Heretic

[Panthira]

we calc opponent wpa with munkbot, and i do pen&paper calcs too if i have time.. as i said though, i dont have hard proof with numerical data to make a claim, just a personal observation.. i remember a list with difficulty bars on it from the old times, i think nightmare was the one of the two with full bars there, along with ll..

edit: i actually googled it and found - http://www.utopiatemple.com/utopiagu...l/39/magic.htm - i remember wrong apparently, ll & ms have full bars, but nightmare is VERY close up there too..

Very good. That's about what it seems like when i cast them.

[feast]

Heretic on undead seems just worse than tact, especially if ypu want no losses on Espionage. So tact does same thing and might even save you more theives, because you still do lose thieves on successful ops. NM will be near impossible for ud to land, unless chained. The rune return is decent but again on an attacker race it's not excellent. Not losing wizards is again just ok for attacker. So I don't see how this is better than tact for undead. Imo.

[Caelum]

OP? Idk. Low-risk opping - particularly thievery - is pretty strong but it's still a roll of the dice, while other personality bonuses are more consistent. 20-50% success on thievery, even if it's at basically no risk, is still only 20-50%... and 80-90% success doesn't benefit much from the heretic bonus.

Nightmares makes it a definite choice tho, but lacking a military bonus can make oow rough.

I wouldn't want to nor would I allow a Heretic kingdom to fight on terms favorable to them... dunno why people agree to the arranged war meta in the first place, but arranged war is really favorable for nm casters.

I was only referring to that as something somebody had pointed out that was *part* of it.

[RedPanda]

edit: i actually googled it and found - http://www.utopiatemple.com/utopiagu...l/39/magic.htm - i remember wrong apparently, ll & ms have full bars, but nightmare is VERY close up there too..

Woah, look at all those Elves only spells, like almost all of those spells these days are personality only and high want spells on top of it.

[StratOcastle]

WHY DON'T PEOPLE REALIZE HERETIC IS FREE ESPIONAGE?!

UD / Heretic pls

I wasn't sure if the safe thieves were only applicable doing sabotage. Humans still have QF and the option of sabotage.

@ others. I disagree that concetrated kingdom strats are better than partial hybrid strats provided the hybrid get to kick ass freestyle. I beat the crap out of full blown attackers every age one on one. This doesn't matter unless you're also resisting ops and that's exactly what happens. This also doesn't matter unless you're the same size or smaller than the full blown attacker and that's true also.

Usually I get my ass kicked taking orders in a build I was dictated to follow in a race and personality I was assigned.

[MyNameIsMatija]

I wasn't sure if the safe thieves were only applicable doing sabotage. Humans still have QF and the option of sabotage.

@ others. I disagree that concetrated kingdom strats are better than partial hybrid strats provided the hybrid get to kick ass freestyle. I beat the crap out of full blown attackers every age one on one. This doesn't matter unless you're also resisting ops and that's exactly what happens. This also doesn't matter unless you're the same size or smaller than the full blown attacker and that's true also.

Usually I get my ass kicked taking orders in a build I was dictated to follow in a race and personality I was assigned.

Getting your ass kicked is exactly the point of a uniform KD strat, it's called taking one for the team, a concept you are not very familiar with from what I can extrapolate from your posts.

[2Utopian]

wait wait wait... you mean when I grow to 5k acres in war and end up with 75% barren acres it doesn't mean I had the best province? I got huge cuz I had the best province ever of course right? Kicked the living hell out of exclusively full blown attackers on my rise to glory!

[StratOcastle]

Getting your ass kicked is exactly the point of a uniform KD strat, it's called taking one for the team, a concept you are not very familiar with from what I can extrapolate from your posts.

This'd be wrong. You'd think a guy is greedy but it's how you play that counts. How many guys am I sending aid to. How many enemies I'm engaging to dominate the field. You see, when you guys line up and fight with no regard for your nw zone, bad things happen.

The problem is that too many kingdom prescribe to colonial tactics. So if you're the best at colonial tactics you win. My point is when you break free from these antiquated tactics that good things happen. It's not my fault that logisticians consider their art as strategy.

Do you know why I run cleric so often? Because I get in there. If I didn't I'd be some UB right? You have to understand, age in and age out, climbing charts, even going solo that I've set out to see if I've been kidding myself. The results so far are that I'm not kidding myself.

You don't have to take one for the team. You should be creating disparity at every turn vs your enemy. Taking one for the team often means the theater hasn't been considered as a whole. You think I don't hit assigned targets? I do. You think I turtle when the job is to attack? No. Even in the small ghetto I'm in now it was me suiciding with my faery cleric. I have no attachments to my well being, I have attachments to my kingdoms well being. Part of that is being healthy enough to jam attackers who'd otherwise be crapping down our t/ms throats.

The enemy has a say in any provinces well being, but I've learned there are less reasons to comply than most realize.

[MyNameIsMatija]

Well my statement is correct then, you don't agree you should get some nice ass whooping from time to time just to keep the juices flowing?

[FATstrat]

Generally the best provinces in war are the ones that get destroyed the most. The opposition will target your biggest threats, so if you are coming out of war in great shape with loads of acres it normally means you were not a big enough threat to be high on the oppositions chain/TM list. I'm not saying this is always the provs fault but it's certainly nothing to brag about.

[RedPanda]

Getting your ass kicked is exactly the point of a uniform KD strat, it's called taking one for the team, a concept you are not very familiar with from what I can extrapolate from your posts.

Taking one for the team is ok, but taking one for the team with a crappy KD strat build is stupid. Especially if your skill goes beyond the KD strat build, the only time when it is OK is when the players skill is average then following the KD strat is ok.

That and I have yet to see a hybrid attacker strat either, and honestly a T/M is a hybrid and if one can do a T/M one can do a A/T or a A/M.
(A/T/M is a whole different story)

[StratOcastle]

wait wait wait... you mean when I grow to 5k acres in war and end up with 75% barren acres it doesn't mean I had the best province? I got huge cuz I had the best province ever of course right? Kicked the living hell out of exclusively full blown attackers on my rise to glory!

Those were by orders not by my hand. You're confusing the attributes of kicking ass. I knew exactly what to do and it wasn't to grow into a land farm. Does that sound like nw zone domination? Nope. I'll have you know at no point in my ascension did I request aid either. How about 8 million gold my first pump? I sent that stuff around for t/m protection, dragon contributions, etc. Orders are orders, but i eyeballed the entire pump.

Guess who volunteered to give over 3k acres in taxes? Because I know i can get mine back. Being sure isn't because I dream it, it's because I do it. I give credit where credit is due. FS handled the logistical superiority of Pyro admirably.

Like I said in 63: I wasn't hiding and I played my way solo. Enemies always got the first attack because I only do retal. I posted my struggles in the forum. Ask any kingdom if I ever asked for help while going solo, even under heavy duress.

It's called teamwork and it works. You have to let your people shine if you want the best from them. Jaded monarchs who are use to self seeking adventurers I understand and I try not to play in said kingdoms unless they're recruiting for an age off. I see the mechanics, thank them and move on. Oh, and how many invites did I contribute? I remember 5. So the stink of insinuating my greed is something I attend to.

It was 80% by the way. How good are you?

[2Utopian]

Some day we should play together, the ultimate challenge! You can judge on your own. I even tried to join noobiums kingdom to see his greatness in action but sadly he rejected me and disbanded in like 7 weeks...

[StratOcastle]

We should. I'm a garbage strat builder on the surface, but I keep my peripherals intact.

If I was to give advice to kingdoms of measurable worth it's to let your attackers run higher guilds to conserve rune usage. Part of the orc mistique the last few ages is the combination of RM and CS. Keep those up all war and the enemy t/ms have to put in an honest days work.

[noobium]

Hybrid is helped next age by relatively lower thief/wizard nw, so provs with a lot of t/m power aren't so heavily penalized on defense.

I'm still of the belief that there is no such thing as a "hybrid", because wpa/tpa and land itself fluctuate heavily for any prov that expects to hit for acres. There are however personalities which lend themselves to opping, and races with a slant towards t/m - though it's crucial to point out that Elf and Halfling, at least by age 68 rules, have some traits that are perfectly fine for a straight-up attacker, so it is not axiomatic that you're picking those for magic/thievery respectively.

Getting a single province crushed is never a good thing, uniform kd strategy or not. Don't know what some people in this thread are smoking.
The problem with going solo is that it usually means wrecking individual provinces is easier and has a greater impact, and some setups (like say orcs) rely on having lots of provinces run that to function properly, and lining up attack time, power, and troop loss bonuses (so you're pretty much locked into selecting Warrior, Tact, or Cleric on your provinces in order to make them work best).
Even then it's perfectly fine to run outliers and specialists that rely on the player's skill at micromanagement, like say running a few avians in the middle of a strong attacking setup... and while the standard is to run the same personality on all 3, splitting the personalities does open some additional options (both direct, and meta options based on how other kingdoms react).
A kingdom full of random province types is a lot harder to operate, especially when you're dealing with high offense provinces that need to line up with each other, but there are advantages to using Virtual Kingdom style wonky setups - far fewer than there are for the unified setups, but advantages do exist. So long as you're wise enough to play your position and work towards a unified goal, you can make alot of picks work okay.

A reason why Cleric is pretty cruddy by the way is that it necessitates playing a fairly bad personality and running a lot of your provinces with it.
Probably the best use for an attacking Cleric would be to run a smaller set of attackers, which would be focused on survival and keeping enemy defenses honest. Something like the 9 attacker 16 defensive setups that were popular for a while is well-suited for attacking Cleric. Even then, I'd probably prefer warriors...