English
4.0
(btw, gear as in clockwork gears, not generic term for equipment)
When a gear fully rotates, it triggers its effect, either summoning the unit to fight or casting the buff.
1) ads:
One of the main concerns of most players and a potential of complains.
For this game, ads is relatively mild compared to bag games.
- first, you get the full space to place gears, unlike bag games where you add it piece by piece and many locked by ads.
- next, like bag games, 1 of the 3 gears generated has a chance to be very strong and locked by ads. But in most cases (at least early game), what you have is already sufficient to win. Those ads locked gears just make it easier if you somehow keep losing or just want to take it easy
- also, gears are 1 bag slot.
What does that mean? If you need to merge 4 gears (or tier 3?), basically you need hold 2 unit slots (tier 2 and tier 1 then draw a tier 1 to merge). For bag games, if the unit needs 4 bag slots, that would be 8 slots, basically eating up almost all your bag space.
This makes it a gamble as you can only chose 1 unit type to merge and pray you draw it. But for this gear game, given that it is only 1 slot, you have more leeway to keep different copies so the difficulty of merging to get the same unit locked by the ads is lower
Basically, mid game, you don't really need to watch ads. After the stage is complete, the ads don't feel as intrusive anyways
2) Game mechanics:
The game mechanics is weird.
One would think that the gears to speed up must be placced before the buff or unit summoning gear.
Like "main gear" > "speedup gear" > "unit summoning gear"
So the speedup gear will multiply the rorations and pass it on to the unit summoning gear. Well, at least that was how I imagined before I actually played it.
But on testing, both the setup below have the same speed
"main gear" > "speedup gear" > "unit summoning gear"
"main gear" > "unit summoning gear" > "speedup gear"
Meaning that the logic is not physics but some unexplained method by the developer
Some rules I observed is
- number of unlinked buff or unit summoning gears that are rotated, will slow down all gears
- linking them up = 1 chain with more contact to main gear = more speed (no idea why)
- so linking 7 gears to the main gear would be the fastest (1 corner can be kept unused)
- attaching a speedup gear any where speeds up all gears linked to it, even if the speedup gear is at the outer most of the group ofr chain of gears (weird huh?)
- higher lv speedup gear gives more speed than individual speedup gears before merge, but compared to speed increase from increasing contact with main gear, is still lower. So the 7 gears should finish setting up before level up the gears?
Also, the game has a cap on the number of units summoned.
This means that even if you use ads to get lots of units summoned at once, most of them will sit waiting behind the wall until an active unit dies. Making it kind of pointless to get ads locked units.
3) Gacha:
The game does not have the conventional level up. Where you gain xp in stages and level up your units. Rather, it is closer to tier up of units.
You gain shards from either rewards or gacha which is used to "level up" a unit and that is capped by the number of stars of the unit. You can up the stars by getting duplicates of the unit from gacha.
So is basically gacha shards to tier up and duplicates to breakthrough in other games without the conventional lv up. In my opinion at least.
Meaning, if you get stuck, you just gotta wait and do more dailies for gacha attempts. Running stages don't seem to help that much.
While tactics may help, if your units get 1 shot by the enemy, there really isn't anyway you can win even if you managed to swarm them. A bunch of catus mobs shooting their piercing shot will wipe your army clean and advance to your wall before your next wave arrives
Conclusion is that the ads portion is not that bad and the game mechanics though not properly explained, is still quite interesting. Progress is locked by unit stats so there isn't a need to rush as you will probably need to slowly gacha your units to becoming stronger.