Play like a pro

or at least look like one.

Seriously, here are some things you should know in order to play well.

1. Know your strength. It's very important to know what level cogs your gags can defeat in one round. Keep in mind that your strongest gags will get stronger the more you use them - until they are maxxed. If you plant gag trees, some of the gags will increase 10% in strength once the tree is mature and fruiting. A birthday cake gag starts out at 40-something and goes up to 100 when maxxed. An organic birthday cake (gag tree) will do 110 point damage - that's enough to defeat a lured level 11 cog. Why is it important to know? So that you can make sure you choose the right gag to finish-off a cog in battle. It is best if you develop a second sense about this, and especially - can quickly figure out what gag to use to in combination with other toon's gag in order to defeat a cog in one round, and not have to risk losing laff points. Why not just use the most powerful gag you have until you run out? Exactly - using a higher level gag than necessary will mean that you may not have your powerful gags later when you most need them - inside buildings and HQs.


2. Learn to jump. Timing is everything. To defeat goons and get through obstacles in higher-level cog HQ's beyond the Sellbot HQ, you need to be able to accurately and precisely jump your toon. Practice, practice practice. Not being able to jump accurately means you will endanger your toon and risk going sad. I recently did a DA's Office B (Lawbot HQ) and we were passing a set of goons. One of the toons went sad unexpectedly - I think he lost some laff points getting squashed by stompers, but when he couldn't jump out of the path of some goons, he went sad. And the really tragic thing is that we were almost finished - there was only one set of cogs left after doing 3 floors of what must have been 12 cogs per floor. When you go against the CFO, you will likely need to be very good at disabling goons and avoiding their deadly cone of death. The larger goons can cost you 24 laff per hit. Even 100+ laff toons can't survive too many of those in a row.



3. Power of observation. in many battles, it's very important to know the level of the cogs coming out of the elevators - because too often you can NOT see their floating tags that show their level - and you don't want to wake a lured cog without being able to finish them off. Knowing the level of the cogs means you can select the right level gag to do the job.
Other things to observe: the capabilities of your fellow toons during battle. Besides the Laff Meter, you should know which gag tracks they have, and the level of gags. All too often, I've entered elevators without really checking and find out once we're inside a building or cog HQ, and finding out that one of the fellow toons has very low laff and/or missing toon-up or sound. After a few very very close encounters with going sad, I now check that there is at least one toon in the party that has toon-up.