Mix your forces
Mixed forces are the most versatile, and the hardest to counter. If you’re putting
together an offensive force, try to build the best counters for your opponent’s
army. In the absence of good intelligence, or if your opponent has designed a well-balanced
army, a nice mix of direct range units, artillery, and melee is a good option for
an offensive force. Using good offensive abilities like Pack, Leap or Charge give
your units an extra punch during battles, and they require no extra management on
your part.
Offensive attacks can also be made in waves. Send a group of artillery units to
soften up base defenses by removing Sound Beam Towers, Anti-Air Towers and Bramble
Fences and then follow up these attacks quickly with fast melee units or massed
flyers. Massed flyers that deliver high damage are particularly effective against
bases once the defenses have been removed, especially so if they are all ordered
to attack the same target.
The best way to eliminate opposition to your offensive forces is to find and remove
any expansion sites. This will seriously hamper your enemy’s ability to recover
from sustained attacks. Sonic attack creatures or artillery units are great for
killing lots of Henchmen at an expansion site, so destroy your enemy’s economy wherever
it is found. If you send along a Henchman with an attack, you can quickly take over
expansion sites, or better yet, build some forward Creature Chambers so you can
immediately bring in reinforcements.
Don’t watch all the battles
Another key to great offense is not to watch all the battles. While micromanaging
your units can definitely win battles, you don’t have time to manage every battle.
Sometimes it’s far better to concentrate on putting together reinforcements, maintaining
your economy or handling critical research. Let your opponent spend time defending
a base, while you work on streaming in reinforcements and taking out expansion sites.
That being said, there are several tricks you can use while in battle to shift the
tide in your favor. Using abilities like Frenzy properly can significantly improve
the offensive capabilities of your units, as can techniques like "focus firing"
where you manually select targets for massed units, which works particularly well
for direct range units and flyers. Ordering all your units to attack a single target
at once can destroy that target in mere seconds.
Expand!
You don’t need a huge amount of resources to build a satisfyingly powerful force
in Impossible Creatures, but you do need a very strong economy to maintain that
force. Several expansion sites with extra Coal and Electricity will help build a
large army of creatures, and more importantly, replace any units that die in a failed
attack. Early expansion will lay the foundation for concerted, powerful, late game
attacks.
Multiple Creature Chambers
Building a large force also requires a lot of infrastructure, namely lots of Creature
Chambers. Using only one Creature Chamber becomes a significant bottleneck for your
time, especially in the late game where high-level creatures take many seconds to
build. To that end, it’s advisable to have at least two Creature Chambers at your
main base that can be used for offense and defense, and possibly others at forward
expansion sites. In addition, if you’re using an air or water strategy, make sure
you have multiple air and water chambers too. A good idea is to set your chambers
to their own group (by using the Ctrl + # function, or the taskbar) so that you
can recall and select the Creature Chamber with the press of a single button. This
can really speed up ordering units, particularly if you are engaged in a battle
somewhere else on the map and you don’t want to have to move the camera.
Keep your chambers well queued with units. You can order multiple units at each
chamber instead of having to build them one at a time. If your expansion strategy
worked, you should have lots of Coal and Electricity. Spend some of it by queuing
up multiple creatures at each chamber! Even if you are at the unit cap (the maximum
number of creatures and Henchman you can support), as soon as a creature dies, a
new one from the queue will resume building and replace it. While resources are
spent immediately while you order units, the resources can be returned just as quickly
by canceling build orders at the Creature Chambers. Typically, you don’t want to
have resources sitting there doing nothing (queued units are resources spent for
a postponed benefit) but in this instance, the expediency of ordering units ahead
of time seems like a good trade-off.
Using the Creature Chamber’s rally point feature really reduces the amount of management
you have to perform. Creatures will automatically move to the selected position
when they are constructed. You can set the rally points for several chambers to
the same location so that all of your units end up in the same spot, which means
you have a solid defense in case you are attacked, and it also means you don’t have
to track down and move individual groups of units, which saves you time. When an
attack is underway, you can even shift the rally points of Creature Chambers to
the enemy base, so that replacements automatically move to attack your opponent.
Research is the key
Building an unstoppable force involves a lot of commitment to research and the selection
of appropriate creatures. While you can put together a large, powerful army at any
research level, the true heavyweight attackers are found mostly in research level
five. Researching level five takes a lot of time, resources and planning. If you
want to commit to an unstoppable force of juggernaut creatures, you’ll also have
to be selective in the extra research and construction you do, because those extras
take resources and time away from the creation of your army.
In terms of the creatures to use, there are a few general guidelines to follow.
The higher-level units are the most powerful, and while you can build a very powerful
level three or level four army, it requires even more discipline in research and
resources. If an attack at level three fails, and your opponent manages to get into
level four or five while you are recovering, the payback will be mighty uncomfortable.
Keep in mind that the unit cap doesn’t discern between creature research levels,
so you can build 30 level one creatures, or 30 level five creatures – it should
be patently obvious which army would be more deadly!
As for individual units, high-health creatures (wolverines/elephants, praying mantis/whales)
provide the best general unit, but their cost is also higher. A good mix of speed
and health prevents your force from being picked apart before it can even reach
the enemy base.
Heavily armored units like Snapping Turtles and Lobsters are easily defeated by
horned-creatures (Bulls, Rhinos), but are devastating if your opponent has no good
armor counters. Even massed Sound Beam Towers will take a long time to kill a heavily
armored unit.
Large numbers of artillery units (chimpanzees, archerfish) are excellent against
fixed structures and defenses, are often available in level four, and are reasonably
cost-effective, but beware of damaging your own units and avoid powerful enemy melee
counters.
The one thing you should avoid is building an army that’s comprised of the same
creature unless you are absolutely sure your opponent has no counter. For instance,
if your opponent has no artillery units, the bulk of your army could be comprised
of direct range units, because the natural counter is missing.
Know your targets
Several strategies already discussed (expansion, research, multiple Creature Chambers)
should put you in a position to deliver the “coup de grace” to your opponent. Impossible
Creatures allows quick comebacks, however, so there will be occasions where your
killing blow will be deflected and you may find yourself on the receiving end of
an attack from a quickly reviving enemy! To prevent this occurrence, good intelligence
is required, so take advantage of your Radar or Sonic Pulse abilities to scout the
map.
Scouting or using your Radar Pulses will also identify areas of massed enemy units
who might engage in a counter-attack. Situations can occur where two opponents are
attacking each others’ bases, and it’s basically a race to see who will win. If
there are no obvious concentrations of enemy forces, you can be more confident about
attacking with almost your entire army.
You should also always be playing towards the objectives of the game. If you’re
playing a "Destroy Lab" game, the target you should most concentrate on is the lab.
There’s no real point in destroying some out of the way expansion site when you
could be attacking the lab.
Mixed Armies
Sometimes the lab (or other objective) is in a particularly difficult area to attack,
or is heavily defended. In that case, it’s good to have a mix of units to deal with
these situations.
Large artillery units are great at taking out closely packed buildings and can do
so from beyond the range of the defenses. The splash damage of the artillery can
also kill Henchmen who are trying to repair structures. Targeting artillery on the
lab will do significant damage to Henchmen emerging from the lab or trying to effect
repairs.
Sonic attack units, like Whales, are not as effective at killing bases, because
their sonic attack does nothing to buildings. In fact, these units must close with
a structure and use their melee attacks, meaning they are vulnerable to Sound Beam
Towers.
Small, powerful level five melee units like Tiger-Lobsters can get between tightly
packed buildings and start attacking the lab well before a larger creature like
an Elephant-Lobster. Even though the smaller creatures do less damage overall, they
are far more maneuverable, more compact, and you can target more of them onto each
building. It is advisable to switch your artillery units to a new target once you’ve
started your attack with melee units lest you kill your own attacking forces with
splash damage.
Abilities
Researching some animal upgrades at the Genetic Amplifier can add some extra punch
to your base killers, so focus on creature upgrades that increase damage or speed.
You should also be very selective about the research you perform. For instance,
melee attack upgrades have little value on range units, and sight radius increases
are of limited value on melee attackers.
Finally, using abilities like Frenzy can really boost the attack damage of your
units. Get your units into melee attack on the lab and trigger the frenzy. Then
you can sit back and watch your opponent’s health drop like a rock.
