Mask of Arcadius: Phoenix

Phoenix

The Phoenix is all about close combat.

And therefore sucks.

10 Energy per tile of movement.

The Phoenix is your single fastest unit, period.

This isn't as useful as you'd think.

That said, this does mean it's a fairly easy choice to buy it a couple of engine upgrades. Max Energy of 110 is always able to do something over 100 max Energy, where other units require Energy cost reductions on weapons for that to lead to anything useful.

300

The Phoenix is really fragile, and unlike the Liberty it's going to get shot at. It's important to get the first couple of HP upgrades fairly quickly, as 300 HP is low enough an alarming enough of enemy attacks will outright one-shot the Phoenix. Fortunately, 300$ is always a minor cost, so that's not a big burden even when you first get the Phoenix.

No shielding.

No armor.

Yes, the Phoenix has no Armor at base. I like to buy two Armor upgrades: the majority of the time it takes damage will be due to Assault weaponry or Missiles, and against Assault weaponry you're easily shaving off like a third of the damage with just two upgrades. This does a lot to help the Phoenix's survivability.

You should buy HP upgrades first, though. They're cheaper by enough that buying three or four HP upgrades for the Phoenix is doubling or more its overall durability for less than the 1500$ needed to boost its Armor by 2, and there is no max HP rot effect like there is with Armor.

20%, Range: 1

In real terms this Flak value is actually going to be a surprising amount of the Phoenix's utility. Not because the Flak is all that great (20% is pretty meh) but because the Phoenix is severely hampered by how contrary it is to the game design.

50

The Phoenix's monstrous 50 Evasion is the primary way it avoids dying horribly. More often than not, enemies taking a shot at it will accomplish nothing. They'll still insist on firing on it anyway.

This is honestly a pretty decent reason to try to keep it alive if you can; shots taken at it are shots not taken at the Sunrider or some other unit you'll need to repair.

Energy: 40, Damage: 250x2, Aim: 60

Even less accurate than the Blackjack's Melee, but it hits harder (No Ryder has enough Armor to render this false: they'd need more than 50 Armor) and due to hitting twice it's unusual for it to do no damage.

Unfortunately, even though the Phoenix is clearly intended to lean heavily on its Melee attack, in actual play this is almost always a bad idea. The Energy cost is so high that even with the Phoenix's low Energy cost for movement it's fairly difficult to find an opportunity to close in on a target, melee it, and then retreat back to the fleet, and the Phoenix's Assault weaponry can often dish out more damage in real terms by standing back and spraying bullets: burning 40 Energy on one 500 damage attack+60 Energy on advancing and retreating? When you could've advanced one tile and used Assault three times for up to 720 damage? Not only that, but the above numbers are misleading: against most targets, the Phoenix won't be able to advance without getting shot up unless it burns Energy on Stealth, restricting how far out it can range while still coming back. Either that or you have the Liberty toss a Flak Off out, but even that comes with caveats; if multiple enemy Ryders are clumped together, for example, a single Flak Off might be inadequate for letting the Phoenix approach to melee while avoiding being shot.

Sure, Assault will miss some of its shots, but quite frankly the Phoenix's Melee is overkill against most targets when both strikes do hit. There's only a handful of Ryder types that are tough enough to survive 500 damage, and the most common enemy Ryder has a mere 375 HP. A couple of Assaults can easily be missing a decent amount and still kill the Ryder with Energy left over to hit something else. This isn't even taking into account that in real terms you've probably got All Forward up, making the Phoenix's peak Melee damage 600 in most situations.

Energy: 30, Damage: 12x20, Aim: 65

Here's the main things the Phoenix will be doing:

-Assaulting capital ships that have lost 90% or so of their HP and thus have nearly no Armor left, which are not worth burning some other, more valuable unit's Energy on finishing off when they could be doing real damage to a healthier unit.

-Assaulting nearby-ish Ryders, particularly Ryders that have already been weakened by one of your other units.

As such, you should ideally get its Assault weaponry upgraded at least a little bit fairly quickly. Reducing the Energy cost to 25 isn't very expensive and takes you from 3 shots in a turn to 4, so that's a good priority for upping its ability to pick off weakened targets as well as just upping its damage output in general. Pay attention when upgrading damage, as well: not every damage upgrade will actually increase its damage. The first and third damage upgrades don't do anything by themselves except eat money, though thankfully the fifth breaks from this pattern and will increase damage to 15 per hit. It's usually worth getting the first two fairly quickly, and the next three are good in the more mid-to-long haul, but past that the expenses rise too fast and if you're considering dumping that kind of change into a damage upgrade it should be on a more useful unit with a more useful weapon, like the Seraphim.

Aim is also useful for helping improve average damage output against Ryders, and I prefer to grab 2-3 Aim upgrades eventually, though damage should always be prioritized first to improve the Phoenix's ability to finish off armored targets; jumping from 12 damage a hit to 15 damage a hit means a unit with 5 Armor remaining will go from taking up to 40 damage from the volley to taking up to 100 damage, which can easily be the difference between worthless chipping damage requiring one or more additional volleys to finish off an already-nearly-dead cap ship to instantly finishing it off. Aim, meanwhile, provides little or no benefit against cap ships, and isn't particularly more valuable against Ryders -especially since Assault has significant Aim drop-off.

Energy: 20. For the rest of the turn, the Phoenix can enter tiles adjacent to enemy units without triggering attacks of opportunity.

Garbage.

Stealth could have been good. Say that Stealth rendered the Phoenix un-targetable by enemies, or made it so they could only target it from directly adjacent to it, in addition to its existing effect. That would make it possible to eg range out, chop up an enemy, and then on the following turn either take some potshots and retreat to the rest of the fleet or re-Stealth and advance for some more slice-and-dicing action. Alternatively, making Stealth last 3 turns would make its Energy burden reasonable, something worth slapping on just in case a decent opportunity shows up in the next couple of turns.

As-is, Stealth is so bad it's pretty much a trap that it exists at all. 99% of the time you should pretend the Phoenix only has two buttons -actually, 80% of the time you should pretend it only has one button- because Stealth really is that bad.

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The Phoenix' core problem is that it's in Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius.

By that I mean that this is a game where blobbing up your units is always the smart way to play. You want everybody near everybody else so they're all under a full Shield bubble and have as much overlapping Flak as possible. While Armor and Evasion don't have any friendly stacking effect, they also don't lose anything from being nearby allies, and critically the game doesn't do splash damage. There's exactly two exceptions to this lack of splash damage, and one of them is exclusive to you (The Vanguard Cannon) while the other is exclusive to the final boss of the game and you get a full turn's warning on it beside. So; big blobs of units is the way to go.

The Phoenix, meanwhile, is designed to charge out into the enemy's lines and fight in close-quarters combat while evading incoming fire. The problem is, if you do that it will die. Missiles and/or Lasers will pick it off in 1, maybe 2 turns. Its Stealth ability does nothing to protect it from this fate. Its huge Evasion score is weak compensation for the fact that you're de-facto raising enemy Aim by charging into their midst, only functioning as a godly defense if you huddle up with the rest of the fleet as far away from the enemy as possible. Its cheap movement isn't cheap enough, compounded by how its actual attacks aren't all that cheap either, further compounded by the need to burn Energy on Stealth to avoid being torn apart by attacks of opportunity, which the Phoenix is uniquely vulnerable to due to its utter lack of Armor. It would need something crazy like for all its Energy costs to be halved for it to be viable to lean heavily on its melee using the existing setup, or it would need Stealth to actually address those issues.

As-is, though, the Phoenix is a unit that wants to do things the game it is in punishes horrendously, and its own design does not attempt to work around or eliminate this punishment. It's by far your worst unit, and the only one where a shrug is a perfectly appropriate response to having it go down. I usually restart if it dies in the first turn, but past that? It's disposable.

What's particularly annoying is that when you first fight it as an enemy, it has a rig that gives it access to Lasers. it would be way less awful if it kept Laser access in your hands!

Alas.

Next time, we cover the Bianca AKA the Ryder whose name really confuses me.