
Originally Posted by
flogger
We started off the hostile with a pretty significant troop advantage, to the point of being kd wide on basically no peasants, pandas left about 3 peasants per acre and weren't nearly as trained. CR started the war about 15k acres ahead, so in order for us to win big enough to compete vs them a week or so later, the standard war where both sides' TMs go untouched and you just trade land, wouldn't do the trick. So I went with the strategy of trying to take down their TM land, and then find a way to farm the core land afterwards.
What I was a bit caught off guard with was I didn't expect pandas to outright give us the button. We kept soldiers around in case they bounced, trained them at the last minute, and we made stables late as well and at our BE's they needed about 2 days to fill the stables, thinking I was going to spend 3 waves going from 4 to 10 to 14 to give button. I didn't expect them to wave and give us button control as we had guys who could break their TMs.
The downside being that since we were topfeeding (2500-2700a attackers on 3200a faeries), they had to leave low defense to break the faeries, and their 3k acre avians were able to 2x, and then after a few rounds 3 and 4x. We made most of our TM's semi attackers and always planned on using them as attackers. Again, the only way to catch CR was to win big, so we had to run close to 25 attackers. In hindsight, we could have won the war, or made it 50/50 had we just traded hits on their avians with our bigger attackers, but vs their attack speed it wouldn't have been a big win or done us any good in the long run vs CR a week later.
Long hostile meter control is annoying, as we had way more offense and could way outhit them, but we never were able to without giving them control of the button, so our hitters had to eat some hits turtled, we never got econ going and pandas got their econ going. The war win bonus and 4 days of them cranking double guilds and decent sci mods made things like greed and FG really tough, so we were never able to GC starve them, so their econ flipped our troop advantage after a few days, so where in war we could only 2x to 2x on the core (whereas we started 3x to 2x)
Pandas made the right moves at the right time, hit the right guys at the right time most all war, and last age it took me 7 days of no sleep to beat em, they're a good kingdom. I didn't have 7 days of no sleep motivation this age given that I joined a few days in. In hindsight I think it would have been possible to just trade hits with their bigger avians and beat em down and we would have been left with the 3 banks and 6 hybrid attackers vs 5 dwarves, but I think our core gets trashed in doing that and the win wouldn't have been big enough to match CR.
Actually at the end, I made a nub mistake, I thought we had made it to day change and I thought when on 150 to 149, once daychange happenned, I had 30 more meter to play with. at 3 minutes before daychange I was mapping out making 20 hits on them. Then prot told me "you know we gotta wait till they hit, right"
I forgot they also went down to 120, so we had no meter left to play with when I wanted one more round to finish off the faes in hostile we did take down (as soon as we declared our med sized dudes suiciding on faes would be chained to where they are now, so we needed hostile to protect them). In theory I was going with trading 1 orc for 1 fae mystic is a good trade.
So when they didn't hit us after the tick I had to come up with a plan pretty quick while at work, it was some pretty bad semi chains I hoped would cause more over pop and give us NW range protection on our med sizes from NW range, but our med sizes had already been beat down hard enough in hostile they got trashed and are the 400a orcs ya see today. So when your open wave is designed to protect your medium and the medium gets immediately trashed, it was pretty clear from hour 5 of the war it was trouble. And speed generally kills, once the speedier kd gets in a good spot, it can turn into some big wins.