How to win at war: war base design and more

By getting more stars than your opponents. Simple, right?

Okay, maybe there’s more to it than that, but at the end of the day, that’s it. Every decision you make in a war should be toward ‘will it get us more stars?’

Now, assuming you’re not facing some hacked out Korean cheaters-alliance, here’s some tips to try and help us win some wars.

War Defense:

• Before the war starts, fill war bases with as high of troop level as possible. Yes, this puts a greater burden on our Industrial and Enlightenment level members, but it makes a difference. Troop types to donate are: Cannons (they can be devastating – in war they have splash damage also), tanks, heavy Gatlings, heavy cavalry (particularly the Greek and French), and riflemen (particularly English, Korean, and Chinese).
• Make sure you pick at least one general and level it up as high as you can. When you go to war, it’ll pick your highest rated general whether he’s available for you to raid with or not and put him on defense.
• This should be obvious, but protect your town center at the center of your defenses. If you can keep them from destroying it, that’s denying them one star. If you can keep them from doing it in the first minute, that’s another.
• Place any non-military building outside your walls. There is no reason to protect your resources in wars – the enemy can’t raid your resources. In fact, your mills and markets have twice the hit points that your wonders do, so they’re great to stick in front of your walls to create extra structures the enemy has to cut through to get to your TC. Your vault also has a lot of hit points, so that’s good to use as a blocking building.
• Put a few buildings in the far corners of your map. This forces the enemy to at least cover a wide area to destroy all the buildings on the map. Who knows – if they end up destroying everything on your map and can’t reach that forge they didn’t see in the far corner by the woods in time, maybe it will save you an extra star.
• Use only war-related Wonders. Remember back when you started and thought Hanging Gardens/Pyramids/Stonehenge would be cool? Yeah – only useful to farmers and farming gets you a fraction of the resources that raiding does and won’t help at all for winning wars. This is one good place to use your hard earned crowns by replacing those wonders with the Acropolis. In the Classical Age, I’d probably say the Colosseum is the best, but Forbidden City is definitely powerful to deny people a star in war if you use it right.
• Good base design. Base design is absolutely critical to withstanding the enemy. If you want to check out some decent examples of some base design, I’ve created a gallery here from medieval to industrial (regular and war bases are mixed together, but you should be able to tell them apart).

In addition, I wrote some suggestions on the other post about protecting your home base that also apply here, so I’ll post those again:

• Overlap your defenses. Set up your defensive structures so that their fields of fire compliment each other. What can kill mortars and redoubts? Cavalry. What kills cavalry? Cannon towers. So, place a cannon tower in proximity to your redoubts and mortars. Preferably with enough space that a single sabotage tactic won’t disable all three.
• Increase the hit points on your town center. How do you do that? By connecting your buildings with a road(s) that connects to your TC. If you do this, you can add at least 25% more hit points to your TC which takes that much longer to destroy in battle. You need a little balance though because roads inside your walls usually space things out too far to protect everything.
• Upgrade your walls. Walls are very expensive and it’s about as much fun as watching paint dry, but they’ve got to be done. Don’t neglect them. Target levels to shoot far are probably level 7 for Gunpowder, 8 for Enlightenment, and 9 for Industrial.

War Offense:

• Disable their Castle first thing in war with a sabotage and then destroy it before it can deploy the generals. If you can destroy it before the generals are released, you won’t have to fight them. 🙂
• When the war starts, COMMUNICATE. Let people know when you’re about to attack and who you’re about to attack. I’ve seen the same folks go after the same target without knowing they were duplicating their efforts. Ask for specific troops you think will help you out.
• It works best if the lower half of the alliance takes their attack first. So, if it’s a 20 person war, players #11-20 should take their first attack first if possible.
• For your first attack, try and attack roughly around your mirror ranking in the enemy alliance – usually within 1-2 slots if you can. So, if you’re ranked #10 in our alliance list for war, try and target between #8 and #12 in the enemy alliance.
• For your second attack, ask leaders or council if they agree with the target you’re going after. The target for your second attack depends on if we’re winning or losing, by how much, and how much time is left.

Any more useful suggestions on how we can win wars, let me know.

Yeah, it’s just a game, and maybe this is taking it a bit too seriously, but I happen to find it fun when you can work together as a team and defeat others trying to defeat you. 🙂

 

How to not get your stuff stolen: home base design and more

Unless you’re Industrial level (or now Global Age I guess), let’s be clear: medals don’t matter. The benefits conferred from climbing the medal ladder are minuscule. If you’re not a maxed out Global Age person (and you’re not), the main goal is to protect your resources so that you can grow.

So, in order to accomplish that, here’s some tips to protect your stuff:

• First, stop protecting your town center! If you have a home base design that protects your town center behind walls, I would strongly encourage you to change it. Move the town center outside your walls. If people destroy it – who cares?! They might steal a few of your trade goods in the process, but you should be stealing a bunch when you raid anyway, so it all evens out.
• Use your town center as bait. Placing it outside your walls, make it an easy first target for people to deploy their troops at. And then trap the heck out of it. And cover it with mortars/catapults, redoubts, cannon towers, and troops. 9 times out of 10, I’ll have people attack my town center first and get half their army shredded in the process which then cripples them from destroying the rest of my base. Below is an example of my current base. Due to the traps (especially the caltrops that reduce their damage), they get tied up so long trying to destroy the base that it gives time for the mortars and the rest of the troops to descend on them and wipe them out.
• Create a kill zone. If you don’t use your TC as bait, pick a spot on your base that makes people think ‘ah! here’s a good safe spot to deploy my troops!’. And then trap that spot. And try and place some mortars to target that spot too.
• Protect your mills, markets, and refinery. Leave your farms, houses, and roads outside your walls.
• Use a base design that breaks up your buildings into sub sections. Either a maze-like design or walled off sections of 2-4 buildings. Preferably a mix of resource and defensive buildings in each box. When I’m raiding someone, nothing makes me happier than finding a base that’s just one big box with all the stuff inside. Once you break through the outer wall, there’s nothing holding you back from sweeping the inside.
• Try an asymmetric design. They’re a little trickier to build, but you can take advantage of the fact that your attacker only has about 30 seconds to assess your base and plan an attack or move on to an easier target. If your base is a nice symmetrical form that has all the defensive structures evenly spaced around it, it may look pretty, but the human mind excels at identifying patterns and can quickly identify the best route to their target or at least determine that all points of entry are equal. If you break things up into an unusual pattern or a spiral, it can be difficult to identify the best way in to attack before time runs out.
• If you’re enlightenment level or above, protect your oil reserves at your center. That’s what higher players will go for many times. If I see someone with 1-2k or more in oil, I’ll usually go after then no matter what other resources they have.
• Keep your medals below 1200. I’m not sure if there’s anything to this or not, but I’ve found that the minute I go above 1200 in my medal count, I get raided by some fairly gnarly industrial level players with tanks and aircraft. I suspect they use that as a filter on their matchup algorithms – that’s why they set that quest to get over 1200 medals I suspect to get people to go over that level. Anyway, not positive on that, but if you find yourself getting your resources stolen, try dropping your medals and see if that helps.
• Overlap your defenses. Set up your defensive structures so that their fields of fire compliment each other. What can kill mortars and redoubts? Cavalry. What kills cavalry? Cannon towers. So, place a cannon tower in proximity to your redoubts and mortars. Preferably with enough space that a single sabotage tactic won’t disable all three.
• Increase the hitpoints on your town center. How do you do that? By connecting your buildings with a road(s) that connects to your TC. If you do this, you can add at least 25% more hitpoints to your TC which takes that much longer to destroy in battle. You need a little balance though because roads inside your walls usually space things out too far to protect everything.
• Keep your resources low. It doesn’t always work, but try and plan your next 2-3 upgrades so you can alternate spending gold/food/gold/food on things. That way, usually one of your resource types stays low while your saving up for the other one.
• Tailor your alliance donations for when you’re away. If you’ll be offline for a few hours, try and request troops from your allies that will protect your base the best. I usually prefer cannons, shooting troops, and Gatling guns.
• Don’t advance to the next age too early. This one is more of a global philosophy, but for me, I don’t advance to the next age until I have all my defenses upgraded and all my research completed in the forge and library. When you advance to the next age, you’ll open yourself up to attack from people one age above you. It helps a lot to be upgraded and ready for them.
• Upgrade your walls. Walls are very expensive and it’s about as much fun as watching paint dry, but they’ve got to be done. Don’t neglect them. Target levels to shoot far are probably level 7 for Gunpowder, 8 for Enlightenment, and 9 for Industrial.
• Spread out your farms. If you can, don’t cluster all your farms in one location. Spread them out around your perimeter, preferably within the radius of one of your towers. Just to prevent and easy target.

That’s about all I can think of for now. If you have more suggestions, feel free to comment and I’ll add them.

If we have resources, we can grow. If we can grow, we can win. Good luck!

To go along with this, check out the gallery I’ve made of some decent base designs (in my opinion).