Lineup Guide ⇒ Last Fortress: Underground (2024)

A lineup is a combination of heroes in one truck. The maximum number of heroes in one number is five, and it is highly recommended to focus on getting your first truck maxed out as soon as possible to have at least one full lineup at your disposal.

I will guide you through the main types of lineups in this game so that you can better understand what heroes are good for what uses.

Last updated: 17.05.2023 ☣ Game version: 1.325.001

Hero Guide – read this one if you want to learn more about heroes in general (how to get and upgrade them).

Non-combat lineups

Let’s first take a look at those lineups that are used in some of the non-PvP scenarios. These are as follows:

• Gathering Lineup
• Zombie Lineup
• Destruction Lineup

Gathering Heroes Lineup

In Last Fortress, there are mines where you can gather resources by sending a truck with heroes and troops.

Gathering is a decent way of obtaining resources early on in the game when your own mines are not of a high level, and you constantly need to upgrade things.

Two things allow you to gather more: speed and load.

Speedis how fast you can gather a resource. The speed of the mining is affected by the following:

• “Efficient Gathering” research in the “Fortress Upgrades” => “World Exploration” tree (+40%).
• “All For One, One For All” research in the “Power Up” => “Faction Enhancement” tree (+20% when 4-5 heroes of the faction in the gathering lineup).
• “Efficient Gathering” research in the “Alliance Techs” => “Alliance Commemoration” tree (+20% onAlliance Duel Gathering Day).
• A fully repaired city grants +50% gathering speed on its territory.
• A VIP level 15 grants +22% gathering speed (lower levels grant less).
• A Gathering Boost provides +50% buff (excluding z-coins).
• Some of the Solari heroes provide buffs to gathering:
  • Laura Chen grants a truck that can be used for gathering and does not require heroes.
  • Grace grants a maximum of 20% gathering speed increase for z-coins (third skill).
  • Mario grants a maximum of 20% gathering speed increase for iron (second skill).
  • Pheidias grants a maximum of 20% gathering speed increase for stone (second skill).
• Certain combat heroes have a third utility skill that provides a gathering speed boost:
  • Minutemen: Brom and Cindy (+15% each)
  • Vindicators: Matthew (+20%) and Ivan (+15%)
  • Wildlings: Dean (+15%)
  • Watchers: David (+25%) and Park Ji-Mi (+20%)
• “Fast as a Hare” battle order can be initiated by the alliance’s R4 or leader to increase the gathering speed of all alliance members by 20% for 12 hours.
• “Fresh fish soop” (need Russel) provides a +5% gathering speed bonus for eight hours. Warning! It will override any active buffs for gathering speed.

Loadis how much your troops can carry when gathering and plundering. The load of your troops is affected by the following:

• Upgrading your APC to deploy more troops per one hero (100 max. at level 20).
• “Load Optimizations” research in the “Fortress Upgrades” => “World Exploration” tree (+50%).
• “Load Optimizations I” research in the “Lineup Boost” => “Deployment Queue” trees (+20% each).
• “Load Optimizations II” research in the “Lineup Boost” => “Deployment Queue” trees (+20% each).
• “Load Enhancements” research in the “Alliance Techs” => “Alliance Commemoration” tree (+20%).
• Alliance skill “Pack Training” grants a 25% load increase at level 12 (the previous system of passive buffs was reworked – Update 1.298.001).
• There is a territorial buff that grants a 2% load increase.
• Some of the Solari heroes provide a load buff:
  • Erica grants a maximum of 10% load buff (second skill).
  • Mario grants a maximum of 10% load buff (fourth skill).
• All the combat heroes with Gathering skills have a +100 Load buff regardless of their level or levels of their skills. Two heroes have load-buffing skills:
  • Wildlings: Irma (+20%)
  • Watchers: David (+20%)

To get started on forming decent gathering lineups, I would first recommend to:

• Get all the heroes with gathering-related skills to at least the orange rarity and keep the heroes themselves at level 1 if you have other heroes for fighting.
• Get the gathering-related research done from the “World Exploration” and “Deployment Queue” trees ASAP.
• Upgrade the gathering skills of gathering combat and Solari heroes to at least the third level.
• Have one truck upgraded to level 20 and two other trucks with all five spots for heroes unlocked.

When forming gathering lineups, ensure the lineups’ Load covers a mine’s deposit amount. When you deplete a mine fully, you will get resource chests. The chest number will equal the mine’s level but not more than five.

The chests are pretty good, as you have a chance to get 900 recruitment points, a 24-hr gathering boost, speed-ups, hero fragments, and m-coins.

The resource amount for the basic level three to five mines that spawn on the map are as follows:

• Iron: 450, 800, 1400
• Stone: 600, 1200, 2000

Make sure you balance your gathering trucks so that each can fully mine one of these mines.

Research/Alliance Commemoration/Unexpected Prank – this research will grant you bonus resources for each hour the APC mines.

Gathering Lineup Examples

Now, to the actual lineups.

Before you get the “All For One, One For All” research done, it does not matter if your gathering lineup has 4-5 heroes of the same faction, so you can lump together all the gathering heroes in one lineup for the most load and gathering speed. For example:

• Truck one: Park Ji-Mi, David, Dean, Ivan, and Matthew
• Truck two: Irma, Cindy, Brom, Doris, and any other hero
• Truck three: Any heroes

But, once you get the “All For One, One For All” research done, you can rearrange things a bit differently for better efficiency:

• Truck one: David, Park Ji-Mi, Dean, and any 2 Watchers
• Truck two: Matthew, Ivan, Irma, Kate, and any Vindicator
• Truck three: Brom, Cindy, Doris, and any 2 Minutemen or 1 Minutemen and 1 hero of any faction

I didn’t go for the wildlings truck because this is the only faction with only one gathering speed hero. So, we split them and use them in different lineups.

Also, you can add a traveling speed hero to the second and third trucks for a little more efficiency, but it is optional. You can replace the travel-speed heroes with any other hero of the same faction.

Zombie Lineup

A good zombie lineup (both for mutant zombies and regular ones) must have at least one healer or shielder in it. Why? Because that way, you will be able to take zombies of higher CP than your lineup with fewer troop losses.

If you’re planning to spend money on the game, I highly advise buying a few Quinns to get her to Legendary quality (golden) and max out her fifth skill. That will allow you to get 30% more m-coins from zombies, which is huge during the S0-S1 phase. Quick math: if you do five mutants a day without her, you will get 5500 m-coins, but if you have Quinn with maxed fifth skill, you will get 7150. Monthly, that’s 165,000 vs. 214,500 m-coins. You can also contract her if you do not fancy spending money.

Here are somespending tipsif you don’t have unlimited money.

Let’s get back to the lineup.

You will need either Jessie, Alisa, or Park Ji-Mi. I would instead go for one of the first two because Ji-Mi has one utility skill that makes her weaker than the other two.

A healer allows you to lose fewer troops when killing zombies, as well as having resolute gear on.

Then, it’s great if you also get a Legendary Harman.

Ideally, your zombie lineup should look like this:

• Harman + Jessie + Quinn + Your best two heroes (tank and back row)
  • If your hero levels are low, include at least one Wildling or two Vindicators to get a 3-hero faction buff. Kin Ogawa would be okay.
• Alisa + Harman + Quinn + Your best two heroes (tank and back row)
  • Here, you will get a buff if you add two Minutemen, Wildlings, or Vindicators.

If you don’t have Quinn, go for the strongest lineup with either Jessie or Alisa.

Later on, you will have Penny and Mira, who are excellent for mopping up and rallying zombies.

This is pretty much it.

Ideally, you should use this lineup for regular zombies as well. When mopping up, just switch the trucks when you are out of durability. This method takes more time but yields the greatest number of m-coins. However, after S2, the difference becomes negligible when you start upgrading heroes past level 80. Hence, you can have two lineups, one with Jessie and one with Alisa, and mop up zombies simultaneously.

By the way, Jessie + Harman combination is also suitable for the expedition.

But what if you don’t have these heroes?

Don’t worry, if there are people in your alliance who can handle the highest-level mutant zombies themselves, you can join in with minimum troops to minimize your losses.

• Create a lineup with the weakest heroes.
• Click\tap on the little men near the troop type icon
• Set the slider to 1
• Send this lineup to the mutant zombie rally

Make sure to ask in chat or the person who starts the rally if it’s okay if you send a minimum rally.

Destruction Heroes Lineup

When sieging a city, you first need to defeat its garrison with a battle lineup and then break its wall with the destruction lineup. The Destruction power of a lineup is how much damage they can deal to the wall of a neutral city.

To see how what your lineup’s destruction power is, open your lineups by clicking\tapping one of the truck icons on your left when viewing the map or by selecting your APC or garage in the base and choosing “Lineups.” Then, choose one of your trucks, assemble the lineup, and look to the right – you will see “Destructive Might” above the field “Load.”

There are four heroes with skills that increase Destruction:

• Watchers: Patrick, Winston
• Vindicators: Betty
• Minutemen: Coleman

You want them all in your Destruction lineup.

• Get their third skill to level four (going beyond that is not usually worth it).
• Your fifth hero should be a Watcher if you researched “Common Hatred” in “Faction Enhancement.”
• Don’t level them up. Usually, these heroes are not suitable for anything else besides the Destruction lineup. Subsequently, their other skills are not worth upgrading.
• Attack the city wall only with this lineup to deal the most damage.

Other things that affect Destruction Might:

• “Common Hatred” research in the “Faction Enhancement” tree provides a 10% destruction bonus if a faction bonus is active (at least three heroes of one faction).
• Pearson (Solari hero) has a skill (second) that grants a destructive might bonus of up to 20%.

Combat Lineups

You will use a combat lineup to attack other players, fight in the arena, and do exploration challenges.

We will take a look at two types of such lineups:

• Backrow-focused damage dealers
• AOE combinations
• Mixed

Before we look at the actual heroes to use, let’s discuss the principles a combat lineup is built upon and the meta.

“Meta” is what most players do in a game. In the case of Last Fortress, meta is what combination of heroes is used by most players.

In this game, if you are not spending thousands of dollars, you won’t be able to upgrade every hero you want (level and skills) within the S0-S3 period – it will take much longer.

As there are only so many players like this on one server (usually), people choose what heroes they will be focused on quite early on in the game.

Currently, the meta is back-row attackers like Kelly, Rebecca, Galande, Marlen, and Laurel until season five. After that, the meta switches to AOE heroes – Heytex, Elaine, Benson, and Ricardo.

And, if you know the meta, you can prepare specific countermeasures to have a higher chance of defeating lineups.

Here are the main principles you should stick to:

• Focus on upgrading your damage dealers first.
  • It is okay when your damage dealers are level 90-100 while your tanks are 70-75.
  • The same goes for skills.
• Have at least one tank hero whose AGI is lower than the AGI of your damage dealers. (But read the last point)
  • Kelly and Rebecca focus heroes with the lowest AGI.
  • You can increase the AGI of your 80+ level heroes by buildingstatues of honor, upgrading them, and allocating points to AGI. You can reset these to reallocate them later.
  • You can use level 5 or 10 head and armor pieces on tanks to lower their AGI.
  • You can reset a hero and gradually level them up until AGI is where you need it.
  • This is explained well inthis video.
  • After season four (when the Mental Control set is introduced), this practice becomes much less relevant.

Now, to the lineups.

Backrow-focused damage dealers (S0-S4)

The main goal is to kill the opponent’s back-row heroes before they kill yours. Here are the heroes you should consider:

• Minutemen: Rebecca
  • Rebecca has high damage and can be fully upgraded by the end of S2 without much investment.
  • Still viable in secondary lineups in the late game.
• Vindicators: Blanche, Kate (sub-par)*
  • Blanche has high damage but is usually used as a fifth hero with four heroes of some other faction or with Enrique or Ricardo and three other heroes. Because of this, you can skip upgrading her third skill, which also makes her a bit worse than other options, as you have a skill that basically does nothing.
  • Kate can be a temporary option for season 0 until you get better heroes.
• Wildlings: Marlen, Kaya (sub-par)
  • Kaya is easy to get early on and max out her skills, but her damage is relatively low, so after season 0, she becomes less viable.
• Watchers: Laurel, Galande (S1), Kelly
  • The trio of these heroes is quite powerful and is used quite often. If you get these three to Legendary (golden), consider sticking to them for a while. Galande, Kelly, and Rebecca also works well.

* sub-par means the hero has three combat skills and one non-combat skill, which makes this hero worse than other options. But you can use such heroes if you get very unlucky with getting something better.

As you can see, Watchers have three such heroes, but they all are Advanced Elite heroes that are harder to get. Usually, this lineup will be built around Kelly and Rebecca, as they both focus the lowest AGI player.

As for your front-row heroes, you can either use two tanks or one tank and one support hero with tank gear.

Good tanks:

• Minutemen: Bolton, Mira (S3), Coleman (sub-par)
  • Colman is rare, so you can get him upgraded fast, but he has a utility skill.
  • I’d suggest you focus on Mira as she is used in most lineups later on.
• Vindicators: Enrique, Ricardo (S2)
  • Enrique has a decent debuff, so if you get him and Blanche, consider using this duo with Kelly, Galande, and Roland, for example.
  • Ricardo is used very often later on, providing decent bonus damage.
• Wildlings: Harman, Buri (S6), Irma (sub-par)
  • The thing with Irma is the same as with Coleman.
  • Harman is a decent tank, used later on with Elaine.
  • Buri is an excellent tank, grab him whenever you can.
• Watchers: Roland, Lunn
  • Lunn is the best non-Elite tank, as all his skills contribute to his role of a tank, so definitely upgrade him.

Good support heroes:

• Minutemen: Alisa, Mira (S3)
  • Mira can be used as a support, equipped with Heal gear for increased healing. In this case, you will have to have a proper tank like Bolton, equipped with Mental Control.
• Vindicators: Chu (S6)
  • I have seen people using Chu a couple of times and she seemed to be good.
• Wildlings: Jessie, Eva (S6)
  • Jessie is a good healer, I might argue that she is better than Alisa (becomes even better with S2 healing gear).
• Watchers: Suzuki Ren (sub-par), Park Ji-Mi (sub-par)
  • Suzuki Ren has a very decent debuff (enemies take more TAC DMG). Even though she has a utility skill, her debuff makes her quite viable as a tank substitute, too. For example, you can have Rebecca, Marlen, and Laurel on the back and Roland and Suzuki in front. You will only get a 3-hero buff, but all your TAC DMG is increased. When you get to S2, you can replace Rebecca with Elaine, for example.

Tank substitutes:

Basically, any hero can be a tank substitute if you put a tank gear set on them, but there are more and less popular options.

• Minutemen: Roger (S1), Kobayakawa, Alisa
  • Koba is usually used in AOE lineups.
• Vindicators: Barron (sub-par), Max, Buccaneer (S4)
  • Max and Buccaneer can be decent with Ricardo.
• Wildlings: Kin Ogawa, Jessie, Titan (S4), Eva (S6)
  • You can get Kin to Myth III (last quality) pretty fast, so he can be quite tanky with tank gear.
• Watchers: Qian Qian, Penny (S3),
  • Penny + Mira is a very decent combo through S3-S5, providing a crazy amount of healing.

Tank substitutes are heroes that you can use instead of one tank. Such heroes should wear tank gear and are usually easier to upgrade to the highest quality fast. The highest the quality, the more stats such a hero would have and be tankier.

Based on these hero types, here are the combinations you can try:

• 3 damage dealers + 2 tanks
• 3 damage dealers + tank and support
• 3 damage dealers + tank and tank substitute
• 2 damage dealers + support healer + 2 tanks

As you can see, you should have at least one tank with lower AGI to take focused damage during the S0-S4 phase. You can have lower AGI for whatever you use in front.

Try to get a four-hero faction buff. A five-hero lineup with such combinations would only be good for Watchers.

3 + 2 combinations are also good, but you never want to play only a 3-hero buff or no buff at all.

Lineup Examples

S0:

• Budget
  • Front: Lunn + Ji-Mi
  • Back: Rebecca, Kelly, Qian Qian
• Higher-tier
  • Front: Bolton + Roland
  • Back: Kelly, Laurel, Rebecca
• Higher-tier
  • Front: Roland + Harman
  • Back: Kelly, Marlene, Laurel
• Higher-tier
  • Front: Roland + Enrique
  • Back: Kelly, Blanche, Laurel

S1:

• For higher-tier lineups, you can swap Rebecca with Galande, having Galande, Kelly, and Laurel in the back.
• In any way, your main pair becomes Kelly + Galande or Rebecca + Galande (budget).

S2:

• Ricardo + Blanche + Betty becomes very viable.
• For higher tiers, you can mixed in Elaine + Harman.
• For lower, Ricardo + Max is also viable.

S3:

• Get that Mira – she will be used a lot later on.
• Mira + Penny combo is decent with Galande, Kelly in the back.
• Using them separately is also OK – Mira + Bolton or Penny + Roland.

S4:

• I have seen Buccaneer used with Ricardo later on, but he is not that popular.
• The same goes for Titan.

AOE combinations (S5+)

AOE = Area of Effect

These are heroes that deal damage to two or more enemies.

AOE lineups are not meta early on, but they become meta in the later seasons. It is quite hard to start with them as many heroes are difficult to get. So, you will probably start experimenting with them no sooner than S4 comes.

If you try this before S5, the “lower AGI” principle we talked about before works here too. Your tanks must tank, as most people will play meta – back-row focused damage dealers.

Here are the heroes you’d want:

• Minutemen: Benson, Chihiro Fujiwara, Kobayakawa, Heytex (S5)
  • Heytex becomes meta in season five, so make sure you save up some faction cards and rec. points to get more of him.
• Vindicators: Enrique, Ricardo (S2), Chu (S6)
  • Ricardo is almost always used in AOE lineups.
• Wildlings: Marlen, Elaine (S2), Kin Ogawa, Eva (S6)
  • Elaine is very strong, as she not only deals damage but also debuffs the enemies.
• Watchers: Laurel, Suzuki Ren, Macklin (S6)

Early on (S0-S1), you can also try to build your lineup around Chihiro Fujiwara and Kobayakawa. In such a case, you could consider these combinations:

• Back row: Benson, Alisa, or Marlen
• Front row
  • First tank
    • Bolton if you picked Benson or Alisa
    • Harman if you picked Marlen
  • Second tank
    • Harman or Enrique if you picked Benson or Alisa
  • Tank substitute (instead of the second tank)
    • Suzuki Ren or Laurel if you picked Benson or Alisa
    • Kin Ogawa if you picked Marlen

In S2, after you get Ricardo and Elaine, these two will be your core heroes. Combine them with Marlene, Blanche, and Betty.

The meta shifts in S5 when Heytex is introduced. Heytex becomes the core hero from now on and is usually used with Mira, Bolton, and Benson. Here are some of the combinations with him:

• Heytex, Mira, Bolton, Beson, Elaine
• Heytex, Mira, Benson, Buri, Elaine
• Heytex, Mira, Benson, Ricardo, Elaine
• Heytex, Mira, Benson, Ricardo, Buccaneer
• Heytex, Mira, Benson, Ricardo, Koba
• Heytex, Mira, Benson, Bolton, Roger

You get the point 🙂

Hope this guide helps you understand lineup formation better. Thanks for reading!