This is my first tutorial so while constructive feedback is welcome, please be gentile ;-)
For this first tutorial I will discus Elf as attacker/Mage. The tutorial is aimed at new players with the goal of getting them ready for their first war.
Strengths:
Extra mana in war
Versatile spellbook
Instant spells (FB, Tornado, etc.) cause more damage
Stronger defensive specialist
Weaknesses:
Several other races have stronger elites
Elves are excellent mages and average attackers. We'll build our Elf province as a/M (attacker mage with emphasis on spell casting) We'll need a personality to boost these aspects. Although some people might prefer Sage as personality, I'm going to pick Mystic instead.
Mystic does not only provide you with access to the spell Meteor Showers (MS) but also makes your guilds and towers perform as if you had twice the actual amount. This will save a lot of room for other uses. The Mystic personality will also extend the duration of your spells by 30% which not only affects the beneficial spells you cast to help your own province but also makes harmful spells cast on opponents last longer.
Buildings
The more land you have, the more buildings you will need of a given type to reach a certain effect. For this reason buildings are usually assigned a percentage of land to be dedicated to them. The buildings calculator in Utopia Angel (www.utopiatemple.com) can help you with this.
The most important building in the game is the farm. Without farms to produce food, your peasants will have to depend on your food stores and once they run out, your peasants and troops will slowly starve to death. We will also need banks to improve our cash flow, guilds to train our mages and make our beneficial spells stronger and towers to provide runes to power our spells. Lastly we will have to dedicate some land to make our army more effective.
During protection we will need lots of cash to train our army faster and armouries to reduce training costs.
During the protection phase I would recommend running a strat somewhat like this:
10% homes
10% farms
25% banks
25% arms (armouries)
25% guilds
5% towers
You could choose to get rid of the homes and replace them with stables for example or more banks and arms.
Once you are out of protection (OOP) you will want to slowly convert your buildings to something that will help you be more effective during wars. You could gradually change your build into something like this:
8% farms
10% banks
14% barracks (rax)
10% guard stations (GS)
10% hospitals (hosps)
15% guilds
10% towers
15% watch towers (WT)
8% stables
During protection you will want to make sure of the following:
Go to the military page and set your draft target to 70%. (you will not reach this during protection) Alternatively you can set it to 0 and wait until your arms are ready before setting it to 70 to take advantage of the drafting cost reduction provided by arms.
About 24 hour before protection ends (if you have Inspire army active you can wait a little longer) you should start training your troops. Make sure to train a least a few thieves (1 per acre or more) and split the rest of your fund between Elf Lords and Archers.
War:
During war Elves will use their spells to disrupt their enemy's economy. Fireball (FB) is one of the most used spells. FB is relatively cheap and easy and destroying an enemy's peasant base will disrupt their economy for a long time. Not only will a lack of peasants significantly reduce your enemy's income, it will also make it harder for your enemy to draft and train new troops. The weakness of using FB is that an enemy can use kidnapping to recover. A stronger way to hurt your enemy is by casting Tornadoes. Tornadoes destroy buildings which will lower your enemy's population capacity. Tornadoes are harder to cast and cost more runes but if will generate a lot of honor for you.
Another category of spells are duration spells (also referred to as fading spells) Greed and MS are the most used of those. Greed increases military upkeep and goes very well with FB. MS will slowly kill peasants and troops while active although your enemy can protect his troops by sending them out.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Ordray
