problems in war with suicidal undead

[liubeeli]

My issue with the undead during wars is that they are hard to take out of commission, you can chain them down but its hard to get rid of their elites. They basically end up kamakazing to great effectiveness due to the difference in land sizes making it hard to whittle them down. My question is what kind of strategy have you used or would suggest to deal with these type of situations? I will have a more specific description of our current war down below

We have more attackers around 1k than they do(more provinces over 1k acres too). But we are a losing by a decent amount in land. We have a gold dragon and they have a emerald dragon on us. I have seen several times people having a BE lower than 70%. We have chained down more provinces than they have, but because they are undead they can make up by attacking back. Their bigger provinces are starting to attack less and be more cautious making it frustrating trying to do max gains. I really can't think of a strategy to take us to victory.

[Landro]

there are several options:
- ambush as much as you can to kill their offense
- massacre them to get rid of their peas, thieves and wiz. This will cripple their income even further and open them up for ops.
- if they have little incoming, use trads instead of massacres to limit their max pop. this might force them to release elites
- have people send spare offense at them if their def drops low enough. (there's little reason for people not to make 4-5 hits per unique)
- have T/Ms hit them if their def drops low enough

also, kill the emerald unless you expect them to be able to send a new one in short time

[skoyl12]

Undead and orcs are really efficient. Since as you say you have chained more you can do really deep chains with your spare generals taking them down to 60-80 acres one by one.

[noobium]

ways to deal with undead:

- leave enough defense home on all provinces to limit the hits from chained undead. basically this requires having a setup of races that can turtle effectively (anything not named Undead, Orc, and Avian basically, with Dwarf being ify).
- with that in place, make sure to landchain an undead deep if they're going to be chained early, in order to drop them to a size where they are forced to to release offense
- cover all of your provinces against Land Lust. this is much easier with noob undead that refuse to build up their channeling science, and with Human/Dwarf which have an easier time acquiring good channeling science.

Those three things together work really well to neutralize undeads, but smart and properly undeads will know this and build their provinces to resist this. A good undead province should have really good channeling science even if their raw wpa is lacking. After that, the undead should make smart attacking choices, and when fighting turtles the undead should only bother with quality hits and hits that are guaranteed to cause overpopulation, and also know when to hold back ghouls that are not needed for a useful attack.

So long as they undead cannot target your top, you should be in decent enough shape. With your smaller provinces, it should be possible to use nightstrike and robbery to weaken the small undead, while enemy undeads do not have that option.

I'd be thinking more about controlling enemy econ at the top, in order to prevent their top from being a threat. The undeads themselves are fairly easy to control economically.

[liubeeli]

So what I am getting is chain them ward, we have a bit hard time with some of their bigger provinces because they have so huge t/ms. Not sure how to deal with them. I was figuring I shouldnt worry abt the lower chained provinces climbing back up, don't think they have the economy to support any real growth,

[tetley]

It sounds like your bigger problem is their unbreakable TMs rather than their suicider undeads.
Gold dragon is bad against undeads, if they are really what you are worried about. If you need to kill their offence, emerald might be your best bet, or sapphire if you can op them.
If you have the coordination, try to not hit the UDs, then chain them the tick they get home. This will force them to release elites likely since their peasants won't die from a long overpop.

Just let undeads get land fat, NS their defence away, then chain them easy. The more bloated they get, the worse their gains are typically, and it doesn't make them significantly harder to chain if you have a decent spread of attackers.

[noobium]

^ what he said (at this point in the war)

deep chains (or any chains) against undead only work if ALL of your provinces can attain securable defense, which apparently is no longer the case; and it helps to have the undeads bigger and your attacker core smaller in order to inflict sufficient damage.

i would say gold dragon is fine in this spot, as a means to weaken the big t/ms. it will do next to nothing against those undeads, but it does rob them of some building choices. gold dragon is really pro-thievery due to weaker td and watchtowers, so if it is possible to build up your unbreakables with good tpa, it is possible to target their unbreakable t/m directly (preferably with the gold being tanked for a while, and a sapphire ready to launch when that gold dragon expires).

whatever you do, you would really want to slay the emerald dragon, unless they have another emerald ready. tanking emerald for too long is going to cost more in lost troops and gains than you'd have spent slaying the dragon outright. if you have controlled peasants throughout the war and have held the advantage, it is helpful, but bear in mind that the most useful peasants are going to be on t/ms rather than undeads.

one of the best ways to handle undead is to let them bloat to a point where your t/m (faery and elf) can pick up their acres, stacking land and peasants where it is going to be useful and moving land away from your attackers that can't use it anywhere near as well.

[skoyl12]

Well, if they have unbreakables and since you ask about chaining undead i'd say that you lost this war. My advice is try to align armies (since you have more mid attackers) kill dragon, do a max gain wave and then withdraw. That way at least you can get some profit out of it

[StratOcastle]

IMHO Landro is giving the best advice in accordance with actual lower tier play. No offense guys but I've lived it and coordinated actions are very hard to pull together. I've averaged traveling to 5 kingdoms an age for 4 of the last 6 ages. Even my kingdom is 10 years in and the veteran core themselves build for independent action. You'd know if you were in a coordinated kingdom.

If I may I'll add my one solution to isolating provinces: add explosions if you can land them. In a perfect world the blanket would be explosions, greed, storms, riots generated by non-mystics. But try going deep in ops one at a time if you're the only one doing them. In other words, put as many of these spells on one guy before moving to the next.
The reason you need, and I mean need, explosions on these guys is because their unbreakables have nothing better to do than op you and send aid. They probably have the next dragon paid for, and that is from experience I assure you.

Good luck, ymmv. If you can coordinate then you can do much more.

[tiggis]

As a lifelong undead player.
If you do not finish the chain (make me release my offense), I will make you regret chaining me at all.

Undead requires deep chains, because anything less just ups their WPA/TPA and allows them to suicide and collect aid all war.

[Cry0]

You have to adjust your expectations most likely, taking a heavy attacker out of commission usually means you either chained them while their army was home or you chained them after they hit and they had no (or minimal) acres coming in.

Typically you aim to simply chain attackers deep enough to force them to release offense to attack and thus drop their max offense below your TM defense and create unbreakable provinces.

In a longer war you can start to really work people over where you take them deep and then all your own chained provs and their chained provs can circle jerk eachother in chained province land.

In your typical 48-72 hour ghetto war it is a race to drop offenses below your TM provinces and then if possible start to hit into their TM provinces.

I would actually caution against having TM put hits into chained provinces if those provinces are undead or are plagued. Getting plague on a TM can mean the difference between being UB or not.. also with likely no hospitals you are generally stuck with plague for an annoyingly long time or you have to use natures blessing to dump it instead of doing ops, either outcome sucks.

[StratOcastle]

@Cry0,Not to mention plague on your t/m curtails aid.

[GodsLittleCow]

Goal is to remove offense from undeads:

1) Hit them with armies home - kills on elites are huge (use pf, etc). Chaining during this time is also hugely effective, since with no incoming acres, every acre lost relates directly to losing population no hope of recovery except landlust
2) Chain them while they have low incoming acres. Sometimes you have to chain undeads twice if they had high incoming acres the first time
3) NS while troops home
4) Stealing war horses (once again, while troops home) is very effective to remove offense from an already chained undead.
5) If they are running super low defense, dropping a few massacres into them is very effective. It stops them from landlusting back up, and you can more safely ignore them - as they gain acres they become super bloated landfarm.

[2Utopian]

3) NS while troops home

Learn mechanics, NS hits both troops out and home.

[GodsLittleCow]

Learn mechanics, NS hits both troops out and home.

Oh yeah, I totally knew that...except for the idiot half of me. Prop is affected by troops home, but not NS correct?