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Regards,
John
Regards,
John
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Dodging and Backtiming Guide by xyziz
Well i made this in w26 some time ago, decided to share it now. Don't know if there has already been one posted, but anyway. Here it is:
Note, you need premium account to do this.
So, you find yourself in the situation where the person you have attacked has dodged with all his offence and sent the attack to arrive ~1 second after your troops get back. You think ZOMG WTF HAX!!!one11! HOW TEH FAR AM I TO DODGE IT (or maybe not that dramaticly, but yeah).
anyway, here is what to do.
step 1:
As the attack gets to say 1.5 min before your offence arrives back. The first thing you do is send all other troops in your base to go find some nice little village to go visit, so you have absolutely no units left in your base.
step 2:
Go to any report of an attack you have made (doesnt matter on who, where, when, outcome etc.)
and then clicky on the attack with all troops:
step 3:
Because all your troops are out of your base, you will get the following screen pop-up:
Now, as soon as your troops get back into your village, the page will automatically refresh, so what you need to do is have your mouse over where the ok button is to send the attack, which should be about where the red cross is on this (provided you leave your screen scrolled as much to the top as possible) Note i used a graphical package so the ok button may be slightly different for non-graphical packs (cant remember which one i used either):
Then provided your net is fast enough you should be able to dodge.
EDIT: Don't forget to click the OK button, it was brought to my attention that i forgot to mention this.
Hope this helps.
Xyziz
Note, you need premium account to do this.
So, you find yourself in the situation where the person you have attacked has dodged with all his offence and sent the attack to arrive ~1 second after your troops get back. You think ZOMG WTF HAX!!!one11! HOW TEH FAR AM I TO DODGE IT (or maybe not that dramaticly, but yeah).
anyway, here is what to do.
step 1:
As the attack gets to say 1.5 min before your offence arrives back. The first thing you do is send all other troops in your base to go find some nice little village to go visit, so you have absolutely no units left in your base.
step 2:
Go to any report of an attack you have made (doesnt matter on who, where, when, outcome etc.)
and then clicky on the attack with all troops:
step 3:
Because all your troops are out of your base, you will get the following screen pop-up:
Now, as soon as your troops get back into your village, the page will automatically refresh, so what you need to do is have your mouse over where the ok button is to send the attack, which should be about where the red cross is on this (provided you leave your screen scrolled as much to the top as possible) Note i used a graphical package so the ok button may be slightly different for non-graphical packs (cant remember which one i used either):
Then provided your net is fast enough you should be able to dodge.
EDIT: Don't forget to click the OK button, it was brought to my attention that i forgot to mention this.
Hope this helps.
Xyziz
Non Premium Guide by Wallam
Hi all,
This is a guide I am writing to share with you guys some sneaky tactics. It is the first guide I have ever written so be nice =D
First Tactic - Sniping the noble
This is the first tactic I am going to share with you guys. You probably all know it anyway but it’s good to be sure. It’s called sniping the noble.
When you are under attack on a village the best way to take that village from an attacking point of view is to send a noble train which usually comprises of 4 nobles one after the other, sometimes 5 if you really want to be guaranteed the village. This is a good timed noble train which I sent. The attacks are hitting in the same second, which makes it difficult for people to use the tactic I am talking about.
Now before that a clearing attack will be sent from a different village. So a few seconds before the noble train hits the clearing attack hits and so they can’t rebuild their defence before the noble hits. The tactic that I am going to show is dodging the clearing attack but then recalling the support to defend the nobles...
There are two ways of doing this. The first is to send away an attack on another village with your defensive troops, just before the clearing wave hits. You then cancel the attack and make sure it comes back after the clearing wave but before the nobles and so all the nobles are killed but the clearing attack does not kill your defensive troops and leave the village exposed. However this tactic has its flaws. For example if cats were in the clearing wave or one attack you thought was a ram fake was actually cats hitting your rally point then you could not cancel the attack and so your village would get nobled. A rally point takes 4 minutes to build and so as long as the cats hit less than 8 minutes before the nobles you would lose your village. Why 8 minutes? Because it takes 4 minutes to go out and 4 minutes to be cancelled.
The second way is much better in my opinion. What you do is either send your troops away and cancel them using the rally point before any attacks hit or you send them to support an abandoned village and withdraw them between the clearing and noble attacks noting the time it takes to get from the abandoned village back to the village you are trying to defend. If you have multiple villages another alternative is to send support from another one of your villages to land between the nobles and the clearing wave. This picture taken by me shows me sniping a noble train using the tactic I just mentioned.
You might notice a cancelled attack at the top of the screen and that was to dodge a scout attack that had just hit.
I find it better to let the first noble hit and snipe the other three as usually people send a larger forcer with the first noble in case the clearing attack has not fully cleared a village they can still reduce the loyalty and so I let the first noble hit and snipe the other 3 attacks.
The best way to snipe is to have a new window open with the times the attacks will hit but minimize it so you can still see the times and underneath have the button ready to press to send the snipe to the village. Your screen should look something like this.
Identifying attacks
The problem is with this tactic you have to be able to identify attacks. This is a topic I will say a short bit about now.
There is only one way to identify attacks accurately and that involves being online when the attacks are sent. In times of war when you are sleeping make sure you always get an account sitter so he can snipe noble trains/ identify attacks. This is especially important if you are on the frontlines. What you do is note the time that there was until the attack hit when you first noticed it. Don’t bother trying to identify them unless you are within a few minutes of them being sent. Then you go to the attack screen and type in 1 of a unit. E.G 1 spear and see the time it takes to get to your village. The closest time for 1 unit to the original time you noted down will have that unit in but remember the time you have noted down should always be smaller or the same as the closest unit. If you get it bigger than you have done something wrong or that unit is not involved in the attack.
To help you identify attacks. I suggest you build at least one of each unit (except nobles) in all of your villages. I know you specialize village but 1 ram is not going to take up too much farm space is it? You don’t build nobles for 2 reasons. The first is that they are very expensive and useless to have in a defensive village except from noble fakes (but we will come onto that later). The second is that if the attack is slower than ram speed than the attack has to contain a noble as rams are the second slowest unit but the nobles are the slowest and so it has to contain a noble.
Another tactic of identifying attacks works in the same way however instead of using units to work out the time you use an external site with a distance calculator on such as tribalwarsmap or twstats. Then you navigate the site to get onto the world you are being attacked in. Underneath each world there will be a function called distance calculator or travel times depending on which site you use. Click these and follow the instructions to work out which unit you are being attacked by. A screen will come up like this depending on which tool you use.
Tribalwars Stats:
Tribalwars Map:
Both of these methods give a list of travel times of each unit to the village and so it is another effective method of indentifiying attacks. If you have lots of attacks starting at the same second press PrtSC (print screen) and copy that into a paint document. Then use the times shown on that to help you identify the attacks than noting the times down. This is because otherwise you may not be able to note down all the times quick enough to accuratly identifying the incoming attacks.
Second tactic - Stopping Sniping of nobles
The second tactic is putting cats in a clearing attack or as a fake attack. This as I have already mentioned will stop the sniping of nobles however this attack will not work on experienced players due to them using the tactics that I have previously mentioned. A key to sending these attacks is sending them when your opponent is offline and so he cannot identify them. Now luckily the cats and rams travel at the same speed and so hopefully your opponent will think that an attack is a ram fake rather than a wave of cats. Make sure if you want the opponent to think it is a ram fake that you have already cleared the village with a different attack before the cats come in otherwise your cats will die and your nobles could get sniped. Now make sure the fake is less than 4 minutes before your last noble otherwise the rally point could be rebuilt in that time. This picture illustrates the tactic I just mentioned.
As you can see the attacks marked with a red dot are just normal ram fakes. However the clearing wave marked with a green dot has been disguised as a ram fake. The cats are just after and destroy his rally point. Then you have the noble train marked by the purple dots and finally the support for the freshly nobled village marked by a yellow dot. You may have noticed the noble train is not particularly well timed. With you destroying the rally point it does not have to be although it does help if the person uses the second method of sniping as it makes it much harder to snipe. (I did this pic as a tutorial so I could not be bothered to cancel and do it again =D. Usually my train would be four nobles in the same second in that situation but I was feeling lazy today =D). The flipside of this however is that players are more likely to use the first method of sniping on trains which are badly timed as it is an easier method of sniping as takes less time to set up. This is especially plausible in war where the player is likely to be receiving 30+ incomings on each village. However If a train is well timed it is easier to use the second method of sniping as it indicates the player is experienced and might try a few sneaky tricks of his own. Remember this tactic does not work on experienced players who use the second method of sniping and so it is always good to get the nobles the same second, and if not for any other reason to practice your timing.
Third Tactic - Support fakes
The third tactic to share with you guys is called support fakes. This is a devious tactic to make it look like you are nobling a different village to the one you are actually going for. This is the answer to the question, wont the support to a village destroy the point of fakes as it will be obvious which village you are planning to noble. The tactic is to send fake support to other villages that you have a fake noble train to. What you do is make 4 or so ram fakes look like a noble train by having them really close to each other and then put a few looking fakes before that. Then send 1 swordsman or another defensive unit as a support to hit just after the last ram. This means they will think that this village is getting nobled as well. If you do this to multiple villages it means he cannot move support around from one village to another. This increases the chance he will choose the wrong noble train to snipe because all your fakes noble trains and real ones should land at the same time. This would mean he only has the possibility of sniping one of the noble trains and fake noble trains and so the chances he chooses the right one are very slim. The attacks should look something like this.
Remember the support fakes should only be one defensive unit. Using swords is the best as it makes the fakes look more realistic if the owner of the village you are faking is online. Obviously you send real support to the village you have nobles’ en-route to and be careful not to mix up support fakes to the villages you have nobles’ en-route to.
Fourth Tactic - Nobling your own village
This tactic is very evil and can be used very effectively in certain situations. It is best used on a village right in the middle of an enemy cluster or you know you are going to lose. What you do is clear your village of troops and noble yourself 3 times make the last noble just before enemy attacks hit. Then the first noble of the enemy takes the village and then he nobles his own village another 3 time wasting his own troops and nobles.
Now in this situation you have two options. You can either laugh at the person who noble themselves and think how great you are or you can noble back the village. This all depends on the positioning of the village, if you don’t think you can re-take and hold the village then ignore the tactic I am about to mention. However if you think you would be able to hold the village after you have retaken it this is what you should do.
Attack your own village between the time of their last noble attack and there support arriving. This is an evil tactic as not only will they have cleared there own village for you and only have a few hundred troops in there, they will support your own village once you have nobled it back. This picture illustrates the scenario.
As you can see the enemy clears the village then nobles it with his first noble. He then proceeds to noble himself another 3 times before you come in and noble it straight back before the support arrives. This tactic is evil, but it works very well. Again, it is important to get the timing right otherwise you end up nobling the village either after the enemy support arrives or before the last enemy noble making the enemy noble the village straight back.
Fifth tactic - Mailing your enemy
You are probably thinking, what is he on about, what will mailing my enemy do. I can assure you I have used this tactic before and it worked beautifully. What you do is write a mail such as this one I used to convince the enemy you are a spy in your tribe working for there tribe.
Not only did this work beautifully and he thought all his attacks are fakes. Even after I nobled 4 of his villages, he was convinced that it was sitters that sent them and so I sent more trains and he still thought they were fakes. You might ask why I told him what village I was nobling.. well I told him 5 minutes before and I knew he wasn’t online. It also added credibility to my argument that sitters sent the trains as I told him before the nobles hit. It was a main reason why I managed to noble more of his villages. This tactic can be very effective although it does not work on most people it is still worth giving it a shot. There reaction is also very funny when they realise what has happened =D
Tactic 6 - Timing noble trains
A key tactic on tribalwars is being able to time noble trains and attacks well. This is primarily to stop the sniping of trains but also to confuse the enemy with well co-ordinated attacks. The main thing to do to get a good noble train is to use multiple windows. Line the windows up across the screen in the order you want them to hit so you want the clearing attack on the farthest right and then the nobles from right to left. This picture will illustrate what I mean. I am using rams as the timing aspect is still the same.
And as it happens this noble train wasn’t great but it is still a method which is a lot quicker than other methods and gets nobles closer together. You want nobles closer together in a train because they are harder to snipe. This image shows the result of the method shown in the last window they weren’t all on the same second but this train would still be difficult to snipe.
Tactic Seven - Identifying attacks when you weren’t online when they were launched
The first thing to do is to try and work out how skilled the player is who is launching against you. There are multiple ways of doing this the best ones are to first look at the timing of the supposed noble train, is it very close together? If it is then it roughly indicates the player has some experience. How many attacks are there? Is there just 5? If so dodge the first one or two and snipe the rest. Then check the ranking of the player. If he has a high points rank he is generally quite experienced but make sure you check the players OD rank too as he could just be a pointwhore.
After you have got as much information about the player’s experience as possible you should be able to tell the following:
- If the player is not experienced it is most likely he will not have disguised his noble trains well and so the most likely attack is probably the noble train. Snipe the attack after the first noble has hit in the noble train.
- If the player is experienced then it gets more difficult. Try to identify the villages the attacks are coming from if there is an attack coming from one village and then 4 from the same village snipe that attack. If there is more than one of these attacks where there is 1 attack from one village, 4 attacks form another, choose the set of attacks at the end.
- If the attack has support after it from an inexperienced player then that is probably the village getting nobled however if it is from an experienced player do not count that it that village getting nobled. This is especially true if there is multiple support coming from the attacking player travelling to different villages that you own. This is an image of an attack coming towards a village.
This image shows a village being attacked. Now say you were offline and then logged on to see this coming towards your village it would be plausible to snipe the attack after the first blue dot. This although not guaranteed to snipe the noble train is the most likely option and the best you can do in the situation.
- Copyrighted by Wallam (C).
Many thanks to these people who proofread or helped me with the guide:
- Mattcurr
- MasterFire
- Galum
- -OwNeD-
This is a guide I am writing to share with you guys some sneaky tactics. It is the first guide I have ever written so be nice =D
First Tactic - Sniping the noble
This is the first tactic I am going to share with you guys. You probably all know it anyway but it’s good to be sure. It’s called sniping the noble.
When you are under attack on a village the best way to take that village from an attacking point of view is to send a noble train which usually comprises of 4 nobles one after the other, sometimes 5 if you really want to be guaranteed the village. This is a good timed noble train which I sent. The attacks are hitting in the same second, which makes it difficult for people to use the tactic I am talking about.
Now before that a clearing attack will be sent from a different village. So a few seconds before the noble train hits the clearing attack hits and so they can’t rebuild their defence before the noble hits. The tactic that I am going to show is dodging the clearing attack but then recalling the support to defend the nobles...
There are two ways of doing this. The first is to send away an attack on another village with your defensive troops, just before the clearing wave hits. You then cancel the attack and make sure it comes back after the clearing wave but before the nobles and so all the nobles are killed but the clearing attack does not kill your defensive troops and leave the village exposed. However this tactic has its flaws. For example if cats were in the clearing wave or one attack you thought was a ram fake was actually cats hitting your rally point then you could not cancel the attack and so your village would get nobled. A rally point takes 4 minutes to build and so as long as the cats hit less than 8 minutes before the nobles you would lose your village. Why 8 minutes? Because it takes 4 minutes to go out and 4 minutes to be cancelled.
The second way is much better in my opinion. What you do is either send your troops away and cancel them using the rally point before any attacks hit or you send them to support an abandoned village and withdraw them between the clearing and noble attacks noting the time it takes to get from the abandoned village back to the village you are trying to defend. If you have multiple villages another alternative is to send support from another one of your villages to land between the nobles and the clearing wave. This picture taken by me shows me sniping a noble train using the tactic I just mentioned.
You might notice a cancelled attack at the top of the screen and that was to dodge a scout attack that had just hit.
I find it better to let the first noble hit and snipe the other three as usually people send a larger forcer with the first noble in case the clearing attack has not fully cleared a village they can still reduce the loyalty and so I let the first noble hit and snipe the other 3 attacks.
The best way to snipe is to have a new window open with the times the attacks will hit but minimize it so you can still see the times and underneath have the button ready to press to send the snipe to the village. Your screen should look something like this.
Identifying attacks
The problem is with this tactic you have to be able to identify attacks. This is a topic I will say a short bit about now.
There is only one way to identify attacks accurately and that involves being online when the attacks are sent. In times of war when you are sleeping make sure you always get an account sitter so he can snipe noble trains/ identify attacks. This is especially important if you are on the frontlines. What you do is note the time that there was until the attack hit when you first noticed it. Don’t bother trying to identify them unless you are within a few minutes of them being sent. Then you go to the attack screen and type in 1 of a unit. E.G 1 spear and see the time it takes to get to your village. The closest time for 1 unit to the original time you noted down will have that unit in but remember the time you have noted down should always be smaller or the same as the closest unit. If you get it bigger than you have done something wrong or that unit is not involved in the attack.
To help you identify attacks. I suggest you build at least one of each unit (except nobles) in all of your villages. I know you specialize village but 1 ram is not going to take up too much farm space is it? You don’t build nobles for 2 reasons. The first is that they are very expensive and useless to have in a defensive village except from noble fakes (but we will come onto that later). The second is that if the attack is slower than ram speed than the attack has to contain a noble as rams are the second slowest unit but the nobles are the slowest and so it has to contain a noble.
Another tactic of identifying attacks works in the same way however instead of using units to work out the time you use an external site with a distance calculator on such as tribalwarsmap or twstats. Then you navigate the site to get onto the world you are being attacked in. Underneath each world there will be a function called distance calculator or travel times depending on which site you use. Click these and follow the instructions to work out which unit you are being attacked by. A screen will come up like this depending on which tool you use.
Tribalwars Stats:
Tribalwars Map:
Both of these methods give a list of travel times of each unit to the village and so it is another effective method of indentifiying attacks. If you have lots of attacks starting at the same second press PrtSC (print screen) and copy that into a paint document. Then use the times shown on that to help you identify the attacks than noting the times down. This is because otherwise you may not be able to note down all the times quick enough to accuratly identifying the incoming attacks.
Second tactic - Stopping Sniping of nobles
The second tactic is putting cats in a clearing attack or as a fake attack. This as I have already mentioned will stop the sniping of nobles however this attack will not work on experienced players due to them using the tactics that I have previously mentioned. A key to sending these attacks is sending them when your opponent is offline and so he cannot identify them. Now luckily the cats and rams travel at the same speed and so hopefully your opponent will think that an attack is a ram fake rather than a wave of cats. Make sure if you want the opponent to think it is a ram fake that you have already cleared the village with a different attack before the cats come in otherwise your cats will die and your nobles could get sniped. Now make sure the fake is less than 4 minutes before your last noble otherwise the rally point could be rebuilt in that time. This picture illustrates the tactic I just mentioned.
As you can see the attacks marked with a red dot are just normal ram fakes. However the clearing wave marked with a green dot has been disguised as a ram fake. The cats are just after and destroy his rally point. Then you have the noble train marked by the purple dots and finally the support for the freshly nobled village marked by a yellow dot. You may have noticed the noble train is not particularly well timed. With you destroying the rally point it does not have to be although it does help if the person uses the second method of sniping as it makes it much harder to snipe. (I did this pic as a tutorial so I could not be bothered to cancel and do it again =D. Usually my train would be four nobles in the same second in that situation but I was feeling lazy today =D). The flipside of this however is that players are more likely to use the first method of sniping on trains which are badly timed as it is an easier method of sniping as takes less time to set up. This is especially plausible in war where the player is likely to be receiving 30+ incomings on each village. However If a train is well timed it is easier to use the second method of sniping as it indicates the player is experienced and might try a few sneaky tricks of his own. Remember this tactic does not work on experienced players who use the second method of sniping and so it is always good to get the nobles the same second, and if not for any other reason to practice your timing.
Third Tactic - Support fakes
The third tactic to share with you guys is called support fakes. This is a devious tactic to make it look like you are nobling a different village to the one you are actually going for. This is the answer to the question, wont the support to a village destroy the point of fakes as it will be obvious which village you are planning to noble. The tactic is to send fake support to other villages that you have a fake noble train to. What you do is make 4 or so ram fakes look like a noble train by having them really close to each other and then put a few looking fakes before that. Then send 1 swordsman or another defensive unit as a support to hit just after the last ram. This means they will think that this village is getting nobled as well. If you do this to multiple villages it means he cannot move support around from one village to another. This increases the chance he will choose the wrong noble train to snipe because all your fakes noble trains and real ones should land at the same time. This would mean he only has the possibility of sniping one of the noble trains and fake noble trains and so the chances he chooses the right one are very slim. The attacks should look something like this.
Remember the support fakes should only be one defensive unit. Using swords is the best as it makes the fakes look more realistic if the owner of the village you are faking is online. Obviously you send real support to the village you have nobles’ en-route to and be careful not to mix up support fakes to the villages you have nobles’ en-route to.
Fourth Tactic - Nobling your own village
This tactic is very evil and can be used very effectively in certain situations. It is best used on a village right in the middle of an enemy cluster or you know you are going to lose. What you do is clear your village of troops and noble yourself 3 times make the last noble just before enemy attacks hit. Then the first noble of the enemy takes the village and then he nobles his own village another 3 time wasting his own troops and nobles.
Now in this situation you have two options. You can either laugh at the person who noble themselves and think how great you are or you can noble back the village. This all depends on the positioning of the village, if you don’t think you can re-take and hold the village then ignore the tactic I am about to mention. However if you think you would be able to hold the village after you have retaken it this is what you should do.
Attack your own village between the time of their last noble attack and there support arriving. This is an evil tactic as not only will they have cleared there own village for you and only have a few hundred troops in there, they will support your own village once you have nobled it back. This picture illustrates the scenario.
As you can see the enemy clears the village then nobles it with his first noble. He then proceeds to noble himself another 3 times before you come in and noble it straight back before the support arrives. This tactic is evil, but it works very well. Again, it is important to get the timing right otherwise you end up nobling the village either after the enemy support arrives or before the last enemy noble making the enemy noble the village straight back.
Fifth tactic - Mailing your enemy
You are probably thinking, what is he on about, what will mailing my enemy do. I can assure you I have used this tactic before and it worked beautifully. What you do is write a mail such as this one I used to convince the enemy you are a spy in your tribe working for there tribe.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by don’t worry ****** on 24.05. at 18:56 Hi, I am an There tribe spy working in your tribe and so I am mailing you to say don’t worry. All the attacks I am sending you are fake, but I had to send you one real one as they sit our account regularly to make sure were not spying. The support however is real but you might question, why am I splitting it up between different villages, why not send all my support from one village to one of your villages. Again it is to do with account sitting, I can claim that I accidentally typed in a couple extra 00's on each attack but if I send a huge amount it looks suspicious. Again, don’t worry, the rest of my attacks to hit should be fakes. - ********** P.S Delete this message after you have read it and replied and I will do the same (please reply to show me you understand). This is because I know there are Your tribe spies in their tribe, but I haven’t worked out who yet and so they might see this on your account. Please do not post this in there tribe forums as again there are your tribe spies in their tribe and my cover could be exposed. P.P.S I should not tell you this, so please don’t tell There tribe leader It is because I know you have a lot of attacks hitting and so I wanted to take a load off your mind and let you concentrate on the real ones.. but if There tribe leader finds out he could get mad.. So please don’t tell him. I did it as I don’t want you to worry.. I know what its like to have loads of attacks hitting your villages ;) ******* on 24.05. at 22:30 Wait.. I just discovered a sitter sent a noble train at your village.. damn. The village in question is Actual village.. hopefully you can snipe it in time.. Don’t worry though about paying me back for the noble costs, I should have it covered.. |
Tactic 6 - Timing noble trains
A key tactic on tribalwars is being able to time noble trains and attacks well. This is primarily to stop the sniping of trains but also to confuse the enemy with well co-ordinated attacks. The main thing to do to get a good noble train is to use multiple windows. Line the windows up across the screen in the order you want them to hit so you want the clearing attack on the farthest right and then the nobles from right to left. This picture will illustrate what I mean. I am using rams as the timing aspect is still the same.
And as it happens this noble train wasn’t great but it is still a method which is a lot quicker than other methods and gets nobles closer together. You want nobles closer together in a train because they are harder to snipe. This image shows the result of the method shown in the last window they weren’t all on the same second but this train would still be difficult to snipe.
Tactic Seven - Identifying attacks when you weren’t online when they were launched
The first thing to do is to try and work out how skilled the player is who is launching against you. There are multiple ways of doing this the best ones are to first look at the timing of the supposed noble train, is it very close together? If it is then it roughly indicates the player has some experience. How many attacks are there? Is there just 5? If so dodge the first one or two and snipe the rest. Then check the ranking of the player. If he has a high points rank he is generally quite experienced but make sure you check the players OD rank too as he could just be a pointwhore.
After you have got as much information about the player’s experience as possible you should be able to tell the following:
- If the player is not experienced it is most likely he will not have disguised his noble trains well and so the most likely attack is probably the noble train. Snipe the attack after the first noble has hit in the noble train.
- If the player is experienced then it gets more difficult. Try to identify the villages the attacks are coming from if there is an attack coming from one village and then 4 from the same village snipe that attack. If there is more than one of these attacks where there is 1 attack from one village, 4 attacks form another, choose the set of attacks at the end.
- If the attack has support after it from an inexperienced player then that is probably the village getting nobled however if it is from an experienced player do not count that it that village getting nobled. This is especially true if there is multiple support coming from the attacking player travelling to different villages that you own. This is an image of an attack coming towards a village.
This image shows a village being attacked. Now say you were offline and then logged on to see this coming towards your village it would be plausible to snipe the attack after the first blue dot. This although not guaranteed to snipe the noble train is the most likely option and the best you can do in the situation.
- Copyrighted by Wallam (C).
Many thanks to these people who proofread or helped me with the guide:
- Mattcurr
- MasterFire
- Galum
- -OwNeD-
Sacred's Evaluation of O Villages
A word of intro. I am quite an experienced player when it comes to attacking, probably even considering all the stars we have here. However I will ONLY talk about Offensive armies as my experience in D is not enough to make me write anything.
The below is mostly just an adapted post from my tribal forum. It talks about lvl 3 but the ratios don't change for lvl 1 troops so the principle is the same.
Additionally, i might add from my experience Cavalry Offence was better to have then Infantry. This is because there are 2 types of players we will come to fight.
1) Noobs: Really bad look at HC and say: "Wow man! luk her this guyz got da best statz!". Some better ones will have swords as the are the most efficient unit. Both kill axes.
2) Experienced players. Have a lot of HC for same reasons as first noobs, BUT know how to use it. It is always better to hit a HC stacked village with LC's then axes.
I will refer to 3 O builds here. Troop numbers given below (rounded as i don't want to bore you), rams are not included for a simple reason I do expect anyone to be able to upkeep a smaller then 3.5k pop O village. If you plan to max O villages out, you might as well stop reading now. Take the ram numbers to verge between 300-400 depending on the size of village.
First thing we really want to know is how powerful these armies are! However my graphs will add a time factor as we of course don’t want an army that is building too slow to be useful!
(the less time the better)
We can clearly see that Normal has the best time and strength! So why the hell do we at all look at OE's 2 builds? Well, the truth is they help with defence.
The 1250 HC's in each strategy OE has come up with grant us 1 freebie full D village for every 3 O's we build which means we can have more offence which balances the power and time! This way we can have 3 O villages for every 2 D villages.
Normal is stronger (by 3% lol) and takes only HALF!!! of the time to build then Openeye. Speed is VERY important on such a slow world. However, this means it uses the resources twice as fast. Has no defence in O villages for quick support and so requires a higher ratio of D:O villages.Normal is more flexible not allowing players to make a counter strategy
OE + LC is the middle ground. It is the weakest BUT it has a good build time of only 21 days. This is two weeks less then the Openeye Strategy. Secondly, it combines speed with Defence as it has the same defensive quantities as it's much longer to build cousin. It however eats up INSANE amount of iron, during the 3 weeks you build it your 2 O's would eat up iron from 3 villages. This requires high markets and a lot of activity on markets :( This makes it a good strategy for someone who has time.
The below shows efficiency of how much of an O you can build per day:
Clearly, when we need to take a part in an Op in 2 weeks and are weak we should go for the Normal Build.
But, if we take part in a long term war against a skilled opponent who manages to counter-attack painfully overall the LC strategy is more efficient.
------------------------------------------------------
Cliffs:
Normal: Easily managed, efficient, powerful and limited resource juggling. Eaily adapted. No Defence. Limited amount of O:D villages. Not "stacking friendly" = weak against surprise attacks.
Openeye: No need for market trading. Has quick defense. 3 O's to 2 D's Requires a lot of activity. Takes VERY long.
OE + LC: Is fast and efficient. Has quick defense. 3 O's to 2 D's Needs huge markets in D villages. Always needs iron. Weakest of all 3. A lot of time spent sending resources.
I am assuming you will have ~100 merchants in an O vil maybe less and a full lvl 25 market in a D village. (bare in mind you will send to, not from the O's most of the time)
For below D village strengths I used a:
8k sp /2k HC build 1:1 ratio of D:O as Normal
11k sp / 1250 HC build 3:2 ratio as OE
There is a difference of ~25% in efficiency of both, but remember i assumed OE player had time to stack villages from O.
Secondly, although the 25% is not so much, remember the OE player also has 1 more O village at his disposal.
Thirdly, remember that the OE player took longer to build and will need to rebuild his O's as well after attacks hit due to losses in HC.
There are also several things that are more strategically than pure numbers can show.
OE's two builds are a real pain when it comes to manoeuvring defence. However, they provide you with a much less painful opportunity to snipe even big parts of an O village because LC and HC have a power of about 3k/5k sp/sw in a D, which means that they can kill A LOT even at lvl 1.
A Normal defence is much less of a pain and requires much less activity in general, which sounds simple but isn’t.
The below is mostly just an adapted post from my tribal forum. It talks about lvl 3 but the ratios don't change for lvl 1 troops so the principle is the same.
Additionally, i might add from my experience Cavalry Offence was better to have then Infantry. This is because there are 2 types of players we will come to fight.
1) Noobs: Really bad look at HC and say: "Wow man! luk her this guyz got da best statz!". Some better ones will have swords as the are the most efficient unit. Both kill axes.
2) Experienced players. Have a lot of HC for same reasons as first noobs, BUT know how to use it. It is always better to hit a HC stacked village with LC's then axes.
I will refer to 3 O builds here. Troop numbers given below (rounded as i don't want to bore you), rams are not included for a simple reason I do expect anyone to be able to upkeep a smaller then 3.5k pop O village. If you plan to max O villages out, you might as well stop reading now. Take the ram numbers to verge between 300-400 depending on the size of village.
Quote:
| Normal: 5900 Axes - 3250 LC Openeye: 11500 Axes - 1250 HC OE - LC: 6750 Axes - 1200 LC - 1250 HC |
(the less time the better)
We can clearly see that Normal has the best time and strength! So why the hell do we at all look at OE's 2 builds? Well, the truth is they help with defence.
The 1250 HC's in each strategy OE has come up with grant us 1 freebie full D village for every 3 O's we build which means we can have more offence which balances the power and time! This way we can have 3 O villages for every 2 D villages.
Normal is stronger (by 3% lol) and takes only HALF!!! of the time to build then Openeye. Speed is VERY important on such a slow world. However, this means it uses the resources twice as fast. Has no defence in O villages for quick support and so requires a higher ratio of D:O villages.Normal is more flexible not allowing players to make a counter strategy
OE + LC is the middle ground. It is the weakest BUT it has a good build time of only 21 days. This is two weeks less then the Openeye Strategy. Secondly, it combines speed with Defence as it has the same defensive quantities as it's much longer to build cousin. It however eats up INSANE amount of iron, during the 3 weeks you build it your 2 O's would eat up iron from 3 villages. This requires high markets and a lot of activity on markets :( This makes it a good strategy for someone who has time.
The below shows efficiency of how much of an O you can build per day:
Clearly, when we need to take a part in an Op in 2 weeks and are weak we should go for the Normal Build.
But, if we take part in a long term war against a skilled opponent who manages to counter-attack painfully overall the LC strategy is more efficient.
------------------------------------------------------
Cliffs:
Normal: Easily managed, efficient, powerful and limited resource juggling. Eaily adapted. No Defence. Limited amount of O:D villages. Not "stacking friendly" = weak against surprise attacks.
Openeye: No need for market trading. Has quick defense. 3 O's to 2 D's Requires a lot of activity. Takes VERY long.
OE + LC: Is fast and efficient. Has quick defense. 3 O's to 2 D's Needs huge markets in D villages. Always needs iron. Weakest of all 3. A lot of time spent sending resources.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by PeRvIs For both you need high level markets which cut back on the pop. space available for troops. |
For below D village strengths I used a:
8k sp /2k HC build 1:1 ratio of D:O as Normal
11k sp / 1250 HC build 3:2 ratio as OE
There is a difference of ~25% in efficiency of both, but remember i assumed OE player had time to stack villages from O.
Secondly, although the 25% is not so much, remember the OE player also has 1 more O village at his disposal.
Thirdly, remember that the OE player took longer to build and will need to rebuild his O's as well after attacks hit due to losses in HC.
There are also several things that are more strategically than pure numbers can show.
OE's two builds are a real pain when it comes to manoeuvring defence. However, they provide you with a much less painful opportunity to snipe even big parts of an O village because LC and HC have a power of about 3k/5k sp/sw in a D, which means that they can kill A LOT even at lvl 1.
A Normal defence is much less of a pain and requires much less activity in general, which sounds simple but isn’t.
Analysis of Defense Options by qwe4rty
I'd promised my tribe I'd write up an analysis of the different defensive options, and now that it's done, I felt like I should share it. This is a long post, and I encourage you to read each and every part of it. If you have constructive criticism, I'd love to hear it.
Each defensive village assumes a 20,000 population size available for troops. This is sufficient to show my intent.
Base build time:
Spear: 1:19 = 79 seconds
Sword: 1:56 = 116 seconds
HC: 6:14 = 374 seconds
a) 10k/10k spear/sword, lvl 3/3 - Standard
General Defense: 910,000
Cavalry Defense: 980,000
Time to build: 1,950,000 seconds = 32,500 minutes
b) 7k/7k/1k spear/sword/hc, lvl 3/3/3,-Hybrid 1 rams lvl 1
General Defense: 917000 --> 100.7% of a)
Cavalry Defense: 798,000 --> 81% of a)
Time to build: 1,365,000 seconds = 22,750 minutes
--------b.1) 7k/1k spear/hc, lvl 3/3
--------General Defense: 427,000
--------Cavalry Defense: 553,000
c) 7k/7k/1k lvl 3/2/2,-Hybrid 2 rams lvl 2
General Defense: 838,000 --> 92% of a)
Cavalry Defense: 758,000 --> 77% of a)
Time to build: 1,365,000 = 22,750 minutes
--------c.1) 7k/1k spear/hc, lvl 3,2
--------General Defense: 397,000
--------Cavalry Defense: 541,000
d) 8k/2k spear/HC, spear/HC
General Defense: 728,000 --> 80% of a), 79% of b), 86% of c)
Cavalry Defense: 728,000 --> 74% of a), 91% of b), 96% of c)
Time to build: 748,000 seconds = 12,466.7 minutes
Analysis
First off, there are several interesting things of note when you look at the different defense options.
Comparison: a) and b)
Build b) shaves off about 10,000 minutes of build time, which is a hefty amount. What are the payoffs? Surprisingly, you actually gain a slight amount of General Defense. However, percentage wise, it is rather insignificant. The main pay off is you lose Cavalry Defense (b) is only 81% as effective as build a) in this regard). In addition, build b) is slightly more flexibly, as it employs a fair number of HC, gaining a little bit more mobility.
However, thought your defense villages will be able to supply these research levels with no problem, you will have to sacrifice a research level in your offense villages to be able to have this defensive arrangement. The only likely one would be rams, dropping you from lvl 2 rams to lvl 1
Comparision: c) to b), with respect to a)
If you're not one of the people who wants to have a weaker nuke just so that you can have full research levels in every village, build c) would be the research levels you take in your offensive villages. Upon inspection, you will notice the General Defense of c) is 92% of a) while the Cavalry Defense of c) is 77% of a).
You have still shaved off about 10,000 minutes of build time. It is slightly weaker then b), but provides you with a slightly stronger nuke.
Comparison: d) to everything else
Finally, we get to the build I've been trying to sell. First off, you'll notice that it shaves another 10,000 minutes off of a). It is almost twice as fast to build as b) and c), and approaches 3 times as fast to build as a).
Now looking at the relative strengths. First off, when you compare cavalry defense of the 8k/2k spear/hc, you'll notice it is almost as strong as any of the hybrids. However, what you lose from changing from a Hybrid to pure spear/hc is General Defense. The 8k/2k is 80% as effective as a straight up 10k/10k, and 79% as effective as the stronger of the two hybrids.
Quick Summary.
The hybrid loses out on Cavalry Defense vs the Standard defense while gaining increased build time. The spear/HC has a comparable Cavalry Defense to the Hybrid, but loses out on General Defense to the Standard and Hybrid (80% as effective as standard, and 79% as effective as Hybrid, a comparable loss in General Defense), all the while, shaving off even more time.
Final (and Selling) point
So far however, this post has only gone into the relative strengths of the ratios, and has not taken into consideration one other crucial advantage the spears/HC has over any of the other defense options: movement speed.
To fully understand this, I'm going to go into a bit of geometry. Take the scenario that a village is under attack and you need to draw support from nearby villages. The attack is incoming in X minutes, and so you can only draw support from villages that are less then or equal to X minutes away. The border of the area that fulfills this constraint is a circle (all points in a plane at a constant distance, called the radius, from a fixed point, called the center), with the center being the village under attack.
The time of the incoming attack will be directly proportional to the distance from the villages on the outermost edge of that "circle" of villages that can get support to the one being attacked. Time is therefore proportional to the radius.
The area of the circle corresponds to the number of all villages able to get support to the village under attack under the time constraints. The formula for the area of a circle is A=pi*r^2
What does this mean in terms of tribal wars? It means as the max distance from the village under attack to villages that are able to provide support (radius) increases, the total number of villages able to provide support exponentially increases.
In terms of tribal wars, the faster your defense can move, the more defense you can stack in a single village, minimizing losses. Time is therefore a limiting factor. We can eliminate a), the Standard Defense, because it fails this miserably. Both its time to build and time to move are abysmal.
The hybrid defense improves upon the time factor of the Standard defense, building 10,000 minutes faster, and employing a number of HC able to provide support to a village. However, it still contains 7,000 swords, and this becomes a problem. While it takes longer to build, it also simultaneously slows down the speed of your support. Depending upon the length of time you have until an attack hits, you may not be able to send the swords with the rest of your support, it would have to arrive after. This significantly diminishes the strength of your defense. You move from a General Defense of 917000 and a Cavalry Defense: 798,000 to a General Defense of 427,000 and a Cavalry Defense of 553,000. Not as impressive looking as before.
The spear/HC defense on the other hand is more likely to be able to get its full defense power as support to a village before an attack lands.
Very last (I promise) point/comparison
With all this being said, it seems beneficial to compare the Hybrid with Spear/HC one last time, taking into consideration the movement speed.
Remember that the only two things significantly different between these 2 builds were the following:
1) spear/HC builds about 10,000 minutes faster
2) spear/HC is only 80% as effective in General Defense as the Hybrid (Cavalry defense is highly comparable, and as stacking increases, this difference diminishes to 0 faster).
Looking at this, one notices one important factor. The only thing spear/HC really lacks is the General Defense contained by the Hybrid. Guess what, Heavy Cavalry provides General Defense! By employing a much larger number of Heavy Cavalry then the hybrid, the chances that you can draw support from another village even further away increases.
Remember, there are several layers of defense that can be sent. The hybrid can send a full D from villages close by (7k spears, 7k swords, 1k HC), a half D from villages slightly farther away (7k spears, 1k HC), and a fractional D (1k HC) from villages extremely far away). Spears/HC on the other hand can send a full D from villages close by (8k/2k), a full D from villages slightly farther away (8k/2k), and a half D from villages extremely far away (2k HC).
By employing a larger number of HC, you can draw MORE support from further differences, and since it is HC, it provides a greater proportion of General Defense, which is the only thing that the Spears/HC lacked that the Hybrid had. (The small fraction of Cavalry Defense that the Hybrid had over the Spears/HC is further minimized by the small amount of Cavalry D provided by the HC).
This specific difference between hybrid and spears/hc is then evened out, and spears/hc are still left with the advantage of building almost twice as fast as the hybrid.
Also, remember that you have the full defense capabilities of the spear/HC after 12,466 minutes of building. At this point in time, the Hybrid will have only slightly more then half of the defensive power. The Hybrid's defense doesn't surpass the defense offered by spears/HC until around 18,000 minutes (this is a guesstimate, I'm tired of writing).
Conclusion
So basically, when you're in a war heavy environment and are being attacked, you may not have the time to even build a full farms worth of D. Each individual hybrid village will have LOWER total defense then spears/HC simply because of the time taken to build. Spears/HC contains all of the advantages of time, and can make up any slight difference in defense power through manipulation of the additional time you have at your disposal to build troops and send them.
___
As a note, I've never used a hybrid before, and there are all types of variations. For this analysis, I had just taken the first hybrid build one of my tribemates had posted. However, my end conclusion still remains the same. The mathematical comparisons I had made between the spear/HC and the hybrid build could change depending on if you went for a more spear heavy hybrid build in an attempt to balance the defense more (which would be a better hybrid build in my eyes), yet the maneuverability of spears/HC still makes it superior in my eyes.
--Researched and written by qwe4rty
Each defensive village assumes a 20,000 population size available for troops. This is sufficient to show my intent.
Base build time:
Spear: 1:19 = 79 seconds
Sword: 1:56 = 116 seconds
HC: 6:14 = 374 seconds
a) 10k/10k spear/sword, lvl 3/3 - Standard
General Defense: 910,000
Cavalry Defense: 980,000
Time to build: 1,950,000 seconds = 32,500 minutes
b) 7k/7k/1k spear/sword/hc, lvl 3/3/3,-Hybrid 1 rams lvl 1
General Defense: 917000 --> 100.7% of a)
Cavalry Defense: 798,000 --> 81% of a)
Time to build: 1,365,000 seconds = 22,750 minutes
--------b.1) 7k/1k spear/hc, lvl 3/3
--------General Defense: 427,000
--------Cavalry Defense: 553,000
c) 7k/7k/1k lvl 3/2/2,-Hybrid 2 rams lvl 2
General Defense: 838,000 --> 92% of a)
Cavalry Defense: 758,000 --> 77% of a)
Time to build: 1,365,000 = 22,750 minutes
--------c.1) 7k/1k spear/hc, lvl 3,2
--------General Defense: 397,000
--------Cavalry Defense: 541,000
d) 8k/2k spear/HC, spear/HC
General Defense: 728,000 --> 80% of a), 79% of b), 86% of c)
Cavalry Defense: 728,000 --> 74% of a), 91% of b), 96% of c)
Time to build: 748,000 seconds = 12,466.7 minutes
Analysis
First off, there are several interesting things of note when you look at the different defense options.
Comparison: a) and b)
Build b) shaves off about 10,000 minutes of build time, which is a hefty amount. What are the payoffs? Surprisingly, you actually gain a slight amount of General Defense. However, percentage wise, it is rather insignificant. The main pay off is you lose Cavalry Defense (b) is only 81% as effective as build a) in this regard). In addition, build b) is slightly more flexibly, as it employs a fair number of HC, gaining a little bit more mobility.
However, thought your defense villages will be able to supply these research levels with no problem, you will have to sacrifice a research level in your offense villages to be able to have this defensive arrangement. The only likely one would be rams, dropping you from lvl 2 rams to lvl 1
Comparision: c) to b), with respect to a)
If you're not one of the people who wants to have a weaker nuke just so that you can have full research levels in every village, build c) would be the research levels you take in your offensive villages. Upon inspection, you will notice the General Defense of c) is 92% of a) while the Cavalry Defense of c) is 77% of a).
You have still shaved off about 10,000 minutes of build time. It is slightly weaker then b), but provides you with a slightly stronger nuke.
Comparison: d) to everything else
Finally, we get to the build I've been trying to sell. First off, you'll notice that it shaves another 10,000 minutes off of a). It is almost twice as fast to build as b) and c), and approaches 3 times as fast to build as a).
Now looking at the relative strengths. First off, when you compare cavalry defense of the 8k/2k spear/hc, you'll notice it is almost as strong as any of the hybrids. However, what you lose from changing from a Hybrid to pure spear/hc is General Defense. The 8k/2k is 80% as effective as a straight up 10k/10k, and 79% as effective as the stronger of the two hybrids.
Quick Summary.
The hybrid loses out on Cavalry Defense vs the Standard defense while gaining increased build time. The spear/HC has a comparable Cavalry Defense to the Hybrid, but loses out on General Defense to the Standard and Hybrid (80% as effective as standard, and 79% as effective as Hybrid, a comparable loss in General Defense), all the while, shaving off even more time.
Final (and Selling) point
So far however, this post has only gone into the relative strengths of the ratios, and has not taken into consideration one other crucial advantage the spears/HC has over any of the other defense options: movement speed.
To fully understand this, I'm going to go into a bit of geometry. Take the scenario that a village is under attack and you need to draw support from nearby villages. The attack is incoming in X minutes, and so you can only draw support from villages that are less then or equal to X minutes away. The border of the area that fulfills this constraint is a circle (all points in a plane at a constant distance, called the radius, from a fixed point, called the center), with the center being the village under attack.
The time of the incoming attack will be directly proportional to the distance from the villages on the outermost edge of that "circle" of villages that can get support to the one being attacked. Time is therefore proportional to the radius.
The area of the circle corresponds to the number of all villages able to get support to the village under attack under the time constraints. The formula for the area of a circle is A=pi*r^2
What does this mean in terms of tribal wars? It means as the max distance from the village under attack to villages that are able to provide support (radius) increases, the total number of villages able to provide support exponentially increases.
In terms of tribal wars, the faster your defense can move, the more defense you can stack in a single village, minimizing losses. Time is therefore a limiting factor. We can eliminate a), the Standard Defense, because it fails this miserably. Both its time to build and time to move are abysmal.
The hybrid defense improves upon the time factor of the Standard defense, building 10,000 minutes faster, and employing a number of HC able to provide support to a village. However, it still contains 7,000 swords, and this becomes a problem. While it takes longer to build, it also simultaneously slows down the speed of your support. Depending upon the length of time you have until an attack hits, you may not be able to send the swords with the rest of your support, it would have to arrive after. This significantly diminishes the strength of your defense. You move from a General Defense of 917000 and a Cavalry Defense: 798,000 to a General Defense of 427,000 and a Cavalry Defense of 553,000. Not as impressive looking as before.
The spear/HC defense on the other hand is more likely to be able to get its full defense power as support to a village before an attack lands.
Very last (I promise) point/comparison
With all this being said, it seems beneficial to compare the Hybrid with Spear/HC one last time, taking into consideration the movement speed.
Remember that the only two things significantly different between these 2 builds were the following:
1) spear/HC builds about 10,000 minutes faster
2) spear/HC is only 80% as effective in General Defense as the Hybrid (Cavalry defense is highly comparable, and as stacking increases, this difference diminishes to 0 faster).
Looking at this, one notices one important factor. The only thing spear/HC really lacks is the General Defense contained by the Hybrid. Guess what, Heavy Cavalry provides General Defense! By employing a much larger number of Heavy Cavalry then the hybrid, the chances that you can draw support from another village even further away increases.
Remember, there are several layers of defense that can be sent. The hybrid can send a full D from villages close by (7k spears, 7k swords, 1k HC), a half D from villages slightly farther away (7k spears, 1k HC), and a fractional D (1k HC) from villages extremely far away). Spears/HC on the other hand can send a full D from villages close by (8k/2k), a full D from villages slightly farther away (8k/2k), and a half D from villages extremely far away (2k HC).
By employing a larger number of HC, you can draw MORE support from further differences, and since it is HC, it provides a greater proportion of General Defense, which is the only thing that the Spears/HC lacked that the Hybrid had. (The small fraction of Cavalry Defense that the Hybrid had over the Spears/HC is further minimized by the small amount of Cavalry D provided by the HC).
This specific difference between hybrid and spears/hc is then evened out, and spears/hc are still left with the advantage of building almost twice as fast as the hybrid.
Also, remember that you have the full defense capabilities of the spear/HC after 12,466 minutes of building. At this point in time, the Hybrid will have only slightly more then half of the defensive power. The Hybrid's defense doesn't surpass the defense offered by spears/HC until around 18,000 minutes (this is a guesstimate, I'm tired of writing).
Conclusion
So basically, when you're in a war heavy environment and are being attacked, you may not have the time to even build a full farms worth of D. Each individual hybrid village will have LOWER total defense then spears/HC simply because of the time taken to build. Spears/HC contains all of the advantages of time, and can make up any slight difference in defense power through manipulation of the additional time you have at your disposal to build troops and send them.
___
As a note, I've never used a hybrid before, and there are all types of variations. For this analysis, I had just taken the first hybrid build one of my tribemates had posted. However, my end conclusion still remains the same. The mathematical comparisons I had made between the spear/HC and the hybrid build could change depending on if you went for a more spear heavy hybrid build in an attempt to balance the defense more (which would be a better hybrid build in my eyes), yet the maneuverability of spears/HC still makes it superior in my eyes.
--Researched and written by qwe4rty
Quick Attacking Guide by qwe4rty
It most definitely is possible to get noble trains less then 152 ms. I have screenshots of me getting 4 attacks in 148 ms and I've done faster.
Anyways, here's the guide on how:
1) Download Opera here
2) Go to Tools-->Preferences
-Then go to Shortcuts and enable Single Key Shortcuts
-Also go to Content and make sure Java Script is enabled
3) Type opera:config into the url field
-Scroll down to performance and click it
Change:
Max Connections Server to 16
Max Connections Total to 64
Network Buffer Size to 32
If you want, you can also uncheck Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections although I didn't.
4) Go to View --> Images --> Cached Images
Then get ready to send your attacks. Go to a village you want to attack. If your mouse has a middle mouse button, use that to open the Send Troops into 4 different tabs. Go to each tab and type in the troop numbers you wish to be sent in each attack, and make sure each attack is at the confirmation screen.
Go through each attack, and right click on the "Ok" button so that it the default action for the enter key. Once you've done this, you should see that it is outlined with a blue box.
Once you've done that, simply proceed by pressing Enter-2-enter-2-enter-2... to quickly move through tab and send the attack.
Changing these settings, I got 4 attacks within 148 ms on my first test.
As you can see, there's a difference in 148 ms between the first and last attack.
Anyways, here's the guide on how:
1) Download Opera here
2) Go to Tools-->Preferences
-Then go to Shortcuts and enable Single Key Shortcuts
-Also go to Content and make sure Java Script is enabled
3) Type opera:config into the url field
-Scroll down to performance and click it
Change:
Max Connections Server to 16
Max Connections Total to 64
Network Buffer Size to 32
If you want, you can also uncheck Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections although I didn't.
4) Go to View --> Images --> Cached Images
Then get ready to send your attacks. Go to a village you want to attack. If your mouse has a middle mouse button, use that to open the Send Troops into 4 different tabs. Go to each tab and type in the troop numbers you wish to be sent in each attack, and make sure each attack is at the confirmation screen.
Go through each attack, and right click on the "Ok" button so that it the default action for the enter key. Once you've done this, you should see that it is outlined with a blue box.
Once you've done that, simply proceed by pressing Enter-2-enter-2-enter-2... to quickly move through tab and send the attack.
Changing these settings, I got 4 attacks within 148 ms on my first test.
As you can see, there's a difference in 148 ms between the first and last attack.
Guide by Mimelim Part 2
Introduction
There are three levels of offense in tribalwars. Village level offense, player level offense and tribe level offense. The key to being a successful player is optimize all three of these levels in terms of efficiency. All operate independent of each other and are all essential.
Village level offense
On the village level, the most important part of building offense is building the strongest army possible as quickly as possible. Offensive armies should be made up of three units, Axes, Light Cav and Rams. Looking at the statistics for each unit, axes are by far the strongest offensive unit produced in the baracks, the light cav are the strongest unit produced by the stable and rams are essential, which I will talk about later.
It should easy to see that axes are better than spears/swords for attacking. But what about light cav over heavy cav? The key here is in farm space. For every two hcav that you build, you can build three lcav. When you build a full army, lcav are the better unit to build and far more economical. Rams, rams, rams. I can't stress enough how important it is to use rams for offense. An enemy's wall amplifies their defending ability significantly. The only way to break through heavy defense is with rams.
Now, how many of each should you build? The optimal build ratio is approximately 6000/3000/240 axes/lcav/rams. This assumes that you have a level 25 barracks and level 20 stable. I have heard it over and over again, "but axes are better than lcav", so I should build more axes. I can not stress how misguided this is. It is true that in terms of numeric attacking power, axes are per farm space better for attacking, but there are important considerations. First off, this ratio, 6000/3000/240 is the fastest to build. You will have more armies faster if you build this ratio, which means you can attack more often. Secondly, most players build either an equal number of spears and swords or more swords. They also tend to use hcav which defend like swords.
Since most player's defense's are sword heavy, having a higher lcav ratio is highly adventageous. It is very very rare for a player to build more spears than swords.
Lastly, the 240 rams. This is the optimal number of rams for eliminating the effects of a wall. This is a complicated subject and is unbelievably situational. I will leave this discussion for another chapter. However, it is simple enough to say that you need 235 rams minimum with each attacking army. The extra 5 rams are for faking, which is a part of the next section: Player level offense.
Player Level Offense
First, groups. I recommend that all players have two groups (in addition to others that you might have). "Offense" and "Building Offense". I will explain what I have found to be the most efficient system at building offense both quickly and with as little hassle as possible. Lets face it. The more easily you can do book keeping, the more efficient you will be as a player. A skill that I think a lot of players miss is the ability to change village's groups often and regularly to make their management easier.
Using the "Building Offense" group, if you have all the villages that need to build offense in one group you can easily see which villages are not building and which villages need certain resources. Since each village in this group is functionally doing the same thing, logging onto your account, within a few seconds you can easily do everything that you would need to to ensure that your offense is rebuilding as quickly as it possibly could be. No more remembering villages, no more searching for villages or forgetting which villages need building. Once a village finishes the army that it is building, it should be moved over to the "Offense" group.
Using the "Offense" group, it is easy to see how much firepower you have at your disposal. There are very few instances when you should be attacking without a full army and by grouping your villages this way, you will again be able to see quickly how much offense you have ready to go. This also makes storing bundles easy, because none of the villages in the "Offense" group need resources for building troops, you can easily store bundles in mass with out worries of forgetting a village or having to go through each village one at a time.
Keeping one's offense organized allows that player to become an effective fighting machine. It also allows that player to help other players out. The more under control things are, the more aid can be offered to other people, which leads into tribe level offense.
Tribe Level Offense
Arguably, this section could be several pages long, and maybe when I have a chance (probably when I quit) I will write up a good long version of this with high levels of details and illustrations. But this will have to do.
Of all the places where one can create an advantage, this is by far the largest. With out question, the ability to cordinate multiple players' offenses is the holy grail of this game. Just a few examples of things that I have personally done with the aid of teamate cordination: Noble 56 villages in less than 38 hours with a single account, cause an enemy player to lose more than a million points in less than 48 hours, eliminate players in enemy strong holds.
The easiest way of taking out a large player is through teamwork. Not only is it easier to take them out but it is more efficient. Players are less able to stack or play effective defense if they have to defend against multiple players. The key here is organization. You need a system for assigning or claiming villages. Spreadsheets work well, but there are a lot of options. The point is that everyone should be able to see who is supposed to attacking which villages and people should be able to see which villages they are supposed to noble and which ones they are supposed to stay away from so that their teamates can take them.
A More detailed screenshot
Another huge advantage of working in a team is that you can optimize resources. Many times a player will have excessive offense and few nobles, or the reverse. By being highly organized a team can utilize both player's assets for the good of the tribe. An example of this is in the sample photo above. Most of this kind of teamwork can only be learned by trial and error, but it is well worth it.
Lastly, there is the issue of 'fakes'. Fakes are attacks that are mean to look like an army, but are in fact a single unit designed to 'fake out' another player. Clever use of fakes can be used to mask a tribe's true intentions. By sending fake attacks at neighboring players to a target, those players are far less likely to support the real target. But this is an over simplification. Most good players can see through fake attacks just by looking at them. So how do you make convincing fakes?
I detailed in the village level offense section that each village should have 240 rams and that only 235 should be a part of an army, leaving 5 rams in the village. Lets say that we think that we will need 2 armies to clear a particular village, and we have two offensive villages to work with. By sending two attacks at one village and sending 1 ram at 5 surrounding villages, it is impossible to know which village is really under attack. From a defender's perspective, all they see are 6 villages that have two attacks incoming. If you do this with multiple villages, it becomes almost impossible to decifer and you will be able to clear many villages very quickly.
Another common tactic against good players is the fake noble train. By sending four consecutive single ram attacks, a defender may mistake this for a noble train and hurry defenses to a village that you aren't really planning to attack. An added twist (kudos to burns for teaching me this), if a player is sniping noble trains, you can send an army from one village and then three single ram attacks and then a full army from a second village. To most players, this will look like a clearing army and then a noble train. If the player has been sniping nobles, they will usually remove their defense and let you clear their wall and then put the defense back after the first army hits. By doing this, you will attack their defenses without a wall.
Without teamwork, this game ends up becoming a stalemate. From the recieving end, a well organized offensive is virtually impossible to stop, no matter who the player is. Tribes have virtually infinite time to organize an offensive, meaning that they can cordinate perfectly in battle time. Defensively, while players have a built in advantage (they can stack troops), as a tribe, it is very hard to cordinate on the fly, even if the attack is from long range.
Conclusion
This guide is aimed at players 100k points and up. I doubt someone with fewer than 10 villages will find this guide useful. There are a lot of holes in this guide and a lot of things that I didn't put in. Primarily because this is getting pretty long and because its hard for me to organize my thoughts. Perhaps I will revise this and put in more details later. Any questions and/or comments/feedback is appreciated.
There are three levels of offense in tribalwars. Village level offense, player level offense and tribe level offense. The key to being a successful player is optimize all three of these levels in terms of efficiency. All operate independent of each other and are all essential.
Village level offense
On the village level, the most important part of building offense is building the strongest army possible as quickly as possible. Offensive armies should be made up of three units, Axes, Light Cav and Rams. Looking at the statistics for each unit, axes are by far the strongest offensive unit produced in the baracks, the light cav are the strongest unit produced by the stable and rams are essential, which I will talk about later.
It should easy to see that axes are better than spears/swords for attacking. But what about light cav over heavy cav? The key here is in farm space. For every two hcav that you build, you can build three lcav. When you build a full army, lcav are the better unit to build and far more economical. Rams, rams, rams. I can't stress enough how important it is to use rams for offense. An enemy's wall amplifies their defending ability significantly. The only way to break through heavy defense is with rams.
Now, how many of each should you build? The optimal build ratio is approximately 6000/3000/240 axes/lcav/rams. This assumes that you have a level 25 barracks and level 20 stable. I have heard it over and over again, "but axes are better than lcav", so I should build more axes. I can not stress how misguided this is. It is true that in terms of numeric attacking power, axes are per farm space better for attacking, but there are important considerations. First off, this ratio, 6000/3000/240 is the fastest to build. You will have more armies faster if you build this ratio, which means you can attack more often. Secondly, most players build either an equal number of spears and swords or more swords. They also tend to use hcav which defend like swords.
Since most player's defense's are sword heavy, having a higher lcav ratio is highly adventageous. It is very very rare for a player to build more spears than swords.
Lastly, the 240 rams. This is the optimal number of rams for eliminating the effects of a wall. This is a complicated subject and is unbelievably situational. I will leave this discussion for another chapter. However, it is simple enough to say that you need 235 rams minimum with each attacking army. The extra 5 rams are for faking, which is a part of the next section: Player level offense.
Player Level Offense
First, groups. I recommend that all players have two groups (in addition to others that you might have). "Offense" and "Building Offense". I will explain what I have found to be the most efficient system at building offense both quickly and with as little hassle as possible. Lets face it. The more easily you can do book keeping, the more efficient you will be as a player. A skill that I think a lot of players miss is the ability to change village's groups often and regularly to make their management easier.
Using the "Building Offense" group, if you have all the villages that need to build offense in one group you can easily see which villages are not building and which villages need certain resources. Since each village in this group is functionally doing the same thing, logging onto your account, within a few seconds you can easily do everything that you would need to to ensure that your offense is rebuilding as quickly as it possibly could be. No more remembering villages, no more searching for villages or forgetting which villages need building. Once a village finishes the army that it is building, it should be moved over to the "Offense" group.
Using the "Offense" group, it is easy to see how much firepower you have at your disposal. There are very few instances when you should be attacking without a full army and by grouping your villages this way, you will again be able to see quickly how much offense you have ready to go. This also makes storing bundles easy, because none of the villages in the "Offense" group need resources for building troops, you can easily store bundles in mass with out worries of forgetting a village or having to go through each village one at a time.
Keeping one's offense organized allows that player to become an effective fighting machine. It also allows that player to help other players out. The more under control things are, the more aid can be offered to other people, which leads into tribe level offense.
Tribe Level Offense
Arguably, this section could be several pages long, and maybe when I have a chance (probably when I quit) I will write up a good long version of this with high levels of details and illustrations. But this will have to do.
Of all the places where one can create an advantage, this is by far the largest. With out question, the ability to cordinate multiple players' offenses is the holy grail of this game. Just a few examples of things that I have personally done with the aid of teamate cordination: Noble 56 villages in less than 38 hours with a single account, cause an enemy player to lose more than a million points in less than 48 hours, eliminate players in enemy strong holds.
The easiest way of taking out a large player is through teamwork. Not only is it easier to take them out but it is more efficient. Players are less able to stack or play effective defense if they have to defend against multiple players. The key here is organization. You need a system for assigning or claiming villages. Spreadsheets work well, but there are a lot of options. The point is that everyone should be able to see who is supposed to attacking which villages and people should be able to see which villages they are supposed to noble and which ones they are supposed to stay away from so that their teamates can take them.
A More detailed screenshot
Another huge advantage of working in a team is that you can optimize resources. Many times a player will have excessive offense and few nobles, or the reverse. By being highly organized a team can utilize both player's assets for the good of the tribe. An example of this is in the sample photo above. Most of this kind of teamwork can only be learned by trial and error, but it is well worth it.
Lastly, there is the issue of 'fakes'. Fakes are attacks that are mean to look like an army, but are in fact a single unit designed to 'fake out' another player. Clever use of fakes can be used to mask a tribe's true intentions. By sending fake attacks at neighboring players to a target, those players are far less likely to support the real target. But this is an over simplification. Most good players can see through fake attacks just by looking at them. So how do you make convincing fakes?
I detailed in the village level offense section that each village should have 240 rams and that only 235 should be a part of an army, leaving 5 rams in the village. Lets say that we think that we will need 2 armies to clear a particular village, and we have two offensive villages to work with. By sending two attacks at one village and sending 1 ram at 5 surrounding villages, it is impossible to know which village is really under attack. From a defender's perspective, all they see are 6 villages that have two attacks incoming. If you do this with multiple villages, it becomes almost impossible to decifer and you will be able to clear many villages very quickly.
Another common tactic against good players is the fake noble train. By sending four consecutive single ram attacks, a defender may mistake this for a noble train and hurry defenses to a village that you aren't really planning to attack. An added twist (kudos to burns for teaching me this), if a player is sniping noble trains, you can send an army from one village and then three single ram attacks and then a full army from a second village. To most players, this will look like a clearing army and then a noble train. If the player has been sniping nobles, they will usually remove their defense and let you clear their wall and then put the defense back after the first army hits. By doing this, you will attack their defenses without a wall.
Without teamwork, this game ends up becoming a stalemate. From the recieving end, a well organized offensive is virtually impossible to stop, no matter who the player is. Tribes have virtually infinite time to organize an offensive, meaning that they can cordinate perfectly in battle time. Defensively, while players have a built in advantage (they can stack troops), as a tribe, it is very hard to cordinate on the fly, even if the attack is from long range.
Conclusion
This guide is aimed at players 100k points and up. I doubt someone with fewer than 10 villages will find this guide useful. There are a lot of holes in this guide and a lot of things that I didn't put in. Primarily because this is getting pretty long and because its hard for me to organize my thoughts. Perhaps I will revise this and put in more details later. Any questions and/or comments/feedback is appreciated.
General Guide by Mimelim Part 1
Background
I boast a relatively low defensive ranking in W1. One could argue that I have less experience than the average player defending my villages. To counter this, I can honestly say that I've watched teamates defend and when I attack, I see how players defend their villages. I've seen the best players defend against unbelievable odds, and have learned in my opinion how to defend effectively and efficiently.
Introduction
First, what is the objective of defending? For me, the objective of defending my villages is to slow down an opponent until I can resume the offensive. In the long run, you can NOT defend and win this game. The best outcome you can hope for is a stalemate, and who wants THAT as the best thing that can happen? By defending effectively and efficiently, you maximize your potential to strike back and make gains offesnsively. Threats do not disapear by defending correctly, they only abate when you show agression and your opponent backs off or you make offensive gains toward them.
Like offense, there are three levels of defense in tribalwars. Village level defense, player level defense and tribe level defense. Unlike offense however, the area of focus is at the player level defense. I will examine in detail each of these levels, focusing on the player level defense.
Village level defense
As a relatively advanced player, you should know that there are three primary defensive units in this game. Spears, Swords and Heavy Cavalry (hcav). Just a brief recap just so that everyone is on the same page. Spears defend primarily against cavalry, swords and hcav defend primarily against axemen. I advocate the even defense strategy, that is having an equal number of cavalry and axemen defense. There are strong arguements for a lopsided defense and it IS highly situationally dependant.
Village Structures:
10k/10k Spears/Swords Split
This is by far the most efficient setup in terms of farm space. There are two downsides however. First, it takes a very long time to build. To be exact, with a lvl 25 barracks it will take 45 days to build, in this game, that is a long time. Secondly, moving troops around is slow. When villages are clustered together this isn't a big deal, but the further apart villages are, the more problematic this becomes.
8k/2k Spears/hcav Optimized Defense
This is a highly popular model of defense. Essentially, you sacrifice 20% of your troop effectiveness in exchange for a faster build time and faster movement. In contrast to the 10k/10k split, this configuration only takes 17 days to build. This is a THIRD of the time required to build the first configuration.
What should you use?
As a default, I strongly encourage players to use the 8k/2k spears/hcav as a default. Besides the reasons I gave above, it is simply easier to rebuild your defenses after an attack with it. After an attack, being able to re-build your defense 3 times faster is a huge advantage. It is virtually impossible to realistically re-build a 10k/10k defense when fighting good players, you just don't get that much time to recover. There is however a place for the 10k/10k defense. For long term support, or other instances where you just need a village stacked, the 20% fighting effectiveness proves useful, just don't lose those troops or you will have a village completely out of commission.
I strongly caution against deviating from these two standards. I have seen people mix spear/swords/hcav. While I can sort of understand the mentality that a hybrid village can fulfill both situations, in reality, you are much better off choosing one method per village and sticking with it. There are very few instances where the hybrid army will be better than one of the more pure forms of defense. Hybrid villages also make thinking through your defense much more complicated, something that you don't want to do when you have 50-2000 attacks incoming.
Player level Defense
There are two primary ways of defending your villages effectively and efficiently. Both are extremely effective, but can prove disasterous if use improperly. Which system you use depends on your answer to this question: Can I hold off my opponent through defensive strength alone? This does NOT mean, "Can I destroy my oppenent's offense?" Offensive troops build much faster than defensive troops, so the concept of troop preservation should be paramount. If the answer is yes to the above question, then your method should be Stack. If your answer is no, then your method should be Dodge/Snipe.
Stack Defense
This is a pretty simple tactic to explain and use. Simply put, you put as many troops as you can in a village before an attack lands. The more troops you can put into a village, the more you minimize your troop losses. A W1 player named Undo stated that it wasn't worth defending a village with less than 30k/30k worth of spears/swords or the spear/hcav equivolent. While this is a decent guideline, depending on what world you are on/what your situation is, this number could vary from 10k/10k to 200k/200k (I've personally seen both of those extremes in the past 3 months). Essentially, you are trying to kill enough of your opponent's offense so that you can re-build your defense quicker than they can re-build their offense. This tactic works well when you know an attack is coming, or it is launched from a long distance.
Dodge/Snipe Defense
The only way that you lose a village is by your opponent nobling it. Lets face it, resources in a village are cheap, walls are cheap. Losing an army or a village is not cheap, both in terms of resources and time. Preserving those two, an army/village are the important things. Many times when you get attacked from close range, or when you are caught low on defense, it is impossible to effectively stack your villages.
The first step is to clean your village. Minimize your losses. Remove your troops before an incoming attack. Send your resources to one of your other villages. What do you lose by doing this? You lose your wall and you lose any remaining resources in the village, small price if this allows you to stop the attack. Very few players disguise their nobles effectively. First, nobles have a distinct time signature because no unit travels at the same speed as the noble. Secondly, most people use noble trains, four nobles sent in quick succession from a single village. By identifying incoming nobles, you can pick out the attacks that you MUST defend against. Beyond this, remember that you can take up to 3 noble hits before you lose the village.
You can't escort a noble with more than one army, and rarely do people escort with more than a handful of troops. By preserving your troops from full armies, you give yourself a chance to take out noble trains. This is obviously a temporary fix since your opponent can simply resend their armies and nobles later, but it buys you time, time that you can use to find defensive troops (yours or teamates) to stack your village with.
A slight adaptation of the noble snipe is quite possibly one of the most effective ways to stop an attack. Instead of trying to stop your opponent from taking your village, you help him. The single biggest bottleneck offensively are the number of nobles available. Killing a noble costs your opponent 1 bundle. Allowing your opponent to take your village and taking the village back costs your opponent the full cost of that noble (anywhere from 1 to several hundred bundles). Usually, what you will do is clear out your village and just before their noble train arrives hit the village with your own nobles, lowering the loyalty as close to zero as possible without taking it (usually 3 nobles). Then, timing a noble to land just after your opponent's noble train. By doing this, you will use one noble to re-take the village, but hopefully this will cost your opponent up to four FULL nobles. For a large player, this could be a couple thousand bundles worth of resources wasted.
There are obvious disadvantages to this strategy. First off, you waste a noble, in other words its costly. Second, you lose any troops that you have from that village, so it is usually best to do this with a village that has already lost its troops (like an offensive village that you have just attacked with.)
Overall Defense
Ideally, when defending, you should be using a combination of all of these tactics to hurt your opponent enough so that they will stop attacking. The key here is defend in full, or don't defend at all. Do NOT spread your troops out thin.
By forcing your opponent to take army and noble losses, you force them to delay any further attacks on you by several days or several weeks, depending on how effective your strategies are. I can't stress enough how playing effective defense is not enough. Once again, all you are doing is delaying your opponent. The only way to really secure yourself against them is to go on the offensive against them.
Tribe Level Defense
I've heard it said many times, "I'm a defensive player". In this game, there is no such thing as a successful defensive player outside of extremely strong, highly organized and structured tribes. The only tribe that has implemented what I'm going to cite is T:V (to my knowledge) and was pioneered by me.
It is highly inefficient to dodge/snipe between accounts in this game, it is really only a player level tactic, not a tribe level tactic. Thus, the primary function of the tribe should be to stack vulnerable villages that are essential to holding. This is again, the all or none philosophy. When you defend a village, defend it strong. I never support someone unless I can ensure that at least 20k/20k worth of defense will be in that village. If there isn't, either I don't send support or I send the full 20k/20k myself.
Who should be supporting? Anyone who is not under attack or is unlikely to be attacked. Caution is good in this game, but there is a limit. Long ranged attacks can easily be sniped, so what is the point in keeping excessive ammounts of defense in untouchable villages. Typically, at any given moment, I have 90% of my defense out defending other people that I know are likely to be attacked today. Of course there is always a reserve number of troops, just in case something unexpected happens, but in my experience, you can predict which villages are likely to come under serious attack, and which ones aren't. The key for a tribe is cordinating the movement of troops from their strong points to their borders with enemy tribes.
To me, a teamate or an ally losing a village is as big a problem as ME losing a village. First off, it hurts the tribe's interested, but also, more selfishly, teamates losing villages puts you in a more dangerous position. I have zero qualms losing troops in teamate's villages instead of my own. The fact that my teamates know this also means that if I need support anywhere, they will do what they can to help me quickly, no matter how much defense I need. It is simply good business to protect the interests of the tribe as a whole.
I boast a relatively low defensive ranking in W1. One could argue that I have less experience than the average player defending my villages. To counter this, I can honestly say that I've watched teamates defend and when I attack, I see how players defend their villages. I've seen the best players defend against unbelievable odds, and have learned in my opinion how to defend effectively and efficiently.
Introduction
First, what is the objective of defending? For me, the objective of defending my villages is to slow down an opponent until I can resume the offensive. In the long run, you can NOT defend and win this game. The best outcome you can hope for is a stalemate, and who wants THAT as the best thing that can happen? By defending effectively and efficiently, you maximize your potential to strike back and make gains offesnsively. Threats do not disapear by defending correctly, they only abate when you show agression and your opponent backs off or you make offensive gains toward them.
Like offense, there are three levels of defense in tribalwars. Village level defense, player level defense and tribe level defense. Unlike offense however, the area of focus is at the player level defense. I will examine in detail each of these levels, focusing on the player level defense.
Village level defense
As a relatively advanced player, you should know that there are three primary defensive units in this game. Spears, Swords and Heavy Cavalry (hcav). Just a brief recap just so that everyone is on the same page. Spears defend primarily against cavalry, swords and hcav defend primarily against axemen. I advocate the even defense strategy, that is having an equal number of cavalry and axemen defense. There are strong arguements for a lopsided defense and it IS highly situationally dependant.
Village Structures:
10k/10k Spears/Swords Split
This is by far the most efficient setup in terms of farm space. There are two downsides however. First, it takes a very long time to build. To be exact, with a lvl 25 barracks it will take 45 days to build, in this game, that is a long time. Secondly, moving troops around is slow. When villages are clustered together this isn't a big deal, but the further apart villages are, the more problematic this becomes.
8k/2k Spears/hcav Optimized Defense
This is a highly popular model of defense. Essentially, you sacrifice 20% of your troop effectiveness in exchange for a faster build time and faster movement. In contrast to the 10k/10k split, this configuration only takes 17 days to build. This is a THIRD of the time required to build the first configuration.
What should you use?
As a default, I strongly encourage players to use the 8k/2k spears/hcav as a default. Besides the reasons I gave above, it is simply easier to rebuild your defenses after an attack with it. After an attack, being able to re-build your defense 3 times faster is a huge advantage. It is virtually impossible to realistically re-build a 10k/10k defense when fighting good players, you just don't get that much time to recover. There is however a place for the 10k/10k defense. For long term support, or other instances where you just need a village stacked, the 20% fighting effectiveness proves useful, just don't lose those troops or you will have a village completely out of commission.
I strongly caution against deviating from these two standards. I have seen people mix spear/swords/hcav. While I can sort of understand the mentality that a hybrid village can fulfill both situations, in reality, you are much better off choosing one method per village and sticking with it. There are very few instances where the hybrid army will be better than one of the more pure forms of defense. Hybrid villages also make thinking through your defense much more complicated, something that you don't want to do when you have 50-2000 attacks incoming.
Player level Defense
There are two primary ways of defending your villages effectively and efficiently. Both are extremely effective, but can prove disasterous if use improperly. Which system you use depends on your answer to this question: Can I hold off my opponent through defensive strength alone? This does NOT mean, "Can I destroy my oppenent's offense?" Offensive troops build much faster than defensive troops, so the concept of troop preservation should be paramount. If the answer is yes to the above question, then your method should be Stack. If your answer is no, then your method should be Dodge/Snipe.
Stack Defense
This is a pretty simple tactic to explain and use. Simply put, you put as many troops as you can in a village before an attack lands. The more troops you can put into a village, the more you minimize your troop losses. A W1 player named Undo stated that it wasn't worth defending a village with less than 30k/30k worth of spears/swords or the spear/hcav equivolent. While this is a decent guideline, depending on what world you are on/what your situation is, this number could vary from 10k/10k to 200k/200k (I've personally seen both of those extremes in the past 3 months). Essentially, you are trying to kill enough of your opponent's offense so that you can re-build your defense quicker than they can re-build their offense. This tactic works well when you know an attack is coming, or it is launched from a long distance.
Dodge/Snipe Defense
The only way that you lose a village is by your opponent nobling it. Lets face it, resources in a village are cheap, walls are cheap. Losing an army or a village is not cheap, both in terms of resources and time. Preserving those two, an army/village are the important things. Many times when you get attacked from close range, or when you are caught low on defense, it is impossible to effectively stack your villages.
The first step is to clean your village. Minimize your losses. Remove your troops before an incoming attack. Send your resources to one of your other villages. What do you lose by doing this? You lose your wall and you lose any remaining resources in the village, small price if this allows you to stop the attack. Very few players disguise their nobles effectively. First, nobles have a distinct time signature because no unit travels at the same speed as the noble. Secondly, most people use noble trains, four nobles sent in quick succession from a single village. By identifying incoming nobles, you can pick out the attacks that you MUST defend against. Beyond this, remember that you can take up to 3 noble hits before you lose the village.
You can't escort a noble with more than one army, and rarely do people escort with more than a handful of troops. By preserving your troops from full armies, you give yourself a chance to take out noble trains. This is obviously a temporary fix since your opponent can simply resend their armies and nobles later, but it buys you time, time that you can use to find defensive troops (yours or teamates) to stack your village with.
A slight adaptation of the noble snipe is quite possibly one of the most effective ways to stop an attack. Instead of trying to stop your opponent from taking your village, you help him. The single biggest bottleneck offensively are the number of nobles available. Killing a noble costs your opponent 1 bundle. Allowing your opponent to take your village and taking the village back costs your opponent the full cost of that noble (anywhere from 1 to several hundred bundles). Usually, what you will do is clear out your village and just before their noble train arrives hit the village with your own nobles, lowering the loyalty as close to zero as possible without taking it (usually 3 nobles). Then, timing a noble to land just after your opponent's noble train. By doing this, you will use one noble to re-take the village, but hopefully this will cost your opponent up to four FULL nobles. For a large player, this could be a couple thousand bundles worth of resources wasted.
There are obvious disadvantages to this strategy. First off, you waste a noble, in other words its costly. Second, you lose any troops that you have from that village, so it is usually best to do this with a village that has already lost its troops (like an offensive village that you have just attacked with.)
Overall Defense
Ideally, when defending, you should be using a combination of all of these tactics to hurt your opponent enough so that they will stop attacking. The key here is defend in full, or don't defend at all. Do NOT spread your troops out thin.
By forcing your opponent to take army and noble losses, you force them to delay any further attacks on you by several days or several weeks, depending on how effective your strategies are. I can't stress enough how playing effective defense is not enough. Once again, all you are doing is delaying your opponent. The only way to really secure yourself against them is to go on the offensive against them.
Tribe Level Defense
I've heard it said many times, "I'm a defensive player". In this game, there is no such thing as a successful defensive player outside of extremely strong, highly organized and structured tribes. The only tribe that has implemented what I'm going to cite is T:V (to my knowledge) and was pioneered by me.
It is highly inefficient to dodge/snipe between accounts in this game, it is really only a player level tactic, not a tribe level tactic. Thus, the primary function of the tribe should be to stack vulnerable villages that are essential to holding. This is again, the all or none philosophy. When you defend a village, defend it strong. I never support someone unless I can ensure that at least 20k/20k worth of defense will be in that village. If there isn't, either I don't send support or I send the full 20k/20k myself.
Who should be supporting? Anyone who is not under attack or is unlikely to be attacked. Caution is good in this game, but there is a limit. Long ranged attacks can easily be sniped, so what is the point in keeping excessive ammounts of defense in untouchable villages. Typically, at any given moment, I have 90% of my defense out defending other people that I know are likely to be attacked today. Of course there is always a reserve number of troops, just in case something unexpected happens, but in my experience, you can predict which villages are likely to come under serious attack, and which ones aren't. The key for a tribe is cordinating the movement of troops from their strong points to their borders with enemy tribes.
To me, a teamate or an ally losing a village is as big a problem as ME losing a village. First off, it hurts the tribe's interested, but also, more selfishly, teamates losing villages puts you in a more dangerous position. I have zero qualms losing troops in teamate's villages instead of my own. The fact that my teamates know this also means that if I need support anywhere, they will do what they can to help me quickly, no matter how much defense I need. It is simply good business to protect the interests of the tribe as a whole.
How to snipe any noble train by mellowpers0n
Ok im celebrating my return to tribalwars by releasing a secret I promised myself i would never release, sniping has really been left to the last resort way of defending due to its innacuracy, you basically have 1 shot to put defence between nobles, that is till now.....
This is a snipe with support method, you will need multiple villages and at least 1 defence village THAT IS NOT TARGETTED with minimum 4k/4k, new world equivalent or thargorans hc tactic equivalent, and an additional 1K/1K per incoming train
most of this is the same method to sniping itself, heres a quick outline:
1. ID where the incoming noble trains are heading
2. Jot down support times to each village with train incomings from each available defence village from the longest to shortest time. Work out a brief plan of order, if you are sniping from a defence village with train incomings make sure it snipes another train before it is hit.
3. prepare to snipe:
this is where the difference lies:
instead of preping a timed launch of support, open opera and prep up a train, if you have a defence village with 10k/10k in it load 10 tabs and put 1k/1k in each, aim this support for the village you are sniping the trains from.
factor in lag +1 second or so to be on the safe side and launch lag+1 seconds before the support time matches the incoming time on the targetted village.
Now launch a train of support at your village
this is a bit different than normal noble trains, in normal noble trains you aim to launch as fast as possible, in sniping trains you aim to launch as REGULARILY as possible, this is because by doing so you increase the chances of landing one between clearing and nobles.
for example:
incoming support train
00:29:59:500- support
00:29:59:999- nuke:
00:30:00:000-support
00:30:00:001-noble
00:30:00:222-noble
00:30:00:444-noble
00:30:00:500-support
00:30:00:666-noble
00:30:00:888-noble
00:30:01:000-support
4. clear the misses, the other great advantage of this tactic is that you can clear all the support that lands outside the train and then reuse the village to support another village.
5. enjoy
and finally, some documented proof of it working, i never said how i took down these incomings, well until now =)
This is a snipe with support method, you will need multiple villages and at least 1 defence village THAT IS NOT TARGETTED with minimum 4k/4k, new world equivalent or thargorans hc tactic equivalent, and an additional 1K/1K per incoming train
most of this is the same method to sniping itself, heres a quick outline:
1. ID where the incoming noble trains are heading
2. Jot down support times to each village with train incomings from each available defence village from the longest to shortest time. Work out a brief plan of order, if you are sniping from a defence village with train incomings make sure it snipes another train before it is hit.
3. prepare to snipe:
this is where the difference lies:
instead of preping a timed launch of support, open opera and prep up a train, if you have a defence village with 10k/10k in it load 10 tabs and put 1k/1k in each, aim this support for the village you are sniping the trains from.
factor in lag +1 second or so to be on the safe side and launch lag+1 seconds before the support time matches the incoming time on the targetted village.
Now launch a train of support at your village
this is a bit different than normal noble trains, in normal noble trains you aim to launch as fast as possible, in sniping trains you aim to launch as REGULARILY as possible, this is because by doing so you increase the chances of landing one between clearing and nobles.
for example:
incoming support train
00:29:59:500- support
00:29:59:999- nuke:
00:30:00:000-support
00:30:00:001-noble
00:30:00:222-noble
00:30:00:444-noble
00:30:00:500-support
00:30:00:666-noble
00:30:00:888-noble
00:30:01:000-support
4. clear the misses, the other great advantage of this tactic is that you can clear all the support that lands outside the train and then reuse the village to support another village.
5. enjoy
and finally, some documented proof of it working, i never said how i took down these incomings, well until now =)
Guide to Tribalwars by lardingd
Lardingd’s spam!!!
(Warning, lots of text >_>)
. To be clear the start goes from a non-crazy beginner protection (i.e. not like w30) to about the 15-25 village mark. As well, sections will first be released with the most relevant information in my opinion, then for completeness I will add to the section as time permits. Anything preempted by NOTE is included primarily for explanation as oppose to guiding.
I will use the word day in this guide. It does not refer to 24 hours. It refers to a day in the game. You can calculate this by dividing 24 hours by the world speed. So for speed 1.5, you have 24/1.5 = 16 hours.
This guide will come in parts!!!! (Btw exclamation points are awesome to me atm, live with it!!!).
A) Beginning of the world beginner protection.
i) Introduction
Beginner protection is the best possible time in the game to use your activity to gain a lead on your competitors. This does not mean in points necessarily!
i) Upon entering
The first thing you want to do depends on whether you are in world with new units. In a world with no statue, you simply want to queue timber then clay then iron to lvl 1 each. However, in a world with the new units you will want to make your statue first than queue all your res to lvl 1. The reasons for this is because you will gain such a small amount of resources from doing it the other way around and potentially you could be letting someone else grab another 100 resources from your closest barb making it in fact a total loss of resources. (NOTE: This DOES NOT mean rush to barracks!)
ii)The map
After setting your Headquarters queue, it’s time to look at the map. Look at how many abandons you have in your 7*7. If you have none there and don’t have multiple just outside your 7*7, then you have a few options. First, you can use your 1 restart to hope for a better location, (if there are bonuses in this world be aware that there is a good chance you will get a bonus in your 7*7 soon enough). Second, you can be indifferent to the situation and let things happen as they happen. Finally, you can attempt to coerce some of your neighbors into restarting. I’ll talk more on that last point in a moment, but before that there is one other thing you need to look for in your map. If you recognize a very good player near you, not in the late game, but someone who does very well at the start, realize that they will most likely make farming comparatively harder than most areas and if you don’t want to play super competitive, you ought to consider restarting to get a different area. (Note: You can only restart once). Ok then onto getting your neighbors to restart.
Restart coercion: Since a large amount of growth can be obtained from neighboring barbarian villages, it might be tempting to try and get more of them through…diplomacy. There is also the con of retaliation from a neighbor who does not like that you asked him/her to restart. From what I’ve seen though, the most effective restart methods are letters clearly showing a player’s excelling status at the game, and an added willingness to give advice upon restart. (Note: I’ve got a 0% success rate with restart coercion; my notes are based on other people’s success). I suggest if you are willing to do this to send to almost everyone close to you in order to raise the chance of a restart. Be careful though, if you don’t have any proof of exceptional playing ability your chances of success plummet. Also it shouldn't be surprising that restart advice can lead your neighbors to a more aggressive stance towards you, quite easily causing random attacks soon after protection ends.
Ok, so you’ve had a good look at your map, it’s time to make your first real decision. This will be based on two things, how active a player you are and amount of barbarian/bonus villages + range.
a) Barbarians near you.
If you’ve got a barbarian/bonus within 2 units then I suggest getting resources to 3-1-1, the build order doesn’t matter too much, so I won’t work out the numbers to optimize it. More timber can help depending on your situation, the more active you are the less clay and iron you'll need. Don't go to barracks at less timber, the timber upgrades will make up for the timber loss before you get enough sp to start farming.
(Note: only upgrade non-resources once you no longer plan to upgrade resources again until after you start farming).
In an archer world you only need 4 spears to start farming, so 3-1-1 becomes more appealing, though I would only consider this if you have a barbarian village touching yours.
(Note: Spear amounts are chosen to yield a profit, you need 9 to not lose more than 1 when sending just spears, but you ought to wait for more in order to not waste too many of the barbarian resources. Even if the barb will grow if you don't have a lot near you, wait till 13 or so spears then instead of hitting repetitively build up a few more inbetween. For example start with 13, then 16, then 20, then 24/25. Your troops will stall, but not so long and you sac less spears saving precious timber. For a paladin world 4 spears can be sent with the paladin, any less and you should pick the speed of sending just the paladin over sending the paladin + spears.)
The first thing you want to do with your hauls is invest in getting your spear force to approximately 20. If your barbarian closest to you runs out before then and you don’t have another close one STOP making spears. Once you get to this spear amount if you’ve got a decent amount of villages close by to farm, you can consider producing some spears till you get to about 33 (decent chance of one living). If you are getting good returns consider avoiding iron upgrades. This is because you will have built up a good amount making spears+farming.
(Note: Your village’s resource per an hour production is deceiving when you start farming because in general raiding income is close to 1:1:1 making your own income closer to that)
Even if you can afford the clay upgrade first consider waiting for a timber upgrade, even if you’ve got a timber surplus. I’ll explain why you want to over emphasize timber and neglect iron in a bit.
!IMPORTANT! do not upgrade barracks or hq or anything else, including construction of a wall during this stage. The only exception is getting a warehouse upgrade and only if your activity forces you to.
b) Not really farming…
If you do not have any barbarian villages within 2 units of you, you will most likely want to keep upgrading timber+clay and maybe iron every once in a while 2-3, keeping timber 0-2 lvls above clay. Keep checking the map if something close by goes abandoned consider getting barracks and starting what I described in the previous section.
So that is how you should use your map to make your beginning decisions. Don’t necessarily stick exactly to what I write. You’ll notice I didn’t give a specific build order! This is because to be correct in best build order varies too much on situation…I’d have to program something that would take the different things into account for each player to give the theoretical best order…which even then is debatable based on whether or not people around you will farm or spike (both will be added to the appendix later)….So it’s not worth doing for me at all ;).
I hope this part gave you a good idea of how and when you should start to farm during protection. Now I left off saying you’d focus on resource upgrades, so I’ll discuss how to know when you’re done with that stage next.
iii) When to stop with the resources, and what to do next
This is an interesting decision, but before that something else will most likely happen, you’ll be forced to upgrade your warehouse and/or you’ll gain a timber surplus. Earlier I mentioned focusing on timber and neglecting iron, that’s to allow you to do the following. If you’ve gained an ~400 timber excess or ~300 and need iron, it’s time to build a market. You can then trade over any excess timber at 2:1 ratio for iron, or a bit less if you want clay.
(Note: The market gives a nice boost because the vast majority of people who build an early market will keep resources about even and this will give them large amounts of excess iron. Especially if they make spears >_> )
Anyway, the latest you want to stop the resource focus is to allow yourself enough time to build ~100 spears before your neighbors start to come out of protection. (This will be discussed more in part 2 of the guide!) If however, you’ve had a decent deal of farming luck, you will want to stop significantly earlier. If your hq is constantly running while you are upgrading resources, keep making spears till you get to 76 (0% chance to lose 1). At this point if hq is still running smooth, it’s time to get a smithy.
(Note: Running smooth might seem ambiguous. You won’t be able to keep things running constantly during protection without a very nice location, but if you’re able to build spears to 100 while upgrading resources over half the time, that’s decently smooth. A limit of resource upgrading before protection ends is timber 14, for sure if you’ve gotten that it’s time to move on to a smithy, If you are heavily active, timber 13 ought to be the highest you get)
With smithy lvl 1, you can make a few swords and split up your spears to keep hitting the closest abandons more often, or if resources are flowing decently, you will want to go straight to smithy lvl 2 and research axes, then use those to split up into multiple raiding parties instead of the slower swords.
(Note: In a 10-tech system this will be even more worthwhile because lvl 1 research for units is much cheaper)
(Note 2: Once you get close to 76 spears and you have a paladin, split these up to take advantage of the paladin’s speed again).
Once you have your troops split up and rotating around abandons, you will want to move towards stables, you won’t have more than a day or two of protection left now normally, so a resource upgrade is now a waste.
Now I want to mention a quick few things about world settings.
EDIT: Deciding to add to this guide, for now want to address this point here. Which brings up another issue. Just because you dominate a top rank, doesn't mean you can't improve.
I previously suggest 76 before splitting up. This is unreasonable as by that point unless you have a large amount of barbs, then a large percentage of hauling will be empty. Let me address a nicer way.
With no paladin, try to limit the amount of sp needed to be remade by starting looting with ~13 sp. Instead of imidiately resending, build a few more to say ~16. Then to 20. Around 30-35 move towards smithy so you can get axes and split up your sp. 30-40 sp may lose spears still, but it gives reasonable chance of living and you waste more resources continuing to build sp that won't mean much if the barb doesn't have that many resources.
With a paladin, spears will always live so no need to not resend immediately but still get that smithy for better splitting at 30-40 sp is nice.
Make axes to allow yourself to split up into small groups of spears and 3 axes. Figure out the resource production of barbs by hitting 1-2 hours apart and seeing how much it made, by micro-farming in this way you efficiently pick up a lot of resources instead of fearing a neighbor hits a barb right before your big group does.
iv) World settings
There are some adjustments you might want to make dependent on the world speed, the unit speed, and the length of beginner protection. The world speed in and of itself doesn’t matter, what’s important is its speed relative to unit speed. If unit speed * world speed is greater than 1, you will be able to farm more and better, so you can consider more farming sooner even with sparser targets.
(Note: I’m not going to consider the length of beginner protection that happened in w29/w30. It was too ridiculous…)
Anyway, if your world speed * beginner protection is greater than 4.5 you have a long beginner protection.
Anyway with a longer protection you’ll want to stop making resources about a day and a half in advance and focus solely on troop production, once you hit 100 or so spears get axes and focus mostly on axes, making spears to keep resources balanced
(Note: I don’t have much fondness for swords, you should never defend until a reasonable time out of beginner protection, will discuss this in a future section more)
Also, don’t upgrade barracks until you have to (in order to make stables) or if barracks and hq are constantly producing, which is highly unlikely during protection. With protection 4.5 days and less, you will start making spears with enough time to get ~100 before protection ends unless again you’re able to keep barracks and hq queued.
(Note: the 100 spears is a bare minimum troop level amount to have, much better is to have a couple hundred spears, and a number of axes to allow splitting)
All that’s left now is preparing for protection to end.
v) End of protection!
If you’ve had a decent income you will be approaching stables or have stables by this time, if not it’s not unreasonable to only have a smithy, or close to it. Anyway, with this point approaching you’ll want to check your neighbors that have under 46 points, for when their protection ends, pick an order to attack these players in right after protection ends because everyone can know they have no barracks (and therefore no troops) so other people can easily rush for them too. You want to pick your first target as the free village your troops will come back from first, which may not be the first easy village to come out of protection.
vi) Final notes
Just a few quick things
a) During protection more than any other time, every resource is precious. Do not ever use any on something you do not need, or by a weird build order. This means do not make a wall during protection, the resources can always be used for something else more, such as getting a resource upgrade even a few minutes earlier.
b) Avoid inter-mixing resource upgrades with other upgrades, once you decide to get the smithy, you shouldn’t get more then 1-2 resource upgrades for the rest of protection max, these take a bit of time to make up for their cost, so with real farming coming in after protection ends, this will be a waste. As well it’s a waste of potential resources to queue hq/smithy/barracks with the intention of queuing a resource lvl right after, unless you cannot afford the resource upgrade and a farming raid will make it possible whether or not you get the hq/smithy/barracks/something else upgrade. A good start will get you a couple hundred infantry troops before protection ends; a great start can get you lc!
c) Some people will be wondering why I didn’t talk about the lc rush, with the skipping of axes and scouts to gain them. First of all, you will almost definitely gain resources faster by using axes to split your troops for protection farming. Second, scouts will help you organize your raids more efficiently then the gains that any lc rush will give you. Now I admit you may get to steadier income faster coming out of protection, and if that’s what you are aiming for that’s fine. I’ve never seen anyone who has done this strategy keep up with my traditional order of units start though to be honest. Not to mention that with a couple hundred axes that you could get instead, you could clear some spear only farms to stimulate your income faster…I’ll discuss this stuff more in a future section ;). I will concede though that it is plausible so will at some point work it into this guide.
TO BE CONTINUED :O:O:O
(Warning, lots of text >_>)
Introduction
This is my view point on playing the start of the world . To be clear the start goes from a non-crazy beginner protection (i.e. not like w30) to about the 15-25 village mark. As well, sections will first be released with the most relevant information in my opinion, then for completeness I will add to the section as time permits. Anything preempted by NOTE is included primarily for explanation as oppose to guiding.Audience
This guide is targeted at people who play actively! That’s somewhat ambiguous so what do I mean by actively? Clearly, checking an account once a day for less than an hour is not actively playing ><. To be active, your account is checked regularly, and you only have one or two periods of 6-8 hours where the account idles. To be clear though parts of this guide will work under the assumption of almost continuous activity until I have the time to update them for a large range of people, please when you read the newest section be aware that it might not take into account activity and should you wonder how this ought to effect you, just ask and I can make a quick post before the next update. Also, a section is any part which is given a Capital letter to mark it. For example, “A) Beginning of the world beginner protection”, is the first section.Prerequisites
You need to understand basic game terminology. I have no patience to explain what each abbreviation stands for. You’ll also need to know the requirements to build each structure; this can also be found in the help files.I will use the word day in this guide. It does not refer to 24 hours. It refers to a day in the game. You can calculate this by dividing 24 hours by the world speed. So for speed 1.5, you have 24/1.5 = 16 hours.
This guide will come in parts!!!! (Btw exclamation points are awesome to me atm, live with it!!!).
Part 1!!! Beginner protection!
There are two types of beginner protection. The first is the time in the period from the start of the world until players begin to be attackable. The second is any time later in the game when you join the world. I’ll discuss these in this orderA) Beginning of the world beginner protection.
i) Introduction
Beginner protection is the best possible time in the game to use your activity to gain a lead on your competitors. This does not mean in points necessarily!
i) Upon entering
The first thing you want to do depends on whether you are in world with new units. In a world with no statue, you simply want to queue timber then clay then iron to lvl 1 each. However, in a world with the new units you will want to make your statue first than queue all your res to lvl 1. The reasons for this is because you will gain such a small amount of resources from doing it the other way around and potentially you could be letting someone else grab another 100 resources from your closest barb making it in fact a total loss of resources. (NOTE: This DOES NOT mean rush to barracks!)
ii)The map
After setting your Headquarters queue, it’s time to look at the map. Look at how many abandons you have in your 7*7. If you have none there and don’t have multiple just outside your 7*7, then you have a few options. First, you can use your 1 restart to hope for a better location, (if there are bonuses in this world be aware that there is a good chance you will get a bonus in your 7*7 soon enough). Second, you can be indifferent to the situation and let things happen as they happen. Finally, you can attempt to coerce some of your neighbors into restarting. I’ll talk more on that last point in a moment, but before that there is one other thing you need to look for in your map. If you recognize a very good player near you, not in the late game, but someone who does very well at the start, realize that they will most likely make farming comparatively harder than most areas and if you don’t want to play super competitive, you ought to consider restarting to get a different area. (Note: You can only restart once). Ok then onto getting your neighbors to restart.
Restart coercion: Since a large amount of growth can be obtained from neighboring barbarian villages, it might be tempting to try and get more of them through…diplomacy. There is also the con of retaliation from a neighbor who does not like that you asked him/her to restart. From what I’ve seen though, the most effective restart methods are letters clearly showing a player’s excelling status at the game, and an added willingness to give advice upon restart. (Note: I’ve got a 0% success rate with restart coercion; my notes are based on other people’s success). I suggest if you are willing to do this to send to almost everyone close to you in order to raise the chance of a restart. Be careful though, if you don’t have any proof of exceptional playing ability your chances of success plummet. Also it shouldn't be surprising that restart advice can lead your neighbors to a more aggressive stance towards you, quite easily causing random attacks soon after protection ends.
Ok, so you’ve had a good look at your map, it’s time to make your first real decision. This will be based on two things, how active a player you are and amount of barbarian/bonus villages + range.
a) Barbarians near you.
If you’ve got a barbarian/bonus within 2 units then I suggest getting resources to 3-1-1, the build order doesn’t matter too much, so I won’t work out the numbers to optimize it. More timber can help depending on your situation, the more active you are the less clay and iron you'll need. Don't go to barracks at less timber, the timber upgrades will make up for the timber loss before you get enough sp to start farming.
(Note: only upgrade non-resources once you no longer plan to upgrade resources again until after you start farming).
In an archer world you only need 4 spears to start farming, so 3-1-1 becomes more appealing, though I would only consider this if you have a barbarian village touching yours.
(Note: Spear amounts are chosen to yield a profit, you need 9 to not lose more than 1 when sending just spears, but you ought to wait for more in order to not waste too many of the barbarian resources. Even if the barb will grow if you don't have a lot near you, wait till 13 or so spears then instead of hitting repetitively build up a few more inbetween. For example start with 13, then 16, then 20, then 24/25. Your troops will stall, but not so long and you sac less spears saving precious timber. For a paladin world 4 spears can be sent with the paladin, any less and you should pick the speed of sending just the paladin over sending the paladin + spears.)
The first thing you want to do with your hauls is invest in getting your spear force to approximately 20. If your barbarian closest to you runs out before then and you don’t have another close one STOP making spears. Once you get to this spear amount if you’ve got a decent amount of villages close by to farm, you can consider producing some spears till you get to about 33 (decent chance of one living). If you are getting good returns consider avoiding iron upgrades. This is because you will have built up a good amount making spears+farming.
(Note: Your village’s resource per an hour production is deceiving when you start farming because in general raiding income is close to 1:1:1 making your own income closer to that)
Even if you can afford the clay upgrade first consider waiting for a timber upgrade, even if you’ve got a timber surplus. I’ll explain why you want to over emphasize timber and neglect iron in a bit.
!IMPORTANT! do not upgrade barracks or hq or anything else, including construction of a wall during this stage. The only exception is getting a warehouse upgrade and only if your activity forces you to.
b) Not really farming…
If you do not have any barbarian villages within 2 units of you, you will most likely want to keep upgrading timber+clay and maybe iron every once in a while 2-3, keeping timber 0-2 lvls above clay. Keep checking the map if something close by goes abandoned consider getting barracks and starting what I described in the previous section.
So that is how you should use your map to make your beginning decisions. Don’t necessarily stick exactly to what I write. You’ll notice I didn’t give a specific build order! This is because to be correct in best build order varies too much on situation…I’d have to program something that would take the different things into account for each player to give the theoretical best order…which even then is debatable based on whether or not people around you will farm or spike (both will be added to the appendix later)….So it’s not worth doing for me at all ;).
I hope this part gave you a good idea of how and when you should start to farm during protection. Now I left off saying you’d focus on resource upgrades, so I’ll discuss how to know when you’re done with that stage next.
iii) When to stop with the resources, and what to do next
This is an interesting decision, but before that something else will most likely happen, you’ll be forced to upgrade your warehouse and/or you’ll gain a timber surplus. Earlier I mentioned focusing on timber and neglecting iron, that’s to allow you to do the following. If you’ve gained an ~400 timber excess or ~300 and need iron, it’s time to build a market. You can then trade over any excess timber at 2:1 ratio for iron, or a bit less if you want clay.
(Note: The market gives a nice boost because the vast majority of people who build an early market will keep resources about even and this will give them large amounts of excess iron. Especially if they make spears >_> )
Anyway, the latest you want to stop the resource focus is to allow yourself enough time to build ~100 spears before your neighbors start to come out of protection. (This will be discussed more in part 2 of the guide!) If however, you’ve had a decent deal of farming luck, you will want to stop significantly earlier. If your hq is constantly running while you are upgrading resources, keep making spears till you get to 76 (0% chance to lose 1). At this point if hq is still running smooth, it’s time to get a smithy.
(Note: Running smooth might seem ambiguous. You won’t be able to keep things running constantly during protection without a very nice location, but if you’re able to build spears to 100 while upgrading resources over half the time, that’s decently smooth. A limit of resource upgrading before protection ends is timber 14, for sure if you’ve gotten that it’s time to move on to a smithy, If you are heavily active, timber 13 ought to be the highest you get)
With smithy lvl 1, you can make a few swords and split up your spears to keep hitting the closest abandons more often, or if resources are flowing decently, you will want to go straight to smithy lvl 2 and research axes, then use those to split up into multiple raiding parties instead of the slower swords.
(Note: In a 10-tech system this will be even more worthwhile because lvl 1 research for units is much cheaper)
(Note 2: Once you get close to 76 spears and you have a paladin, split these up to take advantage of the paladin’s speed again).
Once you have your troops split up and rotating around abandons, you will want to move towards stables, you won’t have more than a day or two of protection left now normally, so a resource upgrade is now a waste.
Now I want to mention a quick few things about world settings.
EDIT: Deciding to add to this guide, for now want to address this point here. Which brings up another issue. Just because you dominate a top rank, doesn't mean you can't improve.
I previously suggest 76 before splitting up. This is unreasonable as by that point unless you have a large amount of barbs, then a large percentage of hauling will be empty. Let me address a nicer way.
With no paladin, try to limit the amount of sp needed to be remade by starting looting with ~13 sp. Instead of imidiately resending, build a few more to say ~16. Then to 20. Around 30-35 move towards smithy so you can get axes and split up your sp. 30-40 sp may lose spears still, but it gives reasonable chance of living and you waste more resources continuing to build sp that won't mean much if the barb doesn't have that many resources.
With a paladin, spears will always live so no need to not resend immediately but still get that smithy for better splitting at 30-40 sp is nice.
Make axes to allow yourself to split up into small groups of spears and 3 axes. Figure out the resource production of barbs by hitting 1-2 hours apart and seeing how much it made, by micro-farming in this way you efficiently pick up a lot of resources instead of fearing a neighbor hits a barb right before your big group does.
iv) World settings
There are some adjustments you might want to make dependent on the world speed, the unit speed, and the length of beginner protection. The world speed in and of itself doesn’t matter, what’s important is its speed relative to unit speed. If unit speed * world speed is greater than 1, you will be able to farm more and better, so you can consider more farming sooner even with sparser targets.
(Note: I’m not going to consider the length of beginner protection that happened in w29/w30. It was too ridiculous…)
Anyway, if your world speed * beginner protection is greater than 4.5 you have a long beginner protection.
Anyway with a longer protection you’ll want to stop making resources about a day and a half in advance and focus solely on troop production, once you hit 100 or so spears get axes and focus mostly on axes, making spears to keep resources balanced
(Note: I don’t have much fondness for swords, you should never defend until a reasonable time out of beginner protection, will discuss this in a future section more)
Also, don’t upgrade barracks until you have to (in order to make stables) or if barracks and hq are constantly producing, which is highly unlikely during protection. With protection 4.5 days and less, you will start making spears with enough time to get ~100 before protection ends unless again you’re able to keep barracks and hq queued.
(Note: the 100 spears is a bare minimum troop level amount to have, much better is to have a couple hundred spears, and a number of axes to allow splitting)
All that’s left now is preparing for protection to end.
v) End of protection!
If you’ve had a decent income you will be approaching stables or have stables by this time, if not it’s not unreasonable to only have a smithy, or close to it. Anyway, with this point approaching you’ll want to check your neighbors that have under 46 points, for when their protection ends, pick an order to attack these players in right after protection ends because everyone can know they have no barracks (and therefore no troops) so other people can easily rush for them too. You want to pick your first target as the free village your troops will come back from first, which may not be the first easy village to come out of protection.
vi) Final notes
Just a few quick things
a) During protection more than any other time, every resource is precious. Do not ever use any on something you do not need, or by a weird build order. This means do not make a wall during protection, the resources can always be used for something else more, such as getting a resource upgrade even a few minutes earlier.
b) Avoid inter-mixing resource upgrades with other upgrades, once you decide to get the smithy, you shouldn’t get more then 1-2 resource upgrades for the rest of protection max, these take a bit of time to make up for their cost, so with real farming coming in after protection ends, this will be a waste. As well it’s a waste of potential resources to queue hq/smithy/barracks with the intention of queuing a resource lvl right after, unless you cannot afford the resource upgrade and a farming raid will make it possible whether or not you get the hq/smithy/barracks/something else upgrade. A good start will get you a couple hundred infantry troops before protection ends; a great start can get you lc!
c) Some people will be wondering why I didn’t talk about the lc rush, with the skipping of axes and scouts to gain them. First of all, you will almost definitely gain resources faster by using axes to split your troops for protection farming. Second, scouts will help you organize your raids more efficiently then the gains that any lc rush will give you. Now I admit you may get to steadier income faster coming out of protection, and if that’s what you are aiming for that’s fine. I’ve never seen anyone who has done this strategy keep up with my traditional order of units start though to be honest. Not to mention that with a couple hundred axes that you could get instead, you could clear some spear only farms to stimulate your income faster…I’ll discuss this stuff more in a future section ;). I will concede though that it is plausible so will at some point work it into this guide.
TO BE CONTINUED :O:O:O
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