Observing the A-Team
For the newer players it's good to take a tour of the kingdoms by ranking. Number 2 in land, nw and honor with a 3-0 war record; let's look at the A-Team. If you press the nw tab you'll see an advanced clamp triad formation. From the center there's a nw spread of 811k to 968k where the entire battery of elf and faery form the belt. Attention to detail shows that the humans are roughly 50k apart through this center belt, which should indicate what in essence is the max gain firing arc. Since this is consistent with stand alone marching kinetics we can draw certain conclusions.
The belt is capable of inexhaustible offense, but is in a characteristically defensive nw posture. One reason could be that the number one kingdom, Emeriti, taxes number 2 and it's best to have a land yielding top of dwarves and humans to surrender tax limited gains. The other reason is to have Emeriti well within nw/acre reach if they decide to take land from t/ms. It's more complicated than that but the fact is that the closer kingdoms are in nw the more efficient gains. Therefor we might be wise to first look at the A-Team as an acre digestion system for Emeriti.
Acre digestion system? For the uninformed, we should regard the Utopian server as an African ecosystem; predators, omnivores, stuff that makes things harder like honey badgers and porcupines...
I'll share an example. I'm in a very small kingdom so we have a reasonable nw advantage vs large kingdoms. A very large kingdom struck our king, but in retaliation my king brought back a much higher yield of acres. What happens is the very large kingdom learns that these are difficult acres, like trying to eat raw horse meat with a human digestion system. It's a factor they the huge kingdom understand, it simply depends if the target is or isn't intimidated. By proxy or coincidence, larger kingdoms than ours begin hitting our monarch but far smaller than the original perpetrator. Thus, the very large kingdom, can by proxy or dumb luck, gain acres by the predatory ecosystem. This is why guys like me account acres going up with greater scrutiny than acres going down.
That wasn't a digression because it's important to understand the probability of linked destinies when you tangle with refined kingdoms.
But yes, look at the nw alignment and observe the dwarves on top with human meat shields as the top clamp, t/m center hinge, with human bottom clamp. In a classic Freeakstyle formation we have a war simplified clamp with no center hinge. The entire attacker core is the bottom clamp and the t/m array are the top. Freeakstyle has proven the simplified clamp is superior in the war tier, but the triad has great function in whoring. The triad, in my observation of AMA and Cromulent Republic, shows these formations are idealized toward land whoring kingdoms that see more war than classically built whoring, augmented by diplomacy. This makes sense since AMAs heyday was in the throes of the Absalom alliance.
Triads work based in center nw accumulations and has it's own acre/honor digestion system built into the kingdom itself. These accumulations and functional prowess seem complicated in architecture but are almost naturally occurring in practice.
Essentially the lower clamp is on a yo-yo diet of acres and honor. These generally consist of attacker types who grind defenses to palatable levels so the center can feed leisurely. (Now none of these 3 elements are simply one function designs; I'm simplifying.)
If we regard top killers as fangs then we can conceive the center t/m belt as the poison injected into the wound. In the A-Teams case the human meat shields are the killers and the dwarves are frustrated cows. How do we know this? It's mechanics, but even if you don't understand the mechanics observe the Emeriti top 3 provinces: build free in 6 ticks, great elite ratio, and a bunch of stuff I barely pay attention to.
Again, things are multifunctional. The center belt isn't just capable of launching ops and sabotage, they have relative defense advantages that create difficulty for the enemy. You can't really massacre them from the top and expect to survive a chaining attempt. And from the lower levels you jeopardize the bulk of your army. Additionally the belt is center to the conflict as interpreted by nw which is kind of a bulk packaging of t/m firing arcs. In most kingdoms the t/ms occupy the top making them less effective vs the enemy bottom. In Freeakstyles case this is a no-brainer since any enemy that could survive the gauntlet of half a kingdom of t/ms might as well break the server.
The center belt in top kingdoms is the stopgap when facing homogenous cores like that of Emeriti this age. What's interesting is that the Emeriti kingdom of this age is a flogger signature. Yet I remember flogger mentioning to them the idea of whoring vs winning wars. So the Emeriti design is pure flogger, whereas the A-Team design was A Mothers Advice design. And I repeat, the triad I observed was prominent in the ages when AMA was outnumbered by Absalom interested: a design that was built for top warring vs pure whoring kingdoms. While I mentioned this before, we have 2 specimens before us that hail to the ages of land crown prestige. The pure whoring kingdom is designed to yield maximum acres, while the triad is a slower whoring construct but superior in war vs a pure whoring set.
Originally Posted by Bishop
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