For some reason there is a lack of in-depth tips on how to play this game online. I’ve had to figure to more complex things out on my own, so I thought I’d share them here for everyone else.

First, we assume you have already read basic guides like this one and know how to play the game.

What do the different weapon types do?

Light Weapons

There two types, the Melta Gun and the Stubber. The Stubber is faster-firing, lower-damage. The Melta Gun is slower-firing, high-damage, armor-piercing.

The Stubber is best for mowing down large clumped groups of infantry. It is minimally effective against tanks, trucks, and the large enemies (gorkonauts, decimators, scorpions, helldrakes, etc — basically all the ones you have to melee). It is passably effective against the buggies, motorcycles, and aircraft (hellblades, dive bombers) but only because those enemies have little armor.

The Melta Gun is most effective against everything that isn’t infantry. It will kill infantry just fine, but it is slower firing so you have to very precise: wasted shots will run down the gun before you can finish off an entire clump if you’re not careful.

With both, you want to fire in short, targeted bursts to avoid overheating.

Heavy Weapons

There are three types, the Battle Cannon, the Gatling Cannon, and the Thermal Cannon.

The Battle Cannon has low damage, but very large blast radius (700 to 1100), around 6–7 round capacity, and slow reload (37–39 sec).

The Gatling Cannon has high damage, lower capacity (4 rounds, called “drums”), and faster reload (20–23 sec).

The Thermal Cannon has the highest damage, a smaller blast radius (400 to 700), 6-round capacity, and the slowest reload time (43–47 sec).

All Heavy Weapons are at least moderately useful against large enemies.

The Battle Cannon is the least effective against large enemies, but its large blast radius will take out groups of infantry (including those who are near a large enemy you might be firing at) in one shot.

The Thermal Cannon is best against large armored enemies. It has a small blast radius so you can take out half-clumps of infantry in a pinch, but it’s not as good as the Battle Cannon.

The Gatling Cannon has no blast radius whatsover, but it reloads quickly. That’s the most that can said for it.

Keep in mind that you can fire a Heavy Weapon multiple times in quick succession if you need to really pound a large enemy quickly.

Mounted Weapons

There are three types, the Rocket Launcher, the Missile Launcher, and the Autocannon.

The Rocket Launcher and Missile Launcher are hard to tell apart. They are best distinguished by the number of holes on the icon: the Rocket Launcher has more.

The Autocannon has the highest ammo capacity (21–23 rounds), low damage (100%), and shortest reload time (36–38 secs).

The Rocket Launcher is medium-capacity (15 rounds), medium damage (195%), and long reload time (48–50 secs)

The Missile Launcher is low-capacity (8 rounds), high damage (296%), and slightly less-long reload time (45–46 secs).

For all three, the weapon won’t fire off all the rounds in your mounted weapon if it can’t find enough enemies on the screen to hit. If you haven’t fired off all rounds, the weapon will take proportionally less time to reload (it only has to reload the used rounds).

If you are clearing a screen of weaker enemies (e.g. infantry), the Autocannon works best, since a single Autocannon round is more than enough to kill infantry.

Therefore, given that the total damage of a full firing is roughly the same across all three weapons (assuming equal wargear rating), you always want to use the Autocannon because if you are using either of the other weapons and there are more enemies onscreen than available rounds, some of the enemies will not be targeted, while others may be overkilled, thus wasting some of your available damage output. On the other hand, if you are firing at a smaller number of tougher enemies, the Autocannon will target multiple shots onto each larger enemy as necessary to destroy it.

Recommended Loadout

This is a matter of individual playstyle, but the best loadout I’ve found is to use a Melta Gun, Battle Cannon, and Autocannon.

Use the Melta Gun to destroy all non-infantry enemies, and use the Battle Cannon to destroy large clumps of infantry. Because the Battle Cannon has limited ammo and takes time to reload, you can also use the Melta Gun to precisely kill small numbers of infantry when they’re the only ones onscreen and you don’t need to prioritize its use for the armored enemies (tanks, trucks) or fast-moving enemies (buggies, motorcycles, flyers). Use the Autocannon to clear things out when tons of enemies appear at once and you get overwhelmed.

The reason to prefer the Melta/Battle-Cannon combo instead of the Stubber/Thermal-Cannon combo is because while the Thermal Cannon is also good at destroying armored enemies (it’s actually better than the Melta Gun, since it’s a Heavy Weapon with far greater DPS), there are typically more such enemies than you can kill using your available ammo. This means you’ll be trying to finish off a tank using your Stubber while the Thermal Cannon is reloading, which often goes terribly. The Thermal Cannon is also too slow to reliably hit fast-moving units, and it takes too many shots from the Stubber to kill them (it’s still not easy to track them for long enough to get all the shots in). You could substitute the Melta Gun for the Stubber but then you’ll be missing a good way to wipe out clumps of infantry effectively: the Melta is workable, but overheats more quickly.

The Forge

I haven’t figured out the exact numbers governing the Forge, but have discovered one important tip:

Using higher-quality/higher-level items in the forge does not always yield higher-level items!

Do not rely on the auto-fill button! The auto-fill button on the forge will automatically select your highest-quality gear that is not the last instance of that piece of gear (i.e. if your highest gear is an Autocannon but it’s your last Autocannon, it won’t select it). You can manually select it and it will warn you, asking you to confirm first.

If anything, I’ve found that using low-level items in the forge tends to yield higher-level gear, so make sure you experiment with putting in different pieces of gear, and use the lowest possible level gear to achieve the highest-level gear your forge can currently produce. This is because any gear you don’t use in the forge can be salvaged for ore, and the ore you get for salvaging a piece of gear is proportional to its level.

Note: With the new v1.3.0.0 update the Forge has become somewhat more logical, in that the 245 max gear level can be broken. You can now go up to 300, and occasionally when producing an “at least 300” gear it will yield a higher-level gear, up to 350. It also properly uses purple and gold items to linearly increase the chance of a gold item, and if an item’s rating is too low it will not produce an item above a certain range. While the effects of individual gear pieces have on the final product is still a little uncertain, producing the highest-possible items now requires using your highest level and highest quality gear.

Score Multipliers

The most important thing for getting a higher score is to keep your Kill Muliplier (the number in the upper-left corner) up. This number can range from 1x to 8x, so successfully getting it up to 8x and keeping it there is key to achieving higher scores and getting all three medals on campaign missions.

The key to doing this is ABD: Always Be Destroying.

You don’t want gaps of time where you’re not blowing something up. What you ideally want is a steady stream of destruction, punctuated by rapid massacres. Sometimes you may want to delay killing an enemy for a bit until the next one is about to appear so that you minimize between-killing delay. This takes some getting used to, because your Freeblade navigates and walks on its own, and you don’t have an infinite amount of time to kill that enemy before your Freeblade turns and walks down the next hallway. Other times, it will require that you kill all enemies in view before it will continue on. Those times, you want to wipe them out right away otherwise you’re incurring delay while the Kill Multiplier will go down. On top of this, you also want rapid massacres of many enemies at once because you get additional bonuses for that (more on that below).

One key to keeping the Kill Multiplier up when there are no enemies in sight is to blow up destructible objects. Blowing up a destructible object will raise your Kill Multiplier meter slightly, but most importantly, if you can keep up a steady stream of destruction, the meter won’t go down. It’s not entirely obvious by sight which objects are destructible. Here is a list:

those huge statues

those huge square pillars

the red generators

red barrels (these don’t do area effect damage to enemies, they just explode)

piles of grey ammo boxes, often near the red barrels

defensive barriers

Czech hedgehogs (those X-shaped things often found near defensive barriers)

the lighter-colored pipes (city and indoor maps)

the vertical-shaped yellow lights (city maps)

second-story waist-height walls (city maps)

the yellow lantern-on-a-post lights (forest maps)

yellow hanging lights (forest maps)

the white cylindrical lights (indoor maps)

The Stubber is the best at spraying and killing the destructible objects (most will blow up with a single round, except for the statues, pillars, and generators), but the Melta Gun will also work so long as you are precise and don’t waste your shots.

Streaks

The other important factor in getting as high a score as possible is streaks, i.e. killing as many things as you can in a very short period of time. You’ve probably noticed that when you kill a clump of enemies sometimes it’ll say “Brutal Streak!” or “Savage Streak!” or “MASSACRE!” These are additional score bonuses on top of the points you get for regular killing and can add many tens of thousands of points to your base score.

Sometimes you don’t want to kill something as soon as it appears on the screen. Rather, let as many enemies “accumulate” as you can, and then wipe them out all at once using your light weapon, multiple shots from your heavy weapon, and possibly even your mounted weapon: aim your mounted weapon, take note of what enemies it targets, and as soon as it fires (there is a bit of delay between when it fires and when the shots kill the targets), kill all the other enemies that weren’t targeted.

This is a little tricky to balance with the “Always Be Destroying” goal but you can do it if you’re careful: during the lulls between killing, when you’re letting the enemies accumulate, that’s when you shoot at the random crap scattered about to keep the multiplier up. Don’t “waste it” by destroying the destructible objects when you are killing enemies for a streak.

One key to helping you get more and bigger streaks is to realize that some vehicles “create” enemies, so you shouldn’t kill them right away. Wait until they drop off their troops. These include the Ork and Chaos infantry carriers, some Ork melee enemies that drop off infantry, and the Chaos infantry dropships. The troops are spawned when they get dropped off, and don’t “pre-exist” inside the vehicle, so if you shoot the vehicle before the troops appear, you don’t get credit for them. Wait for them to appear, then kill the vehicle and the clump of infantry. Troops spawning out of a dropship can be killed easily by blowing up the dropship, which falls on them and explodes.

Get All The Campaign Medals

After you’ve completed a campaign mission, it’s worthwhile to go back and play it again until you get all three medals.

Moreover, as you progress through more chapters, the missions in completed chapters will actually open up new additional variant missions you can run. Ultimately, most of the missions will have four variants. These variants are on the same map, but with different objectives and enemy deployments.

If you can’t complete these variants right away or you just can’t seem to get that third medal, don’t fret: you can come back later when your Freeblade’s wargear has been upgraded. Once you have better weaponry, it becomes far easier to complete the objectives and get all three medals.