Thoughts on strategy

[ProPain]

The whole stout sabbing affair changed my perspective on the game a bit. Would be very curious to hear all your thoughts about my analysis.

key resoucres
The game revolves around 1 key resource: gold. Gold will buy you anything your heart desires and making more gold than you neighbour essentially enables you to defend yourself against his spy/sabbing/normal attacks and to attack him instead.

Basically there are 2 ways of getting gold:
1) per turn income
2) attacking

Attacking works great as long as your small and starting out, once you grow in size it becomes less effective and you tend to become a target yourself

Per turn income becomes substantial very quickly. Every soldier earns you 25 gold, every spy/sentry earns you 15 gold. The bigger you are the more gold you're gonna get.

break even point
So what's smarter? Attacking or gettinh high gpt? Let's do some math:
you generate income and get an attack turn every half hour, so

24 hours * 2 attack per hour = 48 attacks per day
Suppose you probe attack followd by 15 attacks = 16 attacks per hit. You get 48/16= 3 hits per day. On average I guess you'll hit around 600k.: Attacking 600*3=1.8M gold

So how much men do we need to achieve the same amount per day:

1,8M/(24 hours * 2 turns/hour * 25 gpt)= 1500 soldiers.

So once you reach 1500 men your gpt will overtake your attacking income. This will have on impact on our choice to go:

attacking or defending?
Initially Meli's all out attacking strategy worked like a charm for me, however after dr.A. started his spamming account (Hail to Dr.Ali, my loayal officer :)) some other effect kicked in:
1) my increased army size made my spoils decrease
2) my increased army size turned me into a target

I;m thinking all out attack is great to start, after you hit the 1500 mark defense becomes an issue to protect your gpt.

Weapons
I started out using the most expensive weapons available for the simple reason the dmg/gold ratio is better for more expensive weapons, with the exception of the stick which has about he same ratio as the warblade.

Then we discover sabbing which makes the picture a bit more complex. Expensive weapons are more effective but also much more prone to sabbing, making them much less cost effective as they seem.

I now use the following strategy:
My income is around 70k a turn, about 4,5 warblades/plate mails. That means someone has to have a 40% succesrate to sab all of them when you count 11 sab chances per 30 mins and that not even taking my attack income into account. If the sab rate drops I'll grow stronger no matter the sabbing. Off course this isnt gonna work when you get mass sabbed but then nothing is gonna work.

spies and sentries

how to save up

effects of city improvements
gtg, to be done later :)

overview
* growing is important. I'm prioritising investments in more recruits per day and maybe even join a bit of the click fest sites
* Once you hit 1500 men -> start thinking defense as well
* Invest in weapons that fit in with your gpt and attack income. It will make you an much less interesting target for the sabbing crowd


--- more later ---

[DrAlimentado]

The more expensive weapons are harder to sab though - there is a rough formula for working out what weapon you can sab with what spy rating which uses accumalated weapon strength rather than no of weapons, so I'm not sure buying warblades makes you safer overall [ponder] - but the precise formulas are not known so its trial and error really.

general observations:

You can stay an attacker or slayer (slayer = high SA, low army size, high spy for recon) but you have to keep your army size small, usually by training down (and never being too huge) a bit and concentrate on getting a really high SA so you can steal millions not thousands.

If you want to make real money from turn based gold then you need a large enough DA/small enough army (there is an inverse relationship here) to protect your TBG while you are away. To save up to buy stuff that is more expensive than the amount you can hold you need to either bank weapons or turns (so you can go on a pillage spree).
Quantity has a quality all of its own, I see 40k+ size armies around me - they are earning 500k every 1/2 hour!! Their DA's (when I am able to recon) are commonly 8mil+. I also see slayer accounts (<500 men, orc, high-spy, no DA - no sentry) with an SA of >8mil.

There are plenty of Banks too (boring to play....), accounts with lots of men and high DA with high sentry or SA (depending on whether they bank money in BPM's or not) and 1000's of turns saved. No doubt they plan to make good use of their turns in the last week - get some insane steals and shoot up the ranks.

It's easy enough to convert your army from SA to DA etc. by selling weapons/training men etc. you just need enough gold to do it. weapon reselling makes 75% return (not tools) - the only thing that wouldnt be instant would be growing an army, which is all about clicking of course.
And going from all spy to SA or DA is bad because tools are only 45% return sale, in that instance youd be better off keeping the tools/spies and just clicking up a few hundred/thousand men and buying weapons new imo.

[DrAlimentado]

Here's the upgrade chart for siege and fortifications (http://www.freewebs.com/lorclick/upgrades3.htm)

The chart shows at what level you get the best value for money. It does not take into account the psychological level of a high fort level on people who cannot recon your DA (but above a certain level assume you are being spied on imo) or the unsabbability of upgrades. Still, little point saving for a 2mil upgrade unless you have the SA/DA to warrant it really.

where it says 'No of weapons' it means strictly the no of BPM's or IM's (it assumes you are only using the highest weapons!) it is worth selling to buy the upgrade(!). The math is good in terms of the gain the next time you use it, but I am not sure there is any economy in selling something for 75% that you will buy back the next day at 100% [scratch]

[ProPain]

Is it known when this age is gonna end?

[DrAlimentado]

not precisely, but approximately 6 months from the start - which was in febuary sometime I think.

So sometime in July probably.

[Whomp]

On attackers, defenders, sentries, spies etc.
If we were to break this down into percentages.
What would they be?
What tools they should have?

[DrAlimentado]

How many men you have trained in each is a matter of style really.
Here are a few principles;

You need at least one trained soldier to hold each weapon you want used in battle.
Eg. If you have 10 dragonskins, 40 wargs and 15 dragons you want a minimum of 10 defence specialists and 55 attack specialists to use these weapons. If you are banking weapons then you might not want all your weapons used (as they get damaged) so you would have 'working weapons' for each trained man and then a surplus that wouldnt be used.

Unarmed men dont contribute too much to your SA/DA compared to guys with weapons even if they are trained, the values are 5 instead of 4 - rather than (5 or 4) * weapon strength.

However trained men have another purpose - if all your men are trained as attack specialists then they cannot die when you are attacked, and unarmed untrained men die quick, so you can train men to attack to avoid casaulties when defending (but imo untrained men are cheap...)


When it comes to spies/sentries it is a little different. You get less gpt from them (18 instead of 25) but they do not count as TFF - good for pillage and not-being-a-target reasons.

Also an untooled operative has more effect on your spy/sentry rating than an unarmed soldier on SA/DA. You still need tools to make them effective at missions but bulk-training spies/sentries (after upgrading covert level as much as possible) is an effective way to boost spy/sentry ratings.

[DrAlimentado]

What Tools?

The most expensive you can afford. IMO I would only buy Hooks (for spies) and Guard Dogs (for sentries), because tools are expensive already and they are better value.
The cheapest tools are certainly very bad value:

Rope/Candle = 2 strength for 20,000 gold == 10,000 per point.
Hooks/Dogs = 15 strength for 100,000 gold == 6,666 per point.

each spy or sentry trained = 1 strength point for 3500 gold and a man.

you also need enough spies/sentries to use all the tools or they have no effect (untrained men cannot use tools ever).

and spend money on covert upgrades first, each level doubles your spy/sentry rating.

[Shabbaman]

Basically gpt income should be higher than pillage income. To get the highest pillage income, you need a small army (or TFF, attackers+defenders+untrained, right?). But since gpt income would be higher anyway, why not train soldiers as attackers to make sure you do maximum damage? Just kill his men (and thus his gpt income).