How to Cheese in Castle Clash

[Update, 4/15: here's a reddit link including a good video on cheesing, by reddit CCer brahvmaga.  This is like a TLDR of this post.  I leave it here anyway for people who like to read.  And here's a second reddit thread from the same guy, with a video covering more advanced cheesing techniques.]

"Cheesing" is an attack strategy in Castle Clash whereby you attempt to avoid engagement with all enemy heroes except one.  That one you construct a deadlocked fight with, a fight that neither side will win before the attack times out.  You use procs from engaged heroes to destroy the other enemy heroes, or the enemy buildings.

Here's a cheese in progress, about to end.  You can see the purple tones of two Ghoulems going at it in the top of the screenshot.  Additionally I have Treantar in there, with Doom Balloon.  In the middle are the enemy heroes, standing on nothing since all their pads have been blown up underneath them.  All the buildings are gone except for that one nearly-dead camp at the bottom.

A classic "X" base goes down to the cheese.

Subgames

Cheesing can be used in any anti-base mode.  Indeed, it could theoretically be used in any mode where the enemy heroes are range-restricted by hero bases, and in which victory is determined by destroying all of the enemy buildings.

I started doing it in Guild Wars (GW) to try to hit higher bases than I could do effectively with snipers.   (Here's my "how to snipe" article.)  GW is still the main place I do it, because that's still true.  My sniping has gotten no more powerful than it was six months ago.  But sniping is getting harder as pets heal and protect more and more, and as more people have one or more of the newer heroes that make sniping more difficult.

I have found cheesing surprisingly useful in expeditions.  Mostly in expeditions I snipe, but sometimes I stupidly take risks and lose my better snipers.  (Aries is particularly painful to lose.)  Then sniping gets much more difficult; some bases you can still snipe, but some you can't.  Rather than using up a pass, or trying brute force, or taking a one or two star win, you can sometimes cheese a base.  Having additional strategies in your toolkit that use a different set of heroes from sniping is quite useful.

Generally, nobody attempts to cheese on normal raids.  With spells to help you it just isn't necessary.  However, you can use normal raids as a good way of testing it out and refining your technique to some extent.  Of course in this case you cannot tweak your lineup, nor your lineup's crests and pets to try to exactly counter a particular base.  But it still can be a good learning experience, and doesn't cost you much when you fail.


Strategy and Variations

Cheesing is pretty simple conceptually.  You drop a "tank" hero with the intent of drawing out the enemy "anchor" for a 1 on 1 fight that you hope is a deadlock.  (See below for these terms.)  Neither hero can kill the other.  Then you optionally add one or more heroes to pile onto the anchor, again watching carefully to make sure it is still a deadlock.

There are two ways to win a cheese, and thus two substrategies.  The first I'll refer to as a "sniper cheese".  Here you use the deadlocked fight to generate sniper damage, that is, damage which targets enemy heroes and not buildings.  If there is enough of this damage (and not enough healing), you can kill all the enemy heroes except the anchor.  Then you can break the deadlock by adding more heroes; your heroes are now free to wipe the base.  (Keep PD in reserve; he will certainly break any deadlock.)

Sniper-cheesing is relatively rare for two reasons.  First, because snipers also hit the anchor, it is relatively hard to get enough sniper damage without risking killing the anchor prematurely.  Second, because via pets there is now defensive healing that you normally face.  An opposing Bubblow and Mini Angi can heal a lot, requiring several snipers to overcome.  Usually an anchor can only handle one or two snipers.

The more common strategy is usually just called a "cheese" ("normal cheese" if it must be distinguished).  Between your tank and its support heroes, you clear the base by killing all the buildings using proc and/or pet damage.  Usually in this case you win the fight with 3 stars without killing a single enemy hero; this is why it is named "cheesing" since it's rather a cheesy to win this way.

Hero Roles: Enemy

On the enemy side, things are simple.  You want to pick a single hero to isolate and beat on for your cheese.  I call this enemy hero the "anchor".  In theory you could choose any hero for the anchor; if it has enough healing and/or damage protection it can work.  In practice, there are only two heroes that will do: Ghoulem and DD.  Both of them have procs that make them uniquely tanky.  (I call these two heroes, as well as SK, "supertanks".)

Practically, I doubt that SK can be used as an anchor.  The problem is his offense is huge compared to his defense, so he'll kill your tank.  Theoretically he could be debuffed enough to be anchored on, but this is rather hard to do at best.

I have successfully cheesed anchoring off of both DD and Ghoulem.  DD is preferable, because it allows you to use either your own DD or Ghoulem as a tank.  Because Ghoulem is ranged, if you are going to use an enemy Ghoulem as anchor you can only tank with your own Ghoulem; DD will close to melee range with it, which will almost certainly get him attacked by multiple other enemies.

The enemy's heroes other than the tank don't matter much except insofar as they force you to engage the anchor outside of their range.  Heroes with autoproc can make cheesing harder, particularly if you are attacking with DD as one of your heroes.  Other than that, though, they make little difference.

The enemy's pets matter.  For sniper cheesing, if they have good healing and defensive pets, doing a sniper cheese is likely to be risky or just not possible.  On the other hand, those same pets make it easier to do a normal cheese, since they do a lot to sustain the anchor.


Hero Roles: Friendly

There are two main roles for offensive heroes in a cheese.  The first is your tank hero, the one that gets the cheese going by pulling the enemy anchor, and tanks most of the damage.  Some tanks can cheese a base solo, but I find that's rare.  Usually you'll also want other "support" heroes, whose job is (a) to keep the tank alive, and/or (b) to smash the base or enemy heroes.  I'll discuss both roles.

The tank is the key to a cheese.  He is must be a formidable tank; he needs to be able to withstand the damage dished out by the anchor.  Currently I feel only two heroes can do it: Ghoulem and DD.  No surprise that it's the supertanks again, except SK, and for the same reason.  Normal 1 on 1 hero fights don't deadlock.  It is only when both heroes have a substantial defensive boost from procs that it happens.

For support heroes, you generally want heroes that (a) don't cause problems offensively, and (b) add something to the attack, either survivability for friendly heroes, or damage to enemy heroes or buildings.

For your tank in particular, you want at least an evolved hero and better, double evoed.  This is less important for support heroes (but still a good idea).  Evolution (devo) increases hitpoints by about double (triple) that of non-evo; however it increases attack by only a factor of 1.5 (2).  Thus, the ratio of attack to defense goes down for evos and devoes.  This helps you cheese by giving you the hitpoint pool to survive, while not giving you such high offense that you kill the anchor.

Tactics

Getting a cheese set up is often fussy.  The first problem is "pulling" the anchor.  In general you want the anchor and only the anchor to come from all the other heroes and engage your tank, which means only a few locations where you can possibly approach the base successfully.  In a typical 2x3 rectangle of hero pads, look for supertanks on the corners.  If there is, that's a potential anchor.  See if you can drop one of your supertanks in on that side, just close enough to pull the anchor out but not close enough to pull any other enemy.

Usually you cannot drop anywhere that would immediately pull out an anchor.  You have to drop further out, then let the tank work its way in through a few buildings, to the point where the anchor will be triggered.  You want your tank to be paused on a building at this point.

Often a setup won't allow you to use HtH tanks; most "X" bases are like this.  If you can, though, experiment with it.  Generally, it is preferable to use DD as your tank if you can, because with Ghoulem supporting him up he can withstand almost any enemy hero one on one, and his bombs make killing even a pretty high level base go much faster.  (In the pre-pet era, cheesing was the specialty of DD alone, since he is by far the most damaging hero in the game to buildings.)

People sometimes use bait troops to lure with; I have not done this and so cannot say a lot about it.   I would think you'd want the tankier troops to withstand arrow/magic fire for a while, and probably a variety of troops with different ranges.  It should be possible, using bait troops, to lure out an anchor and then engage it with your tank even when there are no buildings at all in the proper place.

If you do pull 2+  heroes it is usually best to quit immediately and retry.  In GW, though, you can let it go and see if your hero(es) can kill the non-anchor(s).  If you die, you don't lose anything; try again.

Generally, if an approach to a pull seems at all likely it usually is possible -- with enough tries.  If one drop location fails a few times, try slightly different positions.  There is a lot of randomness.  I've tried 50 times on a GW base when I had the time to do that.  Don't try to do cheesing if you have limited time.

Once you have a successful pull and the fight begins, watch it attentively for as long as you can without going to close to 50%.  (And also, in expeditions, be careful of dying.)  You want to make sure that it's a solid deadlock.  That is, that (a) your hero(es) are not dying and not even getting close, and (b) the anchor isn't either.  If either side is in danger of dying, cheesing is a very risky strategy.  This risk doesn't matter much in expeditions (especially if it is the enemy dying; you can quit out if that happens with 1 or 2 stars and lose honor badges), but in GW it matters more.

If your tank can't tank it but is fairly close, then consider adding support heroes to help him out.  Ghoulem is the most obvious support hero (if not serving as the tank).  However there are other heroes that make good support; see the section below.

If attempting a normal cheese, do not put Doom Balloon on your heroes while testing the pull and the deadlock.  Leave one hero without any pet.  Once you've established that a pull is possible and the deadlock is stable using a particular tank and helpers, then you quit, add Doom Balloon to your chosen hero and retry.  Doom Balloon is your attempt at 3-star.

You will need to experiment with which heroes you use to tank with and support, which pets they have, and perhaps even their crests.  For ideas on this, read on.


Support and Pet-holding Heroes

There are two kinds of support you can bring by using additional heroes.  One is a hero whose proc adds something to the attack, or to the collective team defense.  The other is a hero -- any hero -- used as a placeholder for a pet.

Here are some support heroes I've tried, and the idea behind using them.

• Aries: used against DD only, the idea is to stop the proccing at least part of the time.  Also used for damage in a snipe-cheese.
• DD: as building damage in a normal cheese, supporting Ghoulem. 
• Ghoulem: for healing and defensive shielding.
• Grizzly Reaper, for dealing uniform damage to most or all enemy heroes in a snipe-cheese.
• Treantar: Tre's proc shields his allies for 5 seconds out of ~10.5, or as low as 6 if you use Valentina to boost his energy, which is very helpful in staying alive.  Also he can maybe revive members of your team if you skate over the edge of "too little defense".  (Of course if they die once, they will often die twice.)  And also, Tre has piss-poor offense relative to his defense.  His proc doesn't affect enemies and his hit speed is just 1500.  He's a great place to put Doom Balloon.
• Valentina adds energy to your team without amping them up offensively like Cupid.  This can be useful in getting slow-hitting heroes to proc more often.

And some I have not tried, because don't have or too expensive.  But seems like they could work too:

• Minotaur Lord: hits lots of buildings.  Most people use him to do "mino-smash": single or double-shot a whole base, after carefully deploying Cupid, Druid and/or PD to get him amped.  If there are no places to deploy the support heroes for mino-smash, though, then maybe a cheese could work.
• Spirit Mage: targets everything, lots of missiles.  Similar to DD except about double the damage and no stun.  Downside is no defensive advantages and weak hitpoints, so you'll have to be careful about making sure he can survive.

Placeholder heroes should only be used if you can't get enough pets in the battle on the support heroes you're using.  You want these placeholders to have low damage, high hitpoints, and no nasty proc effects that would screw up the attack.

• Atlanticore is a decent placeholder.  I have an evo'ed AC (evolved because I was using him way back when in LBF) that I have used from time to time.  He adds very little damage against the anchor while providing pretty good hitpoints, including a fraction of the time invulnerable.
• Although I have not tried it, Paladin would also make a pretty great placeholder.  He's almost all defense, perfect for those high-level GW attacks.  But you'd have to evo him.  Kind of expensive.  Still, his evo'ed appearance is pretty cool.

Pets

Proper pet selection can really help a cheese succeed.  Pets can heal your heroes (Bubblow, Angi), protect them (Angi, Yule), debuff the anchor (Auroria, Lil Havoc).   But as previously mentioned, Doom Balloon almost by himself can win the battle for you.

If you are serious about cheesing, skill up your Doom Balloon to the max.  (Yes, it costs a lot of shards.  Worth it.)  The minimum cheese attempt is a solo tank with Doom Balloon.  Doom Balloon is necessary for almost all normal cheese attempts, unless you happen to have nearly maxxed out Dread Drake.  My DD is 199ee, but lacks any offensive talent/crest; he cannot kill a high level base on his own.

The second most important pet is, in my opinion, Angi.  Your tank needs to withstand the beating from the anchor as well as towers and possibly autoproccers.  Angi helps with this a lot, both in protecting your tank and healing him.

Auroria is particularly useful against an enemy DD; she will keep it stunned about a third of the time.  This reduces damage against your team quite a bit.  Auroria is riskier used against other anchors because they don't autoproc, and therefore may be stunned just when their proc protection has dropped, leading to them getting killed.

Finix is a good pet to add for a normal cheese, but be careful.  He does not hit only buildings (like Doomie), so he will hit the enemy heroes from time to time, which may result in them proccing if they autoproc.  You need to be able to easily tank that, or don't use him.

Crests and Talents

I hate switching crests, and rarely do except for significant payoff.  However, if you're willing to do it, there are probably some optimizations you can make to increase the odds of a cheese attempt working.

Generally, you want your heroes to have less offense and more defense.  So, defensive crests and talents are of more value than offensive ones when cheesing.  

Definitely avoid the talents that do extra damage only to the target of auto attacks: these are slowdown, heavy blow, and deadly strike.  These talents risk killing the anchor while adding nothing to the cheese damage.  

Similarly, avoid scatter.  The anchor needs its procs to survive; don't take those from it.

Some offensive talents may be good on certain heroes but not others.  In particular, increasing Dread Drake's offense (with bulwark and/or war god) will increase his proc damage, which is good.  Be aware that this also increases his auto attack damage, thus possibly destabilizing the deadlock.

For most heroes, defensive talents/crests are best.  Revive is probably the best, since they have a huge hitpoint bonus relative to their offense bonus.  Also, you should be collecting them anyway for other uses, and the revive offers some insurance against low-odds deaths.  However, other defensive talents can also help.  Lifedrain, for example, tends to stabilize any hero.

Artifacts

As with crests, you want defensive artifacts for your cheese team, and you want to avoid the offensive ones.  The best defensive artifacts are the Victor's Emblem and the Goblet of Life.  Also Lightning Rock is mildly defensive, and even Garuda (it will slow down the anchor's proc).

Artifacts all have RNG-based effects in them, and this is something that you generally want to avoid when cheesing.  So, the artifact I like the most for cheesing is Victor's.  Its damage reduction is not RNG based, and it helps the entire cheese team by debuffing the anchor.  By contrast, the Goblet is very powerful when it works, but if you get a bad run of RNGs you can die before it activates.  And it does not help the team, other than the hero it's on.

Generally, avoid the Axe of Strife and the Blitz Scroll.

[Updated: added para on possible support heroes I have not tried.]
[Updated: removed discussion of SK as likely anchor or tank.]
[Updated: added section on artifacts.]