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Form A Balanced Team
Change Up Your Formation
Lead With Vanguards
Focus On Story Stages
Build Up Your Base
Reinforce Your Roster Through Recruitment
Prioritize The Newbie Banner
When In Doubt, Use A Guide
Arknights is a tactical tower defense gacha game where you play as the Doctor, a renowned strategist with amnesia. Your job is to battle various enemy factions as you lead the Infected Operators of Rhodes Island, a massive mobile city, in their fight for survival.
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Arknights has been going strong for several years, with frequent content updates bringing new Operators, story chapters, gameplay elements, and more. If you're just starting to get into the game now, you'll most likely be overwhelmed by the years worth of content that has stacked up. Below, we'll take a look at the most important things to keep in mind as a new player of Arknights.
Form A Balanced Team
There are eight classes in Arknights, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In general, you should focus on forming a team that has two of each class, with one each of Specialist and Supporter. The eight classes and their primary use are as follows.
Class | Description |
---|---|
Vanguard | Generates Deployment Points (DP), allowing you to deploy your other Operators more quickly |
Sniper | Deals ranged physical damage, and can target flying enemies. |
Guard | Deals high melee damage, and acts as a frontline attacker. |
Caster | Deals ranged Arts (magic) damage. |
Defender | Has high health and defense, used for blocking enemies. |
Medic | Heals nearby allies. |
Specialist | Performs a variety of roles, from fast redeployment to pushing or pulling enemies. |
Supporter | Provides buffs, and often attacks with Arts damage. |
While Operators all have one of these classes, their roles may cross over in some cases. For example, you may have a Guard who can deal ranged Arts damage, a Medic who can deal damage, or a Defender who can heal.
When constructing your party, try to bring a balance of these classes to ensure smooth operations.
Change Up Your Formation
Even the most skilled Doctors can't play through the entire game with the same party. Most of the time, you'll need to adjust your squad on a stage-by-stage basis, so that you can target specific weaknesses in the enemy formation. For example, some enemies have high defense, making your physical attacks against them weak.
However, that same enemy probably has low resistance, making Arts, or magic, damage against them strong. Similarly, sometimes you may encounter flying enemies like Drones that can only be targeted by Snipers, Casters, or certain Supporters. Overall, you'll want to adjust your party as necessary as you play through the story mode.
Lead With Vanguards
Vanguards are the best class at generating Deployment Points (DP), which then allow you to deploy your other Operators more quickly. Vanguards are often essential for getting your team onto the field to quickly deal with incoming enemies.
More often than not, the first Operator you deploy in a battle should be your Vanguard. It's often a good idea to bring two to get your other Operators deployed, then retreat one or both of your Vanguards to free up Deployment spots for your other, stronger Operators.
Focus On Story Stages
In your first few weeks of playing Arknights, you should try to focus on getting through the story. As you progress, you'll unlock many different side game modes. Some of these game modes can be very confusing, even for veteran players, so it's often best to leave them alone until you're more comfortable with the game.
Focusing on the story will also let you complete new player missions and earn materials for Headhunting and upgrading Operators. Until your roster is more fleshed out and you're able to comfortably complete stages, the story mode should be your priority!
The only exception here is when a time-limited event is underway. These are great opportunities to farm materials more efficiently, as well as stock up on Originite Prime and Orundum for summoning new characters.
Build Up Your Base
The Rhodes Island Infrastructure Complex (RIIC), or more commonly known simply as the base, is where most of your money and EXP will come from. Upgrading and configuring your base is essential, and should be done as soon as possible so you can start building up your stocks of materials for upgrading your Operators.
There are several strategies to consider when planning out your base, but the one you choose depends on your priorities.
The most commonly recommended setup for new players is the 2-5-2 base layout. This means setting up your base with two Trading Posts, five Factories, and two Power Plants, with two of your Factories producing Pure Gold and three of them producing Battle Records (EXP).
This layout represents the fastest way to stockpile money and EXP, at the cost of not being able to fully upgrade your facilities due to limited power. This layout is best for the early game when you desperately need all the money and EXP you can get, but should be transitioned out of once your roster is more established.
The other option is to go straight for the midgame optimized layout; the 2-4-3 layout. This setup makes use of two Trading Posts, Four Factories, and three Power Plants. With this setup, you'll have enough power to fully upgrade all of your facilities, while also producing a decent amount of money and EXP.
Ignore Orundum production in the Factory. The extra pulls you get from producing Orondum is negligible compared to the amount of money you would otherwise get.
Reinforce Your Roster Through Recruitment
Headhunting is the standard method for unlocking new Operators, but you can also try your luck through Recruitment. Here, you can spend Recruitment Permits to recruit an Operator. By selecting various Job Tags, you can narrow down your recruitment search for more specific roles.
Use a Recruitment Calculator to help you narrow down which Operators come from which Tags.
This is a great way to easily fill out your roster. If you get lucky, you can even get five or six-star Operators through Recruitment. Watch out for the Senior Operator and Top Operator tags respectively for a guaranteed chance at getting high rarity characters!
Speaking of recruitment, your first priority when spending your Orundum should be the Newbie Banner. Here, you can pull up to 20 times, with the first ten-pull being guaranteed to give one of six six-star Operators. The Operators you can get are listed below.
- Archetto - Sniper
- Flametail - Vanguard
- Mountain - Guard
- Suzuran - Supporter
- Thorns - Guard
- Weedy - Specialist
These are all extremely strong characters, but if you're rerolling, Thorns and Mountain are the best options.
For now, ignore the Kernal Banner unless a character you really want rotates into the available pool. You're better off spending your Orundum on the normal, rotating Headhunting banner.
When In Doubt, Use A Guide
Perhaps one of the most important things to keep in mind as a new player in Arknights is to use the resources that are available to you. Arknights has an incredible wealth of community-run guides; from strategies to beating every stage in the game to the most efficient methods for farming resources.
If you're ever stuck on a stage or struggling with which Operators to upgrade first, look up a guide! Arknights is known for its overload of mechanics, both inside and outside of story stages. Don't be afraid to seek out information beyond what the game tells you, and follow along to video games to help you through the more difficult stages of the game.
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