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Thread: Winning wars

  1. #31
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    Spies - Lies - Informers - Moles - Operatives - Sleepers - Farms

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lestat View Post
    Spies - Lies - Informers - Moles - Operatives - Sleepers - Farms
    I know, really. But I digress.

    The World Needs Gyros

    One dimension that flies in the face of the discipline crowd is the influence of great players in the right place. Some of the most memorable moments I've had in Utopia was witnessing great t/m play, both for and against my side.

    Against my side I recall a halfer who in essence carried her kingdom on her back with the havoc she created in a losing cause. She had no quit in her and I remember messaging her to explain that she was the last one standing as her kingdom was shattered. We triangulated her, tried to shut her down but she was so resourceful it really came down to everyone in her kingdom being a shambles.

    On my side was a t/m who like many had some activity issues, but not the no-show type, just a busy fellow. When he logged on it was like a surge hit the kingdom. He'd go hunting and aid us through our enemies, strike them where we needed a break and lay down bombardment on enemy trouble spots. His situational grasp was immediate and he just had a knack for getting the most mileage from his resources.

    It's in these moments when I see the flaws in wave culture. There's an aspect of OCD that runs deep in the type of player attracted to Utopia; it's a mathematical game. But many times these mechanical truisms aren't accommodated by innovation. Most only work within the frame of their chosen understanding and then hone it to razor sharp. This is all well if the strategy is sound to near perfect. Often it isn't, it simply works because the prevailing culture is chain wave. Basically I'm saying that the kingdom that has higher activity at wave time and exercises it in trite yet flawless execution tends to win.

    This has rarely been a teaching virtue, it's just a neat looking time value practice. If we think about it the wave was probably devised with overall efficiency in mind, but not optimal efficiency. It's just nobody spends time to regard origins. Well that's what I'm doing. So when I'm looking at derailing waves it can be as simple as delaying the spearhead or prelude to the march. If I'm so cruel that I should delay the initiation of the first MV, that I'm screwing people at work or people that are up at 3am....even I have mercy.

    So what I've seen are mercurial players, unbridled and executing with abandon. I love this. I love the morale of people with hero fixation. In the world of t/ms I do enjoy an artillery battery but the masters will always be the ones who take the game to a new level through insight.

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    Last edited by StratOcastle; 22-11-2017 at 07:02.
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    Another type of t/m we had many ages ago was a young lady who went by the name Little Red Ridinghood. She was euro and could only log on for brief moments. She always greeted us with "hi" and 5 minutes later "bye;)". She played a faery and started this tradition of spending all her mana and all her stealth on one hapless enemy. When she was done they'd be a smoking heap of ruin. It was the funniest thing seeing some healthy enemy completely mangled by her tornado like fury.

    We didn't want to control her; her freedom was more effective.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bishop View Post
    Correct me then, instead of being a dick about it.
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  4. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by StratOcastle View Post
    Another type of t/m we had many ages ago was a young lady who went by the name Little Red Ridinghood. She was euro and could only log on for brief moments. She always greeted us with "hi" and 5 minutes later "bye;)". She played a faery and started this tradition of spending all her mana and all her stealth on one hapless enemy. When she was done they'd be a smoking heap of ruin. It was the funniest thing seeing some healthy enemy completely mangled by her tornado like fury.

    We didn't want to control her; her freedom was more effective.
    As a corollary to Strat0castle's point above, I'd like to mention a Rumsfeld quote I'm fond of. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have."

    Know your KD, and it's people and their capabilities and constraints.

    There's no point learning about say the perfect NM wave and alternating hits and setting up a perfect networth chain if you know that half your DEs and your middle networth attackers have only a 50% chance of making it to a wave, or planning on a coordinated rogue GA/Prop wave needing precise timing and coordination if u know one of your t/ms only logs on for 5 mins. Work with what you have, plan your strategy around winning with a realistic expectation of your kingdom's capabilities, and make sure you slot your provinces into your plan in the position that will maximize their impact based on their actual abiltiies, not on what you wish their abilities were. To do otherwise just causes unneeded stress.

    For example, if you know you're going to war with StratOcastles's T/M, there's no point designing a strategy based on, for example coordinating with your other 2-3 rogues to MV and GA a Faery Mystics WTs and burn up saved stealth within a short time period. Keeping her in that rigid strategy might well be a waste, since she'll log on and CS + Wts will be back up, and you won't have time to communicate and check surveys and coordinate a better action within those 5 minutes. Knowing her limitations, just use her, for example, to NS an attacker with no WT, or to FB an enemy rogue - basically a position that maximizes her damage without the need for finessed timing and that fits with the player.

    That said, and I'd be happy to debate this Strat0castle, there's a difference between recognizing and facilitating creative thinking, and not exercising control when needed.

    As to your example about the highly effective halfling, freedom and flexibility isn't an inherently bad thing, it can let provinces seize time-sensitive opportunities that may be missed if waiting for a top-down order. That said, for that to work, I think you need to 1) have sufficient communication to ensure that the province to whom you are entrusting with independence and freedom actually understands the strategy in the war, both long-term and short, and both the objective and why that objective.

    I think, a real-world military example would be, for example:

    You want your infantry to surround enemy tanks on a hill, because you have your tank destroyers en route, and want to make sure they're trapped there long enough for you to destroy them.

    If you go with limited communication, micro-managed orders, you might instruct your infantry to make a precise 360 degree circle, 3000 yards from enemy tanks, dig trenches, and remain in position until 06:00 without telling them why. They'll suffer catastrophic losses, but they'll get the job done, and delay the tanks until your tank destroyers arrive and objective achieved. However, by not giving information or the opportunity to take the initiative, that means your infantry commanders might not be able to take advantage of the fact that they notice, when they arrive, that there's a nice easy bridge that's the only way off the hill, and they could just blow it up and trap the tanks without suffering huge losses.

    However, at the same time, if you don't communicate the strategy effectively, or the infantry commander does not fully comprehend the full implications, you might, for example have just told him "Surround the enemy tanks on the hill, we want to get rid of them, you are ordered to surround them at X yards, but you have freedom to act differently." That plucky infantry commander might decide he sees an opportunity to get closer and launch a full on charge against the tanks, drive them off the hill, and then emerge victorious announcing that they had managed to capture the hill all by themselves! However, what he was missing is you never wanted the hill in the first place, you wanted to destroy the tanks - and that "victory" cost you the bigger the victory of taking out tanks, and you would have been better with the tightly restricted orders.

    So it's important to recognize, if you want a province to take initiative whether you sufficiently communicated and the player sufficiently understands the broader goals.

    A simple Utopia example, would be, for example, you're deep chaining an attacker to remove offense. Simple easy-to-follow order, would be, all attackers, trad X as soon as your army is back until I say stop. It's a blunt hammer, but it works. However, if you further explain, goal is to reduce his offense by X and explain all the various ways to do that, you might miss a smart attacker for example, noticing noone's armies are back same tick as him, and if he waited 30 minutes he can catch X with army home. Or, noting that attacker returns home right after tick, and quickly stealing gold would trap army at home, or that no t/ms with large gold stocks were around and a raze might do more damage to his population space, or that you could do 4 ambushes (and kill off offense) and make it back before him to land further attacks. But at the same time, you have to recognize which players you can entrust to make the right call, and which attackers you cannot (i.e. someone who just hears that oh razing right before army back if low on gold does more damage, and just lands 4 razes and finding himself destroyed 12 ticks later, or choosing to massacre the enemy when he's at home, or, with only offense to hit before the army returns, but can only conquest afterwards - and not understanding conquest does less damage).

    Or in the T/M sphere, for example - you might give the order to NS X, because you want to drop his offense quickly when his army is back to stop him from opening up on a t/m with defense just under his offense. You want to make sure your experienced t/ms know the why and goal of the actions, so that they can dynamically, for example steal horses the minute they get home to achieve the same goal more efficiently, or recognize when the attacker is negative income and steal jsut enough gold to trap at home the tick before.

    But I just want to stress that, "letting a brilliant player do his/her thing" isn't just sitting back and letting a smart player make all the decisions and win the war for you, that doesn't work and will backfire more often than not. But if anything, takes even more work from you to make sure that strategy is communicated and understood, and that the output of that player is still managed and directed, just that you're using goal-based management, not micro-management.
    Last edited by changeling; 22-11-2017 at 19:15.

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    Well said, changeling, and a worthwhile read.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bishop View Post
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    Thanks Strat0castle, and I just want to stress I emphasized the need to make sure you communicate your strategies fully and in great detail to truly extract value out of flexibility in your KD members, because from everything I've seen from you - you definitely do that! And just wanted to stress that I find that part critical.

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    It's that I can't approach Utopia from a pure winning perspective.

    There are things in life that get lost in translation. Things that are hard to convey to the Internet generation they don't notice in their conduct. I'm not speaking about superiority, this has to do with nuances and intuition.

    I'm often telling younger players they're not using their dimmer switch. That full blast and off aren't the only approaches. Because they haven't developed what's known as mellowing they react literally and in square waveform.
    Thus, I find deep explanation of strategy rather tedious.

    You might understand if I explained in D&D 4th generation the game took on a very dogmatic illustration of game mechanics. Each character was very deep in complexity. I'd spend time researching my fellow players options just to keep up. A few did the same as me.

    Follow this:

    Others did not do broad research into shared mechanics or specifics to fellow players. This is where character conception and the mechanical world meet. Burt was our leader and had a very defined way of conducting himself. Namely, in combat he would engage the most dangerous perceivable threat regardless of destiny. He often was heavily outmatched. But the orbital strategy was set: we will engage insurmountable threats and we will adapt to consume the theater of battle or be consumed. This is team work.

    Because our leader would set a reliable precedence in every conflict we were free to evolve our execution and strategy around the understanding that we will engage and the central threat will be confronted. He was the flag we planted right in our enemies face and we fought furiously around defending that flag. Me and the deeper students intermingled our ability in fairly sophisticated ways, but there was also a flare for creativity driven by desperation.

    We learn from tough opponents by observing their way of being. In freedom we learn by trying....

    Does it need to be said? Yes, because it is by lack of intuition that we are here. Being in a wave dialing up the correct responses and executing as quickly as possible feeds a feeling of accomplishment. It doesn't offer room for epiphany.

    I spent my ghetto time in seeing the great waves and the timing and the reasoning... and then I had an avian tac with mystic aura, mana and lots of runes. I found out I could begin punching holes in the nw alignment. I found out I could spam mystic aura and stop the majority of spells aimed my way. I found my speed aloud me to step up my wave counter tactics and I begin to spin the first pulsed uniques. I later learned that this wasn't new. Someone asked me if I was an old player(old Utopian) because he hadn't seen that style in years.

    But in that genesis there was no partner, no sparkle of comradery and the willingness to take this thing off the charts and into new territories. That doesn't discourage me. My continued path was that of understanding why things are the way they are in Utopia. I don't need the mechanics because I'm not attempting to be overpowered; I'm only here to have fun. This is why I self induce challenge idioms and don't study game mechanics. If I'm effective off the cuff I'm not going out of my way to rain misery on the frail base.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bishop View Post
    Correct me then, instead of being a dick about it.
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    I would have to agree with everyone that says to adjust your tactics to what you have, not what you think would work best.

    At the onset of every war in my kingdom, we develop a war plan. This outlines targets, overall goal, and what we are going to do next. If someone comes online and doesn't know exactly what to do, they just look at the war plan, which we kept updated constantly as the war evolved and new threats emerged. Also, being able to pinpoint the enemies' tactics and plans beforehand can be a HUGE boon. For example, if you see the kingdom's strategy relies on their ritual, you can abolish it. If you plan your abolish, you can complete it very quickly, and cheaper than casting a new ritual. Then they have to choose between using runes and mana to harm you, or recast their ritual that their strategy relies on. Keep an eye out for little things like that, all through the war, and adjust your strategy. If you are facing dryads, steal their war horses as their army returns. If facing dwarves, GA their farms and steal their food, MV their NB and cast drought and gluttony. Every kingdom has a weakness, sometimes it is obvious, sometimes you have to look for it.

    Also, know YOUR weakness. Don't pretend you don't have one, don't spend so much time trying to hide it that you lose your strengths. Plan around it. Work with it. I know my kingdom is not good at wave times (different time-zones means it's always 3am for someone, and we aren't trying to crown!), so we don't use them, and we don't bother trying to coordinate NM waves. We play to our strengths and try to exploit the enemies weakness.

    Btw - If you aren't good at wave times, don't TRY to work wave times.. If everyone has a different attack time, having them keep their army home for an hour or two to coordinate is just asking for us to destroy you. I've seen it in a few different wars now. If you try too hard to coordinate waves, you make your attackers a whole heck of a lot easier to disable. Armies home quickly become dead armies. Our number one rule for attackers during war is, Army-in, Army-out. I don't care when, just don't let them sit at home!


    You probably won't win every war, unless you are very selective about WHO you war, but if you can put up a good fight, you can at least withdraw with pride.

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    Quote Originally Posted by LuckySports View Post

    Btw - If you aren't good at wave times, don't TRY to work wave times.. If everyone has a different attack time, having them keep their army home for an hour or two to coordinate is just asking for us to destroy you. I've seen it in a few different wars now. If you try too hard to coordinate waves, you make your attackers a whole heck of a lot easier to disable. Armies home quickly become dead armies. Our number one rule for attackers during war is, Army-in, Army-out. I don't care when, just don't let them sit at home!
    Although I agree this is true, it is also situational. Sometimes it can make a huge difference to have one of leadership ask just a couple of people to hold the armies for just a couple of hours so that they can coordinate with a couple of other people whose armies are coming shortly. There are risks, but there can also be big rewards

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    Agreed
    Last edited by tiggis; 24-11-2017 at 16:59.
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    Quote Originally Posted by LuckySports View Post
    Btw - If you aren't good at wave times, don't TRY to work wave times.. If everyone has a different attack time, having them keep their army home for an hour or two to coordinate is just asking for us to destroy you. I've seen it in a few different wars now. If you try too hard to coordinate waves, you make your attackers a whole heck of a lot easier to disable. Armies home quickly become dead armies. Our number one rule for attackers during war is, Army-in, Army-out. I don't care when, just don't let them sit at home!

    Quote Originally Posted by Chris121 View Post
    Although I agree this is true, it is also situational. Sometimes it can make a huge difference to have one of leadership ask just a couple of people to hold the armies for just a couple of hours so that they can coordinate with a couple of other people whose armies are coming shortly. There are risks, but there can also be big rewards
    Quote Originally Posted by Zombies are people too View Post
    Times Zones. All about the Time Zones.
    When building a KD, recruit players based on their active hours, and then decide the roles you will all play. Having half your attackers and 2-3 TM support on the same activity schedule with the other half active together, even if it's in another window of hours(with overlap #golden) makes anything possible. That's a key to winning wars in my experience.

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  12. #42
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    Hiring part-time players for full-time positions sounds disastrous! Unless they can co-op their provs somehow... but then you need 50 of them.
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    Quote Originally Posted by octobrev View Post
    Hiring part-time players for full-time positions sounds disastrous! Unless they can co-op their provs somehow... but then you need 50 of them.
    And this is what separates kingdom tiers to a certain degree. So this search on "winning" is a myriad of experiences.

    I know there is chemistry in some top kingdoms regarding leadership and efficient activity. Where I'm from I engage in fairly wasteful levels of activity, and coordination is nothing to rest ones head upon. I can monitor news and counter a few things, but there's no clarity in casual kingdoms because there's simply no system.

    I shun organized kingdoms because I'm prevented from monitoring news and countering, as a rough rule. What they want is someone who registers as a bot and chat user and seem to care little about any other qualifications. I don't ask because it's not my goal. Everybody seems to be doing fine where they are.

    Most of my posts are aimed at those who can't find traction in their standards & practices. If we look at winning wars from a preparation standpoint I can't help but recommend top feeder kingdom strats. Again, this is for kingdoms who aren't coming by victories and find life outside of war harrowing.

    Pure established war kingdoms and whoring kingdoms don't really need any advice I offer, and they have the positive complexity to run a pure war or whoring strat. Because most war strats are focal they aren't ideal for whoring endeavors. They're already familiar with the way things are and have done diplomacy to preserve their station in the past. They have leadership with experience and unshakable trust from their cores, with a few exceptions. Whoring kingdoms ditto.

    Now to be honest I never try to influence kingdom strat in game, where I play. The leadership and vocal core decide what they want and I try to fill a niche that's missing. The reality is that none of them ever consider the experiences of the past ages.

    I'm not sure exactly why, but short memory my be a hidden strength in the casual tier. If I had to guess it's that these people simply like to play Utopia with people they know. The really hard times are forgotten, whereas top kingdoms are anything but forgetful.

    This is what makes some of us unique. I'm a tweener because I hold no grudges but I remember. To my logic, about every casual kingdom should be weaponized for top feeding. This doesn't make for an ideal war strat, but it does make up for bad diplo. Meter efficiency is another casual kingdom catastrophe so the counter mechanisms have to be overbuilt. These kingdoms aren't beating pure war kingdoms anyways but a top feeder strat can allow room for prep so that respectable conflicts may be had.

    Because I've done stints in micro-kingdoms I'm keenly aware of the predatory manner throughout the game, BUT with the earned knowledge of fighting back. Unlike most nominally sized kingdoms, micro-kingdoms can't be bullied because of the survival algorithm. That is, "everyone is bigger than us so we are the last in line". The only choice is retaliation or PK. There is no parachute. You can't ignore, hide or curl up in a ball.. and they do come for blood.

    To further explain the micro-kingdom point, because of size equivalence in provinces we see predators from all tiers; top, war, honor, ghetto...they all come for something. You experience the broadest range of out of war conflict against kingdoms that feel their size and numbers should result in safe gains. Thus, my perception of retaliation is based in deep field research. My micro-kingdom experiences resulted in more triumphs than my casual kingdom experiences. This is because in micro-kingdoms the mutual benefit to fight back is tight nit and a shared survival idiom.

    In most every other kingdom type you'll have guys that suffer and other who complain and when the CF is floated it leaves the warriors standing in the rain. The top feeder strats include t/m types built for wpa/tpa penetration and abduction resistance. Essentially you build yourself to be meter efficient on your end and less so from the enemy. Review the spell/sabotage abilities, attacker durability and penetration, hybrid assault capability in UF...stuff like that.
    Last edited by StratOcastle; 24-11-2017 at 20:10.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bishop View Post
    Correct me then, instead of being a dick about it.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris121 View Post
    Although I agree this is true, it is also situational. Sometimes it can make a huge difference to have one of leadership ask just a couple of people to hold the armies for just a couple of hours so that they can coordinate with a couple of other people whose armies are coming shortly. There are risks, but there can also be big rewards
    My kingdom watches for this. If your army is home, we can destroy it, and have in the past. We have beaten more organized kingdoms before, because they try to hold a few armies to hit a wave time, and we would see that army home and go for blood. If you are fighting a kingdom that isnt very observant, or doesnt know how to adjust their strategy to the situaion, you will probably be fine. Any respectable war kingdom (and I dont think we are there yet ourselves) would demolish any attacker that lets his army linger.

    Dont rely on wave times if your kingdom can't manage them reliably. There are other ways to win.
    Last edited by LuckySports; 25-11-2017 at 07:33. Reason: Typos

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    Sure, but you won't always be in a position to destroy it, so it's situational. For example, presumably given what you have said you are not holding any armies home yourself, so if you don't happen to have people in the right range / off levels with armies coming back in that 1-2 hours, your only option is ops/spells. So situationally, you might be able to NM, NS, steal war horses, but it depends if you have someone able to do that online at the time, and that in turn partly depends what the set up of my provs are. Remember that I am not talking about a KD wide wave time, just a couple of provs hitting together ad hoc, so you would have no way of knowing in advance that we were going to do it and couldn't realistically plan for it in advance.

    So I still maintain it's a calculated risk with many factors (such as those I have mentioned along with whether the person in my KD is going to be online or just disappear for 2 hours and then find his war horses gone).

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