Mask of Arcadius: Blackjack

Blackjack

Your first 'Ryder', ie anime mecha. Contrary to what you might expect from the anime aesthetic, Ryders are really the grunt soldier units of the game, not the elite combatants. The Blackjack has a pretty strong first impression that may lead you to expect Ryders to be top-tier combatants, but it's misleading, on several levels. The Blackjack is unusually tough for a Ryder, unusually versatile, and the early game ends up making it seem even more versatile and powerful than it actually is.

20 Energy per tile of movement. A one-time upgrade can be purchased to reduce this to 15 Energy per tile.

The Blackjack is ultimately the second-fastest unit in your fleet, though the movement upgrade isn't generally all that high of a priority. It's nice, but it's not necessarily helping on any given turn even if you moved in the turn. In particular, it doesn't actually do as much as you might expect to make the Blackjack's Melee more viable.

Unlike the Sunrider, upgrading the Blackjack's Energy isn't particularly a priority. You should keep it in mind when considering upgrading Energy usage on weapons -such as if bumping Energy up to 105 would allow you to double-fire the Laser for much less cash than another Energy cost down- but the Blackjack is basically the lowest priority in your entire force for upgrading its Energy per se. It doesn't really need it, and it won't put it to particularly great use.

600

The Blackjack is of course notably less durable than the Sunrider, but it's actually considerably tougher than most enemy Ryders and is in fact your second-most durable Ryder. The one other player Ryder that can soak more damage than it is also less evasive and desperately needs to be in the enemy's face to land hits, so in practice the Blackjack is probably your toughest Ryder in real terms, able to soak a decent amount of damage when hit and dodging with surprising frequency.

No shielding.

Given the Blackjack's backstory, I'm always a little surprised that it doesn't have some minor innate shielding. Admittedly that would probably be problematic on a game design level...

10

10 Armor is higher than you might think. Since Armor is, as far as protecting player units, primarily of significance for blocking off Assault weapons and they treat the target's Armor as twice as much and so on... the Blackjack needs to be down around half its health before its Armor stops being basically immunity to small-arms fire. There's one other Ryder you'll get that's better-armored, but not by a ton.

35%, Range: 1

After the Sunrider itself, the Blackjack is your single biggest source of Flak rating. As such, it's a good idea to keep it adjacent to the Sunrider, as usually the majority of Missile and Rocket fire will be aimed at the Sunrider.

In the middling stretch of the game, this is in fact the single most important contribution the Blackjack is generally making to your force.

25

Notice that this puts the Blackjack at a full 50 points more Evasion than the Sunrider. The Blackjack isn't even your most evasive unit!

Though in real terms it honestly kind of is, because the one unit more evasive than it is designed for close-quarters combat where the Blackjack is really basically a sniper that can fend off enemies that get in its face. Since Aim drops off with distance/rises as you close, fighting up close hampers evasiveness.

Energy: 70, Damage: 200x1, Aim: 110

It's exactly the same as the Sunrider's Laser, except with slightly worse Aim.

In practice the Laser actually tends to be the Blackjack's primary weapon of choice, which is a bit unfortunate. The Blackjack's primary flaw as a unit is that while it's well-rounded defensively and theoretically well-rounded offensively as well, in practice it struggles to hit high damage output and so tends to be relegated to eg mopping up enemies your other units managed to grievously wound. It'll be consistently helping, but other units tend to stand out more in their contributions.

There is a bit of synergy going on here, though, in that one of the big factors influencing the AI's targeting behavior is how many kills a given unit has landed in a battle. If you are using the Blackjack to mop up enemies, it'll tend to draw disproportionate fire, at which point its very solid durability -and the fact that it dying isn't an automatic mission fail- is actually contributing a fair amount.

Still, for all that the Blackjack has very impressive defensive stats and all, it's your other units that will tend to put in the majority of work.

Energy: 50, Damage: 30x8, Aim: 80

Costs more Energy than the Sunrider's Pulse Laser and has slightly worse Aim, and it fires fewer shots that hit harder per shot. Against completely unarmored targets its damage is slightly worse than the Sunrider's (240 total vs 250 on the Sunrider), and in conjunction with the Aim and Energy advantages the Sunrider tends to be better at picking apart Ryders with its Pulse Laser than the Blackjack, but the Blackjack will usually do better against armored targets. (The exception is if the target has enough Armor/shielding to reduce both to 1 damage per hit, but who cares about 8 vs 10 damage?)

The overall result is that the Blackjack is a bit more biased toward using Laser over Pulse Laser compared to the Sunrider, actually. The Energy cost in particular has a fairly dramatic effect: for the Sunrider, Pulse Lasers can be fired almost twice as often as Lasers, and not so much for the Blackjack. 'Magic numbers' in particular exacerbate this, where the Sunrider can easily hit points where it can fire Pulse Lasers 3 times and yet still only be able to fire Lasers 1 time in a turn, while for the Blackjack if you can triple-shot Pulse Lasers you should be able to either double-fire Lasers or make a trivial upgrade to Energy and hit that point. 

Nonetheless, Pulse Lasers are the main way of mopping up enemy Ryders reliably and in the Blackjack's case can be really good to hit badly-damaged armored units with, specifically units that are in that awkward space you don't really want to use your Big Guns on but they still have so much Armor left over that Assault weaponry can't really touch them. This is one area the Blackjack tends to shine, even over the Sunrider.

Energy: 40, Damage: 400x1, Aim: 70

Melee is a weird weapon class, being the only weapon type that can only be used point-blank and also being the only weapon type that is restricted in what unit types it can target: it can only target Ryders. Even lighter non-Ryder ships are not valid targets. Those two qualifiers aside, Melee works like any other attack with no special interactions with Armor or whatever.

Notice that the Blackjack's melee only has a base Aim of 70. That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that Ryders generally have some native Evasion. In general, even though the Melee graphic is depicting what appears to be the Blackjack's hand with a sword (Which is odd, because the Blackjack has energy swords when you actually use Melee), Melee is difficult to justify using on the Blackjack. The Blackjack is best off hanging in the back-ish of your forces and sniping with its Laser weaponry, enemies almost never close to melee range of their own volition, if they do they're often torn up enough by attacks of opportunity that Assault will finish them off for less Energy, and that Aim issue makes Melee unreliable against the majority of units you can actually target with it unless you pour a decent amount of cash into upgrading its Aim... which comes back to the problem that the Blackjack's Melee isn't going to be used very often regardless, so you shouldn't be dumping money into it.

By far the most frustrating thing is how much Energy Melee demands. 40 Energy would be on the cheap side for most weapons, but Melee being point-blank means 40 Energy is painfully expensive. The un-upgraded Blackjack, for example, can only attack twice with Melee if an enemy was either one tile away and the Blackjack doesn't mind tanking retaliatory fire (Which, admittedly, is essentially true with its base Armor of 10) or foolishly closed to melee of its own accord. Any further travel distance instantly halves your potential melee damage, and if you're only going to do 400 damage while also breaking away from your defensive formation and thus making all your forces more vulnerable, why not just fire two Pulse Lasers for upwards of 480 damage? Or a Laser and Assault for, again, upwards of 480 damage? Melee theoretically has the advantage that it's good at penetrating Armor, but Ryders generally have no Armor or only like 3 Armor; if you could Melee the cap ships that actually have serious Armor that would be relevant, but as-is it's really only one optional fight in particular where this is helpful.

If Melee cost 20 Energy it would be a bit situational but economical when you were in those situations. It would be totally possible to, for example, move one tile forward, slash 2-3 times for 800-1200 damage, and then back up into your defensive formation. As-is though, you have to sink a fair amount of money into it for it to be worth considering more than once in a blue moon, and really why didn't you just put the money into something that helps you more consistently like your Lasers?

Oddly, Melee is borderline-nonexistent on enemy Ryders. You fight an enemy Ryder with melee in the early portion of the game, so you might expect to enemy Melee to be a recurring threat... but no, not really. It gets a little more common once you're fairly late in the game, but it's still the exception. Melee honestly feels a bit tacked-on to the gameplay system, incorporated not because there's a clear design role for it but because Anime Is Cool And Anime Robots Have Anime Swords.

Which is a bit sad, since it's not really that far off from having a distinct role. Minor tweaks would give it a place.

Energy: 30, Damage: 14x20, Aim: 65

Slightly less accurate than the Sunrider's version, but hits noticeably harder.

In real terms the Sunrider's Assault weaponry will tend to be better, though. Since Assault and Kinetic cannons are intertwined in upgrades and the Blackjack lacks Kinetic cannons, the Sunrider will tend to end up incidentally upgrading its Assault weaponry in the process of getting its Kinetics good to go, whereas for the Blackjack the most cost-effective path is to put money into its Lasers/Pulse Lasers. It's maybe worth improving Assault a little, such as grabbing two or three Energy cost downs if that will let you squeeze in an Assault shot, but it shouldn't be something you put a ton of money into. While Assault is what the Blackjack will use in attacks of opportunity, the fact that the Blackjack is best of sniping with Lasers means it will rarely be in a position to take advantage of this, even once the Bianca comes along. If you find the Blackjack keeps being in a position to help clean up units with an Assault volley and fails to clinch the kill, some Damage and Aim upgrades are worth considering...

... but most of the time you're best off upgrading Lasers.

Energy: 20, Damage: 40x10, Ammunition: 1, Aim: 130

It's a really good idea to get a single Damage upgrade fairly quickly. PACT missile boats have 400 HP and juuust enough Armor that even under Full Forward a Missile barrage won't quite kill them. A single Damage upgrade is all you need to make a Full Forward Missile barrage a guaranteed instant kill if no Flak is involved, and it only costs you 100$, which is slightly painful toward the beginning of the game but absolutely nothing past that.

Outside of that, while the Blackjack's Missiles are more worth considering investing into than the Sunrider's -primarily due to taking 2/3rds of the Energy to fire and thus being really easy to fit in turns firing them- they're still a shaky investment. By the time the 500$ it takes to add another Missile is pocket change, Flak is also so dense on enemies that Missiles are losing their luster, and it's not like it's worth upgrading their Flak Resistance. The Energy price is also already so low that it's probably just wasting money to buy upgrades in that realm. Which leaves... upgrading the Damage when you're only going to get to fire one Missile in a battle?

As I commented with the Sunrider, I really think the player units should have had higher base Missile ammo counts. Just giving the Blackjack 3 Missiles would have done a lot. Or, if they were concerned that the player would thus unleash ridiculous Missile barrages and distort mission design requirements as a result, Missiles could've been given a cooldown so that you can't fire more than one per turn or one every other turn or something like that.

Alas.

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The Blackjack also gets an additional option in the final mission of the game, but I'm not going to cover it both to minimize spoilers and because the final mission is really easy to cut short and make it nearly entirely irrelevant.

The Blackjack is, on paper, your most well-rounded Ryder, almost as versatile as the Sunrider itself, but in practice it's more of a sniper than anything else. And not a sniper in the sense of vaporizing the enemy's head with a single well-placed shot for an instant kill, just in the sense of taking shots from extreme range. It's decent enough at this job, but its peak damage output in real terms is fairly low. Melee is rarely realistic to use, and Missiles are limited in quantity, which leaves its peak base damage as 240 via Pulse Laser. (Which you'll almost never achieve: Ryders will tend to dodge some shots, while anything that doesn't dodge shots is going to be armored enough to slash the damage to a noticeable extent)

In fact, while the Blackjack impresses initially and on paper, in actual practice it's probably your second-worst Ryder, and it would probably be your worst outright if the Phoenix wasn't so completely contrary to the core mechanics of the game. It impresses initially primarily because it's a second source of damage at all, not because it's all that good. To be fair, it's not so much that the Blackjack is bad as that most of your other Ryders are really good while the Blackjack is merely adequate, but the problem is that the game is tuned such that anything that doesn't perform very well is underperforming.

I'm curious as to whether Liberation Day did anything to bolster the Blackjack. It could really use the help, whether through actual buffs to itself or through the mechanics being overhauled. Just making Missiles more viable would drastically spike its utility.

Next time, we cover the Liberty, which in the actual game shows up immediately after the Blackjack.