Hey guys, kinda new to the game after a long time of not being here. I was wondering, what is the right way to win wars now?
Is it to chain someone down and massacre him to cause him to reset
Go for max gain hits and just trade?
Chain down to a certain size, and leave them, still allowing them to break you as a super small province?
What are you suppose to do to win wars now?
Is there a right way to win a chess game? :)
Every war is different. If you find yourself insistently doing things you'll find yourself losing wars.
Then let us use my current war as an example. Our kingdom is a put together kingdom with a lot of returning players from a long time ago. We spent a long time taking out inactives, and we are in our first war, and still had 2 iniactives(now 4), which I don't think is the problem.
As of the now, the summary shows we have more attacks, less gains. We have smaller gains as well. However in the past 3 days we have switch to pking/massacre as a new strat(as I said, lots of people, new things being tried) to take out their main attackers and causing them to reset.
Some people disagree with this method and say it's useless, to just take someone down to 200 acres, leave them, and they have crap gains(however they are still having good gains, of 30+ acres, per attack). At this point every attacker can pretty much break any other attack and make up to 3 attacks per time.
At this time, there is infighting in the kingdom, as some people say this is a stupid thing to do, and it doesn't help. I am just trying to figure out if it is right, or not.
Obviously the ultimate goal is to come out the winner in any case, but 1. having a clear and concise plan of action is paramount and 2. having the ability to adapt that plan to the ebb and flow of the the engagement is just as important.
In most cases the acre exchange between the bottom is useless and can carry on unnecessarily long. Small things like being observant to how well they are army in/out, in some cases, can be enough of an advantage - so long as you capitalize on the opportunity presented.
Unless you have provinces who are in a position to protect themselves sufficiently enough as to enable them the luxury of massacres, you run the risk of being land locked.
Your situation mirrors the last war I participated in in respect to the ratio of attacks:gains. Our opposition was like yourself (I believe they were able to top our total attacks by 40% odd) however we were always in the lead because we were not fixed on the idea of deep chaining. Often times a semi chain is more effective insomuch that you make far more lasting NW damage.
Also, controlling the oppositions economy should be a top priority for anyone in any given war.
Coming back to my first point though, I'd say (based on what you have said) your KD needs to consolidate it's power within. There is nothing more crippling to a kingdom than dissent.
Without going on and on, the point is there is far more that one can do in an engagement than chaining. To my mind, chaining really only makes up a small (but relatively significant) part of the whole.
TovarishchПусть ярость благородная Вскипает как волна.
#Settlers
A pretty good indicator of winning wars:
-Who has the most materiel for fighting wars? theives, offense mostly. wizards too. money and runes (and the means to produce both). This can be determined very roughly by comparing nw and adjusting for the value of barren acres, but not all of that nw is going to be in useful places and some races are naturally more nw-bloaty than others. (coughdorfcough)
-Who is in the best position economically? having peasants and provinces with unbreakable defense goes a long way towards this, even if suffering a nw gap. BE management is also important, a kingdom with 100% BE on most of its provinces has so many advantages over a kingdom with 70% BE, but it takes some clever province management and a lack of peasant control to be in that position (or the easy way, gold dragon).
-Are there any provinces (and how many) in the other kingdom that are shattered to the point of near-total uselessness? A big undead with no nw range to attack is mostly neutralized, even if they are allowed to hold on to their acres forever. There might come a point where those acres need to be cashed in, but as long as a bloated province cannot present any serious threat, better to just feed off of them periodically. Province killing also neutralizes threats. While disabling particular provinces is useful, it has to be balanced with inflicting damage on a kingdom-wide basis, and the resources necessary to province kill or truly disable a province are often so expensive.
-Can one kingdom put themselves in a position where they can learn attack or massacre and not sacrifice too much of their nw lead? Being in a position where your kingdom can afford to bleed away science and wizards like that can convince a kingdom that is losing that it's not worthwhile to hold out for a withdrawal. This goes back to having large provinces that can't be touched by either of those things.
Basically, it's not worthwhile to get to focused on "chain x, fb y" types of orders and lose track of the wider picture. Landchains are a means to an end (removing defense+tpa and potentially offense), and fireballing is also a means to an end (more complex than that). Everything you do offensively should be seen as a means to an end, not something that will win the war in of itself. So basically, the first one occasionally, the second one is pretty much worthless (but sometimes maxgaining acres is actually the best play for overall damage/survival), and the third one is useful but not always the best course of action.
Things that do not win wars:
-Acres
-Honor
-"deep chains" (ghetto style), especially with new massacre and raze
-Moar/Faster hits or outhitting opponents. (this is a terrible criteria for deciding setup guise)
Palem is right too. Every war is different and many kingdoms only live up to a small fraction of their peak potential. There are however some things that work consistently, or at least are reliable indicators of how the war is going from a birds eye view. What I mentioned is by no means exhaustive but they are things I look for.
The smalls in war are often ignored, but some races (avian, dwarf) are really effective in the small war, and generally a bloated orc is worth less than a chained orc.
I'm not quite sure what you are getting at with this. Is this a variant of deep chain ghetto style, or a concerted attempt to set up a pk? Keeping an attacker to an arbitrary land size all war is useless, especially if that attacker has little or no defense left. Whether early war or late war, the purpose of a landchain is to remove resources, whether they are defense, thieves, peasants, or offense. If a landchain does not remove significant amounts of any of these, then it is doing nothing.However in the past 3 days we have switch to pking/massacre as a new strat(as I said, lots of people, new things being tried) to take out their main attackers and causing them to reset.
Some people disagree with this method and say it's useless, to just take someone down to 200 acres, leave them, and they have crap gains(however they are still having good gains, of 30+ acres, per attack). At this point every attacker can pretty much break any other attack and make up to 3 attacks per time.
3taps maxgain and 1tap directed towards your actual target is a fairly common practice though, when attackers have no defense left to work with. I don't agree with using the 4th hit as a trad necessarily. Usually the pattern I prefer to use is 3tap max and 1tap to bring down a province with high defense, like a faery or halfling. This method is potentially dangerous if the faery/halfer has time to cast or thieve on boosted wpa+tpa, but in the long term it is effective and controlling those provinces. (most of the time, anyway... be careful as a halfass chain can be LL'd back)
If you are in a maxgain war, you'd generally want to match up attacker offenses with the defenses they can break, and try to avoid oversending anything as much as possible. This can result in some pretty janky looking attacks, but in the long term it will be the most effective use of offense to win by attrition. It is especially effective for orcs and undeads to do this. Also note that in such a situation, for races with considerable defense on their elites it might be beneficial to hold some elites back in order to prevent too many easy multitaps, while making 4taps against low defense targets. This has many dangers, but in situations where it is important to close off easy multitaps it is very helpful for shutting down shrunken attackers until defense can be retrained. (If you haven't looked up soldier desertions on the wiki, this would be really important information to have to make this work.)
Even though the small war is often ignored in favor of the ub war, the economy of breakable provinces is important to account for, and needs to be invested in the right things for a long term win. Attackers that train defense too early are just burning perfectly good money, but attackers that train offense can sustain a longer period where landchains are a viable strategy.
chain + build unbreakables
chain is the most efficient means to remove a big offense from being able to inflict much damage in the short term, and ub is useful but a good kingdom will be to shred or contain ubs as well. ubs without the income and t/m outputs (and defense of course) are not all that great.
if i'm building up an attacker as a potential ub they're getting plenty of money to train thieves beforehand, and (hopefully) mage and rune control prevents too many nightmares from landing. otherwise all the defense training in the world is just a waste or worse, a prop farm. ubs that can convert to effective thieves have so much more value.
When there is considerate difference in activity/quality of the 2 kds that war, semi chains and max gaining ends war in minimum time.
When both kds are on equal level both kds disable key provinces either by T/M or deep chains or massacres/razes and after 4-5 real days it starts to show which kds has done better job.
Once you deep chain a province their nw drops and the range of targets they can effectively gain from changes drastically. Plus their offense/defense will also drop because of overpopulation.Originally Posted by Litreofcola
Deep chaining someone and then chain masacring them while they are overpop is just stupid.
massacreing a chained prov is very vital to maintaining peons on core, a good kd will have chained provs fb anything they can with almost no rune cost and super inflated wpa. Ofc you dont mass them till all def has deserted and they have LL'd. If they are nub enough to send d specs to drake early after chain then you massacre and they are in real trouble cause they cant LL when troops are home.
- zilyana -- Future Owner of the coveted Nubhat -- Screw-Up Extroadinaire -
Sure but being familiar with the situation I know a more accurate version of what Litreofcola wants to say is: 1-deep chaining a province 2-deep massacre chaining that province in order to PK and making them reset. This includes having provinces with 100k+ offense sending 4 generals to massacre the same guy with 2k defense and few hundred pezzies for over 24hrs of war.
What makes it even more amusing is the intention and thought that this can be done to each and all attackers of other kd one by one. Especialy when the other kd happens to be larger,more active, and has more provinces.
Last edited by Archan; 05-05-2014 at 21:43.
if the 100k off provs are sending 95k of their off on 2 useful hits then yes, its both feasable and smart to spend the remaining off doing just that, weve spent how many ages now just hitting them for 5 acres so they can continue to fb, when 5 provs massacreing with 2 gens in a wave will destroy 94% of a provinces wpa. Thats it, it will never op again. If it grows and get a few peasants then every prov in ur kd can ns+kidnap it.
Sure 10 massacres is overkill, but you get the idea, 7 massacres is -87% wpa, 6 is -82%. Prolly a better example. If there arent 7 spare generals in a wave then theres something wrong.
Last edited by crease; 05-05-2014 at 21:00.
- zilyana -- Future Owner of the coveted Nubhat -- Screw-Up Extroadinaire -
Of course, the kingdom with more provinces intact and greater capacity to keep hitting will win out. That is why you try to position yourself to be the kingdom with greater capacity for attacking and resisting damage, rather than just assuming that OMG OFFENSE WINS WARAR. Not all war strategy revolves around chaining for overpopulation either.
Eventually though, if a kingdom wars long enough, most attacker provinces are dropped to defense that can be 3x or 4x hit. Defense dies a lot faster than offense, especially spec-based defenses. It is not until offenses start dwindling and thief/mage superiority can be attained that attacker defense can be more stable...
Sounds like you are in the kd we are warring right now =P
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