Mech Arena Economy: What are the good deals? (RM & A-Coin)

Keep a stack of 60-100 tournament tickets. They pay for themselves.

There is a maximum of 3 per week for that $5 prodigy crate deal iirc. Get those before you buy any actual coins. You get 1 for 1 on RM to coins and the Chest's normal price is 750 coins.
For comparison, that is the crate awarded for ranking 1st in higher levels of tournament.
These refresh every week, so if you're strictly sticking to $5, unless you get the currency offers further down, that's the best deal.

"Early access" sales are the worst deals. When you first unlock something you'll get a flash sale offering it for half of it's coin value for real money.
The only items worth doing that for are:
Javelin 6
Guardian
Missile Rack
Ares+2x Pulse cannon 6 for $3

Everything else is better earned than bought. The coin(RM) and credit prices for rank 4 items and above are high because they take into account that the item is pre-upgraded to that rank. Because of that, the RM prices of 4-5 star items are whale bait.

You'll get "Upgrade offers" when you purchase a new item in game. These aren't really worth the RM. They're whale bait lol

Outside of those deals, you're going to be looking for the following.
The "flash" currency deals(expires 3 hours after popping up) I have seen are:
500 coins: $1
1000 coins: 5$
2000 coins: $10
3000 coins: $15
These usually pop up on Mondays and Tuesdays when tournament is not active/not paying out coins.

There are other sales that pop up for crates/Blueprint/coin packages that range from $10-$15. They're about the same value as the $5 coins+Crate deal, except part of it is a large lump of credits.

They're all optional, cheap, and cut out a week or more of low/mid tier tournament grinding a peice. The late game tournament bracket payouts beat most of them out when you're at the point you can rank high in higher brackets consistently.

As for spending coins that you earn, the grind cycle I see being the most straightforward:

1-Settle on hangar setup you really like, and feel is solid. For an example, see my last post in the hangar thread.

2-Focus on using credits/coins on leveling that hangar up to it's max level before ranking up. Use that solid hangar to earn more coins in tournament.

3-Use the tournament coins for the 750 a-coin crate when you need blueprints, and the 1000 coins for 100k credits when you just need credits.
Feel free to get everything you're planning to use, or want to own, within the rank your hangar is sitting at the top of, and level/rank it up so it's also ready to rank up.
-You can also stay at this point to buy the bots and weapons in the next rank that you have unlocked and want to use.
For example, if you're at rank 2 level 7, buy the rank 3 items you plan on using before ranking up. If you're at rank 3 level 7 across the board, stay there and buy the rank 4 items you want with your tournament winnings. Then again for buying the last tier of items at the top of that upgrade bracket, and you're in the endgame. Takes longer than it sounds, but once you're at the bottom of rank 4, nothing can be so much stronger than you that it blows you out of the water.

4-Use the next batch of coins you earn/supplement with cheap RM offers to buy the actual rank ups for the items you plan on bringing that far.

Start back at step one, except after rank 4 just shoot to win enough from tournament each week to get the 2250 coin chest that comes with about 90k credits and like 700 blueprints instead of the 750 chest, switching that up with direct credit purchases where appropriate.

S1E1 the $5 deal just popped up for me today as a "weekly deal" the first/last ones I bought was exactly 7 days ago, so it seems to be on a timer of purchase instead of a day of the week. Amended the original response for that.

I think they're random on a daily basis. I keep getting offers for Mortar 10/12 because I used RM for Mortar 8.
Just count your paid coins and earned coins separately. You'll either get the Ares deal again, or you'll get enough coins to buy the credits for the items outright in tournament after a week or so. Either way you dont need to pay wholesale for Credit based items. I've only spent like $23 on this game so far. The 3 Crate deals and the $3 sale for Javelin 6/Mortar 8(because I didn't feel like having that on my shopping list for my grinding coins). (Damn taxes lol)
After about a month and a half, I have everything desirable(and some wasted coins lol) Rank 3 or less, except Shadow, just from Tournament. Costs ramp up, but so do tournament rewards.
Because of the MM, upgrade system, and the items being balanced pretty well, there isn't any pay to win, just pay to skip chunks of grind.

If you look up King Servesh and Omniverse on YouTube, they've been playing for about a year and a half, close to 2. They're sitting on millions of credits and thousands of coins, hundreds of activity/victory crates and aren't really waiting for anything.
King Servesh has said he is entirely free to play, and the resources he is sitting on are just from consistently playing tournament and eventually being strong enough to hold the top spot on every card he plays, with ease.

Redfiend be like:

Running a budget when you're poor be like ??

That's weird. I bought a Shadow like four days ago and I definitely got offered a flash deal. Maybe the game just glitched out for a moment?

Oh wait, sorry I thought you meant you'd bought the Ares and we're looking for the post-purchase key/credit deal that always follows (which isn't actually worth doing imo). My bad, I misread.

I don't know that flash deals always follow immediately after unlocking an item. Especially since deals seem to run for a day before they change. Might be that you have to wait until the tomorrow for Ares to be offered. I do feel like I was offered the Ares deal pretty soon after unlocking the bot. Regardless it will come around eventually.

FYI, it's a good value and I'm glad I got it but you're going to end up wanting to buy Pulse Cannon 8s pretty soon afterwards. Once you do the Ares deal you unlock all the Pulse Cannon tasks. Pulse 6s are oretty weak and it's a pain completing them with just those. P8s flash deals for another $3 get offered pretty regularly.

oh I see.

I just got just an Ares flash offer for $7.99 CAD. Is it worth it?

I just got it, I'm gonna be running both juggernaut and area.

is PC8 pulse or plasma?

As Lava said, PC is generally considered to be Pulse.  Plasma doesn't seem to be near as popular or (if I may) effective.  I haven't seen comparisons at similar level, but most people have Carbines in their sights long term anyway.

Plas6 beats Pulse for sure. And I use them on my R3 Killshot on a bunch of Tourney maps with ceilings where Javs don't work. They're not my favorite weapon but they come in handy. I figure I'll upgrade them and my Plas4s some more for use on 8/10/12 EN light bots although they're a bit further down on the priority list.