I’m always amazed by the things I discover that are as obvious to me as the nose on my face, and that other people have never even considered (and vice versa), so how about a good old-fashioned listing thread? I’ll start off with a few. (Also, if anyone has a dump or a collection of all the in-game tips, that would be cool to throw in the pile)
The character that makes the last match will be taking the enemy’s next turn of damage (active match only, resulting cascades do not effect this).
When making two matches at once, the tile you move determines which of your team will be taking the enemy’s next turn of damage.
Critical tiles are created in three ways: by character special abilities (such as Classic Hawkeye’s Take Aim), by environmental abilities (Containment Breach), and by combo matches (Rectangle, Shifted Rectangle, Deep Shifted Rectangle, Plus sign, T, L, and Bar, Game Mechanics - MPQ Tips and Guides - 505 Go! Official Forums for diagrams).
I didn’t realize health packs regenerated until someone mentioned it in passing in the forums yesterday, and I tested it out this morning by deliberately dropping below 5. I had been hoarding them and being extra careful if they dropped below 10 before, and never below 5.
If you run out of a type of boost, you can spend ISO to buy a pack of three of them.
Any match or mission has a chance to award you three uses of a randomly chosen type of boost. You can’t have more than 10 of each type of boost, though, and the game doesn’t check if you can hold more boosts before it tries to give you one, so if you have more than 7 of a kind of boost, there’s a chance that the boosts you can find after winning a fight will go to waste.
The computer ALWAYS turns potential T matches (for a crit and a free move) into just 4-in-a-row matches (for claring a row and losing your turn). Don’t make the same mistake!
Health packs regenerate MUCH faster than your champions. 20 minutes per health pack vs hours per champion. If you’re going to be putting the game down for an hour or two, use your health packs on your downed champs and you’ll be back to full by the time you get back. If you don’t, you risk your champs not being fully healed when you get back.
Don’t use health packs too early. It might be scary to go in with Thor at half health, but you might lose almost nothing or you might go down. Either way, you got an extra match in before using your health pack.
*Don’t spread yourself too thin!! Pick a few characters and focus on leveling them, you will progress much more quickly than if you try to level up everyone at the same time.
*Don’t get stuck in one playstyle or frame of mind, learn different ways to play (aggressive, manipulative, patient, and most important …well I’ll make that one it’s own tip), and then play whichever suits your situation best.
*Read your opponent’s skills!!! Find which matches will do you the most damage, find which skills will do you the most damage, sometimes you will need to prioritize hampering your opponent’s strategy above building your own.
*Discretion is the better part of valor. You don’t have to fight every fight that comes your way. If it’s not going to give you enough rating reward for the difficulty of the fight, skip it! If you’re fighting a losing battle, retreat, you may survive the encounter and you probably won’t have to wait as long for your characters to revive/heal!
In PvP you can choose the arena you will be fighting in. The background changes as you select your opponent. Normally you can choose from 3 different opponents and the usual arenas are jungle (bottom left), NY (bottom right) and danger room (top). I prefer NY as its special tiles are practically useless but AI has a strange preference on matching them giving you more of an edge there.