Thieves dens vs watchtowers

[Shadowquizzy]

It was brought to my attention that thieves dens increase tpa (modified possibly) whereas watchtowers will provide less than thieves dens if my tpa is decent. Can someone weigh in on this? Are watchtowers or thieves dens better for a human attacker? And what are the main differences?

[Bishop]

WTs are for defense, TDs are for offense.

[marve]

This is a bit of a loaded question, but ill make it short and to the point. Are you pure attacker or a/t? If you are pure attacker, run around 2 raw tpa and wts. If you are a/t and devote time to thief sci and will run 3.5 to 4 tpa raw, then go thief dens. Thief dens are worth it more if you are going to run a higher tpa, as they will keep attackers out and slightly limit tms. Wts are better for keeping tms out because they will definitely fail. So to answer your question directly, it depends what type of attacker you play.

[gergnub]

Or to not make things overly complicated just reread Bishops post.

WTs are for defense, TDs are for offense.

[Ethan]

I'd frame the question of Pure A vs. A/t (vs. A/T) as follows:
Do you just want thief defense? Are you good at finding stealing opportunities? Will you help NS the NS target?
If you just want defense, WTs are the answer, because you are playing pure A.
If you NS the target with your spare stealth, you are playing A/T proper, and will almost certainly need dens to cope with losses and get a good enough TPA mod.
If you like using your thieves, but are bad about actually doing NS, and instead steal gold/runes/pes... you probably want what I call an A/t, with a "little t". You will want dens, but not quite as many.

The A/t role, imo, is to be an attacker that uses thief offense opportunistically to replace the lost offense from higher tpa. Which looks like a 0 gain plan... but if you actually are 0 gains, it is better than a strict attacker.... because you took it from your enemy. Steal horses is the most obvious way for this to work... if you steal enough horses to make up for the lost EPA needed to support your higher TPA... bingo, you've done "free" damage. Taking gold to train more troops is another example, though less direct.

Top level play mostly stops the A/t role for 2 reasons. 1, the T/Ms have higher mTPA, so you need higher mTPA to stay safe. (The attackers just trust in the WTs) That means more offense lost, which means less likely to break even, or close enough for the thief damage to outweigh the lowered attacker damage. 2, the enemy attackers won't have as much for you to steal (and might have better WTs as well).

On the flip side, in a true getto every "pure" attacker should add .5-1 tpa and try for A/t, cause you can feed off the enemy inactives, and the T/Ms are mostly just big explorers anyway. If you can't make up <10 OPA by stealing gold/pes/whatever from inactives... you probably need to find a new game.