HiveComb

Back when I first played Splinterlands six years ago at the beginning of 2019, I searched for gameplay tutorials on Hive (Steemit back then). I still remember that one of the tutorials I found stressed the importance of speed in the game over and over again. Speed is an important part of strategy in the game just as long as you do not become obsessed with it. Many times good strong attacks and a sound strategy are just as important.

Currently, Fire and Water are the splinters most well known for speed. There are a few summoners which give a speed boost notably Conqueror Jacek and Kelya Frendul.

Two Primary Benefits of Having Higher Speed than your Opponent

• Melee and Ranged attacks have a higher chance of missing (and Magic attacks if you have a monster with the Phase ability).
• In each round, you get to attack sooner and so some of your opponent’s monsters may get defeated before they can attack.

The Swiftness ability increases the speed of all monsters in your lineup by 1 and this ability is stackable. So it is worth it to get multiple monsters in your lineup with this ability. According to the splintercards.com website, there are 19 cards in the game that give the Swiftness ability at some level. You can see below that the majority of cards with the ability are either Fire, Water, or Life.

Of course speed is more important is some rulesets/mana caps than others. One is the Lost Magic ruleset since Magic attacks are guaranteed to hit unless a monster has the Phase ability. The other is when you have a small or medium mana battle and you can wipe out your opponent before they even get a chance to attack.

Here is a Lost Magic ruleset battle. I managed to use three monsters with the Swiftness ability. All my monsters were at least medium speed to start out with. You can see that my tank has 11 speed at the beginning of the battle which is incredible. My opponent will have less than a 1O% chance of connecting with it. On top of this, it has Bloodlust so it has the potential to increase its speed higher.

At the end of the battle my tank has a whopping 13 speed as a result of a couple Bloodlust kills. Another one of my Gladiator monsters is up to 9. My monster that was in second to last position is up to 8 after getting an additional speed from a Martyr card. I won the battle while only loosing my Martyr card in the very rear.

Here is a medium mana ruleset in which my lineup has a lot more speed than my opponent's.

I defeated my opponent's tank before they even got a chance to strike. This is great because most of the time when you can knock your opponents tank out first, you will win the battle.

I will admit that in Reverse speed matches I have a tendency to focus on picking out only monsters with 1 or 2 speed. This all too often results in me getting beaten by a team with mostly medium speed monsters. My opponent’s monsters are much stronger and they have a better strategy. On the other hand, I end up with mediocre monsters that are attacking sooner and are possibly harder to hit, but still underwhelming. Most of the time the better overall team ends up winning.

There you have it. Hope you now have more ideas and insights on the importance of speed in battles.

Header image made using Canva. One is from splintercards.com. The rest are screenshots from the Splinterlands website.

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