T/M strategy in war

[bananabear]

At the start of the war, attackers will usually be chaining other attackers, but what should T/M be doing?

For the mages:
1. Meteor showers on high defense provinces, or all provinces?
1. Nightmares on chain targets?
2. Fireball rich provinces?
3. What else?

For the thieves:
1. Night strike high defense provinces that aren't being chained?
2. Assassinate wizards on other T/Ms but with a high failure rate?
3. What else?

[noobium]

attackers will not be "usually" chaining other attackers - there is a reason you wanted all that defense, otherwise you'd roll with 20-25 attackers and say to hell with defense. like in the other thread, situations can vary too differently to use a universal MO.

[pathetic sheep]

- Always get all the intel.
- Always use your stealth and mana/runes.

I am still amazed at how many players have 0 thieves. There are some provinces with 0 thieves and 0 watchtowers. If you have 3X the targets mod TPA you can run most of the opps. Attackers can get updated SoT on provinces with much higher mod TPA. Removing the a few peasants from a province that has very few takes a lot of stealth. On a weak thievery province your T/M can fireball and start off the kidnapping then attackers can scavenge whatever is left. Attackers can also take gold, food, runes, nightstrike soldiers and steal horses. Stealing food would be a waste of stealth for a thief/mage or attacker/thief province.

You can not expect to win a war by stealing a few bushels of food. However, if you find a target that is about to starve you can get the starvation started a few hours earlier. First look at what is there. What did the enemy bring to the war and what did your kingdom bring in.

Assassinate wizards might be useful against attacker/mages and large attackers in very long wars. If you try AW on T/M provinces you will probably fail a lot of opps. Even if you kill half the wizards in a province with mod WPA 20 they still have mod WPA 10 and can fire off spells at one of your attackers. You wasted your all opps but only slightly restricted theirs. Sometimes stealing a large stockpile of runes can be more effective, especially because you get to use them. In a ghetto war you run the risk of wasting stealth and thieves on an inactive or incompetent mage/farm.

The effect of fireball and kidnap are dependent on circumstances. Fireball is an instant opp, but the effect lasts longer. One fireball on a province at max population will lower the targets income by a few peasants. Depending on birth rate the province could be back to maximum population within 2 hours. If you fireball 10% of a provinces total population and then an attacker takes 10% of the targets land you achieved almost nothing. Fireballs are very damaging against targets that are growing fast. With fewer peasants they are unable to populate the new acres. Your fireball could still have an economic impact days later. Storms and plague also draw out the duration.

There is a time for every opp.

[Bukharistan]

For the mages:
1. Meteor showers on high defense provinces, or all provinces?
1. Nightmares on chain targets?
2. Fireball rich provinces?
3. What else?

For the thieves:
1. Night strike high defense provinces that aren't being chained?
2. Assassinate wizards on other T/Ms but with a high failure rate?
3. What else?

Greeds on all non-chain targets. Meteor showers on all enemy provinces including enemy TMs (you might fail more, but the damage done is way higher than on attackers). Riots has to be blanketed 24/7 in-war. Riots is one of the strongest ops and prevents dragons being sent to you if you control the rest of their econ well. Riots on enemy TMs is CRUCIAL.

You can either choose to fireball strong econ-provinces, or you can chain them. You should have in mind before-hand which provinces you're going to chain then leave their peasants alone.

4. Dragon Slaying. Make sure you have a lot of defense stacked as a TM. That means you can't get hit before war and you can slay dragons in-war.

5. Dragon funding. All gold should go to funding your dragons until it's no longer needed.

Other than that, it's just experience to know what to do when. If you're not in a highly organized KD it's way harder to do real damage with TMs.

- Always get all the intel.

TMs should never gather intel. Biggest waste. Rather have an attacker try 15 times than let a TM waste his stealth on that. Only time I would consider it is when you need a SOM on a faery/halfer that has sent out.

On a weak thievery province your T/M can fireball and start off the kidnapping then attackers can scavenge whatever is left.

If you plan on taking down a province, Fireballs and kidnappings will only help him. Those 2 ops should only be done on province that you wisht to bloat (grow fast without NW).

Even if you kill half the wizards in a province with mod WPA 20 they still have mod WPA 10 and can fire off spells at one of your attackers. You wasted your all opps but only slightly restricted theirs.

Depends. If your top is made up of dwarf/sage AMs, AWing a prov down to 10 wpa is enough to make sure the TM in question fails most ops on those provinces. With relative NW also becoming a factor as your sages grow.

[noobium]

At the start of the war, attackers will usually be chaining other attackers, but what should T/M be doing?

For the mages:
1. Meteor showers on high defense provinces, or all provinces?
1. Nightmares on chain targets?
2. Fireball rich provinces?
3. What else?

For the thieves:
1. Night strike high defense provinces that aren't being chained?
2. Assassinate wizards on other T/Ms but with a high failure rate?
3. What else?

I think there was another thread on this but I'll bite...

- your t/ms are T/m - i.e., thievery comes first, even if you are Elf/Mystic. (Elf/Mystic is better as an a/m or a/t/m but that's neither here nor there). You should have decent outputs on both thievery and magic (if playing faery or elf). Halfling is trickier since they don't have a useful spellbook and want more military.
- ALL provinces should try to make use of t/m weak spots wherever the can be exploited. core attackers can often fireball in long wars (and doing so allows your t/m to focus on much better ops).
- if you are Faery, you are best suited for opping attackers, specifically fat attackers with bad defense. Elf and Halfling can op the same targets as well.
- your role as t/m is as much defensive and economic as it is about damage output. in long wars where neither kingdom has proper banks, the t/ms are going to be the provinces that can hold on to economy (attacker shells that are technically unbreakable do not hold on to economy so well, since they tend to have weak wpa).
- land is good.
- land is good.
- land is good.
- selfspells are good. use them; being a mage doesn't exclude you from casting magic shield (in fact mages should cast this at a higher priority than most provinces, unless they know for sure enemy casters are not a threat).

That last point is something that distinguishes kingdoms that use t/m provinces well from kingdoms where t/m is a mostly wasted slot (if not for meteors). The primary concern for a t/m is that they never want to be broken by attackers outright. In practice it is difficult to secure a t/m against attackers in the modern era, but you can limit how many t/ms fall and make it way too expensive to chain deep, and you can set up t/ms to handle land chains better. Massacre attacks however will flatten your province. To be a truly effective t/m, you will need to have a good sense of when it is safe to attack, or when you can attack without losing a war. Likewise an attacker should have a firm handle on t/m mechanics, since attacker ns and petty theft (particularly kidnap) has a strong effect for the low level of risk entailed.

Since all of your provinces should be opping, you should have a unified battle plan, rather than seperate t/m, attacker plans. At higher levels you should have an economic plan for your provinces and your kingdom as well, raw resources are super important against kingdoms that know what they are doing. As such, attacks (of any sort) should be considered like ops, in that they need to be directed towards a particular goal.

So how do you use each op effectively? It would take a long time to explain but generally you want to do things that do the most damage, and play off of each other. For instance, nightmares and trads (with nightstrike thrown in potentially). Nightstrike is one of the few ways to attack army out, even if that army is elite, so you can use ns as a means to control and isolate particular offenses (making it safe to keep those provinces bloating).

You don't need to focus all of your ops in one place (in fact, a lot of times doing this will actively harm your ability to win long wars), but you do need to make sure your ops are part of a consistent plan instead of randomly used for no reason. Fireball for instance is much better if it's not focused on one province, unless you need to crash that target's building efficiency, but you want to avoid fireballing targets you intend to landchain soon. Max gain nightstrike is very useful if your goal is total troop control rather than isolating a particular province; similar deal exists with spread tornado.

You would also want to op in nw range as much as possible, unless there is a critical target that needs to be isolated, or a highly vulnerable target (with useful gains) that is oor. Op damage drops off dramatically if you're outside 30% of your target's nw. If you have small attackers with good thieves, consider having them cover riots on smaller provinces (if those small provinces have significant peasants - they usually don't, but in long wars some might slip away, or be bloated with peasants on purpose). TPA levels can vary more and more in long wars, due to attrition and retraining, so you would want to have fairly regular updates if you suspect a target has bad TPA (especially when your kingdom has a known crime science advantage).

Know that thief damage isn't all about doing big damage fast; the best long-term strategy for thievery is to use economic attrition to build up more and more advantages, and only go for t/ms when you know the odds are in your favor. Sometimes you have to AW right away (made easier if someone nubs and has no WT), but doing AW or Prop too early is a good way to burn through your starting TPA and render a thief worthless. Safer bets, like nightstrike or (greater) arson, are often preferable in the early stages of war, especially as adjuncts to your attacker chains or as part of an isolation play.

Note that 100 successful nightstrikes in nw range will kill around 12-18% of a target's raw, elite offense depending on wt cover - this is not a small number, and it kills defense as well. Considering a core of 9 t/ms can put out 160-220 ops per 12 hours or better and some attackers can join in, you will likely do better than this. NS to kill elites is rather thief-intensive, but it is a more consistent yield than prop and more likely to succeed than AWing a strong thief defense like Elf/Faery outright. (AW also has some pretty deep requirements in order to pay off, since you need to AW to a level where the caster is basically at an attacker's level for the ops to matter...)

Finally, Greater Arson against watchtowers is stealth-positive; that is, the stealth you put into the op before running your primary op is worth more than running the primary op alone, assuming everyone runs their ops around the same hour. While you can use nado to open up on a target, this isn't always the best use of mana or runes (attacker vs. attacker MIGHT get through, but nightmare is going to have way better payoff if it can be cast), while GA is using stealth for stealth.

Most of these assume some level of organization on your kingdom's part. If you can't use nightmare waves, then a large portion of t/m's value is lost, and they're basically there to cast MS, NS, and defend. In any event, you would prefer to minimize fireball use until around mintime, and when you do cast fb it is better to use core attackers (especially chained core), while t/ms focus on MS, nado, nightmare (where it is still useful), or LL for acre-stacking, among other things. Fireball against a province with strong thieves is a bad idea, especially if the target has lots of fat attackers to feed him back peasants...