With the most recent update to DrugWars, we've seen two new faces join our cast of baddies, and a couple of the units have received special upgrades. It's also been revealed by the developers that the Pantheon building, long rumored to perform no function except make you spend your hard-earned wealth to make your enemies jealous of your success, actually does have a purpose. With some new battle rules, a new battle simulator, and new units in the game, let's see what these guys do and talk about how best to use them!

The Hobo

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Players have long clamored for a unit that only costs alcohol, since we already have two that you can recruit only with weapons. The DrugWars developers have heard your cries, and the result is a homeless bohemian who will literally fight for your right to party.

The Hobo is unique in that its the only unit that has a 0 health value, and an attack of 2, so it's literally a poor man's Rowdy. The special text notes that the Hobo dies after the first round, so he wanders into the battlefield, throws one punch, and lays down for a dirt nap.

Using the new battle simulator we can see exactly how this plays out in a fight: Hobos die at the end of the first round, regardless of how many enemies came at them. They aren't even meat shields, because they die after inflicting their damage but before anybody can damage them. So even if you have 10,000 of them turning your block into a piss-soaked, barf-encrusted ghetto, the first time somebody pokes their head in and yells "BOO!", they're all going to faint.

That's OK. Hobos aren't meant to be defensive units. Hobos are meant to beef up an attacking force by adding a metric butt-ton of cheap damage to the fight that a defender has no way to counter. We'll talk about why that's important when we get to the battle system update later, but suffice it to say there's no point keeping Hobos staggering around your property until you're ready to launch an attack where you want to add some additional punching power.

An alternate tactic for them would be to recruit a bunch of them along with a slew of Rowdies if you notice an incoming enemy attack. Nothing like having your foes run into an instant Hobo army to cause some laughs. Better to kill a bunch of their incoming soldiers than have them loot your liquor stores, after all. You can also use them as a resource dump for excessive booze if you need a way to diminish your stockpile quickly.

Hilariously, Hobos have a carrying capacity of 10. According to the battle simulator, sending Hobos in against undefended targets is the only way they can attack without dying. This means if they encounter no resistance, Hobos will stuff a few things in their pockets and stumble back home. They'll take forever to do it with their 13 minute movement speed, but you COULD use a metric shit-ton of them to ransack an opponent if you were desperate and overloaded with alcohol.

The Spy

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Cool, detached, and reserved, the Spy is your guy when you want to know what sort of defenses your enemy is packing...and that's about it. With an attack value of 0 and a defensive value of 1, the Spy will literally give his life to pass on information about the enemy. He's the fastest unit in the game though, outclassing even the Ninja with his 3-minute turnaround time. Like the Hobo, he even has a carrying capacity of 10, meaning if he slips into an undefended area, he'll bring back a handful of goodies.

The Spy, obviously, is the character you want to send in to scout out a potential target. If they have even a lone Hobo or Rowdy on the payroll, he won't be coming home, and with 0 attack, you can't buy an army of them on the cheap to use for defense. Nor can you use them as meat shields to deflect incoming attacks for a round, because the Spy has the highest unit priority in the game. He's the last unit in a fight to take damage. Everything from Rowdies to Mercenaries have to fall before he takes a hit assuming you sent him in with a cluster of other guys for some reason.

The downside to the Spy is that five minute recruit time, meaning you'll want to stock up on them before you want to use them, and buy in bulk since nobody wants to twiddle their fingers waiting to be able to buy up the next one. It's not like they're expensive, so you might as well keep a handful of them around so you can do some exploring at your leisure. They're the only unit with a cost in drugs as well as weapons and alcohol, so watch your resources and don't recruit more than you need.

Bazooka Guy

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The Bazooka Guy isn't a new unit, but he got a rules change and functions very differently from how he did before. You'll notice his attack and defense values have remained the same, but he now deals splash damage, hitting five enemies at once. It's important you know what this means before you go apeshit with recruiting him, because he may not be as powerful as you once thought.

The Bazooka Guy is now crowd control. His damage output is now divided by 5 and spread across five separate units, meaning each unit will take 29 points of damage (145 / 5 = 29). The upside to this is the Bazooka Guy can now wipe out a large swath of enemies instead of being restricted to nailing just one. The downside to this is that if your opponent doesn't have five attackers to split that damage across, the Bazooka Guy becomes far less useful.

Using the battle simulator, you can see what happens if a lone Bazooka Guy gets set upon by a crowd of Rowdies: he dishes out 29 damage to five individual units in that single group...and he's now the only unit that works this way. You need to look at him as though his attack power is (29 x 5), not 145, and take that into account. Under the previous battle system, a lone Bazooka Guy could kill every other unit in the game in a one-round, one-on-one match. Now that is not the case: he can no longer one-shot a Big Mama or a Mercenary, though he can hit up to five of them for 29 damage each. You'll want to add Bazooka Guys to a fight if your opponent has at least 5 units across which they can spread that damage so as to maximize their effectiveness. They'll take out a sizable chunk of most low-level enemy groups, but against a single unit with high defense, their effectiveness drops since they don't have the health to soak up a lot of damage.

The New Battle System

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The DrugWars battle system also got an upgrade. There's one major thing you need to know about that change, and it's that units no longer completely heal between rounds of combat. Damage now accumulates across rounds, meaning that if your group of 10 Bouncers takes 62 damage in round one, six of them will die, three of them will be at full health, and one will have 8 health left. Under the old system, those remaining 2 points would have vanished--this is no longer the case.

The end result of this change is that battles are considerably bloodier, and units like the Mercenary and Big Mama can no longer just soak the damage from a bunch of weenie units forever. Lower-powered soldiers like the Knifer, Bouncer, and Rowdy are now a lot stronger, as their sheer numbers can now overwhelm multiple unit groups instead of getting stopped by a single blocker. Additionally, units deal their damage on a one-to-one basis without damage spilling over to the rest of the group. This means a team of five Snipers will kill five Rowdies from a group of 20, and the remaining extra damage will be lost. The Rowdy group, meanwhile, will unleash 40 points of damage on the Snipers, in two-point increments, killing them as they go down the line. The sole exception to this, as noted before, is the Bazooka Guy, who will hit up to five targets per round with his shell.

With the Bazooka Guy's ability to blast five separate attackers per unit, per round, why wouldn't you just build an army of Bazooka Guys to hold down the fort? Simple: the Hobo Wave.

The Hobo Wave?

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The creation of the Hobo as an incredibly inexpensive and disposable unit has given rise to an entirely new tactic you can deploy on the offensive, which I will refer to as "The Hobo Wave". This will likely replace the "Rowdy Rush" as your preliminary strike squad, and if you're interested in just inflicting enormous casualties without coming away with any loot, there's no more economically viable way than this.

The tactic is simple: recruit a whole crap-ton of Hobos, and fling them (and only them) in a single massive wave at your opponent. Individually, of course, Hobos are nothing special. An enormous mass of them, however, will flow over your target like a tidal wave, plowing their way up the chain of unit priority before dying en masse at the end of the round. The defender's army won't even get the chance to cut them down, as they all collapse before any fists, bats, or bullets make contact.

You can Hobo Wave an adversary just to make them waste resources rebuilding an army, or you can use them as the first stage of a two-pronged attack, where you follow up the Hobo attack with a second assault group comprised of everything but Hobos. The idea here is to use the Hobos to soften up your target, then use your second wave to cause more serious damage and come back with resources.

The best defense to the Hobo wave is, just like the Rowdy Rush, a supply of Big Mamas to serve as a stop-gap against all that damage getting through to your bigger units. While Hobos chew through Rowdies on a 1-to-1 basis, and Bouncers on a 5-to-1 basis, it takes 55 Hobos to drop a single Big Mama. That's 22,000 alcohol per Mama you want to kill, not to mention the added cost of breaking through the lower-tiered forces to get to that Mama in the first place.

The Hobo Wave is best utilized against defenders who have built up an impressive army of high-level units at the expense of neglecting their lower-level units. If you go spy on an enemy and get a report back that looks like this...

Name hidden to protect the guilty.

...or if your own defenses look similar, that right there is ripe conditions for a Hobo wave. That poor Knifer is only going to block 3 Hobos, and after that, it's curtains for the Ninjas, the Snipers, and probably most of the Bazooka Guys too depending on the size of your Hobo wave. That's a big investment to lose because you were too busy to recruit some Bouncers and Big Mamas. Don't be that guy.

The Pantheon!

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So what does the Pantheon actually do?

"Apparently nothing," you might reply. And you'd be right...but also wrong.

The Pantheon doesn't directly influence anything having to do with DrugWars itself. You can build it up to ludicrous levels and you won't see an increase in resource development, a drop in building costs, an increase in battle effectiveness among your soldiers. It doesn't unlock new content, so perish the idea of a Level 10 Pantheon opening up the Research Center from the old version of the game, or anything like that. So why build it?

Because it can earn you more money.

You've likely noticed you can share your battle results with others on Steemit. Each time you do so, there's a small chance that post will be upvoted by the account associated with the DrugWars app. Having an upgraded Pantheon will increase the power of the vote cast on your battle result post if you're one of the lucky winners. Note that upgrading the Pantheon doesn't increase your chance of receiving one of these upvotes, just the value of the vote itself. If you don't do a lot of fighting, or if you do but don't spam up your Steemit blog with the results of each battle, there's little point in upgrading the Pantheon unless you want that delightful hit of dopamine that comes with earning something in the game.

If you are apt to post battle results to your feed, especially if you're part of a Gang and sharing intel with the rest of your family, then the Pantheon can earn you a bit of extra moolah when you do get that upvote, with no out-of-pocket cost. So that's the mystery of the Pantheon laid bare for all. Use it however you see fit.

What's Coming Next?

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The DrugWars devs have promised that the Bazooka Guy isn't the only unit getting some special skills. In coming updates to the battle system, other units may get their own special abilities, and we may see new units arise as well. I could see a Shotgunner being added, for instance, who has a decreased spread attack capability and lower total attack power (say, 15 damage spread across 3 targets).

The change to the battle system has made some units massively more useful and nerfed others. Snipers, for instance, went from being one of the best units in the game to one of the worst. 40 damage to one member of a group is nowhere near as good as 40 damage distributed across a group, and with only 8 health, they're annoyingly easy to bump off. On the other hand, this makes the Gunman far more useful, since 25 damage is enough to one-shot anything except Big Mama and the Mercenary, and their 12 health means they can soak up more hits. Since there's nothing a Sniper can't one-shot that a Gunman can't also one-shot, and Gunmen are cheaper to recruit (6.8k total resources as opposed to 8.6k total resources) while having 50% more health, this makes them the superior choice in every circumstance.

Now, if Snipers were to acquire 'First Strike' capability and higher unit priority, on the other hand...but we'll have to see what's coming down the pipeline. The devs aren't finished tinkering, and just because a unit isn't very useful today doesn't mean we won't see a time in the near future where that unit gets an effectiveness bump. 'Early Access' means putting up with these hiccups, and as long as you're having fun, that's all that matters.

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Did this help? I like to post about new updates to DrugWars when they happen, with a special emphasis on battle strategy and unit tactics, so give me a follow if you're into that sort of thing. With any luck, I'll survive long enough to put together a Gang (the 250k cost in Drugs, Weapons, and Alcohol is the only thing holding me back), and we can raise some hell together.

Until then, liquor up your Hobos, recruit some extra Bazooka Guys, and keep your eyes open for those Spies. Zorker out!