Clampy's Crazy Contemplations Part 1

Clampy's Crazy Contemplations - The Bilbo Baggins - 1 thief province
(yes, I stole Krozair's theme)

Introduction

Hello folks, for those that don't know I've played on and off since the early days and while I have played competitively in the past, I've always had more fun investigating game mechanics and playing around with ideas and that's the idea behind this. So these days I play in a mid-level kingdom that enjoys warring but doesn't really care about winning or losing, and likewise I experiment with strategies not because they are GOOD but because they are DIFFERENT as that's what I'm enjoying. So to be clear, I am not suggesting this as an effective strategy, but something curious and different.

The Build

The idea of this is to have only a single thief in a province, the idea came from age 43 when I played a solo explorer with a single wizard (and came 4th), but with the changes to Merchant, it spawned the idea to play with a single thief. This age Merchant's have:

The Merchant
+30% Income
Immune to All Income Penalties
100% successful on espionage ops at double stealth costs
Access to Clear Sight
+25% Income Science Efficiency
Starts with +800 Soldiers and +800 Specialist Credits

Most importantly Clear Sight (25% of thief ops fail on you), a very potent albeit expensive spell and the espionage ops bonus. The idea is that you can (and will) still use stealth doing intel, and the CS (with around 20% WTs) provides a reasonable thief defence to counteract the 0TPA. I paired this with Human primarily because the income bonus pairing with ToG, but partly because I was curious to try the prisoner conversion (which turned out to be a lot less potent than I hoped).

The 25% protection from CS and around 20-25% from WTs gives around 40-50% effective protection from ops with around 30-40% protection from op damage. This alone is (much) better than anything short of a thief-centric build like a T/M or A/T, but the real potency was from something I didn't expect - the enemy. It turns out when enemy kingdoms see 1 thief, they start opping like crazy... and failing... a LOT. So far this age, enemies have typically burned WTs which is a natural conclusion, but it takes a very large number of ops to drop the WTs number a reasonable amount, then they start NSing, but with still having around 35-45% autofail plus around 20-30% protection (ignoring sci, I figure they cancel out roughly), which means they're actually getting much lower damage then they would against another attacker. So in this way it feels like a bit of a honey trap, which so far all but 1 enemy has fallen for.

The flip side, and why you'd really do this is you can still intel just fine, but you've got a spare roughly 2ppa to spend on offense. This age I've been able to run noticeably higher opa than the other attackers in my kd, which is pretty sweet.

Downsides

So far only one enemy kingdom has figured this out, and they were a pretty highly ranked kd (which we don't normally face - again, this is NOT a strategy that's effective against competitive kingdoms and just some fun), and that is wait 'til I go offline, then MV the CS away, bliz/drake the BE down, burn a few WTs then focus ops (NS). That hurt, although not that much more than it would have been if I was just a normal attacker with like 2tpa and a few WTs.

Conclusion

Not as bad as I expected. I didn't think this would work that well, but would be easy to transfer to a typical tpa, but the honeypot effect has been quite effective in wasting enemy stealth/thieves on low success rate and low damage ops. Having said that, no, I would not do this as a regular thing. It's fun and interesting, but not something I'd recommend.

I was in a kingdom with this Clampy genius all age.

Every war he pretty much spent the whole time feeding the other kingdom land and cash. They would notice the 1 thief in about 5 minutes flat and then spend the rest of the war taking all of his land and stealing gold for their dragon. Clampy did this repeatedly for 8 wars while proclaiming what a great player he is the whole time. It was completely surreal to have someone like this as kd leadership. This same player would also recommend intra kd razes to drop acres even though honour is so hard to accumulate.

I honestly thought he was doing the 1 thief thing because he was a multi, but that kingdom had a lot of multi type behavior. When we came out of eowcf, every single time, he would have about 10 million gc and get plundered and stolen from. This Clampy person thinks that playing like a farm makes him a strategic player. Never seen such a bad player puff themself up so much.

Just to clarify for those who don't recognise an obvious troll.
1) Never got plundered.
2) Never had a kd steal all my gold or continuous ops, the logs clearly showed this.
3) Got targetted for chaining in 3 wars because (as the enemy leadership said), I had 200k more off than anyone else in my kd, so I was a clear target. In only 1 war was the chain effective enough to keep me below starting acres.
4) Billah was criticised by literally every single member of the kingdom as being bad for the kingdom, not listening to anyone and being a troll.

For any kingdoms he joins beware that while he does know how to play a province, he doesn't listen, he's rude and offensive and very often says stuff that makes no sense.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clampy

Just to clarify for those who don't recognise an obvious troll.
1) Never got plundered.
2) Never had a kd steal all my gold or continuous ops, the logs clearly showed this.
3) Got targetted for chaining in 3 wars because (as the enemy leadership said), I had 200k more off than anyone else in my kd, so I was a clear target. In only 1 war was the chain effective enough to keep me below starting acres.
4) Billah was criticised by literally every single member of the kingdom as being bad for the kingdom, not listening to anyone and being a troll.

For any kingdoms he joins beware that while he does know how to play a province, he doesn't listen, he's rude and offensive and very often says stuff that makes no sense.

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Put down your crack pipe. You literally made this post over a month ago telling everyone on the server that you have 1 thief. That about sums up your intelligence level. This age, again, your province name is Clampy and you will probably again run one thief.

You played human merchant and always had a huge surplus after every war. And even after all those plunders at the end of every eowcf, you kept thinking that when eowcf ended you would some sort of way keep people from noticing you had a pile of cash. You are not the sharpest crayon in the Crayola box, seriously. It's like you never realized that Infiltrate Thieves Guilds is one of the first blanket intel ops any enemy kd would do. Every kd we warred knew you had 1 thief within about 5 minutes and they took advantage of it, over and over again. Are you trying to tell us that a kd you are warring against wouldnt notice you have 1 thief, or do you think that all of the people on this forum are idiotic enough to think that during a war a kd will not take advantage of a human merchant attacker who has 1 thief? Give me a break. You got rolled all age and fed untold amounts of cash and land to every enemy we warred. I think you are a farm since you play like one.

On top of how much land and gold you fed to enemies, how many times did you recommend provinces do intra kd razes? We lost thousands of honour to that.

So what happened to Green Hornet? I see that you, Crash, and Crimson Killers are leadership now. Did the devs finally catch on to him using Ranger as a multi? The bot showed all logins and attacks happening at the same time every war. And maybe you can explain why Green Hornet surrendered so many times when we were far ahead on war gains?

Playing in your kd was like being in a complete farm multi kid.