Kaiju Wars may have a disarming charm to it in its writing, characters, and setting, but in actuality, it’s a challenging tactics game with many elements working in tandem. While the game does a good job of introducing you to all of its features, there are a number of strategic nuances that we’ve compiled to help you get a head start in your war against the kaiju.
1. Focus On Science
Earning enough breakthrough stars is the ultimate win condition in every mission. As a result, science production and the ability to earn these stars are vital to your success in Kaiju Wars.
Though you can earn a breakthrough star by defeating a kaiju, this won’t be possible in every mission due to their massive health pools, healing abilities, and other effects that may hinder your ability to deal damage. As such, we recommend that for science you focus on establishing a solid science production infrastructure with structures, such as labs and offices, and researchers that will ensure you earn victory stars at a steady rate, barring any kaiju’s mucking things up.
2. Spend Your Medals
Kaiju Wars includes a minor meta game progression system, where depending on the player’s performance and completion of optional objectives, you’ll earn medals. These medals can be spent on upgrading the stats of ace units, special units, recruiting new researchers, or even unlocking additional slots for researcher deployment.
There’s little reason to horde your medals, as it’s vital to ensure the strength of your units levels up at a steady rate to keep up with the increasing difficulty across the game’s six acts worth of missions. It may make sense to hold onto your medals to buy researcher slots, which cost 15 medals, but generally, unit upgrades for damage and speed are cheap at one medal and three medals respectively. It’s important to note that unit stats can only be upgraded once, so there’s no possibility of rolling with an ace tank with a ground rating of 10.
3. Speed Is Key
On the topic of speed, speed is a vital stat for all units, regardless of their role, as it allows you to approach the concept of positioning (more on that later) more flexibly. Kaiju themselves are quite speedy and their speed rating will vary based on the damage they take and the healing abilities that they activate. It’s quite worthwhile investing in the speed stat for your aces and activating speed buffing projects at the right time can mean you’re able to adequately respond to a surprise appearance of a kaiju or establish a defensive line to slow down a rampaging one.
4. Choose The Right Researcher
Researchers are an incredibly valuable asset as they can significantly improve your science production if utilized properly. Most researchers have specific conditions, usually associated with terrain or specific projects that give you additional science.
Before starting a mission, observe the mission terrain to the best of your ability. Based on the mission layout, the terrain, the placement of buildings, and free foundations, make sure to choose the researcher that will benefit you the most in producing science.
5. Activate Special Unit Projects
Unlike basic units, special units don’t need money to deploy and instead require a set amount of time in production at a lab before heading towards the fight. The prep time of a special unit is essentially a delay timer before using the given unit.
There are of course projects that you can use to reduce the prep timer, but the best way to manage prep time is to activate special unit projects as soon as possible so that your labs can get straight to work on preparing special units. You’ll usually have at least a few turns before the kaiju start appearing and causing substantial collateral damage, so get those powerful units early to minimize the monster’s effect on your resources.
6. Deploy The Aces
Aces are essentially mini-special units in that with an investment of medals, they’ll be more powerful than their basic unit brethren. As such, it’s advisable to use your most powerful units as much as possible and get them into the field as quickly as possible, because you can always repair them.
You’ll need to pay 3 money in order to purchase any basic unit, but repairing costs only 1, so by getting aces out early and active, you’re quite literally getting more bang-for-your-buck, if you’ve spent the medals to develop your aces that is.
7. Track Kaiju Pathways
Kaiju move predictably across the map, with only minimal randomness, and you can use this to your advantage to prepare your units and defenses. You’ll always see a kaiju’s target and if you click on the monster, the UI will display all the possible specific tiles a kaiju will take to reach its target. Use this information to deploy units to most effectively respond to the kaiju.
You can take this idea even further with the spawn areas of each kaiju and best prepare for when they appear. The armadillo kaiju spawns in water tiles, the ape kaiju spawns in the forest or jungle, the worm kaiju spawns on hills, and the fiery moth spawns from volcanoes.
8. Positioning, Positioning, Positioning
The name of the game in Kaiju Wars is positioning where the goal is to place units in optimal locations that maximize their tactical options. Given that humanity’s forces can generally have difficulty keeping pace with kaiju, positioning is a key concept to grasp to mitigate the lack of speed and mobility.
More specifically, units like infantry, artillery, and police are very much positional units as they have abilities that are affected by movement or by their placement in relation to the terrain they operate in. Careful and thoughtful planning, effective foresight, and knowledge of your own units can help determine where they’ll be most useful in any given situation.
9. Slow and Distract Kaiju
The kaiju, especially in later stages of the game, become quite durable and may have health pools so large that repulsing them with direct damage may be too costly or simply not feasible. Given that Kaiju Wars is essentially a time management game, where your primary timer is your science production and ability to earn breakthrough stars, slowing, delaying, and distracting kaiju can be just as useful to victory.
There are plenty of units that have slowing effects to reduce the speed of kaiju if they step on a hapless human unit, while whittling away at the kaiju’s health will inevitably reduce their speed, so causing some damage may well be part of an effective delaying strategy. Distraction can also be an effective tactic to buy yourself time for your labs to earn you victory.
10. Secure Dr. Wagner’s Evacuation Path
As humanity’s lead scientist on the kaiju, Dr. Emma Wagner is the lynchpin of your entire research and victory effort. The kaiju are aided by some mysterious force that will activate dark projects that will degrade your security rating. Once the security rating reaches 0, the kaiju will sense Dr. Wagner’s location and will head straight for their lab.
Because this situation is almost certain, you’ll need to be ready to shift Dr. Wagner to another lab to keep researching the serum. Whenever Dr. Wagner moves near a harbour, army base, airfield or a lab. they can switch to another transport with full movement, meaning you can chain move Dr. Wagner from location to location. When placing buildings, consider placing them in such a way that you can easily chain move Dr. Wagner to a secure location away from the approaching kaiju.
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