Prop vs AW

[Dan4GS]

So running halfer rogue for the first time in a long time...most of my kingdommates insist that Prop is the way to go. With the TD change this age, running 20% TD +5 rTPA will give great mod TPA, allowing us to send 90% of our thieves w/out great risk of losing tons in case of failure.

I've advocated using our stealth to AW enemy mages so we establish magic dominance early in war and protect ourselves from getting fireballed/MS'ed.

Which do you think is more effective and why? We're a mid-level kingdom, 21-23 provinces normally, mediocre activity.

[Palem]

depends on a lot of things

If you're trying to damage a target's wpa, AW hands down. It's reliable.
If you're just trying to soak up honor and actual "gains" are less important, Prop is a nice option.

[Shockwave]

prop is skrong overall...aw is skrong for killing wizzies.

[noobium]

AW is only good if your kingdom can plug lots of them into a dedicated spellcaster. If it takes too long, or worse if you burn out your TPA in the attempt, then the AW was basically wasted.

Chances are your op of choice is going for be nightstrike or greater arson to remove watchtowers, unless you have enough rogues to AW a target properly AND you know your success rate will be good. The high-level ops aren't always the best (and sometimes basic rune theft is a higher priority than anything else, especially if you have a core that can burn their mana w/ good success rate).

The best use for Prop is to target someone with high TPA (assuming yours is better and you can retrain losses), and attempt to remove thieves. The other things either have consistent alternatives or just flat-out suck (prop soldiers or elites for instance, yuck), but thief stealing stands alone and the returns are fairly high.

[Shockwave]

if a rogue is stealing runes, your op allocation needs work. and why wouldn't you want to take someone's elites? yuck? you're insane. greater arson might be good, i'm not sure how much it got buffed.

[smercjd]

I'd vote prop > AW. But as others have mentioned AW is more reliable at accomplishing the ONE goal of hurting wpa. Prop will hurt wpa -- overall not quite as much as straight up AW...

From my experience

50 ops (example numbers given to demonstrate relativity)
Prop: Steals 300 wizards, 800 thieves, 150 elites, 1200 specs, 10 soldiers
AW: Kills 500 wizards

So yes with prop it's likely that you won't dmg the wpa quite as much - maybe even only 1/2 as much or close to...but you'll also dmg TPA (making it easier to continue propping or switch to AW), and military. On top of damaging those things - you'll GAIN them to your own army. Increasing your own wpa, tpa (for even better prop), and if you overpop youself with troops you have options (send to dragon, release as soldiers to aid a KD mate, release into pez, whatever).
My vote goes to prop...but who knows...maybe my limited 1.5 months of playing rogue I just got kinda' lucky with it...

[Dan4GS]

Thanks for all the replies! I think the KD goal for rogues is prop to dragon slay, I just didn't have much success with it last time I played rogue...but that could of been because I wasn't sending enough thieves.

Again, thanks all for weighing in.

[noobium]

the principle i was getting at is that the strongest ops aren't always the most effective, and if you want to throw your stealth to AW a target who will block over 70% of those ops, then AW winds up being not-very-good. same with prop. i'm assuming you're fighting t/ms with something resembling competent t/m defense and economic management. if you're left with no viable target for the high-end ops, then...

this of course has little to do with rune theft generally being more tpa-intensive and difficult than nightstrike, which are reasons why you might pick a rogue to do those instead of a non-rogue. i just picked one low-level op that can be more useful, given that an AW run at the wrong time is less than worthless.

prop vs. elites gives such bad returns that it's not very impressive. i don't know the maximum but i usually get some ridiculously low percentage... 0.2% elites, meh. there are better ways to damage military or build up your own.

[noobium]

re: prop to dragon slay - it's sometimes useful, but way too random to rely upon.

[JuiceD]

As others have stated - It depends on your situation...

If you want to get free draggy fodder, or recoupe dragy losses - then props away, although it is totally random, so damage is spread out and you cannot pick which u get - or if you will get any at all!! A good prop run on a GOOD target (in prime nw range, army home, and if u can find one with a rainbow army (o+dspec, and elites home) usually nets you a decent amount of specs, a few elites - and often even thieves close to losses.... I have often ehard some of my halfers tpas increasing by .5 during a prop run (but towards EoA)...

If you want to snipe asmuch honor away as you can from a target that you know is going to be WD from war - or you yourself are goig to WD, then prop is generally your best bet on a high honor target, although testing wich op gets you more is the smarter option :p

Prop can also be seen as a 'GREEDY' op... if your are not using your free army gains to help with draggys, or aiding solds, or anything that could be considered 'teamwork' ..and if you are ignoring t/m orders (fully or partially, and either secretly or blantantly) to do prop runs - for honor + free army - some (myself included) would look at this as a very selfish or greedy act! since it is only benefitting yourself / your prov, and this is a team game after all ;)


If you want to drive a mystic absolutely batturd crazy mid - late age.. kill all his wizzies ;)..... this is SUPER helpful if you run into a insanely high wpa mystic, who is putting constant ms on your mystics (never a good situation).... or if you can catch a mystic who has made a late building convert for some reason and has low to no WT.....

in my experiences (playing in the midle of the pack warring) 2 HA rogues can effectively CRIPPLE a mystic with 1 full mana run of AW and maybe abit of cleanup ops after just to be sure...... I do not remember at this exact moment but our halfers usually do AW down until a xx amount of wizzies or fewwer have been killed - indicating a wpa of 2ish or similar... im sure u can find (the number suggestions)them somewhere in forums here....

a IMPORTANT THINGS TO REMEMBER;
When you do this you have to be careful - if you AW 5 or 10k wizzies, that province now has 5 or 10k more peasants within a brief amount of time... and can quickly turn into a GC FARM for your enemy.. and if your not paying attention / throwing the odd FB / storms / chastity at this now FURIOUS mystic (with worthless wizzies) he will be doing everythign he can to make asmuch moeny for the rest of his kd, and or any draggys they may be tryign to fund :p (obviously provs should be doing this always but when u light a fire under them then even mroe so! :p)

but as anything else in the game there is always variables to try and watch for and/or avoid ( FOR BOTH OPS)... WT's... higher than normal mystic tpa... mods...

[noobium]

If you have to ask whether your players will do greedy (and stupid) ops you have bigger problems than choosing between Prop and AW.

Biggest mistakes made by Rogues is assuming that they're going to succeed all of their ops all the time and everything is going to be awesome, and neglecting anything but running offensive ops. Even for Halflings, there is a lot more to making a Rogue good than this one-dimensional approach.

[ZenithSun]

AW wins wars (always pez control the enemy mage after AW). Prop is shiny and fun and very situational but can work but unreliable.
However both are useless because Rogue is useless.

No real mage should run less than Max WTs with reasonable TPA and this is enough to fail a rogue with 40mod tpa on AW. However, the point is moot, because you will be networth-controlled out of range of the enemy Elves in hostile anyway.

Sad thing about Rogue, (I just played Ha/Ro for two rounds), even with double-TDs it is broke. I cannot believe that Faery just got CS. Fae was already pretty invuln being able to maintain good tpa/equivalent science/some WTs or TDs last round. Last thing they needed was 25% autofail.

Wars for Halfer Rogue go like this: Trad march in hostile x 2, War declared: immediately peasant controlled, then one further Trad and a mass and you can totally ignore them. Admittedly you can war noobs who leave a Ha/Ro alone but any decent kd will disable rogues immediately.

Fae Rogue is still a reasonable pick but any kd with elves is going to peasant control you, MS you, and grind you down too, so you lose the econ bonus of being Fae.

Sadly, if you picked Rogue (admittedly I don't know what new arson/GA will be like), you should restrict yourself to high-impact ops coordinated with the kd, these are Runestealing (gold if available), Riots, Kidknapping and Night Strike. You can ignore AW and Prop if you really want to do reliable damage to a good kd's TMs.

RIP Rogue until fae is fixed.

tl;dr Night Strike only

[noobium]

this age (with GA and the huge buffs to Rogues) even building wts isn't a sure protection... just an added level of security.
also if fa/rogue (or any faery) isn't keeping up every magic defense buff possible nor taking steps to limit what mystics can do to them, they're being stupid. (also why the f are you trying to control a competent faery through magic in the first place, much less with fireball? if you have to cast on them sure, but faeries counter magic better than they counter thievery...)

Rogue is easily the best personality this age, got absurd buffs because of people who either want Rogue to an easy rape province button (as if it wasn't good enough for that already), for for Rogue to be more competitive in growth kingdoms (and as far as I know Rogue was already good for growth kingdoms). The problem many low tier kingdoms (and some kingdoms higher up) have is that they're not picking effective ops, because they aren't smart gamblers.

If I'm Halfling/Rogue, I usually want to be in the kingdom giving button rather than the kingdom receiving it. The reasons why should be apparent if you are a reasonably competent kingdom, though it isn't a universal case it is certainly far more favorable to the Halfling if their kingdom is in control of hostile.

tl;dr: If you're relying on one or two ops in all circumstances, you are a terrible Rogue and your kingdom strategist should be fired.

[Crazyloon]

I would usually only prop when I can do it to provinces with high amounts of specialists (Elf, Undead [especially if their offense is home]), then make use of those specialists. Or sometimes you get lucky and the enemy Faery neglects proper thievery defense.

If you have Elves in your KD, you can ask them to Mystic Vortex on a Faery to pull off Clear Sight, though this is not going to be easy. Clear Sight is amazing, but you'll see a lot more Faeries who think it's going to save them this age, who then neglect to put up a reasonable amount of Watch Towers. If you catch this, tear down CS and Prop away. You'll (hopefully) take a ton of thieves from them, which is arguably more effective than killing their wizards. Obviously this will be much more effective on non-Rogue this age because of the cheap thieves and lower mTPA on non-Rogue.

If you're targeting Elves and Prop can be successful, I would say it's going to give much better returns than AW. Killing an Elves wizards only goes so far to reduce their effectiveness. Taking their defense and removing their ability to use thievery well is much nicer IMO. Once the defence is low enough you can molest them with attackers.


Be warned however. I did a prop run last age on a Dwarf whose specialist defense was just high enough that a couple attackers couldn't double tap him with army out. I hardly "failed" any of my operations, but about half of them were 0 soldiers or 5-10 elites at a time (this was at 1.2k acres). Had I done Night Strike instead, I would have probably brought him in range of double taps.

Needless to say, it was a major waste of stealth. I got frustrated so I moved on to a Faery who ran Thieves Dens instead of Watch Towers. That was much more effective and it only takes about 5 successes and a ton of luck to hit thieves before you're removing 1 TPA fully. At 1.2k acres you will get somewhere around 200-500 thieves each success.