Mask of Arcadius: Liberty

Liberty

The Liberty is defined around support. Support, support, support. It can shoot things, but most of the time if you're doing that you're using it wrong. Every once in a while you'll be in a situation it actually can't do anything else of use... but not often, and 'what thing is it most useful for the Liberty to shoot at' really shouldn't be your first thought when working out what to do with it in a turn.

I've never really gotten what the shield it's holding is supposed to be about, incidentally. I'd assume it was symbolic of the Shield rating, but the Bianca doesn't have one. Nor is the Liberty unusually tough for a Ryder. So... okay?

20 Energy per tile of movement.

Like the Sunrider, getting the Liberty to 120 Energy is a fairly major 'magic number'. It bolsters you to 3 Flak offs in a turn, or 2 Shutoffs, or you can completely Disable a target and keep moving with the fleet, or you can perform a Repair post-upgrade and also squeeze in a Laser shot... a lot of Energy costs intersect such that the Liberty performs vastly better at 120 Energy than before that point, and since its Laser is the only Energy cost you can reduce via normal upgrades it really is very specifically important to make upgrades to its Energy capacity. You can't make hacking of any sort cheaper through the upgrade system, and there's mostly not special accommodation through the purchase screen either. Repair is the only thing you get to reduce the Energy costs of, out of the Liberty's myriad special options.

475

This is low, but as I noted earlier enemies like to prioritize targeting units in part based on kills. The Liberty should almost never be landing kills, and furthermore is a key piece of your defensive formation. As such, the Liberty will actually almost never be targeted by anything. The primary worry in that regard is the possibility of Missiles being brought to bear: Kinetic cannons will struggle to hit, past the early game you should be largely immune to Lasers, Assault weaponry isn't a concern, Melee almost never crops up... so Missiles/Rockets being sent the Liberty's way if you're a bit careless with positioning is the main way it might actually die.

Keep it in your Flak radius. Ideally, have the Blackjack adjacent to both it and the Sunrider.

35 Shielding, Range 1

It's really important to get the Range upgraded to 2 reasonably early. 1000$ hurts early in the game, but your entire force gets a lot more efficient once you've got two units with a Range of 2 on their Shields.

The Liberty is your first example of Shields in player hands, and if you're not paying close attention to mechanics while playing it's easy to come away with the impression that Shields are a nice-to-have but not terribly significant overall. And it's true that prior to getting your second Shield-providing unit Shielding is only moderately important, but once you've got them... you can fairly quickly make your entire army nearly immune to Lasers, outside of enemy hacking.

In any event, it's important to keep the Liberty nearby the Sunrider in particular, especially before you've gotten the Range upgrade, just to keep Shielding on it. Otherwise the hordes of Laser-using Ryders will tend to end up murdering the Sunrider with little you can do about it.

8

This is still enough Armor to make the Liberty essentially immune to Assault weaponry, though not if it starts taking real damage. So don't let it get hit if you can avoid it.

No Flak rating.

In spite of being a linchpin of your defensive formation, the Liberty doesn't provide Flak at all. I always found this a bit un-intuitive, but it's probably for the best.

20

Yes, the Liberty is almost as evasive as the Blackjack.

Energy: 50, Damage: 100x1, Aim: 110

Half the damage of the Sunrider and Blackjack's Lasers, just as much Aim as the Sunrider's, and actually costs a mere 50 Energy to their 70 Energy.

In actuality, though, 50 Energy is painfully intensive for the Liberty. At base it's incompatible with every hack except Flak Off, and it's difficult to justify pouring money into the Laser when it's so weak and there's no Pulse Laser on the Liberty to improve the payoff.

In practice, the main usage of the Liberty's Laser is to occasionally pick off a single enemy unit that's been badly weakened by your other units already. Every once in a while you'll find yourself in a situation where the Liberty's hacks are not needed, nothing needs repairs, and Aim Up is not relevant either, and you might as well fire the Laser then... but overall you should only rarely be firing the Liberty's Laser, and should generally avoid putting money into it. Maybe a couple of Damage and Aim upgrades once you've got so much money and so many upgrades already made that it's chump change, just to make it a bit more reliable at actually finishing things off, but certainly don't try to pretend you're going to turn the Liberty into a serious attacker.

It's fine that the Laser isn't very good a weapon though, because the Liberty is really all about the supporting effects, and its supporting effects are good.

Energy: 40. Completely disables a unit's Flak rating and prevents it from taking attacks of opportunity on units that get within one tile of it for 2 turns.

Note that all hacking effects have their duration tick down at the start of the enemy's turn, with 1 turn of duration vanishing at that point. This distinction isn't terribly important with Flak Off itself, but it's important to keep in mind with some other hacks.

Flak Off is itself probably the most situational hacking option. Since Missiles/Rockets are limited in number and are generally difficult to justify investing in, disabling Flak to let Missiles through is a pretty eh utility. Furthermore, enemy Flak tends to be so dense that disabling one or two unit's Flak rating rarely lets you get Missiles to a target entirely unimpeded, and isn't even necessarily much of a boost to damage output when firing Missiles if you're trying to merely lessen the Flak fields.

Flak Off does have a secondary utility, which is that Flak rating is -with one bizarre exception we'll be covering later- directly tied to the attack of opportunity mechanic. As such, disabling a unit's Flak is a way to let your own units roll right up to them without taking unnecessary hits, and indeed this is often smarter than having the Phoenix use its Stealth special.

Note that even though Flak rating is intertwined with the attack of opportunity mechanic and there are units with a Flak range of 2, attacks of opportunity only ever occur when entering a tile directly adjacent to an enemy. If you're fast enough, you can even pass through such a region and it won't provoke attacks of opportunity, so long as you don't actually end the move in one of the relevant tiles!

A curious point is that disabling attacks of opportunity works differently depending on whether it's a player unit or an enemy unit being hacked. If you hack an enemy unit, they just don't get a counterattack. But if an enemy hacks one of your units, they'll still counterattack, it's just that their damage is forced down to the minimum of 1 per hit. The distinction doesn't usually matter -20 damage at most is nothing- but it's very odd that this inconsistency exists at all.

Energy: 80. Undoes 300 damage to an allied unit. The unit must be within 3 tiles to be targeted. Can be up upgraded one time, lowering the Energy cost to 70 and raising the healing to 500.

The Liberty is your only unit that can perform repairs in battle, outside of the Repair Drone order letting you heal the Sunrider. This means there's a distinct upper limit on how quickly you can undo damage, and indeed there are individual units that can easily do more damage than you can repair in a turn. Generally speaking in Mask of Arcadius you shouldn't be trying to facetank and heal off the damage: you should be endeavoring to arrange for as little damage to land on your troops as possible in the first place.

Repair is still worth upgrading and using because Armor degrades with HP loss and so undoing some damage now can prevent you from crossing a threshold where enemies can eg simply finish off the Sunrider with Assault weaponry, but it's a very different experience from a number of other tactics games where you're expected to absorb significant punishment and just keep healing it off.

The fact that Repair is so expensive contributes to the issue. It's technically possible to get the Liberty to 140 Energy so you can use Repair twice in a turn, but it's expensive and probably not actually worth it, especially given the benefits would be pretty limited otherwise.

A key option on the Liberty, but one where good play minimizes using it.

Energy: 60. Completely disables the target's Shield generation for 2 turns.

Shut Off is actually surprisingly situational, especially before you've gotten the Liberty's Energy up. Most of the time if you're considering Shutting Off an enemy's Shields, you'd be better off Disabling them entirely: at 100 Energy, all the Liberty can do after a Shut Off is either a Flak Off or move up to two tiles. (Maybe fire a Laser if you've reduced its Energy cost for some reason)

Once you do have 120 Energy on the Liberty Shut Off finally gains a bit of a niche, allowing you to punch holes in overlapping Shield zones so your Laser-bearing forces can tear into the enemies you  made vulnerable, but it'll still tend to be more useful to Disable a target and then have the Liberty move, keeping your formation mobile while removing a source of damage entirely for a turn, particularly since it'll still take out the target's Shield generation and the removal of Flake rating incidentally may provide an opportunity to boot.

I really think Shut Off should've been 50 Energy. Being able to use it twice right away and then at 120 Energy use it twice and move would have much more consistently given it a niche.

Energy: 60. Increase's a single ally's Aim by 15 points for 2 turns. Can only target allies within 3 tiles.

Aim Up is nearly worthless. Most of the time you should be running All Forward anyway, and Aim boosts can't stack in Sunrider: the highest is applied, and that's it. Even if that weren't true, spending 60 Energy for 15 points of Aim for two whole turns is a very dubious trade: for Kinetic weapons that's a whole tile of aim outward, woo, for Lasers it's a tile-and-a-half, and okay for Missiles it's a solid three tiles of range, but... Aim Up isn't enough of a boost to eg take an unreliable 50% shot and make it a fully reliable 100% shot or something. It really needed to either cost less or, better yet, cost more but have a more pronounced impact. If it were +50 Aim for 3 turns, it would be worth considering even at 100 Energy.

As-is, it's fundamentally dubious and then All Forward is its death knell.

Energy: 100. Completely disables a unit for 2 turns, giving it no opportunity to take actions and also disabling both Flak and Shield generation.

The Liberty's single most useful hack, Disable is vitally important for making many of the game's more difficult encounters manageable. Disabling a Pact Battleship so only one of the two is lobbing a Rocket in a turn goes a long way to reduce RNG-screw, and in the process opens up options for your other units to dish out damage with Missiles and Lasers. Note that Disable even prevents Pact Carriers and Assault Carriers from spawning Ryders even though generating Ryders doesn't cost them Energy. The final boss of the game is the only time Disable isn't all that great, and that's purely because the boss is arbitrarily immune to Disable in particular.

That provides a bit of a jumping-off point for a design problem Disable brings to the table: it's too good. A single big target is not possible to be a real threat in Mask of Arcadius once the Liberty joins your forces, and it joins immediately after the Blackjack does. This forces the game to either make a single big target immune to Disable (As per the final boss) or simply always make 'single' big targets pairs. As such, every time Mask of Arcadius introduces a new enemy type that's supposed to be a big deal, there's always at least two of them, which distorts the game design and tends to make Disable mandatory: a single Pact Battleship is supposed to be a noticeable threat to you the first time they show up... but they need to throw two at you since otherwise you can just Disable the Battleship and ignore it. So now you've got two units that are meant to be individually quite threatening: if you don't Disable one of them, odds are alarmingly high you'll lose the Sunrider in 1-2 turns.

I really think Disable should've been broken up into a few different weapon hacks. Shut down a single target's Missiles+Rockets, shut down a single target's Lasers, shut down a single target's Assault+Kinetics. Or maybe break it up down some other line, it's not super-important the details. That would dodge the Disable design issue -it would now be possible to throw a solo Battleship at the player and have it be a real problem- particularly if eg you could only disable a single weapon type on a given unit at a given moment (Okay, you've disable the Battleship's Rocket, but it's still got its Kinetic cannons and Lasers to keep tossing damage at you), and it would actually open up a bit more of a playstyle component, especially if hacks were placed into the regular upgrade screen; being able to focus on the Liberty's Kinetic hack and pour some money into Shielding and Flak to protect against Lasers and Missiles would be a playstyle, with pouring money into a Missile hack and then adjusting the rest of your spending to better protect against Lasers and Kinetics would be an alternative way of playing.

It would also potentially make Shut Off broadly viable without needing to make any modifications to Shut Off itself, for that matter.

Alas.

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The Liberty is an essential unit and if it goes down you're probably not far off from a Game Over. It's unique in this quality, too; every other non-Sunrider unit is more disposable than it, though in the mid-late game the Bianca is not too far behind.

By a similar token, how you use the Liberty in a turn can basically define your entire strategy in the turn. Disabling a key target allows for radically different strategies from Repairing the Sunrider, and if you've got the Energy for two Shut Offs that's a whole other strategy too. Even the Sunrider is arguably less impactful of how you handle the rest of your strategy!

It's also, somewhat unfortunately, almost the entirety of the game's effective usage of Things To Do Other Than Damage. And even there, Aim Up is more-or-less worthless, Shut Off is niche, Flak Off is niche, and Disable being so good warps the design.

Still, I've seen worse designs from fully professional products that were wildly successful and loved by millions. I'm mostly curious if the sequel learned from this game's errors in this kind of regard.

Next time, we cover the Phoenix.