owner of Steam Deck, which has become his primary gaming platform. He’s been making guides since 2012. Sharing his gaming experience with other players has become not only his hobby but also his job.

3 Comments

  1. Once you have the basic campaigns finish and are ready to make progress on raid, work on eldryon and pick between bellator aleph-null re’vas and Abraxas. These are funominal character out side of raids so you can never go wrong pick which one you like and make your raid team around them

  2. Try to find an active guild. Not only can your guild mates speed up your progress by supplying upgrades that might otherwise be inaccessible, both Guild Raids and Guild War are exceptional sources for additional rewards. Ultimately, a good guild makes the game more fun.

  3. Make yourself familiar with what does what, maybe read the introduction on the Wiki
    In the beginning focus on your campaigns. They will yield most ressources and what you need to get going.
    Focus on one to two chars at a time. That can be until you reach a rank or you are able to beat a campaign mission
    Mind your daily quest. The game actually tells you quite nice which game modes you need to do.
    Learn what the terrain does. The effect is huge. Remember when Obi-Wan had the high ground? That is also true in Tacticus.
    Enjoy and have fun!
    This is not a fast game. There is no need to rush.

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