Star Wars: Commander is a smash hit strategy game for the iOS platform, coming soon to Android, the likes of which hasn’t been this big in the mobile world since Clash of Clans. Your goal is to build a large collection of troops, attack other players, and try to defend your base from being attacked by them. There are plenty of opportunities to spend real life money in this game, but you absolutely do not need to. You can still have a whole lot of fun without spending any money.
The first thing to know is that crystals or the currency of the game. You can spend money on crystals and if you are a heavy crystal user, this can get expensive really quickly. There are two ways to get free crystals in this game. The first is to clear junk and rocks from your base. They range in size from small to medium to large, but no matter the size and no matter how much you still have a chance at hurting anywhere between one and 10 crystals.
The other way to earn free crystals is to complete the single player chapter missions. Tap the play button and go to whatever chapter you are on, and fill the completion bar to 100%, and you will earn a crystal reward. Once campaign missions are added to the game, expect those to be I have a source of free crystals as well.
If you are going to spend crystals, spend them wisely. Don’t waste them on speeding up construction or upgrades, and especially don’t spend them on speeding up troop training or research. There is really only one worthwhile use of crystals, and that is to buy another droid.
The reason for this is that each droid that you have gives you one more building slot, a.k.a. one more piece of construction or upgrade that can be completed at a time. This is a lifetime boost so the return on investment is huge. The third droid costs 500 crystals and the fourth droid costs 1000 crystals. The third droid is easy to get just from collecting free crystals.
When you get to higher ranks in the game you’re going to see people who you can tell have spent a lot of money on the game. They have terrible strategies but they seem to have highly upgraded versions of literally everything, with walls that are essentially impenetrable by any sort of normal means. The only thing that separates them from a non-paying player is patience. Always have your droids going at full speed and before you know it, you’ll be one of these players.