1. Niode/crystal income. Just about everything good requires one or the other, so if you want to progress, think about where your niodes and crystal will come from. You can get a few extra niodes from Battle: Circuit Fights after reaching level 12, or by purchasing them (remember mechagalaxy.com gives bonuses to niode buyers!) A bit of crystal is available from your personal crystal farm, but for the amounts of crystal you are likely to want, you probably want to make Facebook friends. Be sure not to send out too many Facebook friend invites, or Facebook may lock you out of your account, or at least start asking inconvenient security questions.
The following links can be helpful for Facebook players.
Mecha Galaxy Players is for players that play the game. Check out whatever new announcements are made (limited edition items, events, &c), chat with other players at https://www.facebook.com/groups/262520027198092/
Mecha Galaxy Honor Guard is for players that want to staff other Honor Guards / have their Honor Guards staffed. Staffing your Honor Guard gives you in-game combat bonuses, so is a good thing. Joining another's Honor Guard has them automatically join yours, and gives free bioptics to boot. Find this group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/275081472605927/
Mecha Galaxy Free Agents is for players without a clan that are seeking to join a clan. It's always nice to find others with shared interests, and other clan members may offer helpful advice if you want. Besides, some events are clan only, so think about joining one! https://www.facebook.com/groups/506464962769038/
2. Would you like to gain levels quickly or not? What's quick and what's slow? If you're making niodes/crystal faster than you can spend them, and have the absolute best mechs, weapons, and equipment you could possibly have for your level, you're leveling slowly. If you're piloting a bunch of Anzu and Red Ant mechs to fill out your roster because you don't want to spend niodes/crystal for anything better, you're leveling quickly. You'll likely fall somewhere in between; exactly where is up to you.
If you're leveling slowly, you're spending a lot of niodes/crystal on costly weak mechs and equipment that won't help much later except in restricted events. However, the event prizes you can win, especially for first place gold or second through tenth place silver, can help a lot at lower levels. Your event performance is good, but your raw game power increases very slowly.
If you're leveling quickly, you may have crystal or niodes, but you're not spending them. Perhaps you're waiting for higher tier mechs and equipment, and leveling your cheap mechs to complete missions. When you eventually spend crystal and niodes, you get a few very strong mechs to go with the rest of your weaker ones. Your raw game power increases as fast as possible, but your event performance suffers as your power isn't on par with other players of your level that didn't deliberately take the fast track.
You don't have to worry much about whether slow or fast is "right" or "wrong" for you. If you go slow then want to go faster, you can speed up. If you go fast then want to slow down, you can do that too. You can't rewind the clock and lower your level to go down in divisions, but if you went fast to begin with, at least you won't have spent a lot of niodes/crystal on weaker mechs/equipment.
Choosing to go fast or slow affects how you will want to spend your niodes and crystal. If you're determined to stall, you'll likely invest heavily in mechs and equipment. If you're determined to push, you'll try to squeak by with whatever you can, reserving most of your niodes and crystal for stronger mechs and equipment available after you level up.
3. Planning mech builds becomes a lot more useful. The choices in Division 9 (levels 1-9) were limited, so it was hard to really go wrong there. But in Division 8 (levels 10-18), leveled mechs have more equipment slots, and equipment itself is more differentiated, making effective combinations possible. Weapon speed starts becoming significant. From fastest to slowest, those generally are projectile, laser, fire, ice, then missile.
There's a random element in determining what fires first, but speed makes a difference. Simply, you either want to fire first, or survive enemy fire so you can fire in turn.
How does mech planning work in practice? For example, the Shocklite is a decent Division 8 mech with high bonuses to missile damage and a lot of equipment slots, particularly a Shield Slot at level 11 that helps it survive. The weakness of the Shocklite is a bit less obvious. The Shocklite, at 20 tons, can only use the first generic tier of shields for 0-25 ton mechs. The difference in damage mitigation for the 0-25 and 25-50 ranges of niode shields is pretty steep. All shield slots are not created equal!
That doesn't mean the Shocklite is bad, it's still quite good. But it does mean you're likely to want other mechs in your lineup too.
4. About now is when you want to slow down on spending skill points for leveling up on energy, and plan for the future. The Heavy Mech skill becomes available at level 10; the first applicable mech you normally see is the Fides at level 23. (Exception: If you purchase niodes at mechagalaxy.com, you get bonus mechs, which may mean you have super heavy mechs at low level.) But you need 5 points in Heavy Mech to pilot a Fides, and you only get 2 points for leveling up. So you need to think ahead and start leveling Heavy Mech at level 21. Similarly, you need 15 points in Heavy Mech to pilot a Namtar at level 26; if you want to pilot a Namtar as soon as it's available, you'll again need to spend almost all new skill points in Heavy Mech every time you level up, starting early. This is all even more so for niode buyers that get bonus mechs from buying niodes on mechagalaxy.com, as those bonus mechs may be a lot heavier than normally available to a player.
Since most of your points in Division 7 (level 19-26) are going to be spent on Heavy Mech, now is the time to start thinking about spending points on things other than energy. You haven't wasted points on energy to this point; you likely want energy anyways for Battle: Circuit Fights starting at level 12. But you likely want to start specializing in damage for one or two weapon types.
I don't suggest armor. Your opponent's mechs have equipment to prevent and regenerate damage. If you can't overcome damage mitigation, your mechs are shot down while your opponent's mechs live, so you lose. Armor doesn't help overcome damage mitigation. Stronger weapons do.
Distributing points evenly across weapon types is much the same; weak weapons don't help overcome damage mitigation, only strong ones do. Concentrating points in one or two weapon types makes a big difference. To use a simplified example, suppose you have a weapon with 10 damage, and your opponent has gear preventing 10 damage per shot. If you have a skill bonus of 10% to weapon damage, you do 11 damage instead of 10, less your opponent's 10 prevention = 1 effective damage. If you have a skill bonus of 50%, you do 15 damage instead, less the 10 prevention, for 5 effective damage. So in this example, increasing weapon damage from 10% to 50% increases damage from 1 to 5. That isn't a 40% increase in damage, it's an increase of 400%! In practice, you don't get nearly as much of an increase in damage, but the same rough principle applies; it's likely more useful to specialize than to generalize.
If concentrating weapon damage is so useful, why not put all skill points into a single weapon type? Some do. Others, though, want to diversify a bit. If you only do good projectile damage, and your opponent loads up on projectile shields, you're in for a tough time. On the other hand, shields that are strong against projectiles make a mech more vulnerable to lasers. So things become a bit interesting. Maybe you spend some skill points in lasers, and equip a few lasers to your mechs. Or maybe you anticipate your opponent will think you're going to go for lasers, so you use missiles instead.
In closing, these four things - where you get crystal/niodes, how you choose to play, understanding how mechs, equipment, and weapons work together effectively, and thinking about allocating skill points in advance of leveling up - are things to consider when moving into Division 8 (levels 10-18). Hopefully this article has been of use; I'll follow in a few days with a review of mechs/equipment for levels 10-18.
Submitted by Jim Lee# 843365