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 ---