Alien Legends — New Trainer Walkthrough

Welcome Trainer! So you have chosen to build a team of fighters to start competing and possibly becoming a legend yourself?

Well, let us get you started then. Here is some information you will find useful!

First, you will be sent to our Onoros registrar, who will take your name and register you as a new trainer. Then take this device, its a map that will always show your current position, as well as information about the relevant locations, like arenas, dungeons and possible fighters who are looking to be recruited in taverns.

Alien Legends — Map (Development Draft)

One element in Alien Legends is the mining aspect of the game. If you played Alien Worlds before your Alien Legends signup, your current mining setup will be automatically imported to start your journey in Alien Legends. If you want to change your equipped tools, you can do so in the Trainer Settings. Each tool NFT from Alien Worlds has values for TLM and Shard Mining Power (or MP in short). Alien Legends will use the proportion of these two as a basis to determine the ratio of your mining rewards. This way it is up to you whether you’d rather want to focus on TLM or Shard rewards for the mining aspect of Alien Legends, just by selecting your tools.

Alien Legends — Tool Selector (Development Draft)

Finally, let’s really get started. You need a team! You need fighters! On Alien Legends, possible recruits are waiting for you in “Taverns”. Only taverns which currently have a potential recruit that would be interested in joining your cause are shown on the map. Travel to one of them and find out if you are interested in recruiting them. Each fighter in Alien Legends is special in their own ways and differs by class, race, element, and possibly up to three abilities. All with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Variety of fighters is vast on Alien Legends

Fighter Details

Let’s use this opportunity to take a step back and talk a little about what to expect with the different fighters that seek your service. From a mechanics standpoint, each single fighter that you can hire in a tavern is randomly generated, thus has the (same) chance to be the absolute star for quite some time to come. Besides the already mentioned class, race, element and abilities, different stats also play a major role in determining the usefulness of a fighter application. So your potential fighter will be one combination from among 12 classes, 7 races, 6 elements and potentially three out of hundreds of abilities. These will determine the frame for your fighter in Alien Legends. Beyond that, your fighter will feature 17 stats, like health points or damage to fill this frame. (We will take a closer look at the stats later, in the chapter that explains how combat works.)

Alien Legends — Fighter Details (Outdated Development Draft)

And while races and element will pretty much behave as you’d expect, class is what mostly determines what role a fighter will eventually play. Here is an overview of the twelve classes of Alien Legends and what role they usually might be used for:

Voidwarden — Main Tank Immovable frontline anchor with exceptional survivability and most of the time attacked first. Deals very low damage but excels at absorbing pressure for the team.

Juggernaut — Offensive Melee Durable bruiser built to push forward. High survivability paired with an acceptable damage output.

Lunatic — Burst Melee Reckless close-quarters striker who frontloads massive damage, then becomes a fragile liability afterwards. Explosive opener, squishy follow-through.

Arcanist — Glass Cannon High-damage powerhouse with minimal health. Devastating when protected; doomed when caught.

Hunter — Precision Assassin Specializes in eliminating fragile enemies first. Strong burst, focused target selection and low durability. Excellent at bypassing distractions to reach priority threats.

Explosioneer — Chaotic Demolitionist Damage dealer who excels at blowing up vulnerable opponents. If he hits them. Medium damage output, low durability, and you never know who gets caught up in his attacks.

Mindblade — Psychic Vanguard Hybrid frontliner with modest damage and solid health. Shows a slight talent for targeting glass cannons, using subtle strikes to disrupt key enemies even while they are still protected.

Desperado — Wildcard Fighter Flexible combatant able to fill nearly any secondary role. Broad stat range, light debuffing, and a swaggering confidence that outstrips even his own versatility.

Astral Knight — Guardian Healer Tough protector with medium-to-high health. Deals low damage but restores ally health with every strike.

Mystic — Arcane Striker & Support Half glass-cannon hybrid blending medium-to-high damage with valuable team buffing on the side. Fragile and versatile.

Voidcaller — Primary Debuffer Operates from the shadows with minimal aggression. Applies potent debuffs and uses clever targeting to undermine key foes.

Tactician — Master Buffer Slow and fragile specialist whose strength lies in teamwide actions. First buffs the team, then tries to set up tactical nukes. You’d better not let him launch those.

Combat on Alien Legends can be quite swift at times — while very tactical at others

With this basic knowledge, now let’s step back to taverns and have a look at your first potential recruits!

The Tavern

Upon visiting a highlighted tavern with an applicant inside, you can see all details about your potential new fighter. If interested, you can hire the fighter for 100 Energy immediately. Or you can play a little side game to reduce this onetime cost by fulfilling certain properties that he would like to see with his new employer. In the side game you will try to convince the applicant of your worth by presenting up to three Alien Worlds NFTs you own, trying to fulfill as many of his criteria as possible.

Alien Legends — Tavern Recruiting (Outdated Development Draft)

Of course you do not need to recruit every applicant. You can also simply leave the tavern if you are not interested in this fighter. And as soon as you own at least five fighters you can start participating in fights. In most cases, for your first fight, you will want to travel to a dungeon on the World Map. One step after the other, however. Before fighting, we should explain the basics about fighting!

How does a Fight work?

Fights on Alien Legends could be compared to how they work in the genre of auto-battlers of previous years: the outcome is calculated based on the participating combatants and surrounding variables, there is no possibility to “fight for yourself” or interact with the fight in any way once it is started.

One fighting squad consists of six combatants: five Alien Legends fighters and one supporter consisting of Alien Worlds NFTs. So when a player attacks an arena, for example, he will have to send in a squad of six against the six defenders. Whether you attack in a dungeon or take part in the weekly tournament: it is always a lineup of 5+1 combatants, following the same combat system. (It might not be wise to use the exact same squad for all purposes, though.)

Alien World NFTs for this purpose always have the same stats, there is no randomness involved with the supporter combatant. In a nutshell, it is just the stats of the crew NFT and the stats of the arms NFT combined. As a result, the supporter behaves exactly like any fighter on Alien Legends would. Just with exactly two abilities, as one is coming from the crew and one from the arms NFT.

Broad audience studying the theoretical foundations of their future

As mentioned before, fighters have 17 different stats. For explaining how the mechanics of a fight work, we will start with the six that actually have an impact while a fight is in progress:

Health Points — amount of damage a combatant can sustain before he is knocked out of combat Damage — amount of damage a combatant deals with one of his attacks Windup — Setup time of a combatant, which means the time needed to get his first attack in Cooldown — Time a combatant needs per attack Taunt — The combatant with the highest taunt value usually gets attacked first Resistances — Reduces how much damage a combatant receives from attacks

How attack order works The combatant with the lowest windup value from among all twelve involved in a fight will be the first to attack. After striking, the fighter then will have to wait for his cooldown to expire until he can strike again. So per fighter, it looks like this:

Initial Windup → Strike → Cooldown → Strike → Cooldown → Strike → …

The now new (or old) combatant with cooldown (or windup) next to expire from among all remaining combatants in a fight will be the next to attack, and so on. Quick example for a fight involving two fighters, A with 42 windup and 30 cooldown and B with 69 windup and 18 cooldown:

1. A attacks first, as he is at 42 windup time, compared to B at 69
2. Next attack of A now is at the time of 42 + 30 = 72, so B will go next at 69
3. A will attack at a time of 72, as B is now up to 69 + 18 = 87
4. A is now at 72 + 30 = 102, which means B goes next with 87
5. A will attack with 102, as B is now up to 87 + 18 = 105
6. A is now at 102 + 30 = 132, which means B goes next with 105
7. B is now at 105 + 18 = 123, thus B will attack again, as A is still higher with 132
8. This will put B to 123 + 18 = 141, so A will be the next to attack with 132
9. And so on, until one of them is knocked out of combat with zero or less health left

How the targeting system works As the most important rule, most combatants will attack the target with the highest taunt of the opposing team. (Some classes have their own ways of selecting their targets. Think of an assassin type of fighter, for example.) Upon attacking this way, the taunt value of the target is reduced. If this still leaves him as the combatant with the highest taunt from the team, he will still be the next one to be attacked. Otherwise the combatant with the new highest value for taunt on the team will be next in line.

Damage calculation Once a player is hit, his health points will reduce. The calculation for the inflicted damage is quite simple: the damage value of the attacker is reduced by the respective resistance value of the target. E.g. if the attacking fighter is of the “Fire” element, then the damage is reduced by the fire resistance of the target. If the target in this example has 34% of fire resistance, then the incoming damage is reduced by 34%. If the attacker has a damage value of 100, the health points of the target will be reduced by 66. If this puts the target at or below zero, the combatant will be removed from combat for the rest of the fight. Otherwise, the combat continues as by the attack order described before.

Weather All fights will be it subject to the current weather effects. These will be indicated before entering the fight. They might range from lesser effects, like e.g. increased damage or decreased haste restricted to a few fighters, up to a total game changer in other matches. Weather per building changes once per day. Weather effects tend to be the weakest on dungeons and strongest on the weakly tournament.

In Alien Legends, weather can have quite the influence on combat

Precombat math Before the actual fight starts, the values for the very combat get calculated. Fighters from Alien Legends don’t have one stat each for health, damage, windup, cooldown and taunt, but rather a possible range for each of these stats. For each combat and each of these stats, one value from the possible range will be randomly selected. Also, before the actual combat starts, all buffs and debuffs from the two teams are applied. All this combined gives the actual values that will be used for this combat only.

With this knowledge under our belt, we can now return to the dungeon we traveled to!

Dungeon Functionality

With that out of the way, let us move closer so our first real fight. Move to a dungeon tile. The higher the dungeons rating shown on the map, the better the TLM and Shard rewards for winning the dungeon.

Dungeon Settings Screen (Early Development Draft)

You can select your combatants and the difficulty for the dungeon. Enemies will be drawn randomly from among the top of the leaderboard. The higher the difficulty you select, the more difficult it will be to win the fight — and the higher the rewards will be. Level in this context is similar to the level progression of fighters. Slight differences on dungeon, however: contrary to the level of your fighters, difficulty can go over level 10. Dungeons also have a reduced difficulty when selecting enemies below level 5. One dungeon can only be cleared once per day, so select difficulty wisely!

You can gain different kinds of rewards from winning a dungeon fight: on one hand dungeon mining points, depending on your selected mining gear, the dungeon rating and the difficulty level of the dungeon defeated. On the other hand, you also get leaderboard points for each dungeon level cleared, with daily rewards for the highest positions on the leaderboard.

Dungeon victory screen (Early Development draft)

Winning a dungeon fight also gives experience points to participating fighters, depending on the selected dungeon level. Speaking of experience points for fighters, these will be covered in our next chapter:

Fighter Progression

When recruited, fighters start at level 1. Once they gained enough experience points, the fighter can be leveled up. This is possible up to the maximum of level 10. And once at level 10, they can start with ascension. Most ascensions give the fighter a small, but permanent increase in stats, except for the fifth ascension, which unlocks the third ability of a fighter. Yet, while the fifth ascension is special, in theory the number of ascensions per fighter is unlimited.

As their motivation for fighters to offer their service to you, they will want to get paid from time to time. In case you won’t (or can’t) pay them properly for too long, in the end, they will leave you without any kind of compensation. Another factor to note is that fighters grow older over time, slowly declining in stats as time goes on.

Ascension makes one fighter stronger at the expense of others

Once you have a nice team, you can move forward towards the endgame. Besides the already mentioned leaderboard from dungeons, there are arenas and the big weekly tournament.

Big Weekly Tournament

This is it. The big thing. The talk of the town. Once per week: excitement, close combats, single knockout elimination, huge prizes. The big tournament that everybody wants to win. Your prizes increase for every victory, additional prizes thrown in for the top spots.

Once per week, there will be the biggest event all across Alien Legends. You can register with one squad, but beware: the weather effects might have quite the impact here. Each round, you will be matched against a random enemy, the winning squad advances to the next round, the loser is out. So better bring a squad that is able to perform well against the field!

Tension in the air among the audience of a semifinal match shortly before it starts

So the big tournament is quite splashy and will often prove to be a fine line between delight and frustration for the players. Possibly also sparking a lot of discussions about nuances in lineups while waiting for it. In contrast, arena rewards effort that trainers put into their everyday playing experience:

Arenas

When looking at the arenas, we should first recall how dungeons worked: you enter an arena, see a snapshot of the defenders, select your squad and send your team into the fight. Your participating fighters would also get experience points for winning. There is no level to select for the opponents, however, they are what they really are. And trying to win against a well defended arena of level 10 fighters if your squad is not yet at the maximum level might prove to be quite difficult. So much for the similarities.

The major differences chime in after the fight. If you lost, unlike in the dungeon, you have to move out. This arena will only be accessible for you again by winning a different arena fight (or some days have passed).

Things get interesting when you win: for starters, you get some mining power. This is like it works for dungeons, just in a separate mining pool. And one of your victorious fighters will be stationed at the arena as one of the new defenders, replacing the fighter that already was there for the longest. You can’t use this fighter for other fights for as long as he is occupied defending this arena.

Variety in available fighters is key for successful Arena domination

As long as this defender you provided isn’t kicked out of the arena, you will earn domination points. Domination points you gain per arena increase the more arenas you control at the same time. The benefit through these points is twofold: on the one hand they giving mining power in the highly lucrative domination mining pool. On the other hand there will be regular leaderboard events with rewards for those trainers who can accumulate the most domination points in a certain timeframe.

As a defending trainer of an arena, you can use credits to buy additional ramifications, which increase the fighting power of the defending team for future fights. These buffs wear off over time as well as by each successful defense of the arena. And speaking of credits, what are credits again?

King of the hill experience in the Arenas

Resources on Alien Legends

Your everyday life on Alien Legends will be determined by your Energy. Most regular tasks require energy, like traveling, entering dungeons, arenas or recruiting. Every day you will get an energy flask to regain some energy for free, yet it is possible to buy more flasks in the shop.

The next resource to mention is Credits. Most of the time, when you have to pay for something on Alien Legends, Credits will be the currency to use. This includes activities like leveling up or ascending fighters, paying their wage or increasing the defense of an arena. (As landowner, constructing or boosting your buildings will also require Credits to pay.) Main income for Credits on Alien Legends will come from selling fighters that are no longer needed and also Alien Legends Farming, basically a competitive staking subgame for Alien Worlds NFTs.

The purchasable premium currency on Alien Legends will be Gems. One focal point for Gems will be the fighter market: a place where you can buy and sell fighters to and from other players for Gems. Other non-core gameplay elements will also require Gems, like staking on Alien Legends Farming or activating the Legend status for your account.

Young and old fighters available at the fighter market

When starting your journey in Alien Legends, your account status will be set as “Trial”. This enables you to play and experience Alien Legends and its gameplay elements, as well as give you some free Energy every day. Once upgraded to the “Legend” account status, you will receive more free Energy per day, your payouts are greatly increased, while also bringing along some other additional perks here and there.

One way of getting these mentioned payouts on Alien Legends are quests:

Quests

The Alien Legends questing system offers up to nine quests that can be active at the same time. There are three slots each for short, medium and long quests. These quests mostly feature everyday tasks, like traveling, fighting or recruitment targets. You get a new quest upon completion or if the available time for a quest runs out. If you are unhappy with a specific quest, there is also the possibility to reroll a specific quest in order to get a new quest earlier.

Alien Legends — Quest Screen (Early Development Draft)

Besides quests, there also are achievements available on Alien Legends:

Achievements

The achievement system consists of two parts. On the one hand, you can receive avatars to show off and be displayed in the leaderboards for reaching certain achievements. Most of these achievement requirements will be pretty straightforward, like fights won or distance traveled.

On the other hand, there is the “Candle Shop”. Every day, the owner offers rewards for participating in her loyalty program. The task of the day is only accessible if you already accomplished the respective achievement of the day. If eligible, you can contribute gems towards the task and subsequently get a reward share equivalent to your contribution share.

Candle Shop in all its mysterious beauty

Closing words

Please be aware that Alien Legends is still under development, with an Open Alpha that started on April 16th. So gameplay is likely to change in some aspects compared to how it is depicted in this article. The goal of this article is to give players a possibility to grasp what the main aspects of Alien Legends will be, not to give you technical and/or final details of specific gameplay mechanisms. So in total, we hope this article gives you a good overview of Alien Legends, how the challenges as well as the possibilities play out for the trainer side of things. And if you haven’t already, you can see how the different sides work together in our previous preview article.

What squad would you want to bring for your first fights?