How to Overcome Wall frustration

Space Arena is a fun and challenging game. As a ship building game, you would spend hours perfecting your ship and feel great sense of accomplishment as you watch your ship beats one opponent after another.

However, after numerous battles you begin to notice that the opponents are getting stronger and have different, even bigger and stronger ships, and your progress becomes slower and finally.... you seem cannot win any battle anymore. As if you are facing a **WALL**.

**Why?**

Well, the game has level and rating. Level determines what ships you can get and rating determines how good you are using the ships at that particular level. As you can see this will result into a situation where your ship is so good that it will reach the lower rating of higher level ships. Make no mistake, those "lower rating" higher ships doesn't mean they are bad. They would often outclass and outgun your best (but lower level) ships. And this of course means you would lose against them. And as you experience one loss after another you would become frustrated. And I myself almost rage quit.

**How to overcome this?**

There are several ways:

1. Slow down your rating progress. You must have notice that your rating increase 1 after a win, and it will jump to two after 5 consecutive wins, and it increases after 5th wins, so next is 3 and so on. (Thanks to Multivist for info). A way to slow this down is by intentionally losing by using a weak ship like a fighter. Why do you want to slow down the progress? Well you want to try to stay facing opponents with similar ships and strength for as long as possible until you can level up and get better ship.
2. Find better and best ship design. Your design may be good, but it may not be the best. Join Space Arena community and learn from the veterans. They would help with advise with design and how best to spend your credits and cels. Above all you can come up with your own idea refining their design. A community that I can recommend is Multiversal Empire on Discord https://discord.gg/HBjHPR

**Walls for End-game players**

When you reach **Super Carrier** level, you would face more challenging walls and possible more frustration. From my experience it is when you reach rank 20 (currently it is about 3550 rating). It is because:

1. The way the match making works. You would be matched against opponents 45+ lower or higher rating than you. Against lower opponents? That's good! You say. Easy to beat. Well, not necessarily. See the reason on point 2 below. And even if you win, your rating will not increase from beating those 45+ lower rating opponents. (Thanks De Hei for info).
2. The way the meta works. You are scratching your head and refining your ship to beat other opponents with basically have almost the same design as yours, you are trying to beat them by tweaking your ship's engines, supports, weapon, shield, etc. And finally it works! You begin climbing the ranks again by beating higher rating opponents. This is until suddenly you are faced with lower opponents and you watch frustrated they beat your ship! That's right. Your design that can beat higher rating opponents doesn't guarantee winning against lower rating ones. And you lose rating by losing. You are stuck!

Solution for this are:

1. **Buy and build another ship**. This will offer you better odds of climbing the rank. However this requires that you invest the same amount of cels as the other ship.
2. **Take note of opponents that often beat you**. You can skip them. However you can only do this 5 times for free for every hour or spent cels.
3. **Analyze the battles**. Do you know you can guess your opponents design by watching how the squares of their ship flashes when hit? You can guess what modules they put on that squares. Watch also how their ship moves. Whether they have warp engines, whether the support ships stay close to the Carrier, etc. Analyze it and tweak your ship. As everything in life, the recipe of the best design are kept secret by the owner, all in fairness. They invented it and they use it. It is our challenge to find their weakness and beat them with our own genuine design.

So, don't give up. Keep designing and have fun in battles!

John74