Waving
How we wave is as much pageantry as it is strategy. Most of this virtual kingdom blends equal parts. The elliptical wave is both an act of strategy and a characteristic of the way I build, or pageantry.
Players locked into the notion of full kingdom waving every 12 ticks or so should enjoy the satisfying experience like watching the pneumatic press channel. It is effective macro and should be appreciated for the crushing blows it inflicts on enemies. The strategic weakness isn’t in the wave itself, but the perception of emptying all your barrels. This isn’t a mistake of experienced players, but more those who’ve witnessed full waves and wish to mimic the effects. What happens is it becomes culturally embedded and players who are great mechanics hone the wave, but fail to recognize the total objective. It becomes a kind of atrophy in that you’re doing it, your enemy is doing it, so no innovation other than mechanical streamlining takes place....until you encounter the “other”.
The elliptical wave is simply ghetto ragtagging sculpted into organized subgroups. It’s not my creation, as I’m sure some forms of alternative waving have always been around. I present my version as a muse; a way to shine light on the micro, and how great kingdoms sustain winning culture.
Most war kingdom waves are one massive spearhead and as such you can conceive the virtual kingdom as being 5 flanking operations. War kingdoms like Freeakstyle were great at micro. They themselves weren’t fanatics of micro, and freely admitted to me wars in which the enemy ran superior micro. They still won most of them. So what we’ve learned in one paragraph is that balance is key.
The divisions are marked spearhead or assault or hq as a rule of thumb and how they’re formulated. The fact is, any division can do the job of the other as opportunities arise. That is the essence of quality micro: opportunity.
For instance, the emphasis I put on dwarf artisan is their ability to have productive buildings in place well before the enemy waves at traditional wave sequences. The enemy can adjust and this action in itself depletes the full kingdom wave. So we act on opportunity, but we don’t just wait for opportunity to present itself; we take initiative. We dictate the pace or we counter what we expect based in the ‘ghost notes‘ of wave doctrine. I’ll admit this a finesse approach to utopian combat, but as a player in the situation I would act with rugged resolve.
Communication is huge and getting information that’s valuable is bafflingly overlooked. If one of our prime attackers has absorbed massive ops and sabotage damage we want to know “who” and we want to know ASAP. I can make them pay, and that’s not petty revenge. The opportunity to wreck a depleted t/m is a war shortening objective. If you get them down before they can replenish you’ve helped the guy after you. Sure, I’ve had players tell me “lots of names” but we want to know who did the vortex, the propaganda etc. Everybody can fireball a struggling fat attacker. This is why I’ve designated rovers and campers in the virtual kingdom. Again, a rover or camper is mostly in name only. The elliptical wave means we have a division on deck at least every 4.8 ticks. Remember, the spent enemy province just inhaled a lot of honor and hopefully wanted as much as possible. This is the hidden strength of the defensive graduation of having every race in kingdom. We can design the divisional wave to move that honor to the next most secure province on our roster. We can even set up our offense based in graduated honor acquisition, but that’s getting close to too much micro. It’s important that we know it exists so we can exploit as many flanks as the enemy fails to shield.
Originally Posted by Bishop
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