The ultimate strategy thread

[flogger]

First, Thank you for starting this valuable thread flogger.
About intel gathering: in war, with what regularity is sot, som, sn, survey prudent?

Surveys I just get in hostile, and i'll get a few throughout the war if I think their setup is one that could be terribly flexible. Mostly probably looking for people switching into watchtowers if they had none previously.
Snatch news is useful to try and gauge who is getting fed if your enemy has people close to being unbreakable, but SoT and TB tracking can negate this.
I ask for a full SoT run on my enemy a couple times a day, makes it easier to assign targets if all intel is updated.
I ask for a SoM on a province the second it sends all its armies out.

[flogger]

- How can you be twice as good as realest but have less then half the ego?

- You made a post about the BB Havoc conflict last age where you were discussing the mechanics of the cow fight and pointed to the ratio of Ospecs to elites as being a reason BB was winning. How does this affect it? Is it the rate at which elites die compared to ospecs even though the specs had +1 offense?

- I play in a lower tier kingdom and we often run into very attacker heavy kingdoms with 75:25 O:D provinces. What do you think is a good way to fight this typical low tier strategy?

If you only had 2 crowns and one of them was gotten through trinity, you'd be a little self conscious too.

I think you are mistaking the cow fight and the core fight. With humans, the worst thing that can happen is you get chained with all 5/0 troops out and no elites out on attack. If you have a mix of elites and ospecs out on attack, you'll always be left with some defense. I made a reference to havoc's core running too high of ospecs being a bad thing, and making my chain calculator figuratively jizz in its circuits.

Easiest way to kill really high offense, no defense provinces is to allow them to get peasants, and then chain them right before their armies return. If someone has 6 peasants per acre to start, and loses 80% of its land, it has 25 peasants left and no room left for its offense. If they're not high on peasants, I'd hope they had low defensive elite values and do what I suggested on orcs in 2 posts above.

[flogger]

Elf Mage Attacker.

Looking for a build that allows MS cast + the ability to attack the low defense, retal and ambush in war.

How does this war build strike you?

5% Farms (steal food when needed)
16% Banks
12% TGs
8% Rax
10%GS
12% Guilds (after wizard pump is done)
12% towers (I have no idea)
23% Wts (too much?)
2% dungeons

Thanks

In and of itself, an elf mage attacker doesn't exist 1 on 1. To cast MS you need to have 3x their mod WPA, which is hard to do and keep up with miltary units. If you want to run elf mage attackers, have your kingdom run 15-18 of them so you don't have to "protect" yourself and complimented by halfer rogues to AW before nightmaring.

As for the build, WTs is probably right, you'll need way more towers ((Land*.68)+680)*2.6 is your rune cost for MS, to cast 1-2 every tick is very difficult, and you need to be large sizes.

The rest of the build all seems right, although at larger sizes most people find a way to skip banks in their war build.

[flogger]

from ghetto point of view , avian,orc,undead/cleric mix core kdm v/s orc warrior core kdm , same number of attackers on both sides
cleric kdm - how would you set up your attackers off. / def. against these over powered orc warriors and how to go about taking them down a.k.a. semi chains or hard chaining
also what would be the most effective dragon to begin your war, unsure if taking a more defensive or more offensive approach ,which do you feel would be best against these overpowered beasts.

Most of the beginning was addressed in the avian cleric/orc warrior response. Sapphire dragons are almost always the way to go in war, they're just so strong, unless you have enough gold lying around to open with like a Ruby or something to hit enemy TMs, then replace with sapphire. I'd try and have the orc warrior kingdom wave you and drag out hostile, or open 2x them turtled to neutralize the military advantage.

[flogger]

What would be your preferred setup for a 3v3 setting in a vacuum with these conditions: The kd has 3k acres pool total. no prov can be smaller than 400 acres. Current age race/pers changes. They will not engage until yr 1, yr 4, or yr 8.

Alternatively, same question with 5k acres.

Everything would have a counter strategy, whatever you say you start the lower 2 at, (Say you picked 3400a, 400a, 400a) the other guy would pick 3000a, 600a, 600a, etc, to kill the bottom two and then provide support for the big. Likely dwarf rogue and abuse BE and TDs in every scenario with most of the acres going towards the bank, with bottom provs being mystics.

[br3nt00]

3 halfling war hero, sapphire is the main dragon to be used and being immune to it lets you riot/rob other heavy thief provs the best, no more doubly effective TDs on rogues so this will have the highest pure TPA.
8 faery mystics - number sounds about right, primarily MS duty on other halfers and some nightmares and Fools gold/fireball. Has clear sight and 5 pt def, gonna be your best mystic.
14 halfling rogue - Can propaganda destroy off/def of any of the core races. has 4/4 units so fairly immune to chaining and with +10% pop not too bad militarily vs attacking cores. Can kill enemy mystics with this sheer number, both sides shred eachothers attackers, whoever kills eachother's halflings the best win, and you've got 8 mystics to ensure MS does its part.

Orc lost its leet creds so isn't terribly viable, and dwarf/avians offenses can be contained with NS and undead lost CS. Setup should be able to kill everything but halfers fairly easily, and you can actually take a halfer down with NM'ing thieves away + NS to secure the WW at the end.

That's the best warring kingdom, probably going to be hard to find wars with that setup, however.

you don't think having no heavy attackers will put you at risk of losing all your acres to an orc kd? 7 power elite and +30% gains vs 4 power elite? i realize you will do lots of damage to their military, but at some point you will need land, no?

[flogger]

you don't think having no heavy attackers will put you at risk of losing all your acres to an orc kd? 7 power elite and +30% gains vs 4 power elite? i realize you will do lots of damage to their military, but at some point you will need land, no?

You'd be doing alot of nightmaring and keeping 70 DPA home while 4x'ing them. Orc can't possibly prevent that vs this setup. We ran an elf rogue kd about 5 ages back and fought a fight vs an orc kingdom. We were ranked 1/2 at the time. Our open war wave, without any hostile period and prepping for ops was 92 hits, so 8 short of perfect, the orcs were on about 5 DPA after we were done with nightmare/NS.

[br3nt00]

that makes sense. a helluva lot of coordination tho!

orc or undead as attacker core?
thoughts on massacres as viable war strategy vs orc kd's ?

[skoyl12]

hypthetical scenario
Your bank is dwarf (or any other race but faery, i leave that out because of the 5 def) the rest of your kd is anything you like but orcs.
My bank is halfer or faery and have a core of orcs in kd.

Your spies in my irc channel tell you that i decided to hit you. If you are dwarf you can hit fort and with builders boon you have 11 hours to switch buildings.
If i need to switch buildings and have gold saved i can do it in 8-9 hours.
Also if my orcs are at 60% DR in 11 hours just by casting pat the can push their DR to 68%
If they run 65% they can push to 72%
Thats 7% of the pop of each province. If i add agression the solds are 2/0 or 3/0 for halfer and if ican add mercs that is 2.2/0 and 3.2/0

Especially in the halfer case that has 10% bonus and with even some minor science (3-4%) i can overpopulate up to 15% more and be able to attack. Thats almost 33 ppa which is huge for bank.

My question is do you see a way to counter that or how much bigger should you be in order to be safe (my questimate is 30% land or more) do you agree with that.

[fawk]

You'd be doing alot of nightmaring and keeping 70 DPA home while 4x'ing them. Orc can't possibly prevent that vs this setup. We ran an elf rogue kd about 5 ages back and fought a fight vs an orc kingdom. We were ranked 1/2 at the time. Our open war wave, without any hostile period and prepping for ops was 92 hits, so 8 short of perfect, the orcs were on about 5 DPA after we were done with nightmare/NS.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but what was true 5 ages ago isn't true anymore.
not only did halfers, elves, and faeries receive huge nerfs. pure attackers received big bonuses.

kingdoms that are based entirely on hybrids like faeries and halflings will be toasted

[flogger]

hypthetical scenario
Your bank is dwarf (or any other race but faery, i leave that out because of the 5 def) the rest of your kd is anything you like but orcs.
My bank is halfer or faery and have a core of orcs in kd.

Your spies in my irc channel tell you that i decided to hit you. If you are dwarf you can hit fort and with builders boon you have 11 hours to switch buildings.
If i need to switch buildings and have gold saved i can do it in 8-9 hours.
Also if my orcs are at 60% DR in 11 hours just by casting pat the can push their DR to 68%
If they run 65% they can push to 72%
Thats 7% of the pop of each province. If i add agression the solds are 2/0 or 3/0 for halfer and if ican add mercs that is 2.2/0 and 3.2/0

Especially in the halfer case that has 10% bonus and with even some minor science (3-4%) i can overpopulate up to 15% more and be able to attack. Thats almost 33 ppa which is huge for bank.

My question is do you see a way to counter that or how much bigger should you be in order to be safe (my questimate is 30% land or more) do you agree with that.

Using a 10,000 acre bank with 10% pop science and 10% halfer bonus, I get its maxpop as being 302k. 15% over that is 45,375 soldiers it can take without overpop. times 3*1.15*1.076*1.09 = 195k offense, or about 18 more OPA, not the 33 OPA you quote. Halfer is about 18 OPA short compared with dwarf naturally, so all this does is essentially make the 2 races even for one round of hits, and losing all of your peasants to the point where you likely cannot afford wages. In addition, when you get retalled, you've just really overpopulated yourself and cost you a lot of thieves and elites. If you can be either nightstriked or nightmared, the enemy can kill the soldiers as well.

The counter would be to also just overpopulate your bank to start off with better units.

However, the idea does have some potential if you can make it unbreakable somehow.

[flogger]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but what was true 5 ages ago isn't true anymore.
not only did halfers, elves, and faeries receive huge nerfs. pure attackers received big bonuses.

kingdoms that are based entirely on hybrids like faeries and halflings will be toasted

Orcs were 9/2 and could train elite credits that age (Age 54), now they're 7/1 and don't get leet credits. Attackers have been nerfed more than t/ms have from then compared to now.

[protector]

no ego inflating

The ultimate strategy thread

Lolwat?!

[s0830887]

What would be the best way to take out a big unbreakable halfling? 1700 acres vs our top at 1000 acres, full elite army, medium wpa/tpa?

[flogger]

What would be the best way to take out a big unbreakable halfling? 1700 acres vs our top at 1000 acres, full elite army, medium wpa/tpa?

That's tough to do. MS+Tornadoes would be your best bet. Alternatively, a NM run to get rid of his thieves and basically your whole kd NS'ing it. But you'd need quite a lot of nightmares.