Undead OOW/War Builds

[Elanesse]

This is my first age playing attacker. I'm not doing so bad, but I thought I'd look for suggestions on improvements. Don't criticize my build or tell me I'm stupid for doing it this way, I'm saying right now that I'm new to attacker and probably have stupid mistakes. This is currently what I do, please make suggestions on how I can improve.

My first mistakes was running Undead Merchant. I did so because of the expensive elites, but now I wish I was a rogue.

During EWOCF, I run the following build:
15% Homes
15% Banks
25% Armories
25% Guilds
10% Watch Towers
5% Stables
5% Towers

After my troops are finished I raze the armories and build
10% Forts
5% Guard Stations
and increase to 35% Guilds for the remainder of CF and OOW until we're ready for a war.

Right before war I raze 25% of the guilds and 15% TGs and 10% Rax for the following War build:
15% Homes
15% Banks
15% Training Grounds
10% Barracks
10% Forts
5% Guard Stations
10% Guilds
10% Watch Towers
5% Stables
5% Towers

I'm kicking around the idea of decreasing the homes to 10% to increase either GS or TGs, not really sure. Also possibly go down to 10% banks. Maybe I shouldn't have Homes or Banks. That's really what I'm looking for advice about. The biggest thing I run into is being able to pay my troops during war, even as a merchant with 15% banks in war. With Greed, Riots, low peasant count, and science turned off I usually only gain 4-8k an hour. Which is cutting it kind of close.

[kazinji]

4-8k that's not on 50% wage is it...that's a lot of gold.

Drastic building changes cost a lot. Mention in post that doing armories need to do a lot of elites just to break even for the cost of raze/build and another raze/build. Show 10% arms, 25% would be worse with the diminished returns as building get higher in percent.
http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...ar-cf-stratagy

We have a Undead Merchant in kingdom and he really shined in the 2 week war we were just in. With basically every building free and so many credits replacement troops were plenty. If you want to do Undead Rogue for the ops...choose another race, seems like a waste of a combo. I see Undead as Heavy attacker, your chained down to 200 acres...first to leave are thieves.

Whats your kingdoms general dpa? Attackers should run similar dpa so one isn't singled out to much more than another. If your going to run forts its for the purpose of reducing the amount of D specs needed in favor of more elites.

War building breakdown seems to spread out and not enough attacker building, during war the 'core' building take president over others(TG, Rax, GS, Hospitals, buildings that keep you in land and attacking). I'm on the side of homes have no place in an war attackers build. Losing the homes with attacks just makes you even more overpopped. But I know a lot of ppl like to run them. 5% Stables isn't worth the effort. When you get chained stables go bye bye, if horse tick at home they go bye bye also. May as well go horseless, which is fine for an 7 power elite race. Otherwise you would need to In/Out army in the same hour just to make sure you don't lose horse to the tick.

[s0830887]

I personally can't stand forts on an attacker unless you are close to being unbreakable in war. The reasons for this is: a) def is much easier to kill than off and is more volatile, so forts are less stable; b) you want to be hitting big and hard and forts take the place of more important offensive buildings; and c) as an undead your elite is 7 points but your def is 4 points, so +10% DME from forts vs +10% OME from TGs = 4.4 vs 7.7 (plus horses, plus generals, etc).

Guard stations I guess are useful if you're one of the biggest and you know you're going to get chained, but I would suggest that 5% GS is essentially irrelevant. Again this is a building that I don't use often but if you are going to use them you probably need a big chunk of them to make them worthwhile. -5% gains or whatever it is I would suggest is not a big help for you. On the same note, homes are dangerous if you get chained because they keep the pes count up which puts more pressure on your military to bail on you. I personally would drop the homes, but I also appreciate your +income pers bonus is better with a better base income.

If you can hit army in/out without crossing over a tick then you might want to consider entering war with 10% stables and then switching them into something else when you send your army out as you will only lose your horses if you cross over into the new tick. So if you can manipulate that, you should try to do so. But only if you are sure you can do it because horses leave really quickly - I think I saw someone say 33% per tick, but I'm not 100% on that.

Maybe you could try something like this?

10% farms
10% banks
20% TG
10% rax
10% guilds
5% towers
10% stables (potential to raze out)
2% dungeons

Which leaves you with an extra 23-25% ish land to move around. 15% WTs, probably, and then if you do decide to change stables you have 18% for something else - GS if you're going to get chained might be a decent shout.

About the income - you said this was your biggest question - if you're not suffering really low income during war then either you're up against a pretty poor set of enemy T/Ms or you're not dangerous enough to the enemy to warrant the use of stealth/mana. The low income is to be expected. Problem for an undead obviously is that you can't steal any gc to supplement your income, which I guess is probably what the rest of us do. Good news is that as an undead/merch your army will be dying slowly and you will be gaining loads of spec and build creds to keep your army coming in and your land built up. I would suggest that you shouldn't really be spending gc on troops - you should probably be using your credits and putting extra gc into any dragons your KD might have. But that's up for discussion.

This comment was significantly longer than I intended on it being. Sorry! I hope at least some of it is useful - it is of course just my opinion and I don't play particularly close to the top.

[Elanesse]

I am almost always the largest province in our KD. First war I got chained down to 237, lost A LOT of defense. I only had like 8k defense when all was said and done. The other KD though, as good as they were to chain me in the first hour of the war, left me alone the entire rest of the war and I made my way back to 700 acres. A little OOW attacking and I was back in the top tier NW ready for the next war. The next war I was again a target, but the KD was pretty bad and disorganized, so I pretty much ended that war even. This most recent war, I started off about with the 6th highest NW/Off and I wasn't a target as much. I did anon hitting to keep a low profile, and it wasn't until after I had gained 500 acres that they realized it and chained me down 500, but they too were kind of bad because they stopped chaining after 6 hits and I regained another 500 before wars end.

I usually am the attention of enemy TMs, which is why I'm almost always underpopped, so I rarely draft troops. I'm used to being stuck with my draft over 80% and only having 2k peasants. That's often why my gc is so low. But I guess with very few peasants, there is really no need for Homes considering all it does is make my overall population limit higher correct? So I will try a war without homes. No one is really saying anything bad about my banks, so I'll leave those in there.

I do like forts, but that's because I always am a target, and if I can pull an extra 7-10k defense, even if defense is fluid, I like to have it. I may consider not build more forts as the war progresses that way my use of them decreases and my building space for other things increases.

I like the Stable suggestion. I will definitely try that. I love the use of my horses. Many times I have needed just a 1,000 more offense to pull off a triple tap and I really on my horses. I almost always send out an attack within 10 minutes of my army arriving home. I will just have to make sure I delay enough that my army doesn't come back 2 minutes before a tick or something.

Are dungeons very helpful? I've never ran them, so I'm not sure exactly how beneficial they are.

Thank you both for your feedback. I appreciate it. I'll take any more advice others may have.

[s0830887]

Homes are useful if you are not getting land chained but you are suffering heavy FB and kidnappings. Obviously they help to fill your peasants back up. If you're getting land chained you should get rid of them though because they're counter-productive.

You're talking about acres but it's difficult to know how much they are when we don't know your average size. What size are you now? Hitting a prov from 1000 acres to 500 is obviously much less damaging than hitting a prov from 2000 acres to 500. Again, 2000 peasants actually sounds reasonable for war. I don't know what level you play at - I play somewhere around #30 and I am usually much lower than that from FBs.

I always run 2% dungeons in war. They're actually my favourite building which probably sounds a bit weird. I just like the idea of sending my shanty prisoners into war with their hands all cuffed and stuff. Kinda ridiculous. Having said that, they are actually really good in terms of %s, but only at a very small %. I did once read someone saying that at 1% like for like with other buildings they're the best in the game - prisoners are good extra offense, they bring in a little gc and they increase BE a little (I think - don't quote that). Plus I think (again I'm not 100% sure of this, but I always had this impression from playing around) that having dungeons increases enemy defensive losses - casualties + prisoners captured.

Forts are better to bring in towards the latter stages if you're pulling away. As enemy def drops, your offense should become more and more effective and if you are getting close to getting out of range defensively then a couple extra forts could be a big bonus for you. It makes more sense to start with no forts and bring them in later rather than the other way round.

[Snp]

Those builds are weak,rainbow strats with a little bit of everything are fail ever since this game started.You should just go read other threads or just take intel in game on undeads in good kds.

[asfas]

Undead/Tactician

War:
Banks 10 % -don't rebuild, get aid if needed
TGs 16 % -build up to 20 %
Rax 16 % -build up to 20-30 %
GS 14 % -keep at 10-14 %
Guilds 10 % -keep at 4-10 % for self buffs (CS, IA, L&P)
Towers 8 % -keep at 4-8 % (cast MP and/or TW to make people bounce if you know you're getting attacked)
Hospitals 0 % -build up to 15 %
WTs 8 % -build 0-15 % depending on TM activity
Stables 14 % -don't rebuild, keep army out
Dungeons 4 % -keep around 2-4 %

If chained, don't worry, build
TG 25+ %
Rax 30-40+ %
GS 20+ %
Dungeons 5+ %

[Elanesse]

You're talking about acres but it's difficult to know how much they are when we don't know your average size. What size are you now? Hitting a prov from 1000 acres to 500 is obviously much less damaging than hitting a prov from 2000 acres to 500. Again, 2000 peasants actually sounds reasonable for war. I don't know what level you play at - I play somewhere around #30 and I am usually much lower than that from FBs.

I'm currently at 1500 acres. I gained a +540 this past war we were in, but we faced a pretty bad KD. After two war wins in a row and 23 provinces, we definitely won't be facing as easy a KD this next war. Which is why I want to improve my playing style. I'm typically a thief, so attacker is experimental for me. I've done my playing around, now I want to get better.

I'll raze the homes before war start and switch into a high TG/Rax build. I'll add a few dungeons. Increase my GS to 10%, won't bother rebuilding banks. I sort of did this naturally this last war anyway.

[tetley]

plz take homes and forts out of this build.

[noobium]

Well, you're saddled with one of the worst personalities for Undead. Undead isn't really effective for holding economy nor has any particular economic bonus like ToG or birth rates.

Undead typically want to avoid being shelled, and Undead can be shelled very easily due to lacking any ops defense. Since Undead can't steal to supplement their economy, it is very hard to retain peasants on a shelled undead. For this reason, an Undead ideally wants to position themselves so that kingdoms will chain them early; this means having lots of offense, and forcing a kingdom to either nightstrike heavily or chain to contain that offense.

I'd probably follow UD/Warrior strategies as closely as I can, and forget about banks. For early war, it's basically playing without a personality. However, the extra build/spec credits should allow an Undead to divert more resources to cranking out offspec and building useful offensive builds. It won't make up the difference to get where Warriors start, but it will function decently enough.
When outside of war, Merchants can pump and grow a little more efficiently than other undeads.

TG, horses, and Homes will all probably be used. Since you are Merchant, it is easier to find the money to rotate these buildings in exchange for your actual warbuild, but you would be doing this if you were any other personality.

Forts are bad juju for Undead, at least at start of war. There are a few cases where it makes sense to built forts rather than waste soldiers and credits training defspec, but it would imply that there are too few effective thieves to NS you.

[Lestat]

eeew merchant

[Elanesse]

Well, you're saddled with one of the worst personalities for Undead.

I totally agree. As I said at the first, it was a mistake that I do regret making. Though, it is helpful for rebuilding, as I rebuild and recover rather quickly, but actual helps in war are nil.

I'd change it if it didn't mean completely resetting my entire province. I'm going to raze Homes, Banks, and Forts for my next war and give it a try. I am still experimenting and I want to learn. We'll see how it goes.

[kazinji]

Don't stop drafting. Lower it if you want. But keep drafting, unless your are seriously in danger of dying of zero peasants.

[Elanesse]

Don't stop drafting. Lower it if you want. But keep drafting, unless your are seriously in danger of dying of zero peasants.

I don't stop draft intentionally. When they FB me down to 2,000 peasants my % of military shoots up to 78-80% and my draft is only set at 70. So I don't draft soldiers by default, not by choice.

[2Utopian]

This thread makes me barf. I see forts and FARMS suggested in undead HA builds. Anyways I would be interested to see builds from Nesta / Tadpole / Elit here if they are willing as they have all run undeads well recently.