Province Management

You'll notice I almost never post numbers. This isn't because I'm trying to hide secrets or fear for my strats being laughed off the forum. My math skills are limited so I don't do formal ratios or even pay attention to elites per acre or measure specs. Although being criticized for my strats the peculiar part is that they work for me.

Influences by metaphor govern a lot of what I do. I'll explain one:

In considering a guard dog I reviewed several books and a few videos to see protection dogs at work and get an idea of all the caveats. To the point, I watched the dogs motion as it went for the bite and how it reacted once it achieved a full mouth bite.

The mark(the guy in the bite suit), after taking the brunt of the dogs impact, swung the dog around to try to force a release. I watched this in slow motion since dogs can move furiously, belying initial perception. When the dog had leverage with it's front and/or back legs it would maximize its tearing force to and fro. When the mark was swinging the dog it relaxed it's body while maintaining a death grip. A dog is a fairly simple predator. It has teeth for the work.

So, when I'm talking about optimum builds we must understand what they do; why they are optimum by community standards. When I'm talking about why they fail it's the lack of constant leverage. Now I'm not saying they fail in every circumstance, but that what the community tends to value doesn't serve in the totality of leverage.

Weakneses and strengths evolve through every encounter. I'm not talking per war, I'm talking per tick. This in itself is reason to take a closer look at the traditional wave and what the alternatives can be. Most of what I say concerns a single province, but we must extend our vision from the actions of a lone province to how we adjust in symbiosis.

Consider when you are chained. If the chain is slow you can maximize the use of tpa and wpa. If you're hard chained quickly and violently you should still consider your micro in the scheme of the big picture. How do you contribute? When the dust settles the player is left with a few remnants and it's wise to consider what remnants you will hang onto.

I myself am very bullish on wpa, but it hardly serves if you can't steal runes to fuel your endeavors. Sure, you can be razed and massacred, but just remember that you're still in play to coerce actions by your enemy. One focus I have is to not be a drain on my kingdom. I attempt to act independently when I'm out of the critical picture, but I still try to muddy the waters. While I fight the survival rigamarole I also attempt to shank bigger provinces to keep them clamoring.

Prior to chaining I've oftentimes already laid the foundations for a chain stall; if orders aren't so strict as to leave your flanks wide open. A chain stall is the active form of nw shelf establishment. If you need a reminder, I'm referring to the kingdom strat you see many top kingdom build inherently. The secret to chain stalling is in what you give and what you take. The basic tactic is to give ground to larger enemy provinces but ambush if possible. The taking is in striking near nw provinces for trad march. The idea here is to surrender acres to the bigs, yet kill elites to augment your tops unbreakability. You trad march provinces in or near the nw below you to establish nw range. Sometimes I'll relay my taps to have a consistent acre feed to hold onto defense, thus nw. Good kingdoms may try to crash the relay but they have to break off from the wave to engage. Isolation is the key if you're the type of player that invokes a constant leverage concept. Regardless of the success of the enemy chain you can rest assured your doing your best to maintain your status as beneficial. The drawback is that you have armies all over the place and some kingdoms frown on this as not having the offense to break a huge defense. But understand that in large part this is due to other kingdom mates incapability to engage.

To wrap your head around micro that serves the macro you must look at the bigger picture. The fact is I've achieved chain stalls against good kingdoms, so this isn't crap born in the inactivity of the ghetto. Another thing to consider is that we are talking about maximum leverage. If every province is doing the same thing we lose leverage. How? In defensive stopping ammunition, like hollow tip 45s, we achieve stopping power by the leverage induced by the hollow point mushrooming in the wound cavity. Solid or round tip ammunition has a tendency to over penetrate, or in our case hitting the same hole repeatedly.

In order to achieve maximum leverage we need to have something to sink our teeth into until there is nothing left to grab. To fully understand this we can't simply look at acres and basic nw, but honor, scientists, wages, trade balance...
The Virtual Kingdom design is predicated on available leverage. No, it's not perfect. That'd be delusional. What I'm saying is, the way the attackers attack, the way the t/ms op/sabotage is coming from all directions, not just one or two.

When you're seeking leverage in one category it'll sometimes compromise leverage in another. In this way you should be planning ahead of the curve to reestablish strength in an area that can become flaccid. A perfect example would be tpa. We can't do much about wpa, but we can train thieves as we go and retain spec credits. Did I mention the enemies runes become more valuable the lower your wpa? You know this so stage 2 thinking invites the idea of taking runes away from your enemy. Constant leverage. Oh, and meteors don't kill thieves ;)

Think about these things, even if some seem naive to a veteran. When I've been told something I do won't work my reply is to stop me. Even if the math against me is sound the idea at its core is to invoke action outside normal practices. Make enemy opportunities traps or turn them into traps as you adapt to an ever changing environment.