Undead Attacker Build Strat Advice

[Shadowjack]

Very good and enlightening info, thank you! I do not fully understand one of your statements though; " Once pumped, the Homes are worthless." I thought I still needed to keep my Homes because if I scrap them my province will not produce enough gold to maintain my large army. I've been using 70% draft rate and am considering going slightly higher.

I am glad that you can see some potential in Forts. I do not believe they are 100% useless for heavy attackers but as I said, I don't believe they're great in all situations.

[noobium]

The reason being is that you want those Homes filled with trained troops rather than peasants. Peasants by themselves are not particularly valuable, and there is plenty of space to grow peasants during war. Therefore, if you are gaining acres after a pump, it makes no sense to build new homes unless preparing for another pump; training costs during normal stance, without armories, and without the time to accumulate cash, are not the best investment of money.
It makes sense to keep Homes over some other building types in order to avoid tanking your economy too early, but if you have enough money to last until new acres and peasants come in, then scrapping Homes is perfectly acceptable.

I would assume, if you are drafting that high, that you are looking to war soon and gain acres. The acres and peasants gained from trad march are your economy.

[Shadowjack]

Wow. I see. That's very interesting and helpful and I do appreciate your counsel. I'm also starting to question my logic on Barracks. During my analysis I failed to consider the merit of making 2 sets of +4hour attacks per day. I was thinking "since I can't make 3 sets of attacks they are essentially doing very little". Essentially Barracks are like the opposite of Guard Stations.

Right now I'm contemplating scrapping my Guard Stations. While they do allow me to appear to be the best attacker or among them in +/-, I wonder if all I'm really doing is encouraging the enemy to hit other provinces in my kd with no Guard Stations. In that sense, Barracks or Hospitals would be a better choice. I really dislike a large part of the benefit of Hospitals going to waste on Undead by the reduced losses are still the main draw and they are incredibly potent at what they do, especially if the war drags on. I'm even tempted to run 20% Hospitals and 5% Dungeons or add 5% Stables in exchange for Guard Stations.

[noobium]

Barracks would depend on what races/personalities you are playing with, and whether the rest of your kingdom can hit as fast as you. Otherwise, the only value to having barracks is to be sure of having the fastest possible attack time, so that no one can beat your armies home and you will be able to ambush any hit that could be ambushed. Merely hitting faster is pointless if it means making too many suboptimal hits, and getting fat sooner.
If wars go on past min time then barracks can be more useful, either as a defensive measure by reducing the window of damage from a chain, or as a way to maximize gains if war is already decided.

I generally prefer to be able to leave my incoming acres unbuilt for the first 18-24 hours of war, in order to figure out how the war will go and what I should build. With that in mind, it is beneficial to pick buildings that you know for sure are going to be useful, and to account for two uniques of growth. Hence, 25-30% TG are going to be useful, since there is rarely such a thing as enough offense.

Based on what you've written so far, I'm thinking you're playing against primarily ghettos, so the need for guardstations is even less than normal. If people are just random grabbing and maxgaining, you might as well laugh at them and enjoy free landdropping+gbp. It's great when people do things like that for you. ^_^

[Shadowjack]

Hehe. Yes it is very tempting to exploit them and enjoy a small number of easy war wins. But using highly exploitative but bad strategies, such as 50% Homes, will not teach me how to compete against higher tier competition. I suspect that next age my kingdom will perform fairly well and face much stronger opponents. Basically my story is that I landed in a kd with a good deal of vets but enough holes in the roster to keep them from going too far. I returned to the game with a friend and we got lucky and landed some solid vets that joined our kd. So all of a sudden a weak kd has had a considerable boost and the enthusiasm is quite high. We went from 0 war wins prior to my joining to absolutely flattening the last 2 wars and I suspect the next war will be much of the same. So next age should be pretty tough in terms of challenge.

I'm tempted to play it safe and go for more sustainability by using 15% Hospitals and 10% Watchtowers. That is so conventional it makes me cringe :D But it is super safe and allows me to transition well in war, instead of using an exploitative/exploitable front heavy attack that can be completely torn to shreds by anyone with a brain :P It's kind of silly because I bet if I have 0% WT they won't even touch me and then I'll regret having them. However if they do target me with ops and I have 0% WT that would clearly suck. One thing that really bugs me about WT is if I use them and someone else doesn't, the enemy thieves will just hit them instead, meanwhile I'm sitting with something worse than 10% Barren Land... It's the same issue I have with Guard Stations. You can't hit me for optimal gains, so hit my fellow province. Even though I loathe being wasteful with bonuses and using Hospitals, it does always have great value to use them and they can really save my army when chained.

[noobium]

Province management is a very small part of the game... if you're interested in playing at a higher level, you should be looking at kingdom-level strategies more than province strategies. Someone can run the best possible province for their kingdom, but a single active and skilled province is only going to marginally improve a kingdom if everyone else keeps doing the same thing. The best thing a skilled province manager can do is lead by example.

At a province level, in anything that isn't aiming to be a competitive growth kingdom anyway, a big pile of offense and heavy TG is win 99% of the time, in any situation involving hitting stuff. A big pile of offense is a given. The problem many ghettos make is that they use their offense in horribly suboptimal ways, don't arrange chains properly, often make selfish decisions in attacking, don't pay attention to economy at a kingdom level, and usually lack discipline and game knowledge at a kingdom level. The results of these is that ghettos walk into traps a decent kingdom strategist would see a mile away, make questionable decisions on slaying and funding dragons, run out of runes due to poor distribution, and fail to utilize anywhere near the full t/m potential available to them. t/ms in the ghetto are notoriously ineffective due to bad leadership or undisciplined players (the latter i've been guilty of...), which gave rise to the notion in ghettos that everyone should be running suicide offense and throw it at each other aimlessly... etc. etc.

Kingdoms that compete at high levels, by and large the province strategies they use are little different than what an average ghetto can run. Most ghettos have figured out how to pump and that high offense is win, even if the implementation is not as effective as a more organized kingdom. Where ghettos fail is from piss poor coordination, and a lot of that is simple things like failure to intel-share, attackers not using ops, t/ms picking silly ops at the wrong times, and failure to take the time to build up science. Fixing these things would help ghettos win a lot of their wars, even with bad province management decisions and spotty activity.

[tiggis]

Meh.
The only thing attack undead Cleric needs is:


TG - 20%
GS - 15%
Hosp - 20%
Guild - 10%
Tower - 5%
TD - 10% (run 3tpa raw)
Rax - 20% or Banks or some combo of banks and armories it does not really matter.


Undead attacks, and keeps attacking. offense should never be home. Economy does not matter, peasants do not matter, Kill kill kill. Spread plague and cause misery.

Go into the war forum and talk crap.. draw ire and attacks and if you get chained you did your job.

[Shadowjack]

Thanks again. I think my kingdom is fairly well coordinated now that our roster has filled out in a favorable way.

[noobium]

why u td on undead.

[Suur]

I definately see Undead running Homes too. Expecially Undead/Rouge as it can kidnap too to re-pop. But why not even Tactican.
A KD with Undead core running 20-40% Homes. It is pretty hard to control with FBs as you cant chain them all at once and cant FB them all. But this is not the main reason of course. As mentioned earlier here you build them to pump and draft very high and have more troops. I normally draft to around 80-85% with 20-30% Homes. Add here decent BE and Housing sciense that combined with those Homes will gives you awesome pop and still decent BE despite of high draft. You last longer in war when you are not chained at the beginning of course. As whole KD you have way more troops than the opponent at same size. When chained you dump those extra def spec you have (for example if you put this extra pop into def) into dragon. Also when you get chained you can keep slightly more troops than without Homes so they also work as GS a little. I personally put incoming acres into more TG more Barracks and start war with rather lower TG. But I do not raze homes. Imagine what happens if I do it at 85% daft. Usually war do not start so suddenly of course and you are probably allready gained some acres and your draft is lower by the declaration time and you allready have more peasants. I have been FB target too in last 3 wars and it took them a lot of time to get my peasants under control. Definately it needs more organized FB. And the enemy KDs where not completely noobs. 2/2, 2/2 and 3/4 WW KD-s. As I am Rouge so I was able to kidnap some peasants back after their wave so they never got me under 7K peasants. But even when not Rouge you attack and get peasants too and when all Undeads running Homes its pretty much hopeless to get them all under control considering you probaly have some more important things to do as mage to run NM waves, cast MS maybe.

[tetley]

Plz get rid of the homes. They are just awful on an attacker.
That's a lot of stables, 8-12% is a bit more reasonable.
You want 10-15% WTs so you don't get wrecked by NS etc.
Please get 12-15% hospitals as well. They are good regardless of your undead bonus.
Don't bother with forts.
Get some dungeons, it's just a strict boost to your offense.

UD tact I would run:
20% TGs
20% GS
15% Hosp
15% WTs
11% stables
2% dungeons
10% guilds
7% towers
Any flex on the hosps/wts/stables/towers, I would put the excess into GS I guess.

[noobium]

I don't know why anyone would want to run anything but absurd offense, until the developers realize they made offense too overpowered.

[Bishop]

Overpowered defense is worse.

[noobium]

Overpowered defense is worse.

Offensive power is overpowered compared to econ or defensive buildings on attackers, and the dominant strategy is just to cram as much offense as possible on a province and **** everything else. Only during war do other building types start to be really useful for an attacker, and there are options besides offense cramming. Of course defense wins wars, imo that is how it should be. (I'd still say that offense is way too strong after the big defense nerf, and it is way too easy to destroy provinces through ops or attacks, but that's something else entirely...)

If I'm Undead, the best safeguard against being land chained is more offense for more incoming acres (or better yet, the ability to split between landgrabs and massacre), and maybe barracks. GS have uses for kingdoms that want to keep their acres in peacetime, but if I'm a warring ghetto I don't give a crap about acres. Against a chain, even high GS are only sparing 3-4 hits, and for a province with high off:def they are still going to drop to zero defense quick. If I were big and/or had defense worth a damn then I'd favor guardstations, but if I had 20+ hitters who could chain me in range then it's not happening unless I were to nerf myself by running way too much defense.

[Suur]

Decent defense for a bigger UD is not completely useless. The bigger you are relatively in your own KD the more dpa you should run as the opponent starts chaining from top in most wars. The more def you can dump into dragon + the more it takes them to chain you. High total offense do not always mean that you have more incoming acres every round. The opponent will pick chain targets according to incoming acres they have, the less the better. But more important factor is the later in chain you hit the less incoming you have no matter how good offense u got.