Someone from AMA had asked me to help him pull together a guide that includes province/kd elements and so forth near the end of last age and so I started pulling together some of my stuff, but he has disappeared. As a result, here we are. I'll answer questions in the thread as I have time, and add to it.(there were screenshots of some of the tools, but obviously they don't paste and I'm not feeling up to uploading them atm. If someone wants to upload some screenshots, I'll link them).
It looks like it doesn't paste super well; I'll work some on the formatting later. It's a work in progress; if you want to contribute (especially around some of the tools I don't know well), poke me with something sharp.
Growth
If a kingdom is optimizing for growth, always ask your monarch before you take acres from the explore pool or cast paradice.If you are dicing for growth, you want about 20-25% guilds and as many towers as necessary to cast the spell every tick. If you are exploring for growth, it depends on how you?re doing it, but you?ll want mills and banks and potentially armories to bring down the draft cost. However, for most provinces that you would want to explore, peasants generate more gc than the tb hit from getting aided soldiers so trading is more optimal where you can afford to buy soldiers for TB and get them aided instead of drafting..
Most provinces will grow largely from attacking. Which leads us to -- how do you grow from attacking?
The answer is partly that it depends. There is one central rule, however:
THE BEST WAY TO GROW IS TO NOT GET RETALLED.
Your province will be in the best possible shape if you acquire safe acres and don?t get retalled. Even if you only get 50 acres per hit when you could get 150 elsewhere, this is the best way of growing. Why? Because every so often the hit for 150 might get you hit back for 250, then you?re trading hits and dealing with military/peasant loss that is bad for your province.Generally speaking, when you?re whoring, you want to be focused on offense to the exclusion of defense to bring down your nw relative to your targets and let you hit safely. This is part of why you need to be disciplined when whoring -- two ages ago, I whor*d up to 6k acres with under 6k defspecs and pure offense elites. Growing this way is more art than science; unfortunately you need to have an understanding of whether you?re likely to get waved and if you are, you need more defense. So it?s not something you can do without some kind of deals.
So how do you identify safe hits? First, you look at the province you?re hitting - what?s their OME? If it?s higher than honor + payrate, they have TGs and are an attacker. This means be careful. Do they have horses? Another sign of an attacker. Generally speaking, attackers can hit you back which is what makes them bad hits -- it costs you or your kingdom acres when they hit you back. You want to hit t/ms that are the biggest province in their kingdom in kingdoms with no attackers the same size as you / in range to retal your kd.
Now, obviously this is more of a general rule than hard and fast; it?s impossible to always hit safe provinces, but always hit the safest in a kingdom if you?re randoming a kingdom, and always hit the safest available to you.
When growing, a sample build might be something like:
8% farms
16% TGs
25% guilds
5% towers
10% stables
20% banks
15% hospitals
1% dungeonsThe goal here is to have decent econ (banks/hosps), offense (TGs/stables), and still gain WPA.
I got hit, what do I do?
Generally speaking, if you got hit you can't hit back. If you can, you should. Retalling slows growth at the top and generally discourages more hits into your kingdom. There are some issues here though -- eventually, target selection reaches a point where you're the most attractive target even if you do retal. And sending out can get you hit more. So you need to have a sense of what else is out there that can be hit.In ~95% of situations, retalling is the right move for you to make.
If you can't retal, there are some ops you can do, but generally the best move is to rob resources from the kingdom that hit you.
Generally speaking, training offense will make you less likely to be hit (by bottomfeeding SKs) than training defense. It's more NW efficient and makes hitting you risky.
Waving for Acres
There will be times when due to setup, global growth mechanics, or cf?s purely safe whoring is not viable. At times like this it is possible to hide your weak whoring ability by running a more war-growth hybrid build and wave kd?s that you believe are unlikely retal. If you random out on a bad hit, then you are much more likely to be retalled than if you wave a kd. However, this is still a far more risky option than safe whoring. This can be a good strategy for when you have a combination of turtle core and suicide core. Knowing when you can get a war from waving, when you will get a cf and acres from waving, and when you will be trapped getting fb?d for weeks is critical to this more risky strategy.Pumping
When pumping, again, you need to have an understanding of the climate. If you?re not likely to get waved, you can pump more aggressively than if you are likely to get waved. When pumping, you generally want to get to whatever the set ?target? defense is, and then have as many peasants as possible. You will need thieves and/or WTs to protect from being robbed.Scipump
When pumping science as a TOG race, a sample build would look something like:
8% farms
22% guilds
35% banks
30% schools
5% towersNote -- you only want as many towers as it takes to TOG. You want ~15% guilds minimum; we generally prefer to run more (even more than the 22% here) to pump WPA at the same time. The schools/banks distribution is something that will vary as you gain more alc sci and BE sci, but this is a decent starting point.
See AlsoHow much do you spend on the hobby in a yearMonger Regrets- ( I've had a few)Utopiaguide | Navigating a Digital Utopia - AvreviewchatA Players Guide to UtopiaYou?d generally be hoping to achieve about 8 military units/acre, 2 TPA, 2 WPA, and 15 peasants/acre, give or take.
Elitepump
An elitepump would look similar to a scipump, except you wouldn?t have schools and would probably have all banks until you want to start drafting. Then you would rebuild to have 25-30% arms, (more/less depending on cost) and train them all in one go.Homespump
A homespump operates similar to an elitepump. The main difference is that ~48h before you begin drafting, you rebuild to add homes to your build -- the number of homes depends on how much gold you have available. This lets you draft from a higher population number, meaning that when you raze the homes, a higher % of your total population will be in military compared to not using homes. Using homes can be a very effective way of getting drafted quickly or getting more drafted than you could have without homes.WPApump
This is pretty basic -- run as many guilds as you can. At least 50%, preferably more.Kingdom Tools
If you use any of these, design any of these, and want to add a little, please let me know.There are some general tools available for use. There is utopiapimp,and upoopu that are publicly available, and then stinger makes stingernet available and munk makes munkbot available. Lucidbot is an IRCbot that is also publicly available.
Utopiapimp
This is the most basic of the sites. It does not link with an IRCbot, or as far as I know, have a browser extension. Forum agents(such as the one included in Angel) can send directly to it. You can then view data on your kingdom or opposing kingdoms along a number of different metrics. The way intel can be viewed is highly customizable on utopiapimp. It can also track ops, which have to be inserted manually into it. Utopiapimp sometimes suffers from display bugs.upoopu
A more optimized webtool that has similar data to utopiapimp. It has a browser extension which makes it easier to get data into the system. It is supposed to be easier to manipulate data once it is in the system as well.Stingernet
Stinger makes stingernet available. It is an ircbot that is linked to a website. It has similar data available in its website. It also has a custom targetfinder that is linked to a NAP system to prevent anyone you have a CF with from showing up in the targetfinder. In order to have access to stingerbot/stingersite you must obtain permission from Stinger. There are limited spots for his service. Stingernet is largely available on the absnet server, although it has migrated to utonet on some kd?s. Having an ircbot means that you can enter a command string, such as !cb zauper and get back my CB, rather than having to go to the website to view it. It?s partly a matter of convienence, and partly very helpful because there are custom views that are easier to get on IRC than through the website -- a sci calc, for example.Stingernet also includes an automated WPA calculator.
**I?m told that Stinger currently has it available now.Munkbot
This is what CR uses. It has similar features to stingernet, listed above, plus a number of other ones. It includes an activity tracker (internal and external), links to prep and province simulators to help you prepare for conflicts or think through strategy, and has fully customizable views that are designed to be exported into other tools for setting up waves. It is both a website and a bot.It also tracks op success rates over time and will automatically calculate WPA for provinces you collect all intel on. (You can force it with !wpacalc on IRC).
It also has incorporated tools similar to utools below.
You can also generally request a feature from Munk and he will code it after spamming !donate at you for a few minutes. He?s fussy but if you ask nicely he?ll probably set up a bot/site for you.
IRC Bot:
orders
aid
tracks ops
tracks attacks
show intel
integrated with whatsapp and can call/sms.
perform calcs (soldswap / wpacalc / defence home / practical offence / offense keeping set defense and much more)Lucidbot
Lucidbot is only a bot. It collects intel from whatever repository you use and is fully customizable for reporting. It comes with many of the same bot features as stinger/munkbot. Lucidbot must be hosted by someone in private channel. Lucid is very easy to obtain and can be used in conjunction with any of the other public intel sites such as pimp or upoopoo. An intel depository site and intel pull script has been in the works.Other Tools
Angel
Angel is the classic tool for intel. You take a CB, copy the intel, there?s an export line so anyone else with angel can read it in. Angel forum agent can be used in conjunction with all bots and intel repositories that lack intel-pulling scripts.utools
A browser extension that duplicates much of angel?s functionality. Alters UI in-game, adding features such as expected gains and beheading advisors.Targetfinder
Munk?s targetfinder (tf.umunk.net) is probably the best publicly available targetfinder. To use it, search for provinces within your nw range (+/- 30% nw), you can set kingdom size restrictions as well, and sort/limit by race. The TF also possess war trackers. Site is sometimes private at start of age.Overpop
Note: preventing overpop is a mechanic that really privileges activity and it is not expected in most kd?s that you do these things when being chained. If you do nothing else but mass LL before troops get home so as to be able to send out easily this is still better than nothing. However, lots of wars are won or lost by how successful chains are, and these things make chains fail. One of the most significant differences between top-tier kd?s and standard war kd?s is their commitment to overpop control and maintaining a strong ?small? group of provs.See AlsoReal Estate Discussion ForumSo, a few new things to work on for preventing overpop. Preventing overpop as you go down in a chain is good for lots of reasons: 1) if you have enough land coming in with armies you end up losing nothing and the chain is completely useless, 2) without losing defense you are able to maintain higher def, often preventing multi-taps which can also decrease chain success. 3) At the bottom of a chain defense is, perhaps counterintuitively, often more valuable than offense.
So the basics are still the same: have lots of acres incoming, army-in army-out, release to dragon if you have to before sending out. Here are a few formulas and tricks though:
Military desertion formula: ((((total pop-(peasants*.07))/maxpop)-1)/5) * (thieves + eliteshome + soldiershome + specshome)
Note: You only desert if maxpop*1.15 is less than totalpop-(peasants*.07). So if you have 10k total pop and 9k maxpop, you?re not deserting.
You lose up to 7% of your peasants/tick when you?re overpop, and they leave prior to desertions which is why the formula includes that.
If this number is equal to the amount of soldiers you have, you only lose soldiers for the tick. This is why pers/race bonuses that return dead troops as soldiers are are so valuable when lots of people use IRC, because you use the soldier pool to prevent casualty losses. A good kd will use the soldiers generated to try to bounce provs and feed others. A great kd will use the soldiers to make it as if the prov was never chained in the first place.
Trick #2: besides microing tickly loss this way(either by releasing thieves into soldiers to leave, being aided, ect) another strategy to alievate the destruction of chains is to setup LL targets, either via AW or out of control growth. These target should not be targeted by attacks and will serve exclusively as LL farms for chained provs. The only spell not affected by -damage mods in race is LL damage, so regardless of what kind of attacker you are, if you are likely to be chained you should try to maintain 60 mana at all times. That's a lot of LL, and the target will always be very large, and have no wpa. When your land is about to come in, LL to where you would need to be once acres come in + are built and then go use your great new mwpa for fb.
People argue over the value of releasing WPA on chained provs.
1) If you keep the WPA, you wind up with high WPA provs capable of FBing potentially otherwise unoppable provs in the other kingdom
2) If you keep the WPA, you wind up with a lot of lost potential military and your chained provs potentially fall behind
3) If you release the WPA, you can LL less (but you would run out your mana on LL before releasing
4) If you release the WPA, you can be intra-kd fireballed to release peasants, but it usually is better to release the WPA (several ticks) prior to army coming home, as you release WPA into peasants that you then need to lose to solve overpop.Here's what Crazy_Pete, one of the players in AMA, does to handle overpop. There are some good tips in here that haven't been fully incorporated yet:
Here is what I do when chained:
I try to run as many barracks as I can and guard stations as a secondary building speed build the first few sets of incoming land if possible (ask for aid if needed). The faster you can get that army in/out the harder it will be to finish you off if your active and make the enemy gain as few acres per hit on you as possible also. Depending on the situation I will run between 30-40% military barracks and 30-40% guard stations on average when chained. You will always have incoming land that is un-built so over build these 2 buildings in particular because the actual built land is lower. In extreme cases I have had 50% barracks and 50% guard stations to try to make it difficult to be chained out of the war but at that point I'm quad tapping enemy chained provinces hard. I only recommend this to hyper active players that are willing to get up every few hrs throughout the night. If your not active you will be starved, people could steal food to try and starve inactive chained provinces.
Use gang bang protection to your advantage you will be maxed out at 15% tax with heavy gbp so don't bother with building farms(if active enough)/towers/guilds/or stables and don't be afraid to ask for aid. Keep hitting, the minute you aren't able to hit out your horses start to leave, just keep sending that army out and don't let a tick pass army home. Guilds are useless in this situation and you require 0 guilds for offensive spells, don't bother with any self spells. If you have a poor kingdom, don't pay for wages until the hr before you need to attack and beg for money before hand so your army doesn't go unpaid making you unable to attack.
When you have chained provinces you need your kingdom to "feed" you. Your kingdom needs to drop provinces for you to attack to at least 150% your net worth preferably lower to 125-130%. It doesn't matter if you can double,triple,or even quad tap a province well above your net worth the gains will be minimal and you will be finished off very fast.
Use your wpa wisely, for me wpa is important to keep if at all possible. I personally would never release below 5 wpa raw especially since after war you will quickly whor* your lost acres back. The biggest weapon you have is your wpa. Some kingdoms will use them for fire balling high wpa unbreakables, or like Zauper mentioned land lust for self preservation. The kingdom should be supplying runes to chained provinces, the lower rune cost and high wpa can make a chained province a deadly weapon. Eventually big provinces will start to waste hits on massacring the chained provinces, so plan it properly and don't expect to be able to get away with it the whole war. Make every opp count.
That being said TPA is lowest on the list if you are pure attacker. I will release thiefs first when I'm over popped to usually at least 1 raw or even lower if needed. Try at all costs to keep reasonable defense, release offense and train defensive spec's as needed in order to survive. You will not require a high offense to multy tap enemy chained provinces.
Control the bottom, use your chained provinces to obliterate the enemy chained provinces. Take advantage of chained provinces who have kept high offense and not kept any defense, multy tap them 2-3 times, make 1-2 "big" hit(s) on the chained provinces that have good defense.
Races/Personalities -- for update after changesWar Strategies
Setups
There are a number of different kinds of setups that are viable for warring (and almost all of them also work for growth). The most popular 'war' setups these days tend to work around having three classes of provinces:
High offense attackers -- these generally consist of undead or orc, potentially dwarf or avian could work here. These are usually tacticians (space efficiency, resistance vs ops) or warriors (offense boost, 5th general for hits at the bottom of chains). Most of the 'war kds' we see run between 8 and 12 of these.Threads like this: http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...uicidal-undead depict the difficulty in keeping down provinces that are playing this role effectively. Make sure you look at the sections of the guide relating to overpop for how to keep them alive as they get chained.
Turtle attackers -- these generally consist of some combination of human, dwarf, elf, faery, halfling. Generally what you're looking for in this role is generally being fairly resilient (difficult to op down, potential for high def) and some offense op power. Most of the 'war kds' we see run between 6 and 8 of these. Their role is to be a place where you can safely stack acres.
T/Ms -- these generally consist of some combination of elf, faery, and halfling. They are generally either mystic or rogue. They run higher twpa and will attack if they can safely. Their goal is to take down the other kingdom's high def provs wihile staying safe and preventing any prov in the other kd from running away.One important thing to note is that you want to make sure your relative offense/defense makes sense vs the kingdom you're fighting. If you're leaving 30 DPA and have 100 OPA, while they have 115 OPA and 20 DPA, you have an advantage because you can 4x (actually 5x) them and they can't quite 4x you. It's especially important to note that you either want your turtle attackers safe or only 1xable, while your high offense provs run much lower def and are 2-4xable.
As your kingdom gets larger (more competitive for land), it becomes harder to run as many t/ms so you see a shift towards a more heavily hybrid-focused setup. The reason for this is that you have less explore pool you can dedicate to t/ms since you need more explore pool for your cows.
Chaining
Chaining is when you attack a province such that they suffer from massive desertions. For example, if a province is on 1k acres and you were to attack them until they were 200 acres, they would desert a lot of military. There are a few goals with chaining:
1) to remove offense from a high-offense province. This would be chaining the high-offense attackers in the opposing kd. This is usually done to secure your own turtles safety.
2) To remove anyone who has made a mistake (bounced, 0 acres incoming, etc) -- the reason you target these kinds of provinces is because incoming acres make it very difficult to kill offense off of attackers via chaining. The incoming acres provide a safe blanket of popspace to protect the hitter's offense.Unbreakables
Unbreakables are exactly that. There are generally 3 ways to deal with them:
1) fireballs. Put them on no peasants and their effectiveness is substantially reduced. Especially if you add MS, their military will slowly drop over the course of the war.
2) Conquest. You can CQ down a province you can't break until you can break them. This is a little risky, because it limits incoming acres on your own provinces.
3) Nightstrike or other 'direct damage' ops followed by an attack chain.The end result is that if you are looking to secure your own unbreakables, one of the largest things you can do is make sure that you have strong twpa on that province, because if they can continue to train (can't be fireballed), it becomes very hard to take them down. Unbreakables are one of the best ways to win wars -- they can't be taken down, so they can collect acres forever, and turn the tides of a war by massacring the other kingdom's t/ms.
Winning the bottom
Some folks like to win wars by winning the bottom of wars. You can look at the section of the guide on overpopulation to look at how you might focus on keeping your provinces working through chains. There's more to this than just that -- after you've chained provs down, this is about keeping them down and making it worse by throwing a lot of spare hits on them to force desertions and pushing them under NW range of your small provs. If the other kingdom has a prov on 100k nw and your smallest is on 300k nw, the gains hitting your prov will be minimal, preventing them from really participating in the war if they even have the military to.NW gaps
Another tactic that can win wars is forcing NW gaps. This is a similar concept to the above -- if you are in a position your provs NW is such that you can topfeed and chain down their bigs, but they don't have the NW spread to chain your provs (because of NW difference, with some provs being too big, and most being too small to get gains), you can be well situated to control the war and gains in the war.That said, you still need to be careful about controlling the provinces bigger than yours of course, because if you don't they can run away (get UB and unoppable) and win the war by massacring your t/ms and feeding their other provs defense to get out of range of your attackers.
Here's a chaining tactic from crazy pete:
We generally use something similar; we aim to quadtap our targets and have the first 1-2 hitters singletap, next sets fo doubles/triples, and thne have the first hitters make the rest of their hits. It winds up in a similar situation, where it's harder to ambush any of the big hits because you have to spend all generals to ambush any of the big hits and total gains are similar regardless of which set of hits you ambush.Cross chaining:
The concept is to avoid using anon or war spoils (never WS in war unless your a bank hitting). The first 2-3 of the largest initial hits only use anon. After you will hit in a specific order based on net worth, the highest net worth province attacking hits first, lowest net hits last. Every province joining the chain will single tap only to start. The province who hits first on the first attacks hits last on the second set of attacks and vice versa the last to hit on the first set of attacks hits first on the second.
Example: the letter represents the attacker, the number is the hit he makes on the hit list.
You have 8 attackers joining this chain. A=1,B=2,C=3,D=4,E=5,F=6,G=7,H=8 (first set of singles)
(second set of hits) H=9,G=10,F=11,E=12,D=13,C=14,B=15 ,A=16.
If the chained target goes to ambush hits the person he decides to ambush will not matter because you will all have taken a similar amount of acres after you have chained him. He will have to ambush at least one low acre hit before he can get to a larger hit on him. There will be no easy way for him to recover a lot of acres through ambushing.
Great tactic for honor based kingdoms, or any kingdom that is organized enough to try it.
Dragons
gold
I think there's a consensus among top kds that gold dragons are pretty useless. The -BE just doesn't compare to the impact of the other bonuses. The only place I would consider a gold is a vs a kingdom that is running almost all rogues -- the minus BE is a stronger way of stopping thieves and a sapphire.
emerald
Emerald dragons are highly situational. They're best when you're in a situation where the other kingdom is taken by surprise (not in warbuild, so they have limited hospitals and the losses are huge), or in situations where you're using bounces to impact safe provinces in the opposing kingdom. They're probably the 2nd worst.
ruby
Ruby is a strong dragon, but it is also situational. Ruby is very strong against hybrid or turtle provinces, because it forces them to send out, and very strong in a hostile phase of a conflict where you're looking to hit down potentially unbreakable provinces at the top. Ruby tends to not be as strong in war itself, which is why you often see top kingdoms overwrite a ruby they send with a sapphire.
sapphire
In spite of it's recent nerfs, sapphire is still king of the dragons. Sapphire tends to give you a 1-way MS advantage (it is very hard to cast MS on the opposing kingdom when you have a sapphire on you and they do not), and potentially enable landing MS on the opposing t/ms. It also makes it much easier to perform kd-wide fireballs against the other kingdom, giving a peasant advantage. Sapphire is the go-to standard in the top.
