Half Super Thief war build

[Vermesan.Ionut]

This was my first age as a halfer super thief and decided to go with this war build, i want to see other opinions about it.
I have 2.6 RWPA and 9.063 RTPA , Mod TPA 42

Homes 30%
farms 7%
Banks 5%
guilds 10%
towers 3%
TD 30%
forts 15%

My science is

ALchemy 6.9% (24 bpa)
Tools 8.7% (74 bpa)
Houseing 7.1% (119 bpa)
Food 39% (24 bpa)
Crime 84% (199 bpa)
Chan 21% (21 bpa)
My wages now are on 100% cause im in fort and i have 74 DPA, with 200% wages ill have little more i think ill go around 76%-77% DPA.
Can i do it better then this? i mean on build, i know i need alot more science :)

[Vermesan.Ionut]

Oh, forgot to say that my BE is on 84%

[br3nt00]

74dpa is not enough to protect your province, particularly at the beginning of a war. you might consider dropping tpa to 5-6, increasing dpa to ~90+, then as war goes on and your province is secured, increasing your tpa (cheap thieves make this more realistic).

although im not sure as a war drags on you'll need 9tpa, more likely you'll do just fine maintaining 5-6tpa unless you come across some stout enemy halfers.

edit: i also recommend upping your guilds to 12-15% and you'll need more than 7% farms with 30% homes.

with ur 9tpa i doubt you'll want to be spending stealth% stealing food (im guessing you intend to AW/prop enemy T/M's)
and halfers have a lot of self spells to cast, ive found 10% guilds still fails often, and that means less FB's on enemy attackers.

[Vermesan.Ionut]

One thievery op gives me enough food for 1 day, i dont think thats my biggest issue.
The % of guild only affects the duration of spells and success rate on self spells.
The ideea of having more def and after war to switch def with tpa is something ill get in mind, cause some masacress on hostile will rly f.uck me over i think, im rolling the dice here.

[Bukharistan]

Think youre 30% TDs is a bit over the top. 15-20% is enough as a halfer. You already have the 50% racial bonus and thieves are very cheap to retrain.

If you'd invest 15% of that into forts, your def would be good with the army you have now :)

[tetley]

train offspecs and attack undeads/orcs with army out instead. Superthief is dead.

[shadoweminence]

Your WPA is too low. Better to go for 20-30 mTPA and 8-10 mWPA. You will keep your peasants this way and you can afford to retrain thieves during war.

[Persain]

20-25% TD is plenty and you need better science. my theif science is 80% and im playing a mage.

[Vermesan.Ionut]

Thx for the advices.

[noobium]

There is no easy way to defend a Halfling, except for another province to be a more attractive target... and because Halflings lose so much when they are chained, most kingdoms will make sure they are a priority target.

tetley is right - the traditional superthief is dead.

I wouldn't play Halflings unless my kingdom was prepared to feed them lots of money to train thieves during war, which basically implies building a kingdom strat around them and around thief ops... that is dicey at best. (Or I guess if I was bored...) Early war I'd focus more on military and a decent enough TPA to nightstrike attackers... so maybe 3 raw tpa assuming a substantial crime science advantage. I'd want to come into war with enough gc and soldiers to double the raw number of thieves on them, so about 750 gc/acre. I'd want enough gc to do this for most or all of the halflings in my kingdom. I wouldn't play Halflings at all unless I was planning to make offensive thievery a core part of my war strategy.

With that in place, you should have about 18-20 elites/acre and about 8 mounts/acre (10% stables). With forts that should be somewhere between 90-100 mod dpa armies in, but some of those elites will be spent on attacks... early war the best you can hope for is to keep your Halfer away from double-taps.

Probably the best use for Halflings is as a decoy for your actually good provinces to not get landchained, because Halflings themselves suck horribly against being landchained... but since you can control the defense at home for Halfers, it gives your attackers license to play with lower defense, and means that your actually good t/ms like Faery/Elf aren't chained early. Since you enter war without too much tpa, if you are landchained you haven't lost too much, and if you are not landchained you have the potential to mass-train TPA (you did bring money to war I hope).

You have to ask yourself - what is your Halfling doing that is worth the immense investment needed to build them up and keep them safe? If they are playing anything but Rogue, there is an alternative for any role that does what the Halfling does better and cheaper. Since a kingdom that uses Halflings would need to use a lot of them, that is at least 6 province slots that could have been something that isn't garbage.

Most ghettos, even if they somehow get a position where the Halfling would be useful, fail because they can't use any ops that another thief couldn't have done.
Even in the a/t niche I'd rather have a Faery than a Halfling, since Faeries have the actually good t/m bonuses and all the useful spells.

[Vermesan.Ionut]

Last time i played utopia was 10 years ago, and i allways played attacker, now when i came back, i said, what the hell attacker i played all the time and allways wanted to try a super thief and from there u get the picture, and i started at the half of the age. I will surelly wont play a T/M next age, its ****ing boring and needs too manny things to worry about...Thx for the advice once again and one last question...When is this age ending? from my calculation it will end at the end of June real time, am i right?...if anyone knows...

[noobium]

It ends some time in june - the end date is announced a couple weeks beforehand, usually. would estimate about 3 weeks left this age, maybe 4.

edit: I would not train offspecs for Halfling oow unless they were setting up to attack for plunder/science oow, and don't care about land. elites are better for growth and for warring, because halfers need to do a lot to hold on to as much defense as possible. offspecs have a use in war, if it becomes necessary to use the halfers as strong attackers in a long war - by that time, the halfers should be fed soldiers to attain the offense they need to break really tough targets.

[Persain]

noobium our halfers are on 35-38 pop/acre. It can work though and they can self sustain if u design the kd right

[noobium]

the question then is, what are the halflings doing that matters, when a better province can fill that slot and do more with less upkeep? the only way to make halfling really work is to op targets that would be impractical otherwise, and the only efficient way to do that is to feed them thieves.

any ghetto halfling who has not thought along those lines is doing it wrong and is a terrible noob, and any kingdom that is not prepared to manage their economy in a moderately useful manner should stay the hell away from halfling.

[shadoweminence]

I'm doing decent as a halfer this age...basically playing as a fireball/prop machine/dragon slaying machine. Last war I propped around 10k specs from an elf (I was getting 600-800 specs per op) and basically slayed half a dragon all by myself. Between -50% thief training costs and propped thieves, I had no problem maintaining my tpa