Why does the chicken Kros the road?

So when you start your first Krolossium (helped by the tutorial), here’s what you get. The game will “lend” you 20 Krosmasters, and you must create a team out of that. Whatever you have in your collection doesn’t matter, you only get those random 20… which is good, since my collection isn’t exactly huge right now! There’s usually a good spread of different levels, and Krolossium teams tend to be a bit more “out there”, with weird combinations and characters you wouldn’t see in a more competitive environment.

This is the team I’ve selected for this first try. Bakara is a good long-ranged character, Moon and Coa Gulary hits incredibly hard at short range, and Khan Karkass can push those two forward with ease. All in all, a rather good team for a start, with some synergies and strong characters. I was tempted to make something a little more “weird” with the Dragostess, Pandalida and other close-combat characters, but I barely have had the opportunity to play with Moon these days, so I went with him instead.

Krolossium demands that you complete 4 games in a row; you will receive your reward at the end. Note that you can change your team between two games if you want to, and that you can leave the game and come back later if you don’t want to play the whole stretch in one go.

So I went and did my four games… and it paints an good portrait of the game, in terms of variety and different maps. I swear I didn’t tutor these in any way (I don’t have that kind of power!), this was one single Krolossium run that ended up perfectly for this article! Let’s have a look.

My first game was on the Astrub map, against Buck Anear, Evangelyne, Arty and Maskun John. A rather… peculiar team, for sure. It doesn’t really have any good synergies, and characters are rather fragile, but it has a good range. My main target was Buck, which is worth a juicy 5 GG for very little HP…

My opponent pushed Buck forward, and I was lucky enough to get Iop Style (increases contact damage for a single turn); I ran on it with all I had and it went down easily. Arty was a bit scarier, and used his breath attack to severely damage two of my characters, but he was the second one to go down. Two characters down in a couple of turns, my rush-down tactic worked perfectly: it’s a win for me.

Second opponent: Count Frigost, Grampy Shopkeeper and Sadlygrove, played on the Xelorium map. That was much bigger challenge, because I had less targets at my disposal. Killing Grampy or Sadlygrove alone wasn’t enough to win the game, so I had either to play around Count Frigost or go straight for him. We deployed on opposite corners of the map, so the latter wasn’t really an option.

My opponent foolishly send Sadlygrove alone to fight me, and he went down without much effort (as I said, Moon hits HARD). Grampy was my next target, but my Moon ended up dying under the barrage of attacks, and Coa barely survived the same turn. Except Moon… doesn’t really die: he gives out his 5 GG, but stay on the field. I was behind but still in the game! In the end, it’s Moon that struck the winning blow, killing both Grampy and Frigost in a final hammer strike. Victory!

Third game in a row, this time against Captain Amakna, Dark Vlad, Kriss Krass and Ogrest, playing on the Forfut map. Okay, I’m screwed for this one! The team is extremely mobile, Captain is a pain in the butt since he can run away from my heavy hitters, Dark Vlad has a deadly ring of fire and Kriss can shut down Moon’s resurrection powers! There’s no way I could win this one, right?

Except… my opponent made some baffling moves and poor choices. On his first turn, Kriss used all of its mobility and ran across the whole map to deal… exactly one point of damage to Moon. Wait, what?! Of course, at the mercy of my entire team, he went down immediately. On the next turn, my opponent seems to focus on Bakara, but leaves Dark Vlad in range of the same three guys that ate up Kriss one turn prior… All I had to do was to pick him up like a flower.

The game lasted only two turns and I still don’t know what happened.

Fourth and final match, on Moon Island’s map to complete the tour: Bakara, Henual, Lumino, Maskun John, Steamy Wonder and Kivin. Ooooh, though match-up. Bakara + Henual is a dangerous combo that can pummel down the enemy from far away, and plenty of level 1 meant that my opponent would have the upper hand on kamas and ground control. It was basically a more optimized version of my own team.

Fortunately for me, my opponent didn’t deploy Henual right next to Bakara, and had to scramble a bit to get into position. This gave me some time to try and get what I would consider “weak points” in his team. I was lucky enough to kill Lumino from afar on the first turn, then an over-achieving Kivin on the next turn. His Bakara focused on mine, but he forgot that she’s quite resilient against Fire attacks, and couldn’t damage her enough. Most of the enemy team stayed as far away from as possible, but using Moon as human (monkey?) grappling hook, I pulled Maskun John closer and he fell down. Victory was mine!

So yeah… Four victories in a row! I must admit, this is most unorthodox for a first try. Usually, on my main account, I get 2 to 3 wins, and I expect a new player to not fare as well as I did. Still, I’m quite glad I got this far!

So, what did I get for my efforts? Well, I got 4 kroz, 1 recycling fragment…

… and a new Krosmaster! Yup, that’s the thing, if you win three or four games during your Krolossium, you have a good chance to get a random character as prize. Granted, Amalia isn’t exactly an amazing character, but there’s plenty of level 1 and 2 (or even 3 or 4!) characters to add to your collection.

This is Krolossium’s main appeal to me: you get to play with characters you may not own, against improbable and frequently unoptimized teams, and in the end, you get rewarded for it, sometimes by getting a whole Krosmaster. I would say that you could play Krolossium a lot, even more than some other game modes, and still completing your collection.

As a side note, I got some more achievements during my time playing. Got three of those for 10 kroz each, and then 20 additional kroz for finished a perfect Krolossium. Hey, it happens only once, but I’m not spitting on 50 kroz! I also got my daily quest by picking 25 kamas off the ground during play, which needed only 3 games to get on my run.

So our total is…

454 kroz and 23 recycling fragments. Not bad!

Well, that went on much longer than I expected, sorry for the wall of text. Tell me, what do you want to see for my next entry? Should I go shopping and get some Krosmaster for my collection, or should I do some more Adventure/Krolossium to get a bit more money and buy more at once?

So what to do now? We don’t have enough kroz to buy characters yet, so we need to fill our pockets with them. Well, there’s two different ways you could go on at it…

First, you could get Astrub 100% completed. Every time you finish a mission with a Krosmaster that hasn’t done it before, you will get 3 kroz; every new mission you finish for the first time gives out an additional 4 kroz. If you finish every Astrub mission with every character (in several takes, obviously), that’s a substantial amount of kroz: 168, to be exact. In my case, I also pocketed a daily quest while doing so, that’s an extra +40 kroz.

Now, I will say that it’s not for everyone: doing the same mission over and over again can feel a little ‘grindy’ for one’s taste. But on the other hand, Astrub is such a cakewalk that it shouldn’t take you long before you check every box on that list. You will even learn how to use 8 Krosmasters along the way, so it’s far from wasted time.

Two daily quests, one full Adventure world and completion achievements amounts to 248 kroz and 18 recycling fragments. Hey, not too bad! We could actually buy a random Krosmaster with this, and craft a couple of low-level one as well. But let’s continue a bit more before we go shopping crazy, shall we?

Second option: let’s continue further to the next Adventure level, Frigost. Now, if Astrub was a walk in the park, Frigost is going to be your wake-up call! The difficulty ramps up and you’re gonna have to step up your game to finish it. But it will teach you much about the game, like carefully reading your opponent’s powers, counting the cells between your enemies and you, and so much more…

Here’s a few tips to beat Frigost:

·         It’s good to have a Krosmaster in your team with a high initiative that can kill the little penguins in one shot. Once it’s down, the rest of your team can lash out on the bigger penguins that are no longer invincible. I usually use Wally Fire in this role.

·         The ice foxes will attack you from as far away as possible, then run away. If you’re far away from it, it won’t have any MP left to flee, so, you might want to take a step back to catch it! Beware, its attack will make you lose 1 MP.

·         Don’t mess with the Yech’ti. He will hit you twice in a zone if he gets close enough. Get him from afar! His attack also gives you MP for some reason, take advantage of this if needed.

·         Read carefully what is asked of you for the current mission. You don’t always have to kill everyone to win.

·         When a mission asks you to defeat several waves of monsters, all of your Krosmasters are healed to full between each waves. You can exploit this by taking unnecessary risks to end an opponent, or to abuse Quentin Flush’s strong attack (which I did!).

·         Don’t neglect Demonic Rewards. Those temporary or permanent boosts can give you an advantage on the later levels. Bear in mind that there are no GGs in those levels, so, don’t buy those who affect that, it would be a waste…

·         Top Krosmasters in this world: Argon Gass, Quentin Flush, Srammy.

The final boss is Count Frigost, and he’s not messing around. You’re fighting a powerful enemy at a disadvantage; and he comes with a couple of critters than you might want to trash first. But there’s a little secret to defeat it easily… If you’re stuck, read the spoiler below:

SPOILER Count Frigost will always attack the closest Krosmaster available to him. If you put Srammy 2 cells away from him, he will attack him relentlessly… but won’t do any damage, thanks to Srammy’s power. So you can use your guy as a wall to protect the rest of your team, while you amass kamas, buy DR and clean up any annoying monster. It may be a bit long, but it’s far more secure than just rushing and hope for the best. END OF SPOILER

It took me about 90 minutes to get to the end of Frigost. I picked up up 72 kroz on the way, 7 recycling fragments from the achievement, and an additional 40 kroz thanks to the daily challenge (told you it was important!).