First War Strategy

[madtyres]

I've always wanted to ask this since my old kingdom always seems to struggle with winning the first war, but usually coast along very well once we are out of that teething stage

What is the "best" general strategy at small sizes like 500-700 acres?

Our usual approach is to pre war mass 1-2 Mystics +/- hit some Rogues, then once in war, deep chain the most dangerous attackers, while selecting fb/NS targets. Usually we chain 2-3 TMs as well. Of course the strat varies depending on whether we are giving button or receiving.

Now this generally works in later wars, but at start of age some unique problems exist:

1) Rune supply for fb control on top of MS blanket - even with 25-30% towers and stealing it is barely sufficient for good pop control
2) Low land - chains must be really deep in order to hurt = waste offense
3) Attackers quickly run out of offense to hit TMs

So what often happens is that while we focus on deep chaining (and we do it fast), the other enemy provs tend to run away scot free due to our lack of TM control (fb-wise. we always do blanket MS + greed +riots).

Any ideas as to a way we can improve on general strat?

[noobium]

max gains.

[Bukharistan]

In our first war of the age we just concluded I ordered quick semi-chains on every wave. The idea was to pull away as many attackers as possible from our top NW-register, making it near-impossible for them to hit my big attackers at one stage. They went for deep-chaining, failed, and payed the price for it.

[Vermesan.Ionut]

Semi-chain army home and max gain.

[madtyres]

Thanks for replies so far, any explanation for those strats being superior?

[citadela01]

early age/oop wars are fairly specific.
Hit ppl with troops home and semichain while maintaining maxgains as much as possible.
NS'in untrained sols is extremely rewarding, other than that use your stealth to rob vaults/towers and riot high pop provs.

Focus on pop/aconomy control and taking land, win will happen on its own.

[Shockwave]

Early wars are tough, they basically boil down to which side is more active. no one is drafted super high so chaining isn't as effective. NS is pretty much worthless except for hitting soldier stacks, better off stealing gold/runes like citadel said. attackers generally have low def, so if you have problems with t/ms running away hit them first. it's all situational really, as any war is.

[claritinclear]

Just finished our war. I can attest that trying to deep chain doesn't work. Chaining but not using all your hits on the target so you can still max gain at least one or two armies is ok. But honestly I think simply max gains and t/m support is good enough at this stage. Guess I will have to wait and see for myself next war since we are still pretty small.

[Persain]

Thanks for replies so far, any explanation for those strats being superior?

oop wars are about econ. semi chaining keeps the enemy low on peasents and unable to keep drafting/training. t/ms wont have enough science or raw wpa to be that effective and since everyone is low drafted its nearly impossible to cause desertions.

[noobium]

a lot depends on your setup as well, and what it is good at, in addition to how early (oop? end of week 1?). if you have lots of rogues or sages, you're likely going to go with a thievery-focused strategy for your first war, if you have merchants your strategy will be focused on economic superiority, and the attackers will probably want to exercise their early troop advantage. however, just about everyone benefits from playing a kind of a/t early on, because in the early age useful TPA levels are a lot more fluid than they are later, and thieves don't suffer from the same attrition losses as your regular troops.

if you know you're going to war early, some people prefer to build max guilds in order to prepare useful wpa; however, any mystic is going to beat that (and of course Mystics should be cranking out huge wpa). still it's a good practice to get good guilds early on (30% minimum, preferably 40-50%), simply because ramping up wpa is one of the best things you can do during the first week, whether you grow or stay at a relatively small size. if you're trying to go for pure growth you might drop to 20%, but definitely want a plan to raise wpa at some point.

also if any kingdom has huge cows, for god's sake don't wave into them unless you have decent cows of your own, or some way to match the cows' economic outputs. if the cow kingdom gives away button it's different, but so many noobs still don't understand how strong big provinces are. building your own cows is impractical unless you are competing for growth charts, and i'd like to think most kingdoms aren't so monumentally stupid, but they still exist apparently...

mostly though, you should be focused on building up your own provinces, and then looking at what the enemy has. it's not about destroying individual provinces, but making sure your provinces are better than whoever you're fighting, and that every province attains the most use out of their networth.

you would probably play faery or halfling as attacker in early wars, or at least you should. i know noobs get in a huff when they're asked to play attacker, but it's really the best way to handle early age unless you are willing to feed up the faery or halfling to a size where their defense will actually matter. elf can play an attack role too, though it's probably better to try and assure they have 1-2k elites and then train up extra offense if it is needed...

generally speaking, you would rather nightstrike big offenses rather than hit them, since at this early stage most provinces are spec-heavy. if there are only a few exceptionally large attackers you might just chain or semi-chain them to remove their defense/pez, but it's usually better to let those big offenses bloat, weaken their off/def through nightstrike, and take the acres once those attackers have bloated tremendously. in order to pull this off, you'd want to be in enough acres and growing well enough so your attacker core has the nw range to hit these bloated targets, and you should only isolate 1-3 provinces in this way.

while kidnap and robbery are useful, most kingdoms aren't going to keep a lot of free gc or runes floating around. while you would prefer to use ns to kidnap where you can, and destroy soldier piles where you can, any excess thief output is likely going to be used to trim the largest offense you can reduce with NS (making sure to account for likely success rate as well). the less defense you need to be technically unbreakable, the easier it is to close out the war. the end goal would be to build defense, along with the thief superiority necessary to make sure your defense doesn't automatically die (and you also have an attack option to make up for your inferior offensive numbers).

this is not a comprehensive analysis by any means, there are way too many variables, but for two typical ghettos approaching each other that refuse to grow or differentiate their provinces in any significant way, it works pretty good...

[madtyres]

Thanks for input. I'm looking at this from the point of view of a mid-top level warring kingdom with good activity (mostly at least). But I guess it can also apply in the ghetto I'm currently in.

Yeah TMs will definitely do opportunistic stealing in addition to the other stuff. But point noted that NS perhaps is not the most effective.

So from a practical POV, semi chain 3-5 provs at a time? Also, is it worth massacring pre-war?

[noobium]

early war - not really worth it to massacre pre-war, there simply isn't enough to destroy (tho imo this applies any time, pre-war massacre sucks unless there is an obvious situation for it). using massacre if the war drags out might be a good idea, but you'd obviously prefer to be winning and have the tpa to capitalize on massacre immediately.

semi-chains will likely happen automatically. it's more like "pick a few targets that you don't want to hit", either because you're letting them bloat or because they're just too small/weak to bother with immediately. the rest is just a matter of doing the thing that is most valuable immediately, and semi-chain is slightly more valuable than strict maxgaining for the purposes of forcing defensive desertions and peasant loss. just note that you should try to direct these semi-chains towards provinces with actual defense as much as possible, and use low-defense targets in order to keep your provinces afloat (and of course, to give your own defense-oriented provinces an easy source of acres).

[Feint]

Yup, agree. I even told my opponent the deeper they chain, the faster they lose. But they dont believe me.

[Zantetsuken]

This early in the age it's still relatively easy to chain t/ms. In most cases this is just as effective if not moreso than massacring at any point during war. At least it seems to be doing my kd wonders so far :) We inevitably drop in acres depending on our opponent's strategy (in our current war, we are finishing off their last T/M while they have been maxgaining for the last 12 hours). Both kds are back to their starting size at declare, so that means we're in much better shape than they are considering we haven't done any maxgaining yet.

And to the people saying deep chaining is ineffective this early on, we chained their monarch from 900 acres to 100 acres 24 hours ago (when we declared). He still hasn't been able to send his army out and dropped from 70k offense to 20k. We've done this to 2 attackers so far and their bank which is why we were able to stay even in acre trades without even maxgaining. Deep chaining works, but it has to be VERY deep and is sometimes not the most efficient use of resources. But we have a couple of warriors at the bottom (me!) running 25% rax and 15% GS to keep them down so it works for us.

[noobium]

fight a kingdom slightly less ghetto.

edit: probably the biggest mistake weaker kingdoms make (at any point in the age) is failure to understand what to do during the crucial early stages of war, as far as what buildings they should build, when and what to train, and a failure to look at kingdom-wide situations.