Guns Up! Mobile Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Assemble a Powerful Army and Dominate the Battlefield

Guns Up! Mobile is a multiplayer real-time strategy game developed by Valkyrie Entertainment and NHN Corp. It has you assembling soldiers to wage war against enemy fortifications, all while keeping your defenses in top shape from the attacks of others. Along the way, you will gather resources, upgrade your base, and recruit new soldiers to aid you in your efforts. Do you have what it takes to win on the battlefield?

Attacks in Guns Up! Mobile are asynchronous, meaning that while the defense layouts you encounter are based on layouts from actual players, you do not attack any players that are actually online. While this means you do not have to worry about your target quickly shutting down your assault in response, they can counter this by making their defenses an absolute pain to go through.

Luckily, you have access to abilities that can support your troops. These range from blowing holes into ramparts, to orders that will have them travel to a specific location to either regroup or take advantage of a weak spot of the enemy’s defenses.

Your starting fortifications and soldier do not look like much. However, as long as you know which enemy to fight and by keeping your gear in top shape, you will start trampling enemy defenses in no time, all while repelling their attacks with little trouble. Just remember to update your defense layouts or else someone is going to barge right through. Stand at attention and learn what Guns Up! Mobile has in store for you!

1. Pressing The Attack Or Pushing It Back?

Your first “mission” is a simulated fight against an AI-controlled enemy, wherein your troops are besieging their defenses. Your main goal is destroying the enemy’s Outpost at the far end of the battlefield. All attacks start you off with an armed transport truck that lets you spawn troops in exchange for Energy.

While Energy regenerates on its own, you get more Energy by killing defending troops and destroying any structures they have. Troops also have cooldowns before you can summon another group. Take note that the transport truck is not invincible, and defenders can destroy it with enough firepower.

For the starting assault, enemy defenses are quite high, but the game gives you a tank to compensate. The tank can fire its cannon to devastate particularly stubborn defenses. All sieges have a five-minute timer, and if the timer runs out before you destroy the Outpost, the siege is a failure.

The Outpost itself is fairly durable, and periodically spawns units that can be selected by the defending player before an attack takes place. Of course, defenders have a variety of tools to impede your progress:

• Walls: Simple wooden barricades that force invaders to walk around them until they are destroyed. Unsurprisingly, they quickly crumble against fire and explosives. However, soldiers will never target walls directly, and will more likely be blown up due to direct player action;

• Bunkers: Static fortifications with two machine guns, chewing up any troops that get into their line of fire. Similar to the walls, explosives are their worst enemy, and they have a limited firing arc that makes them vulnerable to flanking;

• Explosive Barrels: Traps that blow up when destroyed, explosive barrels are devastating against clustered enemies. However, these can be detonated by invaders and potentially toast your own defenses;

• Tents: Harmless on their own, Tents spawn additional defenders to help bolster the Outpost’s garrison;

• Sandbags: Smaller and less durable than Bunkers, but can be manned by whatever defending troops are assigned to the Outpost and any available Tents.

Ground forces are not the only things that attackers and defenders have on hand. You have access to Commander Abilities called from the skies that can support your troops’ progress. You can only equip up to four starting abilities however, you can get additional abilities every few seconds depending on the game mode, as drops from killing enemies, or by destroying enemy defenses.

The abilities you can find from enemy drops or from the forty-second requisitions do not have to match up with what you started with. Some of the abilities you can find in Guns Up! Mobile are listed below:

• Missile: Simple yet effective, it blows up whatever you point the crosshairs at. Great for dealing heavy damage to bunkers or getting rid of walls;

• Smoke Bomb: Blinds anyone or anything caught in its area of effect for roughly five seconds. It will affect your own troops as well, so be careful where you deploy it;

• Rally Flag: Orders your troops to move to a given point on the battlefield. This does not seem useful at first, but it can direct your forces to cover when under fire or to make them regroup;

• Fire Bomb: Creates a line of fire that lingers for a few seconds, burning any enemy that walks into its area of effect. The damage is less pronounced on buildings unless you make the Fire Bomb’s area cover as much of the building(s) as possible.

After completing your first attack and visiting your base, which we will discuss later on, you will be taken to perform your first defense after putting some buildings up. Instead of transport trucks, enemies will spawn in increasingly difficult waves from the right side of the screen, with your Outpost on the other side.

Troops you have assigned to the Outpost, along with Tents and Sandbags, will automatically fire at any enemy in range. However, most invaders will have access to Commander Abilities much like you do: when you send a Missile to blow up their formations, expect them to return the favor onto your bunkers. You just have to make sure your Outpost survives all the waves that enemies send your way.

Both Attacks and Defenses have a rating system based on how much progress you or the enemy make through the defensive line, using up to three stars. For Attacks, it follows how far your transport truck makes it before the timer runs out or it is destroyed; you get a perfect rank if you destroy the enemy Outpost. For Defenses, it follows how many enemies you manage to kill before you drive them all off or if the Outpost is destroyed. You get better ranks by killing groups of enemies in a single shot.

2. Base Of Operations

After your first mission, you will be taken to your base. This is where you gather resources, experiment with your defenses, and upgrade your equipment. Your defensive line is located to the right, and you can scroll to it via touching the screen. Your base has the following buildings for you to manage:

• Command Center: Your HQ, where all your gathered resources are stored. Upgrading this building unlocks new units and equipment, increases the number of resources you can stockpile, and allows you to upgrade the other buildings at your base. It also protects a portion of resources from theft should invaders successfully get through your fortifications.

• Gold Mine: This where Gold, one of three resources you need in Guns Up! Mobile that is used mainly to upgrade defensive structures, is collected. Upgrading it mainly increases the rate Gold is collected, but it also increases the Gold stockpile cap by a small bit.

• Munitions Factory: Your second resource-producing building, this produces Munitions which are used mainly for upgrading your units and its equipment. As with the Gold Mine, upgrading the Munitions Factory increases the rate of production and the amount stockpiled.

• Engineering: This is where your builders stay when not building or upgrading things. Normally you can only build one thing at a time, but upgrading this building gives you more Builders to assign. Upgrading this building also gives you Commander Ability slots and increases the Energy cap for spawning troops.

• Vehicle Station: This is where your transport truck is parked when not sent to attacks. Upgrading the station increases the stats of your truck, how my kinds of units you can equip for missions (with the cap at five types), as well as the maximum cap of troops you can spawn in missions.

• Veteran’s Lodgings: Available for construction after upgrading your Command Center to Level 2, this allows certain soldiers in Attacks to gain experience and rank up, gaining more health and damage. Veterans can be summoned separately from your other troops during attacks, and will be stationed at your Outpost to help defend.
  
  From here, you can order them to stay at Sandbags, meet invaders at the frontline, or only fight when enemies have reached the Outpost. Veterans have a set number of “lives” that allows them to be revived even if they die during missions. But once those lives are gone, they die for good. There is a cap on how many veterans you can collect, and upgrading the Lodgings allows you to collect more of them.

• Oil Refinery: The last structure you can get, it is unlocked for construction by upgrading your Command Center to Level 3. Oil is used to fuel an additional vehicle to escort your transport truck, but you will only unlock those vehicles by upgrading your Command Center to Level 4.

Upgrading these structures requires both Gold and Munitions, which go up along with the time needed to complete the upgrades.

While the starting missions give you some upgraded units, your actual starting units will be different and start off without upgrades. Your beginning units are as follows:

• Assault: Your basic squad of bullet hoses, they come in groups of three and most likely serve as the bulk of your forces during attacks.

• Grenadier: Soldiers armed with grenade launchers; these guys will be your first means of cracking open structures. They do heavy damage against infantry as well but their slow rate of fire means that they can get swamped by squads.

You can unlock some new units by upgrading your Command Center, and you will unlock the following units as you reach the Command Center Level 3:

• Medic: As you can guess, the Medic can heal up to two nearby units, keeping them alive for longer. That does not sound like much, but you can rectify that later.

• Grunt: Weaker compared to the Assault units, the Grunt’s real purpose is to be cheap, costing much less Energy to send out and sporting a shorter cooldown between spawns. This makes them great for overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers.

Some of the units types you can find are not unlocked by upgrading the Command Center. Instead, you will require medals which are picked up as drops for killing enemies, found in chests that can also drop from enemies, or by winning attacks and defenses. Once enough medals have been collected, that unit is unlocked for your own use. As time goes on, unit performance will suffer against improved defenses. To counteract this, you can upgrade your units in a variety of ways:

• The first method is by collecting unit shards from crates or enemy drops. These are used in conjunction with some munitions to upgrade your chosen unit’s stats.

• The second method is by using excess medals to unlock new passive skills. For example, the Medic can heal more units in range for every upgrade of the “Additional Supplies” skill, keeping more allies alive in the process.
  
  There are four skills for every unit, with the final skill only available once the previous three skills have been fully upgraded. If in case you do not have enough medals to upgrade a skill, you can convert 10 medals from other units into a single skill shard that can be used with any unit.

• The third method is by giving units equipment, also found as drops from enemies. These include body armor, scopes, and gas masks among other things, and can also be upgraded via equipment shards and some munitions. At first, all units can only hold one piece of equipment. You can expand that to three pieces of equipment via a resource obtained through quests, which we will discuss after this part.

During our playthrough, we managed to acquire a pre-registration bonus that included a unit called the Sergeant that improves the accuracy of allies in range, along with some extra resources. We are not sure if you can find her through the methods above, but chances are the developers will make her available to other players who join in later.

The premium currency of Guns Up! Mobile is Gems, which can be earned for free by levelling up or by completing Missions. Missions come in three flavors: Achievements that can only be earned once per account; Daily Missions which generally reward Gold, Munitions, and experience; and Weekly Missions which have more difficult objectives but reward lucrative things, such as skill shards and Valor. Valor is used to add more equipment slots to your units. Since you can only get some of these resources on a weekly basis, it pays to be diligent in completing the Missions regularly.

Lastly, Guns Up! Mobile has a store where you can exchange Gems for chests, as well as use Gold to purchase shards and equipment directly. If in case production falls short for your next set of upgrades or mission, you can buy additional Gold, Munitions, and Fuel with Gems. Naturally, this is also where you can purchase Gems directly via in-app purchases. You can even buy additional builders independent of your Engineering cap to get more things upgraded at once.

3. Military Matchmaking

Now that you have set up your base and arranged your defenses accordingly, you can start launching attacks on other players by pressing the “War!” button on the lower-right corner of your screen. There are four modes of gameplay to choose from, two of which are available from the get-go, while the other two are unlocked by upgrading your Command Center.

There are also a couple of game modes that have yet to be added as of this writing. Regardless of your chosen game mode, the game lets you change your loadout before launching a mission, even letting you upgrade units and abilities, as long as you have the resources for it.

The first mode is Raid, where you are paired up against another player’s defenses in exchange for rewards. You are given a layout of what the defender’s field looks like, as well as the level of their Outpost. Since gameplay is asynchronous, your opponent is not actively countering your siege and it is only a matter of spawning soldiers and supporting them on the way to the Outpost.

Commander Abilities are given out every 40 seconds. You can either choose the displayed the opponent immediately and start setting up your forces, or use a small bit of gold to find another opponent for a more level playing field or more rewards. As a rule, Outposts with levels higher than yours will give out more rewards for beating them, but their defenses will be more durable and more numerous. Choose your opponents wisely before deciding to take them on.

The second available mode is Defense, where you basically pit your defenses against AI-controlled attackers. Here you are limited to changing what abilities you plan to use, and seeing whether or not your fortifications can withstand the oncoming assault. Defense missions are grouped into increasingly difficult stages, and you get a hefty one-time reward for beating a stage for the first time. This game mode typically rewards resources to upgrade your Commander Abilities, along with some Gold and Munitions. Unlike Raids, you only get Commander Abilities from killing enemies in this mode.

The third available mode is Zombies. Here, your soldiers are placed in the middle of the map, with only some sandbags for cover and a tent to defend from the encroaching undead. As expected, there is strength in numbers and zombies will use this to overwhelm your forces and ultimately destroy your tent. The last waves of any stage feature elite zombies that are not only more durable, but also have abilities that can really impair your units’ performance in defending the tent. This game mode rewards resources for upgrading Vehicles.

The fourth game mode is Community Challenge, which has players banding together to overcome weekly trials. You will unlock this mode after upgrading your Command Center to Level 5; it will take some time before you can see what the developers have ready for the community to tackle.

Lastly, all the game modes, other than Raid, consume Battle Tokens. You have 20 in total and each game, whether it succeeds or not, consumes five Tokens. This will limit the number of times you can play those modes in your playthroughs. The Tokens regenerate naturally, and levelling up your account will occasionally give you Token Rolls, which give out ten Tokens when used. Your current number of Tokens is displayed only when you select the game modes that use it. It is displayed where Fuel would normally be, so check your Token balance before starting the round.

4. Soldiers Of Fortune

Now, we can talk about how to improve your performance in both attacks and defenses.

• Remember your resources: Because resource generation and reaching stockpile caps is fairly slow even as you upgrade your production buildings it can be tempting to use your Gems to quickly gain resources. You are better off just being patient and letting your buildings reach their cap. Based on our experience, it takes about four hours for a new player’s base to reach stockpile capacity so give your base time to rest and check after four hours have passed. Your wallet will thank you for it.

• Walled-up: When you are building your defenses, walls should not be underestimated. Because enemies will never destroy walls on their own unless Abilities are used (blowing them apart or ordering troops to break down walls), these can force enemies through chokepoints. Be warned though, as they can also block bunkers from opening fire; placing a wall in front of them is very ill-advised.

• Flank ‘em: As solid as defenses can get, defenders usually put their fortifications in a set path, wearing your forces down through attrition and potentially causing a loss via timeout. To counter that, use your Commander Abilities to make holes in their barricades, allowing your men to go through the battlefield with less resistance.
  
  This also gives your forces an easy kill by “sneaking up” on bunkers and opening fire in places which their firing arc does not cover. You might need to use a Rally Flag to get your forces to move through the breach however, as some of them will simply head forward without taking the breach into account.

• Keep your shields polished: As you upgrade your Outpost, the overall area of your defensive line increases. If you do not take these changes into account, your enemy will have plenty of time to send their missiles and fire bombs to your buildings before their soldiers even meet the first obstacle.
  
  The Outpost has the option to remove all your current defenses from the field, putting them in storage so you can use them later. Once you have a new layout you can even test it using your own forces, to see how well it performs against the enemy. You will be placed as the “attackers” in that simulation, but it otherwise functions as a normal Raid.

And that concludes our guide for Guns Up! Mobile. We hope that this helps you combat your selected targets and hold off any aspiring raiders at bay. If you have any tips you would like to share, let us know in the comments below! Good luck, and game on!