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seanpaustin
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Posted
: February 28, 2007, 12:34 pm
Title: Fenris' Lessons
Subject:
Lessons from Fenris' Boot Camp
Lesson 0: Terrain and Class
There are 60 combinations of terrain, class, and focus path, and all combinations are definitely not created equal. Which combination you choose can have an enormous impact on the success of your camp. The following combinations are recommended (sorted in no particular order):
Nuke:
Popular/City
Nerd/City
Goofball/Forest
Goofball/City
Goofball/Plains
Econ:
Popular/Mountain
Popular/Forest
Goofball/Mountain
Goofball/Forest
Goofball/City
Mech:
Popular/Forest
Nerd/Forest
Nerd/City
Nerd/Plains
Goofball/Forest
The desert is not in my list of recommended combinations. While the desert has been advocated by GameAdmin, no one has ever been successful in the desert, and it has no significant advantages. Since there are usually only one or two Nuke path players in an alliance, there is usually enough Uranium ore floating around if everyone builds on all their Uranium deposits. Even if not, there is usually tons of Uranium ore available for sale at cheap prices.
Scouts are not in my list of recommended combinations. While there have been many successful scouts, those players were successful because of other strategies, not because of their class. Every other class gets an advantage, and the disadvantages in most cases can be overcome by the midgame. However, it is very difficult to create an advantage on par with the advantages of the other classes, and any advantage that a scout can create, the other classes can create, too.
There is more information on class and terrain combinations here: http://sgwiki.pbwiki.com/ClassAndTerrain. Note that one combination occurs in all three focus paths, Goofball in the Forest. This is by far the most flexible and forgiving combination.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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February 28, 2007, 2:40 pm
Lesson 1: Loki's Gambit
Fast Start Tactics and Research
In the first few days of a round, you are only competing with yourself. With everyone in anonymity, no one can negatively affect you. Pre-determined allies can aid you, however. So, this is the best opportunity to race ahead without a competing camp slowing you down.
Like any short race, the advantage goes to the person who is the fastest off the block. Don't end a single turn until you have 18 survivors already in camp. Play the mini-game to find them. Don't play every level in the mini-game; that's too slow. Hit 'q' to advance through the levels that don't have CEP or survivors. If you are starting with a minting license, then you don't even need to worry about the CEP. There are only two levels that have survivors. In about half an hour of playing the mini-game, you should have enough survivors to bring your camp up to 18 total.
This start puts you only a few turns ahead in terms of population, but it allows you to do one very important task from the very first turn, research. Assign 11 people to construction, queue one laboratory, and queue one shelter level 3. The advantages of starting research early are substantial, but it does come with a complication. Immediately, your camp is dependent upon disposables. The burn will not be much at first, but it will catch up to you. This will come up again later.
Assign one person as a messenger. If you use donations to obtain a minting license or if a pre-determined ally has provided you with the 2500 CEPs necessary to buy one, then buy the license and assign two people to mint, four if you are a Goofball. If your ally hasn't delivered the CEPs yet, then wait until he does. It is much better to start off with a minting license, if possible. You will need to add a purchase order for supplies to cover what is required to mint the CEPs.
The minting license gives you the advantage of buying all of your food and disposables from the NEC Auto-exchange and to delay constructing production centers for about half of the early game, and that is long enough for Goofballs to start generating sufficient CEPs from factories to never need to build food or disposable production centers. Buying all of your food and disposables gives you the advantage of being able to immediately start searching for land, instead of food. So, assign one person to explore for land, and assign the remaining people to recruit. You still should only have one person assigned as a messenger and no purchase orders for food or disposables. The 200 of each you start with are enough for a few turns.
Once all of this is complete, you are ready to end your first turn. So, in your first turn, you are growing the most important resources you need: people, land, research, CEP, food, and disposables. For maximum growth, you will want to grow each of these each turn, if possible.
Upon ending your first turn and constructing your first laboratory, you have now opened the Learn page. If you are minting, then switch the topic to Marketing. For every half point of Marketing research, you can add another person to mint. Research this to 10 first. This will allow your minters to stay ahead of your food and disposable requirements for a while to come. If you are not minting, then switch the topic to Tracking.
The best order of research for early growth is:
Marketing
Tracking
Ingenuity
Architecture
On average, you should be trying to build a laboratory for every point of research gained. So after learning each of the above topics to 40, you should have between 40 and 50 laboratories constructed. Also, with these topics, you have the tools for explosive growth: busses, fuel, communications, factories, power, recruiting bonuses from tracking, exploration bonuses from ingenuity. Also, you can improve the efficiency of your minters by replacing storebought supplies with supplies from your own factories.
Unless you are ready to participate in the early game anonmymity busting, you should stop exploring once you approach 1000 land. Experienced camps will have already raced to barracks and classrooms and will be waiting to hit camps who come out of anonymity without army, militia, and weapons.
If you are not a Goofball, then soon your population growth will outstrip your ability to buy using CEPs generated from the minting and selling the factory output. You will need to start generating your own food and disposables. Once you are to that point, then it is a good time to stop for the first day.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 2, 2007, 2:11 pm
Lesson 2: Evaluating Production Structures
Disposables, building supplies, gas, and ore are all produced by only a single type of structure each. However, food can be produced by three different structures: fire pits, gardens, and farms. Fire pits and gardens are the only food structures worth building. Farms are inefficient in both land and population.
Fire pits require 1 person, 1 land, and 2 building supplies per turn. At base research, each fire pit will generate 3 food.
Gardens require 2 people, 1 land, and 2 disposables per turn. At base research, each garden will generate 5 food.
So, gardens are slightly more efficient in land (5:1 > 3:1), and fire pits are slightly more efficient in personnel (3:1 > 5:2). However, these differences can change quickly, depending on other factors. The first is what you are researching.
If you are researching Tracking for your alliance, then you should choose fire pits since those become very efficient at high levels of Tracking research. If you are researching Gardening, then gardens make the most sense. If you are researching Recycler Prospecting, then gardens become cheaper simply because your disposables become cheaper. If you aren't doing research related to food, then the next selector should be terrain.
Each terrain gives bonuses and penalties on different types of food production. Mountains and cities should use fire pits. Forests and plains should use gardens.
The next selector is class. Nerds have a harder time finding people, and therefore the human efficiency of the fire pits is more important than the land efficiency. Everyone else should probably choose gardens.
The final selector is a matter of personal preference. Supplying gardens with disposables is usually pretty easy. Most camps can make or buy extra disposables for their gardens by changing only one thing about their camp. Building supplies are more complicated. Increasing your food output from fire pits means increasing not only factories but also generators and possibly fuel refineries and recycling plants. There is a lot more hidden cost in building fire pits than there is in building gardens. For that reason, if you get down to here, and the decision isn't obvious based on your research, class, and terrain, then gardens are the better default.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 5, 2007, 1:54 pm
Lesson 3: Exploring and Recruiting
How do the big camps get big faster than anyone else? Recruiting and exploring is how. The most common mistake that new players make is to overestimate the importance of early game research. A lot of effort generally goes into stabilizing camps. Once that is done, most new players tend to put as much focus as possible into developing their labs. However, explorers and recruiters are a resource that must be developed, just like research, factories, food, and weapons. Developing the explorer and recruiter base means sacrificing something, and once a camp has reached basic stability, the best place to cut back is labs.
How many recruiters and explorers should you send? Once upon a time, there was a hard limit on the number of effective recruiters and explorers, and it was close to the number listed as the five day max searched. That hard limit has been replaced by a logarithmic diminishing returns function. That just makes it a matter of preference as to how many people you are willing to commit.
The x day max searched values are multiples of the camp's circumference. The one day max searched is three times the camp circumference, and the five day max searched is 15 times the camp circumference. I use 20 times the camp circumference as my max. Why? I do it because it gets noticably better returns than 15 times circumference, and 30 times circumference doesn't seem to get any better returns. Finally, it's easy to do the math.
So, if you don't have enough population to send 20 times circumference exploring and recruiting, how do you divide them up? Recruiting is more important than exploring simply because recruiters can find explorers but not vice-versa. So, I tend to stage my growth in each area alternating until I get them both up to what I consider to be the key milestones: camp circumference, one day max searched (three times circumference), and 20 times circumference.
For example, let's say that my camp circumference is 100. My one day max searched would be 300, and my 20 times circumference would be 2000.
Where x is the population I have available to send:
if x < 100, then 1 explorer and remainder recruiting
if 100 < x < 200, then 100 recruiting and remainder exploring
if 200 < x < 400, then 100 exploring and remainder recruiting
if 400 < x < 600, then 300 recruiting and remainder exploring
if 600 < x < 2300, then 300 exploring and remainder recruiting
if 2300 < x < 4000, then 2000 recruiting and remainder exploring
if x > 4000, then 2000 recruiting, 2000 exploring, and remainder doing something else
When recruiting, the growth from the one day max searched to the three day max searched is very slow. However, from three day max searched to 20 times circumference happens very quickly. The subsequent growth of the explorers is also very slow. Frequently, I have to tap into my explorer pool to achieve important camp goals, but until I am sending 20 times circumference in both explorers and recruiters, I don't consider my early game complete. This generally happens between day four and day six.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 5, 2007, 2:13 pm
Lesson 4: Busses
In the previous lesson, I discussed how to grow your explorer and recruiting pool. Busses make that pool more effective. At some point after your camp is stable and sustainable, you need to improve the efficiency of your recruiters and explorers. That can happen a couple of different ways: Tracking mastery, Ingenuity mastery, and Vehicle Transportation.
The two masteries are something that the other camps in your alliance can provide, but everyone who wants a very large population or land mass will have to research their own Vehicle Transportation. The higher your Vehicle Transportation research, the more busses you can send and the higher bonus your recruiters and explorers receive.
Most camps who need large populations should strive to have Vehicle Transportation to 20 some time in the first week of the game. This will allow you to send approximately 10 times circumference recruiters and explorers and have one bus for every 50 recruiters and explorers, maximum capacity for the busses. If you are sending 20 times circumference recruiters and explorers, then you will need to research Vehicle Transportation to 37. I try to have this done by the end of the second week. This does slow down my focus path, but it allows me to have a larger army once I do get focus.
Such a high Vehicle Transportation level does have a high associated fuel cost, until someone in the alliance gets the Vehicle Transportation mastery. The growth you can achieve from the extra returns can cause you to need to quickly scale your fuel production and storage capacity.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 5, 2007, 2:30 pm
Lesson 5: Dusters
The world is radioactive. At the time of this lesson, bombs have fallen 16 times in the past 175 years. The world is very radioactive. The radioactivity comes to your camp in the form of dust. Once you have opened up power, you can also build dusters.
I generally start to build dusters somewhere on day three or four. The dust will get to lethal levels by day seven or so. So, it's good to have some run-up time. We have seen dust get to lethal levels before. It wasn't pretty.
Build dusters for two reasons. One, if everyone flakes on their duster responsibility, the game will get nasty for everyone. Two, dusters give a disproportionally large number of points for their cost. More score means better recruiting returns. In the late game, dusters don't mean much to your score, but you can easily double your score in the early game by building even a moderate number of dusters.
To combat the dust emitted in a single day, the equivalent of 2,000,000 dusters must be in operation for one turn. Early in the game, that seems like an impossibly high number, but by the end of the first week, it is possible for a single camp to have 2,000,000 dusters in operation. If you are in the top 25 players (excluding admins), then you should have at least 10,000 dusters. If you are in the top five players, then you should have at least 100,000 dusters. The top one or two players frequently have 1,000,000 dusters or more.
If your alliance does not have the Power Generation mastery and the SR-90 level is at 0, then turn your dusters off. The SR-90 level cannot be driven into negative territory. Once the air is clean, free up your power for something useful. You still retain the points for having built them.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 7, 2007, 2:30 pm
Lesson 6: Double-time Techniques
Some of us are online all day. Most people are able to play at least an hour a day. A few people have to try to crunch through all of their turns in 30 minutes a day. Lost turns are huge opportunities lost. However, there are some techniques to be able to play at a competitive level and spend only 30 minutes a day playing.
Each 24 hour day provides 144 turns. In order to use those turns in 30 minutes, you must be able to spend turns at a rate of five per minute. That's Blitz speed!
The first technique is to spend five turns at a time. To do this, open up Time Management as soon as possible and research it to five. So, your opening research path should be modified to: Marketing, Recreation, Time Management, and then follow up with the remainder of your opening research.
Once you are able to end 5 turns at once, you still need to be able to click the end 5 turns button every minute. In order to do that, you need to trim down the things you do each cycle. You won't be able to queue buildings, recalculate your recruiters and explorers, send an attack or train army, tweak your garage production, and still end 5 turns in a minute. Pick a smaller subset to do each turn and manage the rest in larger chunks. For one, I recommend not bothering with an army and focusing on civilian growth only. That eliminates a chunk of complexity right off the bat.
There are two main risks to ending five turns at once, starving your population and losing them to insufficient communications. Communications losses can be eliminated simply by making a habit of checking your communications each cycle. I'll come back to this. Keeping from starving your population is a little more complex. The key point is to make sure that you always have five days of food on hand.
The way to make sure that you never run out of food is to keep at least 20% of your food storage full, and make sure that your people eat no more than 4% of your storage per day. Each time you finish a bout of building storage huts, check your food storage capacity and multiply it by .04 (or 4%). Keep that number handy. At the end of each cycle, check how much food your people ate. If that number exceeds your 4% mark, then it is time to double your storage huts again. If you are producing food and your food ever drops below 40%, then start to double your food production. That should give you enough time to have actually doubled it before your food storage drops to 20%. If you are buying food, then you can wait until your food actually drops to 20%. If your food ever goes above 80%, then double your storage huts. I use this same technique for gas and disposables, too.
Another way to reduce complexity is to queue large numbers of buildings at once. Anticipate your needs and queue those buildings in large chunks. For example, if you know that you are going to need more food soon, then don't just increase your firepits to the point where you are back to break even; instead, double them. Of course, doubling firepits may require doubling factories, doubling gas generators, doubling fuel refineries, and doubling recycling plants. So, queue them so that they get built in the correct order. Then assign only enough population as builders such that the new buildings will take up most, but not all, of your average recruiting returns. That way you don't end up draining your recruiters and explorers.
Finally, it helps to establish a routine. I call it a cycle. When a batch of five turns ends, make a habit to do the following:
1.) check food production, use, and storage
2.) check disposable production, use, and storage
3.) check supplies production, use, and storage
4.) check gas production, use, and storage
5.) check for any alert type messages (can't build x because of y, etc) and go to the appropriate page to adjust
6.) check research and change topic, if necessary
7.) check shelter to make sure that you have enough room for 10 days worth of recruiting
8.) go to the construction page
9.) queue any new long-term goals at the bottom of the queue
10.) queue any short-term goals (additional food, shelter, etc) at the top of the queue
10.) queue mines for all available deposits at the top of the queue
11.) queue communications relays at the top of the queue
12.) assign explorers and recruiters
If you have an army or militia, then you should also take a few extra steps towards the end of your day:
On the third to last cycle of the day, queue additional barracks and classrooms. If you are not making weapons, then buy weapons for the additional army that you are about to train.
On the second to last cycle of the day, queue additional militia, army, guard posts, and walls.
On the last cycle of the day, queue additional barbed wire.
Finally, after the last cycle of the day, scan the people and infrastructure pages to make sure that all the numbers are where you want them to be.
A few last things to keep in mind. A camp will probably never need more than 5000 guard posts and 1000 incinerators. So, you can build those once and never have to look at them again.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 7, 2007, 3:08 pm
Lesson 7: Mastery Relevance
The Top 5 Masteries Every Alliance Must Have
Tracking
Vehicle Transportation
Power Generation
Domestication
Recycler Prospecting
The Next 5 Masteries Every Alliance Should Have
Ingenuity
Gardening
Housing
Coercion
Mechanical Engineering
Lesser Masteries
Architecture
Marketing
Recycling
Wall Strength
Spatial Logic
Waste of Time Masteries
Recreation
Time Management
Medical Technology
Waste Management
Communications
Except for Tracking, all of the top 5 masteries significantly improve the efficiency of fundamental camp needs. Tracking is an exception, but it still makes the top 5 because it significantly improves growth across the entire alliance. Power Generation, Domestication, and Recycler Prospecting should always go to the alliance's best Nerds. Vehicle Transportation and Tracking should go to your alliance's population farms. Your alliance will be more succesful, if you have all of these accomplished in the first week.
The next five masteries all improve efficiency in more narrow, but still important areas. The lesser masteries all have a positive impact, but only on areas of only minor or very limited importance. The waste of time masteries all require significantly more investment than the returns, generally because the costs eliminated by the mastery are so small.
Communications is a mastery that is frequently achieved because people get frustrated about losing recruiters and explorers. However, this can be better corrected by establishing a good habit of checking your communications before ending turns.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 8, 2007, 4:33 pm
Lesson 8: Evaluating weapons and vehicles
On the battlefield, infantry weapons and vehicles behave nearly the same. So, as you compare the world of possible weaponry, include both sets. All of the information you need to compare weapons is located in the manual. However, when comparing weapons, the important information is: range min/max, primary damage, alternate damage, armor, reload time, run speed, and accuracy.
A lot of that information is pieces of a bigger puzzle. How much damage will this thing do? The simple answer is (damage * accuracy) / reload time. So, for example a sword will do (1.5 * .90) / 1 == 1.35 damage per turn to a preferred target. A pistol will do (2 * .8) / 1 == 1.6 damage per turn for a preferred target.
Swords vs Pistols
So, how many attacking swordsmen would it take to kill 100 defending pistoliers in one round? Well, if they are both in range of each other, then the answer is enough swordsmen to to deal 300 damage (100 pistols each with 3 armor) or (100 pistols * 3 armor) / 1.35 damage == 223 swordsmen.
However, defenders strike first. So, the swordsmen corps will have to have enough swordsmen to take the pistol rounds and still have enough to attack. 100 pistols will kill 53 swordsmen each round, (1.6 damage * 100 pistoliers) / 3 armor = 53 swordsmen. The total number of swordsmen required to kill 100 pistols in one round is 223 + 53 == 276 swordsmen.
However, that answer is still not complete, because they will not start within range of each other. Pistols outrange swords by quite a bit. So, the pistols will have additional rounds of fire before the swordsmen can attack. How many rounds is determined by how far apart they start and the run speed of the attackers. Pistols have a max range of 50m and swords have a max range of 0m. So, the pistols will start firing as soon as the swordsmen are at 50m. Swordsmen have a run speed of 50m per round. So, the pistoliers will only get one additional round of fire before the swordsmen will be on top of them. So, accounting for range, the total number of swordsmen required to kill 100 pistols in one round is 223 + 53 + 53 == 329 swordsmen, more than three times.
These are rough calculations and don't include additional defense afforded the pistoliers by any trenches, pillboxes, or hairpins that the swordsmen have to traverse. However, the numbers are pretty close. This is why weapons tech is more important than numbers.
Rail guns vs tanks
Let's look at another example. How many attacking rail guns does it take to kill 1000 defending tanks in one round? In this case, both have a maximum range of 400m. So, defenders will fire first, but attackers will also fire in the first round of combat. Tanks have an armor of 40. So, the railguns have to be able to deal 40,000 damage.
Tanks are not on the rail gun's list of preferred targets. So, it will only deal the alternate damage of 1. So, the damage that each rail gun will deal is (1 damage * .75 accuracy) / 2 round reload == .375 damage per round. The reload time shouldn't count, if the battle is intended to end in a single round, but I generally include it anyway, just in case it takes more than one round. So, to deal 40,000 damage / .375 damage per railgunner == 106,667.
However, the tanks will fire first. The rail gun is not on the tank's list of preferred targets, either. So, it will also only deal the alternate damage, 10 in the case of the tank. The damage that each tank will deal per round is (10 damage * .40 accuracy) / 2 round reload == 2 damage per round. So, 10,000 tanks will kill a total of (10,000 tanks * 2 damage per round) / 3 armor == 6,667 rail gunners.
So, the total number of rail gunners required to kill 10,000 tanks is 106,667 + 6,667 == 113,344. This is why I say that vehicles are better than infantry weapons. However, some infantry weapons are specifically anti-vehicle.
Recoilless rifles vs tanks
Let's look at another example. How many recoilless rifles does it take to kill 1,000 tanks in one round? In this case, recoilless rifles have a range of only 375m and a run speed of 25m compared to the tank's range of 400m. So, the defending tanks will fire for one round unanswered before the recoilless rifles will be able to fire. Tanks have an armor of 40. So, the recoilless rifles will have to be able to deal 40,000 damage.
The damage that each recoilless rifle will deal is (40 damage * .40 accuracy) / 2 round reload == 8 damage per round. So, to deal 40,000 damage / 8 damage per recoilless rifle team == 5,000 teams.
However, the tanks will fire twice first. The recoilless rifle is not on the tank's list of preferred targets. So, it will only deal the alternate damage, 10 in the case of the tank. The damage that each tank will deal per round is (10 damage * .40 accuracy) / 2 round reload == 2 damage per round. So, 10,000 tanks will kill a total of (10,000 tanks * 2 damage per round) / 6 armor == 3,334 recoilless rifle teams per round.
So, the total number of recoilless rifle teams required to kill 10,000 tanks is 5,000 + (3,334 * 2) == 11,668.
Conclusion
So, using a little math and common sense, right now tanks are better than snipers, snipers are better than recoilless rifles, and recoilless rifles are better than tanks. This is the tactical loop that decides most battles in the mid game. Which combination you choose versus which combination your opponent has chosen has more of an impact on your success than any other single factor.
Choppers and stingers have a lesser, but still significant impact on battle. However, once the army camps get medium and heavy mechs, those are the only things that matter. To win versus mechs, you must either have a far superior tank force or an overwhelming number of recoilless rifles.
Right now, the two vehicles that are the weakest are AAVs and light mechs. High level camps generally use these only as decoys for recoilless rifles and snipers to draw fire away from their tanks and mechs.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 12, 2007, 2:04 pm
Lesson 9: Offensive Military
Big guns go boom! After you sign in, the very next page, just before you enter the main page, in the middle of the page, away from everything else on the page, in capital letters, quotated, reads the following words, "[Kid,] Welcome to the fight!" Ok, so some of that was made up, but it does welcome you to the fight, not the cooperation, not the peace-mongering, and not the Alice's-Restaurant-Anti-Masacree-Movement-In-Four-Part-Harmony. If you don't believe me, I can wait. I'm not proud... or tired.
Some camps are not aggressive. That's fine. Those who choose to not arm themselves will become subjegated to those who do, unless they can smelt gold or build nukes very quickly overnight with no one watching. Those camps who want to win by means other than climbing over the backs of their neighbors would do well to remember, "The best defense is a good offense." That is even more true in this game than in most. If you perceive a threat, you are generally better off eliminating it. You don't have to follow up, if you don't want to, but eliminating a threatening army leaves your opponent with fewer options. Ultimately, if you are not going to try to win through military domination, then you must fight on your own terms. Do not let the military camps dictate the battle terms.
So, everyone should fight, and I recognize that not everyone will. So, if everyone is gonna swing, then everyone should know what it takes to win. In general, you should not attack intending to lose.
Some general rules of thumb
When to attack
Attack when you have either technological superiority or 150% of your opponents force.
Who to attack
Attack anyone with the same level of military tech who can build up to 150% of your force size and remain in your attack range. They are a serious, impending threat.
Attack anyone who is a foe. Your alliance has foed them for a reason.
Attack anyone who has made threatening gestures. They either are weak and are bluffing, or they are strong but not strong enough to hit you. They could be strong and taunting you in an attempt to get a defensive victory, but this is rare because it is very risky.
Attack any underarmed or defenseless Nuke or Econ path camp. The only defense against their ability to gain 10 ranks in two hours is to keep their population under control. It's mean. It's cruel. You either do it, or you watch them blow right past you later, while your attacks kill less than 10% of their population and stop their growth a sum total of 0.
Attack any underarmed or defenseless population farm. The purpose of these camps is to send off population to other camps. Camps who might stomp on you later with an army twice the size than the one they could have recruited on their own.
How to send an attack
Do everything else you normally do during a turn. Prepare your camp to end 5 turns, 2 if you are sending an air raid. So, send recruiters and explorers for 5 turns. Make sure you have enough food, disposables, etc for 5 turns. Wait until the very end of the turn to start your attack process. Take this part slowly, and do it right.
On the construction page, verify that any needed communications relays are queued.
On the attack page, verify that the target shows in the target dropdown list and does not show as (unable).
On the statistics page, verify that the target is not a member of a friend alliance. Verify that attacking the target will not increase your score to put you into range of a foe with a superior army or military tech.
On the defense page, unequip only the weapons you need for your attack, and replace them with other weapons, if possible.
On the attack page, select the target you want to hit, the rules of engagement, the formation, and your weapons configuration.
Select the Auto Assign checkbox for officers.
Enter the total crew required for the weapons configuration listed under weapons crew total into the number of trained army to send.
Double check your target at the top of the page.
Taunt your enemy in the IRC channel and then immediately end 5 turns.
Unless you sent an air raid, send out recruiters and explorers for a single turn. Queue any mines. Queue your communications relays. Make sure you have builders assigned. Double check your communications relays. End 1 turn.
On the defense page, reset your defensive weapon configurations.
Patience is a virtue
Losing people to battle and communications or starvation at the same time hurts. When your army returns, you are probably going to want to restaff it to at least the same level, if not higher. Hopefully, you won the battle, but you probably took some losses. If so, then you are now amongst higher ranks, who usually have bigger armies. Take your time, double check your standard stuff before ending turns, especially food, communications, and to a lesser degree waste.
Check your Target
Make sure you are attacking who you want to attack. Sending an entire army equipped for short range combat into rail guns and tanks will earn you the title Captain of the Light Brigade.
Check your Background
Make sure you understand the effect of the attack. If you have a team member who could be put into harm's way by the person you are about to attack either because you win or you lose, then you should probably wait for that team member to beef up his defenses first. If you, yourself, would be put into harm's way by winning the attack, then you should probably wait until you have sufficient army to make your attack and not immediately get stomped by another foe waiting just ahead of your target.
Play by the Rules
It is much, much better to nearly lose than it is to nearly win. If your army has the competency and your intent is to win, which it nearly always should be, then set your rules of engagement to Mission Critical attack. The more men you lose, the more victory score you gain but only if you win the battle. Also, you are likely to lose all of your men in a standard assault, if they try to retreat versus tanks, mechs, or rail guns. While retreating, your army takes very heavy losses. So, if they are gonna die anyways, let them die fighting and just maybe sqeak out a victory. In this regards, you should consider battle the way a Klingon does. Never retreat. Never surrender. Never be taken prisoner. For this reason, you should never send out an army against a defended camp, if you cannot afford to lose every man.
Captain on Deck!
Mass confusion in your ranks will cause a superior army to go down in flames. Always send the correct number of officers. The best way to do this is to always have trained more officers than you need and then select the Auto-Assign officers checkbox. If you send too many officers, they get in each other's way and cause confusion, too. So, don't think you can just send them all and be safe. The Auto-Assign feature is there for a reason; use it.
Drop Your Pants for As Little Time As Possible
Only unequip your defenders at the last second before preparing your attack. Then, end five turns, reset for one turn, and end that one turn. As soon as that turn as has ended, go to your defense page and reset your defenses, assuming you still have any army left. During the time your army is away, you are subject to sneak attacks by watchful and opportunistic individuals. Just because your army has returned, doesn't mean you are safe. You are not safe until you have an equipped army on defense. You may not even be completely safe then. You may need to train additional army to be safe from the guys underneath. Sometimes you should sacrifice that safety for additional attacks on your target, and that's acceptable. However, once your attacks are complete, waste no time in getting your defense page back to normal and your army numbers up to the level they need to be to keep you safe. Remember that it is clock time that matters, not number of turns. If you only have three turns, then you can safely send an air raid, but not a ground assault. For a ground assault, you should wait until you actually have six turns ready to use. If you send a ground assault with only three turns available, then you could be sitting undefended for 30 minutes, plenty of time for multiple attacks against you.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 12, 2007, 3:09 pm
Lesson 10: Defensive Military
So, you are going to be attacked. You know this. You accept it. What do you do about it? Defenders have an advantage in the battle system, but attackers have advantage in timing. Attackers get to decide when they will attack and under what circumstances. If you are in the top 10, it can even be assumed that your enemy has a spy in your camp and knows how big your army is and what defensive formation you are using. So, prepare for an attacker who knows this information, and you will be more than prepared for an attacker who does not.
If an attacker knows your defensive formation, then he can choose an attack formation that specifically counters it. The only defensive formation that does not have a specific counter is Forward Concentration. Ranged Fire Primary comes closest. If none of your weaponry can reach 400m, then your attacker can stand way back with rail guns, stingers, tanks, and heavy mechs and just pound your defenses until your defenders finally realize they gotta charge in order to deal any damage. By then, the battle is probably over anyway. So, how do you avoid this? Have weapons and vehicles on defense that can fire at 400m, like tanks, stingers, and rail guns.
So, what is the best defensive configuration? Consider what the typical attacking army has. Generally, the most effective attacks occur with armies that have 80% tanks or mechs (or best long range weaponry, if tanks and mechs are not yet available) and 20% support infantry. However, some people really like their infantry and will send 100% infantry, and other people really like their tanks and mechs and will send 100% vehicles. Your defensive configuration should prepare for all three scenarios.
Defensive tanks counter offensive tanks very effectively. Defensive tanks counter light and medium mechs very effectively. Defensive tanks counter infantry reasonably well. Defensive tanks are not an effective counter to offensive heavy mechs, but then again, nothing counters heavy mechs very well. Unless you have heavy mechs, tanks should be the cornerstone of your defensive configuration. Like offensive armies, defensive armies should be 80% tanks.
So, what beats tanks? Recoilless Rifles and heavy mechs. If they send lots and lots of infantry, then they may wear your tanks down quite a bit, but the 25 round limit will usually kick in to stop that kind of grindfest. In that case, defense wins. So in the mid game, the biggest threat to a defensive tank is the recoilless rifle. The best defense against the recoilless rifles is rail snipers. The rail snipers can kill the rifles before they ever get into range of your tanks. If the offense brings 80% tanks and 20% recoilless rifles, then the defensive snipers have no other preferred targets than the rifles. So, in order to protect their recoilless rifles, the offense must bring snipers of their own. However, this forces them to dilute their tank regiments, which makes your tanks more effective. Before heavy mechs, 80% tanks and 20% rail snipers is your best defensive configuration.
Choppers can throw a kink into the above configuration, but few people use choppers extensively. If choppers start showing up on your doorstep, though, then you should consider subbing out up to 20% of your tank force for stingers. Stingers have the additional advantage of firing at 400m.
Heavy mechs throw a serious kink into the 80/20 configuration above. Heavy mechs love tanks; tanks taste like candy to the big lugs. Once a camp has achieved heavy mechs, you can almost guarantee they will be the main force in an attack. They are just too good not to use. So, once heavy mechs hit the scene, you may want to change your configuration to 40% tanks, 40% recoilless rifles, and 20% rail snipers. This configuration should still deal with most tank and medium mech assaults as well as giving you a fighting chance against the heavy mechs. This configuration does weaken you versus a heavy infantry assault, but those become more uncommon as heavy mechs hit the scene since infantry are nice and squishy underneath the feet of the heavies.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 12, 2007, 5:55 pm
Lesson 11: Air Superiority
Air raids are not a replacement for ground assaults. They don't give you victory score, and you probably won't completely eliminate an army via air raids. However, they are a very effective method of both civilian and, more importantly, military disruption. Sending an air raid is a pretty trivial matter. As with ground assaults, remember to check your target, but you won't gain much score from a successful air raid. You could lose the score from your army, if your planes are all shot down. So, do check your rear for potential threats there. Also, the score drop from sending your army out is pretty significant and takes a few turns to trend back to where it was. So, again check your six before sending an air raid. Send a 5:1 ratio of fighters to bombers, if you don't know whether they have fighters. That's pretty much it for execution.
Aside from the fact that they are pretty simple to execute and not terribly risky, unless you commit your entire army, why would you send air raids? The answer is factories, lots, and armories. When armories and lots are blown up in air raids, they take some contents with them, unlike spec ops. They also do a lot more damage than spec ops. This can have dramatic effects on their defensive weapons configuration. Let's say that you want to attack someone who you know has many, many railguns and recoilless rifles, and you are a heavily mechanized army. If the bombing raids take out a number of armories, then you can safely assume that it took some of the rifles and railguns that were supposed to be on defense with them. Most people tend to pack their armories pretty full and tend to only have enough weapons for their defense. They then take those weapons off of defense and assign them for offense when attacking. Imagine taking out 50% of an infantry only army's armories. When you send in your ground forces, half of their army will be unarmed.
The same is true of lots and vehicles. This is even more important for lots because of the way defensive weapons are assigned. When an attacker arrives, defensive weapons are assigned in order from top to bottom as it shows on the defense page. So, if the armories only took a light beating, the lots took a heavy beating, and the barracks only took a light beating, then the defensive army will staff all of the infantry weapons that it has but will have much smaller vehicles to staff. Vehicles are a very important part of defense, and you just eliminated that aspect of their well-planned defense.
This disruption is what is so important about air raids. If they are running without any extra space in their armories and lots and if they don't have a separate set of weapons and vehicles for attacking, then you have likely just completely scrambled their ground defense strategy. However, well thought out it was before, it is more or less randomized now. That gives your ground forces a much greater chance for success, as the defense is likely to be less than optimal on an important part of their defense.
Also, most people do not have enough fighters to staff their entire army. Thus, their defenses are likely to fall to a well prepared, similar sized army's air raid. At the same time, you have just reduced the number of enlisted men that they can use to defend on the ground, too. This is another form of disruption. If you have twice their army in size and they do have enough fighters to put their entire army in the air, then you can actually kill their entire army in the air. This can be an important tactic if you have the numbers, but they have the technological superiority on the ground, like heavy mechs.
The civilian disruption of factories is equally important. Fuel refineries are of lesser importance. Both of these are expensive to build, requiring 16 men each. Also, until an alliance has the Vehicle Transportation mastery, their recruiting and exploring returns are heavily affected by their ability to gas their busses. Finally, Goofballs in particular are sensitive to having their factories bombed. Many of them are using the Cash is King strategy and Factories are their only production facilities. That means they have lots of factories, and that means lots of targets for your bombers. So, once you come in with your invasion force, they will have an even harder time rebuilding.
So, air raids are really, really good against most targets because most targets are underdefended from the air. Most camps need to harden their air defenses. In the mid game, hardening your air defenses means building or buying enough fighters for your entire army. For most camps, building AA Guns and SAM Sites requires too much Ingenuity research. That research is disruptive to other, more important goals. However, in each alliance there is frequently one person who achieves the Ingenuity mastery. Air raids against this person are a bad idea at any stage of the game. SAM sites will destroy your air force quickly. If you are particularly frustrated by air raids, then you should ask to be this person for your alliance.
Late in the game, having all of your army available to go up in fighters can be very bad as it can allow a very large air force to wipe out your ground defenses. In the early and midgame, few things affect the score so much as army. So, it can generally be assumed that anyone in your range has about the same amount of army as you do. Certainly enough that your defensive fighters, which fire first, have a good chance of knocking the attacker's fighters out of the sky before they kill your fighters, leaving their bombers open to demolishing. However, by the second and third week, lots of things can affect score enough such that armies can be very different in size, twice as big or even ten times as big. So, late in the game, 50% is probably a better number. However, that could leave you weak against an air raid. So, you may want to beef your air defenses with Ingenuity to 50 for SAM sites. If this is your path, plan to go all the way to 50. AA Guns are not all that effective. The biggest thing that keeps the size of air raids in check in the late game is gas. It takes so much gas to launch an air raid that sizes in excess of 200k bombers and 1mil fighters is unusual. However, defensive fighters require no gas. So, if you have a 5mil man army, then 1.5mil fighters may keep you safer than any number of SAM sites. In this case, air superiority still wins.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 22, 2007, 7:47 pm
Lesson 12: Planning Groups of Attacks
If you play nice, then you stop after sacking someone's camp, but people who play nice, usually don't win. Even if your only goal is to eliminate a camp's army and thus the threat it represents, it may require more than one attack to do so. So, usually any individual attack is just one of many tactical assaults on a camp leading to some strategic goal, like a smoking ruin. Each attack can take one of three forms: ground assault, air raid, or spec ops. When planning your attack, keep the following things in mind. First, your goal needs to play the biggest role in the planning. Second, cooldown needs to be considered. Third, attack limiters need to be considered. Finally, any accomplices should be considered.
Any set of attacks against a camp should have a goal. While emotional aspects like revenge certainly give motivation, there still needs to be a strategic goal to be achieved. Goals can be as simple as more score or as complex as eliminating the population of a population farm to prevent them from shipping population to a military camp who is approaching the range of an allied camp. Usually most goals fall into one of a small set of categories: threat elimination, population control, and score gain.
Threat elimination is the most simple goal. Usually, this can be accomplished with a simple combination of attacks. If you know that the opponent is light on aerial defenses, then send in a few bombing raids to tenderize and scramble defenses. Then send in a ground assault. There are some ops missions you could run, but ops against a heavily defended camp rarely succeed without a high Ingenuity level.
Population control starts with eliminating the army. Once their defenses are down, commence with three bombing raids. Follow up with three crop or water poisoning. Finally send in two more ground assaults with the entire army armed with short range weapons, preferably shock pistols. The bombing raids and poisoning ops don't do nearly as much population damage as ground assaults. However, they do damage infrastructure that will probably need to be rebuilt as the camp grows its population back. So, even as the player regrows the camp's population, more of the population will need to be directed towards repairing the camp instead of of building nukes or smelting gold. So, the raids reduce the effective population of the camp. The final ground assaults will likely put the camp into cooldown.
Score gain is usually an important secondary goal. However, sometimes, especially to bridge a large score gulf, score gain is particularly important. The more you lose during battle, the higher your victory score for that battle. Also, the more you kill during battle, the higher your victory score. There's not much you can really do to change how many people you kill in a battle. The opposing camp has the army they have and the population they have. The only way to you manipulate that is to send it down by bombing or using poisoning ops before your main assault. Population lost to ops and bombing raids do not give victory score or any kind of score. So,if your main purpose is score gain, then prepare to lose more people, and hit them while they are at their strongest.
You can affect how many people you lose in battle by altering your weapons configurations. Send in some portion of your army armed only with swords, for example. However, this is something that you should attempt only if you are certain of victory. Attempting to gain score should not come at the cost of the victory itself. Otherwise, you will lose a bunch of score instead of gaining it.
Cooldown and, to a lesser degree, attack limiters can stop your strategic goals in their tracks. If your goal is population control, then cooldown is the desired outcome. However, in every other case, cooldown immediately brings your plan to conclusion. So, if you've already damaged their population heavily in your first attack and you need to get in two more assaults, then your second assault should be light, maybe just 50 men. Then, the final assault can put the camp into cooldown, if desired.
Attack limiters can come into play more when there are accomplices involved. When two camps work together as a team, they can take down a foe too large for either one of them to handle alone. This generally means that one of the two is going to lose a battle of some kind. Preferably, that should be an air battle. If the opponent has an air force whose size is known to be large but not larger than the air force that one of the accomplices can send, then that accomplice should send an attack and attempt to wipe out as much army as possible by air. If air attacks are not feasible, then a ground assault can perform the same function. A ground assault will cause the accomplice to lose victory score from defeat in addition to losing score from the lost army. It will also bump up the target camp. So, in general, the camp lowest in score should take the initial hit. If possible, it is best for the lower camp to send only enough army to reduce the target's forces sufficiently that the other accomplice(s) can successfully take down the target. That minimizes the score jump and the damage done to the losing accomplice's army. Also, if the smaller accomplice has some army remaining after the larger accomplice takes out the target's army, then the smaller accomplice can gain some score back by sacking the now defenseless target.
Accomplices attacking in this way will more than likely lose more total army than the target. However with multiple camps being able to follow up on the initial sack, the damage to the target can be much greater in terms of total population. Because there are multiple camps at work in this scenario, attack limiters are more likely to come into play. Make sure that the accomplices who can deal the most damage gets in their hits first. Also, be careful of the 15 attack limit. The attack limiters are 24 hour limiters, not 18 like cooldown. They also only prevent the camp from being attacked, not from attacking. So, if you don't deal sufficient damage to prevent the target's recovery within 24 hours, then the target will have that remaining time to attack you without you having the ability to retaliate.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 22, 2007, 8:04 pm
Lesson 13: Asynchronous Cooperative Battle, AKA Escort Army
By the second week of play, battle will begin over alliance aid. Any alliance that contains specialized camps will need to move resources around. In the case of population, the only way to move that resource is via alliance aid. Without an escort army, population aid is not feasible. If two alliances are in close competition, one alliance can disrupt the other's growth by building up an escort army and selecting the other alliance as a foe. Once any one alliance considers another alliance a foe, one alliance's escort army will come out on top. At that time, only that alliance will be able to send population aid.
So, for an initial, sometimes costly investment, an alliance can shutdown population aid to a minimum of three other alliances. This gives that alliance a huge advantage over the other alliances. Population aid greatly increases the speed at which a sacked camp can recover. It can also greatly increase the amount of population that a Nerd who is building nukes can put into his nuke factory. These advantages are structural and tend to feed back into the alliance. The stronger the alliance is, the less likely its camps are to be sacked. Therefore, the more of that aid can actually go to building defensive weapons to further prevent the camps of that alliance from being sacked. It is an unbalancing, runaway, feedback condition, and there is only one way to stop it.
In order to keep one alliance from dominating in the end, there must be a continual battle for escort army dominance. Members of an alliance will have to pool their resources and slow their own growth temporarily to field an escort army large enough to eliminate the standing dominant escort army. At the very least, it will force the alliance with the dominant escort army to devote more of its resources to the escort army instead of fielding those same men and armaments against your camps on the battlefield.
Disrupting alliance aid is one of the most important strategic goals of any alliance. Don't make your enemy's job easier by letting him ship population to where it can hurt you. Make the sacrifice or lose to those who will.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 22, 2007, 8:58 pm
Lesson 14: Offensive Weapons Configurations
By week two, you have an abundance of weapons options. Level one and two weaponry are basically dead technologies, and the world belongs to tanks, rail guns, and recoilless rifles and to a lesser degree choppers and stingers. Soon, mechs start to dominate the battle landscape, too.
So, when you go to launch an attack against an opponent, what do you send? It all depends on what you know about your opponent. Usually, stick with the obvious. Is your opponent Army Focus? Then, he probably has mechs, and you should attempt to determine his mech configuration from his mech score. Did your opponent attack one of your alliance members with tanks? Then he probably has tanks on defense. Is your opponent a weapons seller who doesn't have vehicles on the market, yet? Then he's probably infantry heavy. Direct and derived intel on your target is the key. Once you can guess to a reasonable degree the defensive weapons configuration of your opponent, build a weapons configuration that will take it down. Use the information provided on the garage and barracks pages to help you.
However, there are plenty of times when you just don't know. So, what do you send as a default? That depends solely upon you as a player. The most common option is 80% mechanized forces and 20% infantry support. Mechanized forces means mechs, tanks, and choppers, usually in that order. Infantry support means rail guns, recoilless rifles, and stinger rockets, usually in that order. That configuration is popular because it works the most often. However, that also means that people build defenses assuming that is what they are most likely to get hit with.
So, other more uncommon offenses can be attempted to try to break the standard defense. The most common of these is the 100% infantry solution. Another one that used to be more common and is now less is the 100% chopper solution. Once heavy mechs hit the scene in full force, 33% heavy and 67% medium mech configurations become more common.
There are limits to the configurations of what you can take, but there is essentially no limit on the proportions. Learn the weapons attributes, pay attention to the current state of weaponry around you, and come up with something different. If nothing else, you'll learn something about the weapons.
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Experientia Docet
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Posted
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March 23, 2007, 6:48 pm
Lesson 15: Defensive Structures
Trenches, hairpins, pillboxes, and anti-tank guns affect ground assaults only. Anti-aircraft guns and SAM sites affect air raids only. Light posts and guard posts affect spec ops only. Walls affect both ground assaults and spec ops. Militia affect all three, if you have AA guns or SAM sites. So, militia are your most important defensive structure.
At 25mil land, you only need 4,000 guard posts, and having more than you need doesn't really help all that much, if at all. Each guard post needs two militia to keep watch at night. 5,000 guard posts and 10,0000 militia will keep you saturated with militia for the entire game in most cases. The only reason to ever keep more than 10,000 militia hanging around for an extended period of time is to man anti-tank guns, AA guns, and SAM sites.
There have been cases where people have used very large militias to wipe out sacking armies, but those are not very effective in the long run. Those should only be used in the case where you have the population and the short range weapons for an army, but you haven't aquired the long range weapons or vehicles yet to field your army. The problem with excessively large militias is that they are 100% susceptible to battle, whereas general population is only 85% targetable. In the first week, having 500k to 1mil man militia can bump a camp's score up high enough to avoid getting hit for a short time while the camp's leader is away. The problem is that it doesn't take too long for someone to field an army that consists of 50% of the size of the militia, and that's all it takes to wipe out a militia. 2:1 kills are about the worst an army will do versus a militia. 3:1 is the most common, and 4:1 is possible.
Having 10,000 militia is also sufficient to build trenches, hairpins, and pillboxes in a reasonable amount of turns. These structures are unlikely to change the outcome of a ground assault. However, they can affect how many men you lose when you successfully repel an attacker. While their benefit is not huge, their cost is also not very high.
Anti-tank guns are limited by camp size, which significantly limits their effectiveness. By the time most camps can reach 30 Ingenuity after taking care of other priorities, the number of tanks likely to attack is far higher than the number of anti-tank guns that a camp can build. However, if you have unlocked anti-tank guns on your way to the anti-aircraft defenses, then you might as well go ahead and build them. They will have some impact on battle. However, you must have officers in the field who can tell the militia in the anti-tank guns where to fire. No officers means no covering fire from the anti-tank guns. If you build anti-tank guns, add enough militia to man them. There's no point in building them, if they are just going to stand empty during battle.
AA guns and SAM sites are not limited by the camp's circumference, and once these are unlocked, then you have to make a decision as to how many of each you want and therefore how many militia you need. In the mid game, 20k of each is sufficient to repel any reasonably sized air force. In the end game 100k SAM sites will put enough metal and explosives into the sky to down almost any attacking air force in a single round.
Light posts can be expensive to power until you get the Power Generation mastery. Also, the level 1 spec ops are more annoying than dangerous. So, I generally wait to build light posts until the alliance has the mastery. I usually queue 27mil light posts and just keep them on the bottom of my queue until they are all built. Everything else gets queued ahead of them. However, since they only cost one man to build, any extra workers left over from your other construction can build a few light posts here and there. If your light coverage ever drop to less than 100%, just throw it up to the top of the queue and build them for a few turns and them push them back to the bottom.
Walls and barbed wire do nothing versus an air raid and very little versus a ground assault, but do noticeably reduce the effectiveness of special ops. In general, spec ops is annoying, but the level 2 poisoning and the level 3 anti-focus ops can do significant damage. Also, the level 2 reconnaisance ops can reveal information not just about you but also on your entire alliance. Keep the walls up topped with barbed wire, guard posts in place, and minimum militia trained any time you are not in cooldown, even if you are not ready to rebuild your army, yet. Don't give away your teammates' defensive weapons configurations, if you don't have to.
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Experientia Docet
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