From pure attacker to A/t

[Uhm hoi]

I wish to change my build strat around to get it more in tune with the rest of the kingdom. I'm playing an undead tactician in a semi-ghetto. My current build works fairly well, I'm active, attack as much as possible and the kingdom has just won a war. During this war, we found it hard to chain high def provinces though and the opposing kingdom did have a lot of high def provinces. In fact all their active attackers had 8 or more defensive specialists per acre. We tried nightstriking some of that defense away and it worked fairly well, but I think we should be able to do it a lot better and faster than we did. I used about 2 TPA, mostly for defense, and about 10% watchtowers for most of the war and it stopped most of the ops done on me. For the next war I want to be able to NS our chain targets so I intent to up my TPA to about 3. Now the questions:

1. Is 3TPA enough to reliably get nightstrikes in on other attackers?

2. Do I still need the watchtowers and if so, how much should I use?

3. Should I be running thieves guilds to get those nightstrikes in and if so, how much should I use?

4. I've red on these forums one shouldn't use both watchtowers and thieves guilds at the same time, but it lacked further explanation. Why should I not use both?

[Bishop]

1: no, get 4

2: no

3: yes, 10-15%. They drastically reduce your thief losses and increase your mod tpa.

3: watchtowers are purely defensive. Good tpa and tds are both offensive and defensive.

[Uhm hoi]

Thank you for your fast reply.

I have another question. I got 75k books from the war win. What kind of % should be going to crime for an A/t?

[Bishop]

I think i would consider a ratio of

alc:tools:pop:food:mil:thief:magic
2:1:3:0:1:2:2

It would look something like this at 1k acres with 440000 books

** Effects Summary (Known Science Only) **
9.4% Income (80,000 books)
4.7% Building Effectiveness (40,000 books)
5.3% Population Limits (120,000 books)
0% Food Production
6.6% Gains in Combat (40,000 books)
40.2% Thievery Effectiveness (80,000 books)
40.2% Magic Effectiveness & Rune Production (80,000 books)

[Palem]

Not having food science is just a waste :(

[Persain]

Not having food science is just a waste :(

um...

I'm playing an undead tactician in a semi-ghetto.

[Uhm hoi]

Why would I need that much channeling? The only thing I really do in the magic department is buff myself. Is that just so I need less towers for the runes?

[Bishop]

That and you need protection - you can easily drop it but its not really at high

[KuhaN]

I wish to change my build strat around to get it more in tune with the rest of the kingdom. I'm playing an undead tactician in a semi-ghetto. My current build works fairly well, I'm active, attack as much as possible and the kingdom has just won a war. During this war, we found it hard to chain high def provinces though and the opposing kingdom did have a lot of high def provinces. In fact all their active attackers had 8 or more defensive specialists per acre. We tried nightstriking some of that defense away and it worked fairly well, but I think we should be able to do it a lot better and faster than we did. I used about 2 TPA, mostly for defense, and about 10% watchtowers for most of the war and it stopped most of the ops done on me. For the next war I want to be able to NS our chain targets so I intent to up my TPA to about 3. Now the questions:

1. Is 3TPA enough to reliably get nightstrikes in on other attackers?

2. Do I still need the watchtowers and if so, how much should I use?

3. Should I be running thieves guilds to get those nightstrikes in and if so, how much should I use?

4. I've red on these forums one shouldn't use both watchtowers and thieves guilds at the same time, but it lacked further explanation. Why should I not use both?

make tds with 3tpa. Dont worry about wts, wts are srsly a waste of space in ghettos, good players in ghettos will exploit their competition in specific ways and play an a/t/m style.

10-15 percent tds should do the trick btw.

[Bishop]

3tpa drops to uselessness too fast - better to start from 4.

[Palem]

um...

We get it...I don't read things...stop showing off :p

[Ethan]

Quite a while back I did sims on human/sage A/T science allocation. I found that, with a target mTPA of 10-15 and a target mWPA of 3-4, that thievery and magic science were approximately equal most of the time. I can't remember for sure if I assumed that magic sci lowered guild% required - I don't think I did. I also don't know if it really does, even now. (It gets confusing really fast - go look up the latest thread Bishop was trying to explain the nuts and bolts of magic in if you really care, maybe it will make more sense to you than it did to me.)

So - *if* my sim was fairly accurate (or conservative on this point) the change to UD shouldn't have a major impact, and I would advise keeping magic sci within 2/3rds of thievery sci, if not nearly even.


Also on TPA drop - I'm amazed how fast my TPA goes this age, now that I'm facing not gettos. But back in the getto I used to run 3.rounding with some TDs and be a perfectly functional A/t for the first 2 days. After that I usually lost the /t because I built military instead of thieves, though every now and then I tried to bulk back up the tpa. So it kinda depends on how big a T you want (stealing vs. NS), and how semi- the semi-gettos you face are. 3 rTPA is basically the minimum, IMO.

[nooblet]

Be prepared to train thieves and build extra TD during war. Being a good thief throughout the war will require doing this to some degree.

Still need to start war with about 4 tpa and pray that you don't get chained while offline. Fortunately undead has some useful anti-chain spells to make this less of a problem.

a/t is difficult to use without good mage support that can pull off nightmares and tornado runs, to make your thief ops more effective.

[Uhm hoi]

Alright between all the awesome advice given here (thank you very much to all contributers) and the build strat I was already using, I am going to build my province in the following way: 10% banks, 12% guilds, 8% towers, 18% training grounds, 12% barracks, 20% guard stations, 5% hospitals, 2% dungeons and 13% thieves dens. Science will be around 20% Alchemy, 20% Tools, 27% Housing, 12% Military, 14% Crime, 7% Channeling. With the housing science I'm getting a little over 26 pop/acre which will be distributed between 4 TPA, 1,5 WPA, 6 def specs per acre, and about 9 off specs/elites per acre.

[dingy2]

You can solve the opponent's high defense problem two ways: more thieves, or more ghouls. The undead in my kingdom generally elect to go with the ghouls.
That's not to say TDs and TPA can't work great, because it does if you use your stealth wisely - but I find that getting chained with a high TPA leaves me with a lower offense and the same crap TPA I would've had anyway. Undead/tact are exceptional heavy attackers, so why not rock it? Let your tpa/wpa be defensive, and only situationally offensive.

Also on undead science: I suggest focusing heavily on gains, and next up are crime and channeling (I call these the WAR sciences). Gains enhance my primary function, and crime/channeling act like a sort of population bonus that doesn't become useless as soon as I take a few fireballs. Make my defensive 3 tpa+WTs and defensive ~2 wpa work harder for their money, and prevent the low-life mages and thieves from messing with me for free. The only economy science I'm pumping is BE. BE is a big factor when you're pumping 30-40%+ GS/rax like I am in war. Anyway, for my sciences I'm focusing on modifiers that always work. I get chained too much to bother with things that pump up my economy. Besides, I'll get them from learns...
Your mileage may vary. ;)