What makes Nightmare chaining hard?

[clairec]

I see people talking about Nightmare chaining in forums and how hard it is but my KD doesn't do it so I'm wondering what makes it hard? Do you just cast Nightmares on your chain target and then hit in NW order within that tick or is there more to it than that?

[dizzysky]

hardest part about nightmare is making sure you have all your casters of nightmare on casting same tick..then hitting same tick. chain a guy to oblivion with army all nightmared away...and they get mega overpopped as they return each tick. the spell itself is reasonably hard to cast in general..but to make it most effecting..all same tick basically

[Pillz]

I see people talking about Nightmare chaining in forums and how hard it is but my KD doesn't do it so I'm wondering what makes it hard? Do you just cast Nightmares on your chain target and then hit in NW order within that tick or is there more to it than that?

Like dizzy said, the hard part is doing it all in sequence and in one tick. It can take time to NM, and it can take time for attackers to launch, and the longer anything drags on the more strain it puts on the people waiting to hit or they might miss a window of availability.

So faster is better.

Plus if you're relying on NM but you can't land it for whatever reason, it is a bit of a damper, and again as dizzy said nm is a reasonably difficult spells. So for instance, if youre Hybrids and win a war or take a lot of land in a wave/s, your wpa might not be up to the task immediately if you're vultured.

[StratOcastle]

What I find peculiar is that almost every unorganized kingdom(yes, UN) I've travelled through don't use NM. Granted, it's very pretty in organized waves, but you can kickass with it just ad-libbing.

Now, I've played lead off caster in NM waving. I was an elf mystic, back when they had the spell. My first cast was MV(mystic vortex) to knock down protection spells. Once the appropriate defense was wiped out we spammed NM until the number of abandoning troops equalled 100 or less/cast.

We would sometimes back NM with a run of NS(Nightstrike). Leadership never shared specific reasons but rather than completely squash defense was to get the enemy defense down to an appropriate tap count.

Learning Quickly -

Before I joined this particular organized kingdom I had been with one of the last barbarian kingdoms known as Aggression is the Liquor. The way we played was to simply try to outdo each other with no war winning concept to get in the way. One of our quiet loners was playing an elf mystic and was always performing out of his mind as a hybrid. I learned he was using NM alone and marching on his hapless victims.

When I joined the organized kingdom I had just been playing an avian tac. Back then, avian had mystic aura which I had used to spam defensively for a few ages. By playing a build I knew could stall a NM wave I augmented some of my style as the lead off elf caster. This is unwelcome in organized kingdoms, but that's why I don't play in them. Also, they're not as good as you think, they're just organized lol.

Anywho, we started a NM wave against a dwarf and this was the first age dwarves got mystic aura. He obviously was using it to block the NM run, which I told the wave captain but egos being what they are, squandered many resources.

To put this in perspective, the bulk of the t/m crew were chatty casuals who barely respected the irc wave channel. This is what I mean by "not as good as you think". A delay in the wave causes a lot of BS from the chatty players lagging the wave to anxious attackers needing to get to work. Screwing a wave is a art that I keep in my Break Glass in Emergency box.

Oh, and also in this organized kingdom was politics. In organized waves the wave captain wanted the following information: your nw and your total offense. As you surmised you chain based in nw and t/ms follow with their stinky little offense. The wave captain tells you how much offense to send, not normally sharing what defense you're trying to break. This dolt apparently didn't like me and caused bounces before I began sending 1000 or so over what he dictated. - Because this pissant and the gullible monarch would want to chew on my ass for the bounce. That's the other reason they aren't as good as you think; if you're better they don't want anyone jockeying position.

But back to NM. I've run a couple of sloppy elf hybrids but my pride and joy was the elf cleric with -60% defensive losses(plus cleric) and NM as a racial spell. I never forgot the single player dynamics I'd seen by my kingdom mate in Aggression. This was incredibly effective and I used it against top 10 warring opposition and top 10 land, but not whoring: I respect the whoring tier. The kicker is that the elf cleric I was running was only 5.5 weeks out from EoA.

I run most builds as experiments in the lower tier. I try to visit the top 10 land kingdoms about once every 10 ages to keep abrest to the magnitude of mechanics. I feel experiments are only worth their effectiveness at the highest possible level. Whoring is focussed, so while some of these things might work up there it isn't their nature to do what's inefficient for acre expansion. To explain that, my purpose is more defensive, based in countering.

[Persain]

hardest part about nightmare is making sure you have all your casters of nightmare on casting same tick..then hitting same tick. chain a guy to oblivion with army all nightmared away...and they get mega overpopped as they return each tick. the spell itself is reasonably hard to cast in general..but to make it most effecting..all same tick basically

Simplistically a nm wave can be INSANELY easy because its not that hard to get 3 or so casters online all casting and hitting in one tick and an extra 2 or so pure attackers the same tick or tick after. That "Wave" could easily turn the casters going from singles into doubles and attackers from doubles into triples....7 hits to 12 hits really is a big difference in a chain. E.g. your kd has 200k off in casters 300k off on attackers, you nm someone from 150k->100k boom you have a nice chain.


The hardest thing about nm wave though is "doing it right" and that involves the time commitment and coordination it takes from a leader. Nm needs to be done in nw order as damage/op falls off when casting out of range. Then nm alone really doesnt do a ton of damage you need to couple it with a ns wave AFTER the nm wave (could be the difference in a nm wave from 180->110k or 180->60k--- StratOcastle note this nm remove tpa too so ns is easy). And then finally choosing a target with low incoming or ensuring you nm wave high peasant targets or just before an army gets in requires decent target selection.

This COULD mean you have 4 casters and each caster takes 5 min to cast in order, then everyone NS's another 10 min....then you need to hit in order...another 4 min per attacker. Means the nm wave could easily take 50+ min from start to finish. Oftentimes that means everyone involved ends up sitting online "waiting" till its their turn and you have a bunch of people "near" a computer for an hour. Make it a war declare wave and some failed activity and your looking at a few nm targets on a declare wave ends up taking 2-3 hours. imagine your on one of the hitters in your kd waiting 2 hours for you "turn" to attack....bleh.

Now, even if you did a NM wave fast, and each person took 2 min to spam nm, (6 min) everyone spam ns's (5 min) and each person attacks in 2 min your still talking 15 min per target you nm wave to complete the entire thing..my kd is about on par with that if i plan it out and everyone is on the ball. We typically take closer to 30 min mid war so even at that it can get time consuming. Our only advantage is both me and my war leader can run 2 nm wave targets simultaneously....doing THAT is hard, but you get much better results when a kd waves in 1 hour than when it takes 2-3 hours of armies being spread out to attack.


edit..... to give some perspective, i had one nm wave a couple of ages back where i had 25/25 armies incoming mid war all within 2 hours. So i planed 3 nm wave targets and added to my monarch msg

---ALL hits an NM must be done in the ORDER listed below---

TARGET:
Nm'ers: x, y z,
Attackers x,y, z, a, b c

Took about 2 hours to plan, then over the 2 ticks we got armies and people asked for targets i said things like hey Y talk to X and Z for nm wave. hey B...harass A to hit before you and C after you. Whole thing took about 4 hours of my time on a saturday to plan+guide but those 3 targets lost 90% of their military. (peasents+in training +wpa meant they kept <5k leets from a starting size of 2k)

[Bo To]

Just to add something - before the nm wave starts it's wise to do some ga/wts and aw.

[Madchess]

Used it with my kingdom 2-3 ages ago, generally took 1 hours at declare and less time later on, we did 1 nm target most of the time, but often chained 2 provinces. Only did 1 nm run a day but it worked for most people due to the time selected.

One thing to note if the target is already on low def it is gennerally a waste of resurces to nm, and you also should not do so for people who got army in.

It can be a great weapon, but it is not an universal sure win strategy, if you spend to much time or resurces for each target you nm chances are that the chaining without nm would be faster and this has cost us some wins in the past.

Also not sure what the new ages changes do to this kind of strategy but I guess we will soon find out.

[RattleHead]

If No Oops, then the above stuff can all be true.

If Oops, then it is the most significant problem. Because as state you need many player on at once, with focused targets, who act quickly. Oops can turn this into a trainwreck, making it difficult to finish ops even within a tick, let get all the hits in you want too.

I've seen it rock before oops, easily a 20-30m KD operation- with Oops 60-90m of frustration.

Have had KD comps to avoid this for a few Ages now, so I don't really know the state of the Oops, I still see it from time to time it seems, but it can be a factor.

[VanCanto]

We used NM strat this age with 10 elf heretics and 15 orc warriors. Very effective.

Currently we are warring and have dropped 4 provinces with NM, NWPA was 1350, 1800, and the last we dropped to 3000 NWPA+. Effectively killing 1M Offence down to 200-300K or less.

[Tadpole]

I ran NM based war-kd set-ups for roughly 8 consecutive ages. It's good fun, but very demanding. Like Persain said, in the best of worlds, with 2-3 war leaders working together and 25 players showing up when they should - you can get it of at ~30 min upon declare. And it easily gets a lil messy. Key is planning well in advance, so that wave-leaders know more or less exactly what to do. Declaring with enemy armies home and waving back + unexpected nw drops forcing you to swap your own hitters from pre-planned target to another of the NM targets for optimisation + a drake slaying in the middle, and directing your rogues to dump stealth before their sapphire hits you - and it quickly becomes a lil messy.

One tricky part is the huge NW drops targets take after NM+NS. It's neat enabling all your hitters to quad, and locking up enemy troops in training - but its also quite easy to drop your target down too far, essentially forcing bottom-feeding. Now that won't be an issue with land-based gains next age. But had to be part of the planning in ages past.

[Minty]

The only thing that makes it hard is Oops

[StratOcastle]

And I've only seen NM used in a narrow chain, not a max gain(ish) semi-chain across the enemy core. I'm mildly interested in the total utility of NM as in augmentation.

Now I've used amnesia as a tick-to-tick braindrop and might play with this if I go undead sage this age. With treant gone I've got to experiment with something else.

Bo To makes a good point about planning. Really it's just about being tuned in at which point the plans can be loose because the situation changes constantly. You need plans for the question aspect. It's a matter of communication.

[Relswick8619]

What I find peculiar is that almost every unorganized kingdom(yes, UN) I've travelled through don't use NM. Granted, it's very pretty in organized waves, but you can kickass with it just ad-libbing.

Now, I've played lead off caster in NM waving. I was an elf mystic, back when they had the spell. My first cast was MV(mystic vortex) to knock down protection spells. Once the appropriate defense was wiped out we spammed NM until the number of abandoning troops equalled 100 or less/cast.

We would sometimes back NM with a run of NS(Nightstrike). Leadership never shared specific reasons but rather than completely squash defense was to get the enemy defense down to an appropriate tap count.

Learning Quickly -

Before I joined this particular organized kingdom I had been with one of the last barbarian kingdoms known as Aggression is the Liquor. The way we played was to simply try to outdo each other with no war winning concept to get in the way. One of our quiet loners was playing an elf mystic and was always performing out of his mind as a hybrid. I learned he was using NM alone and marching on his hapless victims.

When I joined the organized kingdom I had just been playing an avian tac. Back then, avian had mystic aura which I had used to spam defensively for a few ages. By playing a build I knew could stall a NM wave I augmented some of my style as the lead off elf caster. This is unwelcome in organized kingdoms, but that's why I don't play in them. Also, they're not as good as you think, they're just organized lol.

Anywho, we started a NM wave against a dwarf and this was the first age dwarves got mystic aura. He obviously was using it to block the NM run, which I told the wave captain but egos being what they are, squandered many resources.

To put this in perspective, the bulk of the t/m crew were chatty casuals who barely respected the irc wave channel. This is what I mean by "not as good as you think". A delay in the wave causes a lot of BS from the chatty players lagging the wave to anxious attackers needing to get to work. Screwing a wave is a art that I keep in my Break Glass in Emergency box.

Oh, and also in this organized kingdom was politics. In organized waves the wave captain wanted the following information: your nw and your total offense. As you surmised you chain based in nw and t/ms follow with their stinky little offense. The wave captain tells you how much offense to send, not normally sharing what defense you're trying to break. This dolt apparently didn't like me and caused bounces before I began sending 1000 or so over what he dictated. - Because this pissant and the gullible monarch would want to chew on my ass for the bounce. That's the other reason they aren't as good as you think; if you're better they don't want anyone jockeying position.

But back to NM. I've run a couple of sloppy elf hybrids but my pride and joy was the elf cleric with -60% defensive losses(plus cleric) and NM as a racial spell. I never forgot the single player dynamics I'd seen by my kingdom mate in Aggression. This was incredibly effective and I used it against top 10 warring opposition and top 10 land, but not whoring: I respect the whoring tier. The kicker is that the elf cleric I was running was only 5.5 weeks out from EoA.

I run most builds as experiments in the lower tier. I try to visit the top 10 land kingdoms about once every 10 ages to keep abrest to the magnitude of mechanics. I feel experiments are only worth their effectiveness at the highest possible level. Whoring is focussed, so while some of these things might work up there it isn't their nature to do what's inefficient for acre expansion. To explain that, my purpose is more defensive, based in countering.

I was Tolerian Academy in aggression is the liquor lol, we had a few 5/7 ages but we're barbarians lol. Anyway which elf were u referring too I ran half and elf hybrid all the time.