How to fight for free in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes - Hints, tips, and tricks

Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is out right now on iOS and Android. It lets you create a team of legends from the Star Wars universe and lead them into battle.

It's a pretty simple RPG, but there's some surprising depth to the levelling system, so we thought we'd jump in and give you some hints and tips to guide you through its intricacies.

We'll also furnish you with some tactics that you should be using to make sure you're always victorious, and show you some secrets that'll turn that bad feeling about this into a may the force be with you.

Or something like that.

Once you've got a team of five characters, the hand-holding comes to an end and you're left to slog through the rest of the game on your own.

Here we'll show you some of the basic strategies you need to use to make sure you're winning battles more often than losing.

Many of the teams you'll come up against will have at least one healer. It's important to target these characters, otherwise a lot of the damage you do is going to be negated when it's the enemy turn.

If there are multiple healers, focus your fire on them one at a time. Don't try and take them all out, you'll end up doing just enough damage to each of them that a heal will see them back to full health.

Learning when to use your special moves is key to success. Wasting them means you'll be left without them for a good few turns with no reward.

It's best to heal at the start of the second or third battle, because you'll regenerate some health in the gap between scraps.

And use your multiple-shot moves when one enemy is close to death to finish them off and deal some damage to the others.

Each of your characters has different skills if they're in the leader slot. Read what they do, and choose one that suits your play style.

Some of them require you to have multiple same-race characters on your team, so once you've unlocked the powers it's best to focus on more generic ones.

Chewbacca's power grants an armour boost to everyone, so for the first few hours of the game it's worth having him in your lead slot.

Whenever you get a chance, stick some equipment in the spare slots on your characters. Once you've filled up a character's slots, you can level them up.

This means you need more gear, but also lets you use better equipment, which will give you an extra edge in scraps.

One thing you need to do constantly is make your characters stronger. The overall power of your group is based on everyone's score, so you need to make sure there aren't any weak links.

You'll often find you're short on money, but there's a way round this that the game doesn't tell you. Check your achievements on the main page.

You'll be rewarded handsomely for these, and can spend that money on making your characters tougher.

If you're losing battles often, try heading back to earlier levels and playing them in hard mode. You'll get better quality training droids that give you bigger level boosts.

Shards are another aspect of the levelling system. You can use them to unlock new characters, as well as spending them to change the star rating of your characters.

You get them by fighting in the hard levels, so they take some getting. Other characters you can only unlock by fighting in the multiplayer arena.

Make sure you check in every day to get the log-in rewards, even if you're not planning on playing. And check when you can get free Bronzium cards as well.

Check the daily activities if you have the time. You'll get some decent rewards for finishing them, and they should be reasonably easy if you've got an hour or so to kill.

Remember to spend your Sim cards as well. You'll get the rewards for competing levels you've already got three stars on without actually having to do anything.

These tips work for the light side and the dark side battles. But it's best to focus on one side of the force to begin with, otherwise you'll be spreading your resources too thin.