Min TPA for a/t?

[uzziah]

Your damage is based on raw number of thieves sent.
Thieves also die as you op, so starting with low raw means you'll lose your ability to damage people fast.

There are very few ops that benefit by sending more than 1 tpa raw. Yes you lose thieves as you send but your success rate will be just as high and you're losses will be easily replaced where as if you use more raw than mods your losses will be harder to replace and you'll fall out of success range more quickly.

Toadi is not talking about running 1 tpa raw and 400% effect in mods rather running 4 tpa raw with 250% effect in mods instead of 6 tpa raw with effect in 166% mods, both have 10 mod tpa but the 4 raw tpa has a much easier time of maintaining 10 mod tpa.

[shank]

You have to be either talking about genesis or fishing awful low in the nw's.

Nope, talking about WoL. Had a 495K op yesterday sending 17,000 thieves. Obviously I must be fishing in the low nw's... lmao

[Toadi]

Actually my province is currently sitting around 1500 acres and probably 270K NW. In this range there are a lot of honor hunting kingdoms who seek for plunders all day long, and inactives are never able to amass high amount of gold. I think the highest I found this age was 4M gc. I roughly have 10K thieves, but never ever use them all, so my raw number is fairly irrelevant. On typical NS my returns are usually capped at 1500 thieves, only Riots really benefits from sending slightly more.

Your damage is based on raw number of thieves sent.

Since people will never send all their thieves, as long as you have enough thieves to send to reach the optimum, all what is relevant is the success rate, thus the modified TPA. Someone with 5 TPA and no modifiers will be less efficient than someone with 3 TPA but high modifiers, because both provinces will inflict the same damage but the second one will succeed more.

Thieves also die as you op, so starting with low raw means you'll lose your ability to damage people fast.

Once again, as long as your raw is over the optimum, you lose nothing on having a lower raw but with a higher mod.

[VT2]

Technically, all ops can benefit from sending more than 1 TPA raw - it comes down to whether or not sending more than 1 TPA raw will inflict maximum damage/steal maximum resources.

Yes, a high mod is badass, but if you don't have the raw numbers to back the mod up, you'll run out of thieves in short order, and the damage you'll be dealing will be significantly less.

[hatter]

How about propaganda and AW (asked this another thread - no response so far). Will 5 TPA raw buy you anything more than 3 TPA raw?

[VT2]

For propaganda, yes, most probably, but losses will be just as epic as your gains.

Assassinate wizards, not sure. Try it out.

I haven't really found a limit to propaganda since it was boosted a few ages ago - same with assassinate wizards.
Might have to go rogue the next age to check them both out.

[shank]

How about propaganda and AW (asked this another thread - no response so far). Will 5 TPA raw buy you anything more than 3 TPA raw?

Last age I did a lot of experimenting with this.

Prop's really tough to test due to its inherent randomness... but I'll say I didn't find my gains ceiling to really be significantly higher with 10,000 thieves vs 6,000 thieves. (let's say a gnome ~2K acres)

That said I usually send 3+ tpa on props because that's where I've found a happy medium. Wish i had more to support it than the empiricism of ages past...

[Toadi]

Assassinate Wizards do have a cap, but if you are using it on T/M or A/M, they will usually have enough Wizards so that sending all your Thieves will not reach the optimum. You will only start noticing the cap after pulling heavy AW on them already, or if you are performing AW on low WPA provinces.

Propaganda does not seem to have any decently achieveable cap, I have made a couple of tests this age sending up to 7 TPA on similar range provinces (both in NW and land) and results indicated a constant progress in returns.

As a good rule of thumb, 1 TPA is a good start for most of the ops, Riots excepted. Then tweak around this value by increasing or decreasing it, and watching the trend. For example go for a first NS with say 1000 thieves on 1000 acres, and kill 100 troops. If a second one with 1100 kills 100 too, then you are oversending, and should move down to test 900. If kit kills more than 100, then keep increasing until it caps. As you inflict casualties, returns will go down and the amount of thieves sent should follow proportionally.

[Dragons Mate]

Raw tpa doesnt really matter unless you have like .5 raw tpa with 6000% modifiers. no matter what you are going to want to have atleast 3 raw tpa in order to do some damage with your ops.

Anyway, back to the actual topic of this thread... First off, the amount of tpa needed for an A/T to be effective is depending on how strong your oponents will be. If you in a SK (i'm guessing your not because your asking us how to run an A/T, and all SK know how to run hybrids) then I have no idea how many tpa you need, because i'm not in a SK! If you are an average KD, then under 7 mod tpa is an ineffective A/T. 7-10 mod tpa is an OK A/T. 10-12 mod tpa is a good A/T, 13+ mod tpa is a great A/T. If you are in a ghetto KD, then just bump each of the rankings down 1 lvl.

[FaeryRediculous]

Try this website out for size:

http://utopiaresource.com/wiki/index...es_%26_Stealth

Also:

4 Raw TPA is a good start. The hardest ops call for at least a 3/1 ratio of mod tpa. Every operation is different, thievery is definitely an art.