Landlust based attacker

[Topsy]

You can find me idling there pretty much whenever, just give me a hollar in pm. The idea of "trapped" land that your thinking about is the right track, its just the situations that youd need to/can do them in that are unique.

I'm not sure what "attacking is overpowered" means, but im guessing its not accurate, similar to tact being the "obvious" choice for orc.

[idiocy]

Attacking is absurdly strong and everyone knows it. Immunity to ambush without having to cast anon or warspoils is a bonus that was removed for a good reason, until this age and its ill-thought changes. Cleric is the only personality that comes close, and that depends on being able to use the extra general on a useful attack. Having reduced attack time is just a nice bonus for a damage output machine.

[Topsy]

in almost any war where you are chaining, ambushing shouldn't be a problem against orcs as it would require all their generals just to reach the big hits from 1 of the person in the chain. Having some protection against getting hit turtled, undying elites, and 20% more gains later in war(when its just a war of generals*gains) is pretty significant. And obviously TM'ing is the way the game designs the mass transfer of acres, but at least for a very large number of ages wars are won or lost by t/m's(in particular rogues).

[jamin]

As a halfer I gained a lot of my acres this age from LL.
LL is what was so successful with AMA in their war vs Sanc.

Anyone who thinks it's not worth it clearly don't know how to use it well combined with Massacres and AW as a coordinated kingdom plan.

[Palem]

I don't think anyone is claiming there's no benefit to LL'ing.

What everyone is saying is that LL is best used in specific situations with kd coordination and planning. Not as a solo player who wants to use LL as a replacement for attacking.

[idiocy]

^ what Palem said.

[Landro]

Yeah... the last time I played an orc that was very much so the case; I'd get hit 10-14 times a day, every day, every war, and still be getting 8x attacks out anyway.

However, I'd be planning on running about 20%+ WT and a good 3-4 TPA to back it up. It wouldn't prevent a halfling rogue who was determined to waste all their stealth for the entire war on me, but it'd mitigate enough damage that it wouldn't be that bad (I should hope).

Now herein comes the problem... if orcs are so unkillable, how is this allowed to stand as is over alternate strategies? So far all I've heard is Bishop say once that people obviously just aren't waving them properly, but the question is, how do you properly wave an orc who will only have their army home for 3-5 minutes a day? Yes, you can gradually bleed them down a little bit in power, but not enough to really matter significantly as their offensive power is still around, and losing 1000 acres means nothing to an orc as they have another 1000 incoming from their armies anyway.

It's possible to permanently remove a mage from a war 100% so that they are no longer a threat at all, but the same isn't really true of an orc except for insanely well organized kingdoms at the very top. This implies that there's a bit of a balance issue in that there's only truly one "right" answer on how to attack, which kind of worries me since the whole point of Utopia was that there were so many options.

So I guess the question then becomes, is it realistically plausible to keep an elf's mages alive so they can still be useful? Running over 20% WT is almost a must if landlusting, due to the extra land lowering the percentages of land used, probably around 30% early war and just letting the WT stay there as more acres are added.

I'd like to be useful, I just like to do so in unorthodox manners =P I'd just like to see that, if I have to put in more time and effort to make a very difficult race/personality concept work, that it should at least be even remotely close to effectiveness as a much simpler option. Risk VS reward kinda thing.

Why do you need to chain Orcs? If you keep their pop down with FB/Kidnap, they won't be drafting soldiers to spend their credits on. Add Greed and Riots and they'll have trouble paying wages. Add tornadoes to destroy their rax (unless they picked tact) and you'll be screwing with their attack times.

[Lightspeed]

In a 1 v 1 argument people say that your WPA goes down vs opponent up over time. What if you are doing AW as a rogue and LL in the combination, their ratio is going down, yours is going down yet who's is going down FASTER. My bet is the person you are op as a rogue. You have more build space for guilds. You are less susceptible to fireball/kidnap BE% reducing ops, you will train more wiz/hr.

So say Faery rogue, you get 2 ops per tick of thievery and magic in war. You are LL with 1 op and amnesia with the other, you are 2 X AW with the rogue ops, who's WPA is going down faster? and as T/M you are starting from higher base, higher science.
No competition, you pump in EOWCF and all other times.

[Lightspeed]

what is wrong with majority rogue kingdom all using high dpa?

[idiocy]

no attacking = getting chained hard, not being able to chain peoples.

There are a zillion reasons why kingdoms need offense... but, there are examples of kingdoms that run mostly defensive provinces and do well enough during war. Majority human kingdoms for example. But those Humans are doing a lot more than sitting behind defense and LLing, nor are they picking Rogue. FS a couple of ages ago was running half Faeries and half heavy attackers, and made that setup work as well. BiO a few ages ago ran almost all Elf/Rogues, but that was a setup that requried immense activity and coordination to work, and they didn't come close to winning.

There are lots of cases for using AW and LL, but the kingdoms that can use AW and LL should have other options as well.

[Landro]

In a 1 v 1 argument people say that your WPA goes down vs opponent up over time. What if you are doing AW as a rogue and LL in the combination, their ratio is going down, yours is going down yet who's is going down FASTER. My bet is the person you are op as a rogue. You have more build space for guilds. You are less susceptible to fireball/kidnap BE% reducing ops, you will train more wiz/hr.

So say Faery rogue, you get 2 ops per tick of thievery and magic in war. You are LL with 1 op and amnesia with the other, you are 2 X AW with the rogue ops, who's WPA is going down faster? and as T/M you are starting from higher base, higher science.
No competition, you pump in EOWCF and all other times.

the problem with your argument is that this is a team game. I'd much rather see our rogues AW the enemy's main casters. That keeps FB and MS off our attackers to help them deal more damage

[Palem]

what is wrong with majority rogue kingdom all using high dpa?

1. You need to get relations to use those spells. Any kd with a small understanding of the game will avoid giving you relations if they can avoid it and giving relations with all faery/rogue TMs is a dangerous operation.
2. With mostly TMs, your ability to actually war people "as in someone pushes the button", is very limited. You have to engage in super long hostiles and if you don't get to a point where your TMs feel mostly safe it's unlikely that you'll ever get into a war you'll win. That's bad because TMs (Faeries) really thrive on higher honor to be effective. If your kd doesn't have honor and the others do, you're at even more of a disadvantage.
3. LL alone doesn't cause the same kind of damage that a traditional march causes. Let's say you LL a guy for 100 acres and someone hits a guy for 100 acres. Same result right? Wrong. The traditional march, in addition to taking away 100 acres (and giving it to you), also killed the targets defense AND took some pezzies AND earned Spec/Leet and Building credits. Wars are about putting the most amount of damage into the most appropriate places and forcing them to surrender. Yes, LL is a little better for overpopulation, but that kind of serious drop really isn't too practical considering landing a LL by the end of the "chain" would be near impossible if the chain was as effective as an attack chain.
4. The biggest problem, assuming you're running all faery/rogues is the general penalty. If you're running all (or a large majority) Faeries, you have SIGNIFICALLY less generals than the other kd, which means they can actually afford to just run 100% offensive leets and suicide on every hit because you won't be able to match their output and your biggest asset of being able to turtle as been compromised.

[idiocy]

There is nothing that says you can't attack and use LL, ya know.

[Lightspeed]

Thanks for your reply Palem. A lot of these arguments are reasonable, for instance people avoiding your kingdom if it has a lot of T/M.

If you look too strong, people won't play with you.
You can ask any girl and she will tell you this is true.

I have this experience of playing a variable unbreakable successfully and I am considering why it is not a more widely used tactic. Certainly we won a war by outgrowing equal and best attacking players who had pre pumped WPA this way. If people did give us the button, it is quite easy to get to a situation like Rattata has experienced and I also experienced this situation in a war.
There is no reason when I say majority rogues, that your minority can't be on the top bank provinces who attack top and attack well enough and high enough in the order that if people ignored your kingdom, they would lose too many acres outside of the button to ignore you.

It seems like a good idea to have multiple unbreakable/variable near the top of the kingdom and the middle high dpa and near the bottom easy to hit high opa who tank and smash people you have already opped down. This seems to be used by some good kingdoms well. It doesn't have to be so obvious as a 1 race kingdom would look, you could use multiple races and hybrid types as A/T and T/a with a few M thrown in.