Spider Tanks - Metal on mayhem, free for all brawler

Introduction

Spider Tanks is a 3v3 PvP arena brawler developed and designed by Netherlands-based development team GAMEDIA. Players create their own tanks by customizing their weapons and tank bodies, as well as 2 extra equipment slots which give you abilities in combat to complement your play style. The game will feature Play-to-Earn mechanics, resource collection, and a player driven upgrade cycle. There are multiple game modes and maps which will benefit certain strategies and team compositions. Tank bodies, weapons and more are fully tradable and rentable as is the usual with NFT assets.

The game is still in closed beta, so you will need to purchase a full tank to participate for now, but it will be free to play on release.

Customizing your spidertank is simple, you have the weapon, the body and 2 equipment abilities you can select. As well as cosmetic options for a prop and skin.

Weapons come in many different varieties, every weapon has it’s own unique rate of fire, reload speed, ammo capacity, range, and projectile speed. There are even weapons that heal when you hit an ally!

Weapons like artillery guns have a huge range and fires in an arc, meaning they can hit targets behind cover. However artillery projectiles move slowly and are easy to dodge, and also have long reload times. They also cannot shoot at targets too near!

Close range spread weapons like the shotgun or flamethrower do massive damage up close, but have a very short range.

Sniper weapons like the railgun or crossbow have ridiculous range and do very good damage per projectile, but fire and reload very slowly.

Then you have the classic weapons like cannons that shoot projectiles in a straight line at decent range for decent damage, with an average ammo capacity and reload time. These are good for any situation.

Tank bodies are even simpler, they have 3 stats: Speed, Health and Energy recovery rate. Speed is how fast your tank moves and turns, health is how much damage your tank can take before being destroyed, and energy recovery rate is how fast your tank generates energy to spend on abilities.

You can equip each tank with 2 extra abilities to help you out in a battle, these vary from supportive abilities such as dropping healing fields or health packs, to offensive ones such as deploying turrets, and even utility-focused ones that allow you to teleport or go invisible. Each ability costs a different amount of energy to use, and energy caps out at 10 units.

Gameplay

Once you’re satisfied with your spidertank, it’s time to test it out in battle! The first thing to note is that there are currently 3 different game modes available, the classic team deathmatch, capture the chicken and capture the flag. Matches are 4 minutes long.

Team Deathmatch is exactly what you’d expect, the team with the most kills at the end of the match wins. If you are playing with friends, make sure you pick weapons that synergize well and cover your weaknesses! Stick together and pick your enemies off while keeping each other alive.

Capture the chickens is a mode where players must collect chickens around the map and deliver them to a drop-off point. The team with the most chickens delivered at the end of the match wins. You can hold multiple chickens at a time, but when your tank is destroyed you drop them all. Chickens are also delivered one at a time and delivery takes time to channel. Kills do not matter when it comes to this mode, unless your target is carrying a lot of chickens! Controlling the drop-off points and having a fast tank collect chickens while avoiding fights is a great strategy for this mode.

Capture the flag is a little different from traditional capture the flag modes in other games. There is only 1 flag on the map, your team will gain points as long as a member is holding on to the flag, the flag is dropped on death. The team that held the flag the longest at the end of the match wins. You will want abilities and weapons that keep enemies away to protect your flag carrier, but also a tank that allows you to chase them down if they have the flag.

Team

Gala Games

Gala currently consists of a team of 90+ members, with approximately 1.3 million monthly active users across the ecosystem, and a growing NFT market that has sold 23k NFTs as of time of writing, the most expensive NFT going for 3 million dollars. Town Star is Gala’s first game release, and 4 more games are currently in development. Mirandus, a fantasy RPG; Spider tanks, a PvP arena brawler; Fortified, a tower defense game and Echoes of Empire, an RTS.

Eric Schiermeyer is the founder of Gala Games; he was also the co-founder of the well-known Zynga Games development team. Previously, he was also the Chief Technology Officer of MySpace.

Partnerships

Gala has no shortage of partners backing their projects, and just this year managed to receive funding from the Binance Smart Chain $100 million Accelerator Fund.

They are partnered with Polygon, the protocol and framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks, as well as Brave, one of the most popular upcoming internet browsers focused on privacy and efficiency.

Other notable partners include Bitrue — a crytocurrency management platform, Mazer Gaming — a professional esports and entertainment gaming organization, and Flare — the first Turing complete Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) Network.

Assets & Ecosystem

Gala coin is on the Ethereum network, and is the native utility token of the Gala Games ecosystem. Gala is transferable between users and provide a secure means of payment and settlement between players who interact within the Gala ecosystem.

There is a maximum supply cap of 35 billion tokens.

Aside from the Gala tokens, each Gala game has its own special coin that can be earned by playing and used to purchase NFTs specific to that game.

In Town Star, the token is Town Coin, Spider Tanks has yet to receive its own token as the game is still in development.

This is an example of one of the many NFT tanks you can buy and customize. You can also purchase weapons and bodies individually.

NFTs can be purchased from the Gala Store with Gala coin or game specific tokens. You can also find them on 3rd party marketplaces like Opensea.

How to get started

Playing for free

As the game is still in closed beta, there is no way to play for free currently. You can participate in the closed beta by purchasing a full tank on the Gala store which will allow you to play.

On release however, the game should be free-to-play, with new players having access to a few basic weapons and bodies to use.

Playing to earn

There will be multiple play-to-earn mechanics in Spidertanks, and the details of all of them are still yet to be released. We will cover what is currently known about P2E in the game.

Firstly, simply playing the game will earn you battle rewards, additionally if you are a Captain of a tank you will be able to rent them out to other Pilots, similar to the Splinterlands card rental system, and receive a share of the Pilots battle rewards.

The other method revealed so far is to purchase and own a map, which will make you a Baron. Baron’s earn by hosting battles on their maps, earning for activity that takes place on their map. Maps can be upgraded, increasing the levels of Tanks that can battle on them. Upgraded maps give greater rewards.

Fabricators own Factories that are placed on maps. Factories have luck and drop ratings that affect quality of components produced from that factory. These can also be upgraded by the owners to increase stats and therefore play-to-earn potential. The Fabricator will earn a portion of rewards of matches played on the map their factory is in.

The final known method is to be an Emperor. Emperors own Planets, which host maps and factories. Emperors gain a portion of all rewards from all battles that take place on their planet.

How to purchase Gala and NFTs

• Purchase Gala. Binance, OKEX, Kucoin, gate.io, Sushiswap and Uniswap are some of the exchanges that list Gala for purchase. Simply purchase your desired amount and send it from the exchange wallet to your Gala account wallet!

• To get your Gala wallet address, go to your inventory, then click on GALA (ETH). Once there, click on the ‘Get Gala’ button underneath your shown balance to get your address, then send the Gala you purchased from your choice of exchange to that address via the Ethereum network.

  Be aware that there will be a transaction fee, so make sure you send the amount of Gala you want to hold + the transaction fee, or you may not have enough Gala and will have to make another transaction which means even more fees!

• In Town Star, the amount you can earn daily is affected by your Gala Power level. It is still unclear if Spider Tanks will follow the same mechanics as Town Star, but it is likely it will be similar.

For more in-depth information on how Gala Power level is calculated and other specifics, check out the Gala Games official blog.