5:19 vs 7:5 Noobs vs AvArice

[Uhm hoi]

Ok so for an AvA perspective in-house;

Start acres:: relatively same between kds, our tpa/wpa/sci slightly higher, even peas count, they had 90k more military (with 1 less province) and about 1mil NW diff at start (could be wrong but arguing semantics really) . For all intents and purposes a very even fight start.

Our prep was solid - most humans hit the right numbers, although one did build Armouries instead of Rax, should've guessed that was a sign of things to come...

Instead of putting our mystics on top, we left our hybrids there, which also gave noobs a good shot at taking them down on the opener which they did quite quickly. Again, errors on our side saw 60-70k defence on one of our mystics desert in lieu of thief dropping/soldier desertions. They were never going to be UB at the top if we had of grown them, but it would have been at the cost of WPA dilution which we agreed we didn't want to do.

Our opener was the worst of the age, having think-tanked it for a good 24-48 hours we went with the option to avoid the oopsfest that has been our whole age nemesis with our NM/NS chains. I really hope Jeff & Dave and co read this 'cos designing a strategy to get around **** servers and throttled/error ops is ridiculous, especially at the peak of the season. You've had a whole 2 ages to fix it and both sides are generally still locked out for 30mins at war start. See Noobs complaint even regarding a dragon drop and FB ops only causing oops (which we had similar of our own) in a 1 way op affair still caused it to freak out. Horrible.

Basically after the opening wave we were on the back foot, we couldn't curb their top offence quick enough whilst simultaneously chaining down their 2 HA/Rogues, we lost all 3 mystics and 1 rogue in the transaction.

We lost 2 humans outright because of main army bounces, well over 750k offence lost in 2 unrecoverable chains early on.

Fast forward 4 days - all the humans have been rotted out on both sides, our's still have favourable and usable offence to take down their last remaining rogue and/or an elf heretic that over-extended and we failed to capitalise on those opportunities.

Econ was closing, they had 70k troops up on us and when they broke through on one of our heretics and couldn't retal, that was curtains.

Some minor acre tweaking at the start, deeper humans (on our lower acres) and better overall activity during clutch times may have yielded a better result. As the planner I would say 95% of the blame lies with me and the opener, and to my KD I apologise.

All in all I don't think we lost any face by losing, its disheartening sure, but I feel we gave a good account of ourselves given our mistakes.

Well done Noobs on the win, thoroughly deserved and hopefully we meet again soon :)

To add a few details from noobs perspective.

On the opening wave we purposely made a target out of our 3rd highest offense attacker by getting him bad incoming acres. We chained an elf mystic and a human on the opening wave and wanted to chain a second elf mystic on the second wave. Only the two highest offense humans were able to properly break the second elf and we needed them strong. AvArice took that bait and chained Boo, which ensured we could chain the second elf mystic.

Fast forward a bit, humans on both sides were chained, both sides created 1 land farm on the opposing team for those overpopped to landlust from, AvArice's elf mystics were mostly disabled and Noobs halfling rogues were mostly disabled and the battle for the unbreakables was the whole focus of both kingdoms. This was our reason for targetting the elf mystics right away, we did not want to deal with meteors on our t/m's. On the other side, non-heretics slowly drop some wpa during war while heretics slowly gain some during war and landing meteors on AvArices elves took more and more fails to the point it became unfeasable to try most of them. At this point, noobs choose to max gain 2-3 hits with the humans, make 1-2 massacres or razes to control econ and make a bounce with the 5th general on an elf heretic to open it up. AvArice for a big part did just 4 trads and a bounce or 5 trads at that point with their humans. At the same time, noobs was pumping off specs on unbreakable elf heretics so they could break bounced down opposing elf heretics. Then noobs would drop a saphire dragon, mv clear sight, bribe thieves and all nightstrike the elf that was just massacred by the top offense elves with very good succesrate to make it very breakable. In the end AvArice ended up with a bunch of breakable packages of honour points that were ripe for the taking, at which point they withdrew from war.

The dirty tricks I spoke about earlier were things like
Putting wrathful smite on the provinces AvArice were trying to bounce open for enormous offensive losses on the opposing provinces,
AvArice trying to starve noobs provinces when the players were sleeping,
Reflecting landlusts by provinces who didnt have reflect themselves
Bloodlusting our elf heretics to get the offense needed to break opposing elves. (definately wanted to keep this a secret, since they'd suffer increased losses had AvArice tried to bounce them)
Faeries abducting and putting the science into alchemy to send more dragons

Again, faery paladins making other provinces stronger helped a lot in this war and currently at least 4 out of the 22 princes in utopia are faery paladins. I think it's funny how some forum trolls have been trying to make everyone believe it's a bad combination while they are one of the most powerful things currently in utopia. It's more funny the devs seem to listen to those trolls and buffing both faery and paladin next age. My advice for every war kd will be to get a few faery paladins in your kd.

I'd like to end this with a quote from misses Nox: "You scared me at night when I woke up, looked to the right and you were smiling like smeagol over your phone playing that f'ing game." But she also said she was proud of us for winning it, so I guess everything is okay.

[Bulzye]

Ok so for an AvA perspective in-house;

Some minor acre tweaking at the start, deeper humans (on our lower acres) and better overall activity during clutch times may have yielded a better result. As the planner I would say 95% of the blame lies with me and the opener, and to my KD I apologise.

All in all I don't think we lost any face by losing, its disheartening sure, but I feel we gave a good account of ourselves given our mistakes.

Well done Noobs on the win, thoroughly deserved and hopefully we meet again soon :)

The post by our strategist Gigglebits was very informative, and for the most part correct.
However, the quote I have left in is the only false part of his view of the war. We have had horrendous openers before, losing entire provinces on the oops, and come through when it looked dire.
IF there is to be blame, then that falls on the kingdom, not it's strategists. Being online a majority of the time, I can say for a fact that if our members had been online (no dragonkillers is a killer in war) this war would have turned out much different. And even if the end result had stayed the same, it would have been a much decidedly different type of battle.

I will not take anything away from Noobs, they took advantage of our mistakes to the fullest, and made sure we could not recover like we had in the other wars.
But make no mistake, we have some of the best strategists in the game, and when we are at full strength, and our participation is at 100%, odds are we're gonna get you.

[Uhm hoi]

and our participation is at 100%

That doesn't happen. Ever. You think our participation was 100%? We're very active, we have eachother's phonenumbers for emergencies (and support spells when we're not even in war... stahp waking me up for random bs, nubs! I aint spending my precious mana to NB your plague even if I wasnt annoyed of you waking me up for it!), but even so, I was one of the killers in noobs and when your saphire dragon landed I was unavailable to slay it and we had to use some elf elites to kill it. Work, driving, being exhausted and go into coma with no chance of your ringtone waking you up all happens, in every kingdom. Just gotta do the best you can with what you have available.

[Madchess]

Faery Paladin is a powerhouse that much is clear, in my micro kingdom we had one and even thougth we did not war and he was not that active it was a timely boost to Dryad to be able to freely add bloodlust, greater protection and smite depending on the needs.

I think like 1/3 of the attacks I've recieved was smited because you send out and get smite as fast as possible, can't say I've run into more than a few myself where I thougth oh no when I saw the loses.

Congratulations with your win, if you feel like using dryads next age I can give a bit of advice on their management atleast, you know how to find me.