When you defend, you have the advantage of being able to stack your
units and gain advantage in numbers. If 2000 slingers attack a defense
with 500 swordsmen and 500 archers, the defense will not be particularly
effective. However, if the defenders had ten times those numbers (that
is, 5000 swordsmen and 5000 archers), they would be 45% more efficient.
Now, if you consider that defenders already have city walls and towers
which, when fully built, will give defenders 151,9% defensive bonus over
the attacks, this means that you don't want to fight more defensive
troops than you have to.
The reason that the positioning of cities is so important when you fight
other alliances is that you don't want to give them the chance stack
defense in their cities. Because of this, you will always want to have a
city within one island of your target that you can lauch from. Since
colony ships are slower, your clearing waves and support should be able
to reach the target city in time, even if other cities are further away.
When two alliances go to war, they will almost always end up with one
or two big fronts against each other, with no or little mixing of cities
on each side of these fronts. If you have cities in the midst of enemy
cities, they will likely have many more cities that will be able to
reach those cities than you will have cities that can send support in
time. Thus, cities in in the middle of your enemy area will often be
quickly captured or will take a lot of effort to support or sustain.
Normally, what you should do in is not just to get all alliance cities
within a limited area, but also to get them on the same islands. If you
are able to cluster up your cities and cover a smaller area with more
alliance cities, you can cooperate more effectively. The distance of one
island might not mean much, but if you don't cluster up cities, you
alliance might be streched over twice the space, likely meaning that if
you are attacked at one end, you will not be able to defend with over
half of your cities, because they are too far away. An added benefit of
having several cities on the same island is how quickly these can reach
each other, should one of them be attack. If a city is under siege,
other cities on the same island will be able to ignore the ships
defending it and siomy try to kill the ground troops and breaking the
siege in this way. It goes without saying, of course, that no player
should have more than one city on the same island (as only one city per
player can use farming villages), so if this ever happens, the city
should be handed over to an alliance-mate.
Generally, you will want your offensive cities to be near the front, and
the defensive cities slightly behind them. If any defensive cities are
very far away from the front, you can send their troops in advance to
those of your cities that are most likely to be attacked. Against a
really strong and active alliance, it can be very hard to take a city if
your colony ship takes over three hours to get there. What you can do
is that you get some cities on the same island as the enemy alliance.
You can colonize it if you have to, and wait a few weeks for it to build
up. Then you can launch from this city. Attacks and support will likely
take longer than the colony ship, so these should be sent in advance.
Using this methods, you can gain ground on your enemies even when it
seems impossible, since you will be able to start a siege in something
between 1 and 1,5 hours, and you only need enough biremes to be able to
hold the siege.
To get a proper overview of positioning, Grepolis Maps is incredibly
useful. It can quickly show you where all the different alliances have
their cities located:
Conquest
More often than not, many elements will have to be involved in a
successful conquest. You need planning and coordination and you need to
be prepared any tricks the defender will come up with. If you are very
new to attacking and want a bit of basic information, you will want to
read my raiding guide.
Planning
Whenever you go for a city of an enemy alliance, it's highly
recommended that you plan in advance. Very few alliances have so active
and plentiful members that you can just post the arrival of your colony
ship and expect a lot of clearing waves and support to arrive in time.
The advantage of attacking without planning in advance would be that it
doesn't leave room for any spies within your alliance to pass
information onto your enemies.
In order to be able to properly plan and coordinate, it's important that
the alliance agrees on certain time settings and that all members use
these settings. Once this is done, you should be able to set a certain
time and see whether everyone can join in. Setting a time allows
everyone to build up for the attack and have full favor for the gods and
full population for their attacking cities. You also need to be sure
that you have the necessary amount of troops, so that you don't only
have a lot of normal attacks with offensive units and light ship
escorts, but also have some light ships nukes (attack consisting of big
amounts of light ships - typically around 260 when fully built) to go
first and break the biremes that will likely be awaiting you once you
reach the target city. Likewise, you not only need to be able to start a
siege in the city, but be able to have enough ground troops and biremes
to defend it once the other alliance tries to break it.
Spying in advance of an attack can be a bit tricky. It can be an
advantage to know what's in the city before you attack it, but normally
it's not really necessary for large-scale attacks. There are only a few
reasons you would want to know what's in a city. It would be useful if
you doubt you have enough offensive units to break the initial defenses
and would rather target an enemy city with offensive units. Also, if you
launch attacks to clear the city at the same time as you send the
colony ship (to kill the units early and avoid them being there to snipe
the colony ship later), knowing what's in defense helps you determine
how much you need to send ahead. What you should try to do is to gather
as much info about enemy cities as possible. Once you have seen what
cities typically send for attacks, support or light ship nukes, you can
have a good idea or what kind of defense they might be able to muster.
If you spy, I siggest that you do it some time before do the conquest so
as to not give your intentions away if the target city has a lot of
silver in the cave (which it likely will). If a city is spied a few
times, some people might take precautionary action, but if nothing
happens, they will likely let things go back to normal. A ground attack
from the same island can also be an alternative to spying and reveal if a
large amount of biremes/transports are holding in the city before you
commit to an attack.
One thing you might consider in the planning is that the player who has
the siege will get more battle points. The distribution of battle points
is decided by the amount of population each player has in the city that
is attacked, but the person who owns or occupies a city will always get
at least 30% of the battle points of any battle. So, if you have some
players with fairly few culture points and others with many, it might be
a good idea to let those with les culture points do the siege. After
all, you need less culture points to get more cities at the low culture
levels, while once you get up to higher levels, each culture level will
take several hundred culture points. So, the battle points gained from
defending a conquest might help one player get enough culture points for
six new cities will only help another player gain enough culture points
for one city. In morale worlds, you can heavily abuse the morale-system
by letting low-point players capture the enemy cities; this is not
something I can advise you to do, of course.
Coordination
Being able to make well-coordinated attacks is the alfa omega of
conquest. Basically, what you want to coordinate is the following:
- Light ship nukes: Light ship nukes should preferably hit
first, clearing the city of biremes. If biremes aren't cleared by the
time clearing waves arrive, many transports will likely be killed,
meaning that many of your offensive land units will die without ever
participating in the fights. That said, some light ship nukes should
arrive among the clearing waves as you have no idea of what support is
arriving at the city when (sometimes bireme support will be timed
specifically to snipe your colony ship, whereas, in other cases, all
support will just be send in advance). Keep in mind that even if you
decide to send your clearing waves as breakthrough-attacks (which is
generally not recommend), many transport ships will still die, and you
can never conquer a city unless you clear it completely of both ground
groops and navy (with the exception being fire ships, which do not fight
against the colony ship).
- Clearing waves: These will basically be offensive land nukes
(a city only building offensive land troops). As you would with any
attack, you should include a light ship escort (usually 40-50 light
ships). These attacks will have to hit between the light ship nukes and
the colony ship. You will want them to land as close as possible to the
arrival of the colony ship so the colony ship will not fall victim to a
defensive snipe (see further down) or support from another city sent to
intercept it.
- Support: You need your support to arrive as soon as possible
after the colony ship arrives, to protect from any incoming attacks sent
to clear the conquest and to avoid an offensive snipe (see further
down).
To coordinate, you will at least need to know whose units are the
furthest out. Normally, it would be preferable that no attacks that
participate are slower than the colony ship, but sometimes that cannot
be avoided if you lack the necessary firepower close by. If the slowest
attack is not the colony ship, the arrival time of the slowest attack
should be given to the player launching the colony ship so that it can
be timed to arrive after that attack (if you send several attacks before
the colony ship, you need to know which of those arrives last). Once
the colony ship is launched (time to arrive behind attacks sent before
if necessary), its arrival time will be shared so that people can time
their attacks and support more specifically. You can see the specific
arrival time of an attack by click on its icon in the troop movement
overview:
Something that is extremely important to keep in mind when timing
attacks is the anti-timer that has been implemented in Grepolis. It
keeps you from being able to precisely time your attacks, adding an
element of luck. Every attack you send will suffer a random offset at
its departure that can be anything from 0-30 seconds +/-, with the
maximum offset varying between worlds. It is crucial that you know what
the maximum offset is in the world that you play in. I have done a test
in Phi by sending out attacks several hundred times and recalling them.
By noting down the difference between projected arrival time and actual
arrival time, I have been able to surmise that the maximum offset for
Phi is +/- 12 seconds. That means that if I send an attack, it could
arrive up to 12 seconds earlier or 12 seconds later. In the above
example, the attack is launched in Phi. The colony ship arrives at
7:26:39, so that means that All clearing waves should be sent to arrive
at 7:26:26. That means that the latest they could arrive is one second
before the colony ship (+12 second offset), while the earliest they
would arrive is 25 seconds before (-12 second offset). If you have a lot
of offensive troops and know you likely won't need them all, you can
try to get the timing closer to the colony ship and simply recalling
your attack if it doesn't get the right timing (to avoid it accidentally
arriving after the colony ship and attacking your own siege). The same
goes for support. In the above example, all support should be sent to
arrive at 7:26:52, meaning that none of it has a chance of arriving
before your colony ship does. This tool, although it's made for another
game, can be useful if you want to calculate when you should be ready to
send your attack to have it arrive at a specific time.
If you are quick, one way to get a good timing is to send several times,
recalling when you don't get the right timing. So, you might send your
first attack 4-5 seconds before the time you want to hit, hoping for a
delay. If you don't get it, you recall right away, send again. If the
timing still isn't good, you recall once more and resend. Of course, the
greater you antitiming offset it, the earlier you can make your first
attack, so in worlds where the offset is very big (30 seconds, for
instant), you can make more attempts at getting a good timing. If you
are attacking with fast transporters and use a single normal transporter
for timing, you can try this two times; once with the timing of the
normal transporter, once without the normal transporters, with the
timing of the fast transporters. Another trick is to send any units that
you don't want to send out of your city in advance so that they are
stationed in another city. That way you can make use of the 'Select all
units' button to select all units easily when you re-send.
Execution
There are some important ground rules for attacks:
- You should always cast as spell on your conquest attack to protect
it from spells from the defender. Your colony ship will likely be killed
if a Sea Storm is cast on your attack since it takes up a significant
part of the population in your attack, therefore being more likely to be
hit.
- An attack can be recalled within the first ten minutes, so if the
defender casts a spell on your attack right away, just recall it. Never
recall it if all your alliance-mates have already launched their
attacks, though - then you have to go through with it to avoid them
being caught in an unfortunate situation. Note that you won't get
notified if the defender casts the spell Desire on your attack, but you
will be able to see if it has been casted by checking the attack.
- Once your colony ship arrives, always make sure to recall the
offensive units that arrive with it (select 'return several units' in
agora of the attacking city). You do not want these to defend, so you
are better off just recalling them before any attacks arrive to try to
break the siege (mind you, you are required to leave one units and one
light ship with the siege):
- Mind the "insufficient units" bug. If you have units building in a
city where you launch an attack, you might get an error saying "Not
enough units in this city". This happens when you keep your
attack-window open and a new unit is built in the meantime. So, don't
keep your attack-window open for a long time if a unit is about to pop
out (you can check unit progress in barrack and harbor).
- You should always try to attack at times where your opponent might
be sleeping or away at work/education, since these will be the best
windows to strike. Always keep in mind to take note of the online times
of your opponents. If you need more information, send random attacks to
find out when your opponent is online and to keep him or her guessing.
- If you care to make the effort, it is useful to time decoy clearing
attack for your colony ship. It have the potential to make the defender
waste his spells them and can also confuse the defender about the
intention of your attack. At the same time, it can also give a false
impression of overwhelming attack power and affect the defender's
decision to send support and how to time it. If you have three attacks
arriving shortly before the colony ship, a defender who is short on
units might recall his support if he is not able to time his support to
arrive after those attack, since he does not want to lose small
remaining defensive force and assuming that you are sending full attack
forces, not decoys.
- Allowing some of your attacks to arrive at the target after your
conquest attack arrives can we very useful. Just like when you attack
your own cities, the only thing that will happen when you attack your
own siege is that you get a message saying that your troops visited
during peacetime. However, many defender might assume that the last
attack is the conquest attack or think that since more attacks arrive
after your conquest attack, it is simply a decoy for one that will be
sent later. Additionally, if you have a lot more units in the area than
the defender, you will have the chance to kill his support so that he
has nothing to defend if you launch another conquest attack. If your
conquest attack is killed, your attacks that arrive after the conquest
attack will be able to kill the units in the city, which it is unlikely
that the defender will be able to remove in time.
- Never include mythical units in the support you send for a siege as
it is likely your support will never arrive at the city, since you can
only support cities that have the same god as the mythical units.
Attack composition
If you follow the
multi-city guide
and specialize your cities, you should be set for a good attack
combination, not matter what combination of offensive units you choose.
You simply need your attacks to be as big as possible to make sure that
the advantage in numbers never falls too far into the defender's
advantage. If you spot that the defender has a weakness, for instanace
building too many swordsmen, you can adjust your composition to be more
effective (for instance, including more sharp attackers, which kill
swordsmen more easily). If you have pure nukes, meaning attacking cities
that only produce one specific attack type, without mixing the
different attacking units, this adjustment becomes easier.
Mythical units can be excellent to include in your attacks, if you can
build up a significant amount. Normally, people will have defenses that
are a little weaker against sharp attackers, since chariots and hoplites
aren't as effective attacks are slingers and horsemen, with only 14 and
16 attack points per population respectively. However, medusas are
sharp attackers and have 24 attack points per population, so they can do
quite well against most defenses. Manticores and harpies, both
effective attackers, are flying units and do not take up the capacity of
your transport ship, so if you build these they will allow you to build
up a bigger offensive nuke, with more offensive units and less
transport ships. Only build the mythical units if you know that it's
unlikely you will need the favor for other things, though.
Using normal transport ships will allow you to include more offensive
units in your attack. Therefore, using normal transport ships in your
offensive cities is preferable. Normal transports are slower than fast
transport ships, but if you only keep offensive units at the front
towards your enemies and convert the ones further away to defensive
cities, this will never be a problem. However, if you find that there
are several action zones and you have too many offensive cities unable
to participate due to not being able to get there in time, you should
switch your cities from normal transports to fast transport ships.
For bigger attacks, I greatly recommend that you send some attacks that
arrive at the city early, before any additional support will reach the
city. These attacks should be launched at the same time as the colony
ship so as to not give the defender any advance notice of the incoming
conquest attack. The purpose of these attacks are two-fold: 1) to kill
the defending troops so that the defender cannot make a defensive snipe
2) knock down the city walls. If the city wall is fully built, you will
typically lose 2-3 times more units than the defenders do when you try
to take a city. However, if you send two attacks consisting of, for
instance, 1200 slingers and 50 catapults, you can manage to knock down
the city walls before your attacks arrive. If you send catapults in
clearing waves to arrive just before the colony ship, chances are that
too many defensive units have arrived and your catapults will not do
much damage to the walls. But even against a maxed out defense in a
city, a catapult/sliger nuke can do considerable damage to the city
walls. However, once several thousand defensive units have arrived, such
an attack would do almost no damange to the city walls. The points is
to knock down the wall so that by the time your clearing waves arrive,
they can fight without a high level city wall present, yielding much
better results.
You should expect your enemies to be able to get a lot of biremes to
defend their cities. It would likely not be too far off to expect every
fifth city of theirs to be a bireme city (a city that has 300-350
biremes). At any point in time, it is likely that it will, on average,
be at half strengh (say, 150 biremes). Whenever you attack the alliance,
it is likely that they will get at third of their biremes to defend the
target city. Similar numbers go for the light ships that they will send
to break your siege. So, this should give you an idea of what numbers
to expect, but an even better measure is your past experience and
concrete intel you have on the alliance.
Fake attacks
At some point alliances and players get so big that their defenses
can seem unbreakable. Therefore, decoy attacks become a natural part of
any conquest attempt. The idea is that you launch one or several
conquest-attack somewhere else to distract from your real attack and
draw support there. An alternative version is that you launch
conquest-attacks at different times towards the same city, making it
impossible for the defender to know which attack to time a defensive
snipe against. The defender might try to snipe one of the fake attacks,
only to find that it's fake and have his defensive units wiped out by
the followign clearing waves. He might also dodge the initial attack,
assuming that it's a fake, only to find out that it was the real attack
and the following attacks are simply 3-4 light ships.
The timing of a decoy attack should be such that the defenders will not
be able to recall their support and send it to the real attack. It is
also crucial that the decoy attack looks exactly like a real one with
both clearing waves and support. When you attack, your attack always has
to consist of 3% of the total amount of population in units that
belongs to that city. So, if the city has a total of 2000 population
worth of units, any attack would have to contain at least 60 population
worth of units. So, if you send light ships for your fake attacks, which
would be a natural choice, you would need to include six in each fake
clearing wave, whereas if you have cities with low population, you migth
get away with sending just 1-2 light ships. If you usually attack with
normal transport ships, you should build a normal transport ship in all
the cities that send fake attacks and include them in the attacks so
that the attack times will match those your enemy expects (might also
make it easier for you to hit the right timing on your attacks, at least
giving you two chances to do some; the slower time with transport ships
and the faster without). There is no limit to the amount of units you
are request to send to launch a support-mission, so I recommend that all
fake support waves simply consist of a single normal transport ship.
You should consider the following rules for decoy attacks:
- All fake attacks should be hidden through the use of spells that you
cast on them. If you have cast a spell on your attack, no other spells
can be cast on it, and therefore it cannot be revealed by Athena's
Wisdom spell.
- You should never send more than one fake attack from one city
- You should never send a fake attack from a city where you are sending a real attack from
- Any city from which you send a fake attack must have at least 4000 points (to make it believable as an attacking city)
- Never send fake attacks from a city that has recently been revealed
to your enemies as being a defensive city or one without many troops in
it
Holding the siege
To hold your siege, you will need both biremes and defensive support
troops to arrive after your colony ship. You need both, since, if either
you naval units or ground units die, the colony ship with be destroyed
as well and the siege will be broken.
Once you land your conquest attack and start your siege, you can keep
track of incoming attacks and support by clicking the icon of the siege
and selecting the 'Troops' tab:
You will not be notified of attacks, so if you are doing several
conquests at the same time and don't know where to send your support,
you should keep checking this tab regularly. Notice that you cannot cast
spells on the attacks that are coming towards the city where you have
your siege.
Should your siege get broken, it is important that you withdraw any
remaining troops. Otherwise your enemies could attack them and gain both
the offensive and defensive battle points for killing them.
Gathering intelligence
When you make attacks against an enemy, it is always a good idea to
take a screenshot of your city wall, where you can see how many troops
you have killed (when checking the killed units, you can also check
whether your opponent was online and enlisted militia). If you lose the
battle and you are not able to see how many troops you killed, you can
often figure out the magnitude of the defense using the simulator. If I
attack a city with 100 light ships that all die, I will not receive any
information about how many ships I killed. So, I will check my city wall
and compare it to the screenshot to see how many ships were killed. If I
killed 73 biremes, I can run the result through the simulator (remember
to input morale, luck and other bonuses) to figure out how many ships
had to be in the city in order for the defender to suffer this exact
loss. If you have been attacked from that city before, it will be easy
for you to check in the simulator whether that player has the Captain
premium bonus or has researched Battering Ram.
Any time that another alliance tries to take your city, make sure to
note down which support is sent from which cities. If you attack them
later, you will have a very good idea of which initial defenses to
expect.
If you attack a city with ground troops from another city on the same
island, you will be able to see all the ships in the city, even if you
lose all yo. This is not only useful to see the amount of biremes and
transports that your enemy will stack in a city if you attack it, giving
you an indication about the amount of defense that player can send in
support.
Defending Against Conquest Attacks
In conquest-worlds, there are a lot of possibilities for defenders to
kill off attacks on their cities. If you only have one city, no
friends, and you're put under siege, this system is very merciless. In
fact, you can never really rest assured. However, should you be online,
there are various things you can do, and I will try to describe how
defense works below. If you have very little experience how defense
works, you can read more about that in my
defense guide.
General pointers
- If you have an incoming conquest attack, don't cast any spells on it
right away, unless you hope to kill the colony ship with a Sea Storm
before the attacker puts a spell on it. The attacker can recall within
the first ten minutes of an attack, so unless you want to cast a Sea
Storm or Zeus' Rage on the attack and hope to discourage it, you should
wait out the ten minutes.
- If you see an incoming conquest attack and know that you can send a
lot of support in time for its arrival; play dead. Don't give any signs
of life by casting spells. If you are dodging attacks from the attacker
or people associated with the attacker elsewhere, do not summon militia
and be careful not to show that you have dodged by leaving one of two
units that came through the production queue in the time between your
dodge and the arrival of the attack. You can also apply this mentality
to normal attacks. Any incoming attack might be a conquest attempt in
the making. Never show that you are online too soon.
- Use fast transport ships for all your defensive cities, unless you
keep their troops permantly stationed somewhere else. It is essential
for being able to get to the the city being attacked quickly, especially
if your alliance is spread over a big area
- Your enemies will sometimes to send messages to your to figure out
your online times or simply to check if you're online at the moment or
can be attacked. When you send a message to someone, you can see whether
they have read it, even if they don't respond. So, if you suspect this
is the case, I advise you to not read/respond to messages from enemies
at times where you would give away your online times (for instance,
right when you wake up or get home from work), but rather do so at odd
times or at times where you would not normally be online. Even if your
enemies don't want to use it against you, they will subconsciously add
knowledge about your online times judging from which times you usually
respond to their messages.
- Whenever a city is attacked, all the supporting troops only gain the
bonuses that the owner of the city has (including premium bonuses),
while none of their own bonuses matter. So, even if you make a naval
city where you have no intention of building ground troops, you should
still research Phalanx, and likewise you should also research Battering
Ram in cities when you only build ground troops. If you are online very
often, you will also be likely to benefit from building Tower in your
cities, whereas if you are no online very often, it is like that your
enemies will benefit from you building Tower, since they will get the
10% defensive bonus once they start a siege in your city.
The role of naval units
In revolt-based worlds, you can more easily rely on using only
biremes to defend yourself. You always have more than 12 hours to react
to an incoming conquest-attempt, which gives you plenty of time to stack
all your biremes in the targeted city and fight with a big advantage in
numbers against the light ships while annihilating any land troop
attacks by killing the transports. However, in conquest worlds the role
of biremes is not so clear cut.
A big amount of biremes can do wonders if the attackers do not send
enough light ships to screen for their attacks or do not send suffient
light ship escorts with their ground armies. You can get a lot of cheap
battle points this way. Having biremes always provides you a great tool
to snipe an incoming conquest attempt, timing your support to arrive
after most light ships have already attacked and easily withstanding the
limited amount of light ships that are sent with the clearing waves and
colony ship. However, biremes aren't fantastic defenders on their own.
Whenever biremes are not stacked in their thousands, light ship nukes
can do quite well against them. Against people who don't specialise
their cities and maybe won't attack with more than 50 light ships at a
time, a few hundred biremes can do quite well, but don't normally kill
more than 150% of their worth. While the losses in the faceoff of light
ships and biremes will be fairly even, the attacker will suffer much
greater losses when facing a big defensive ground army in a city with
high city walls. Therefore, you cannot really depend on either. You
always need biremes to defend your own siege when you take cities and
it's always worthwile to try to use biremes to snipe colony ships or
kill off lightly-guarded transport ships, but you will always need the
defensive groud troops to be able to take the damage when you face
overwhelming odds.
Recognizing a conquest attack
When you are under attack, it is crucial to know if the attack is a
conquest attack or just a normal attack. If it's a normal attack, you
might simply dodge or send a few troops to incept, but normally a
conquest attack requires you to enact more defensive measures. You can
always recognize an attack with a colony ship by its speed. If you check
the Grepolis
Units Portal,
you can see the speed of all units. Here, you can see that the colony
ship is the slowest naval unit, and since fire ships cannot attack, no
other naval unit is less than twice as quick. When you are attacked,
there are three speeds that you normally need to consider:
- Attack with colony ship: The slowest of all attacks
- Attack containing normal transport ships: 2,6 times as fast as an attack with colony ship
- Attack containing light ship (and no normal transports): 4,3 as fast as attack with colony ship
To get the time it would take for a colony ship to attack a specific
city, you simply select attack on the city that is attacking you and put
'1' in for colony ship, and the time will show:
So, if an attack were to come from the city in the above example, I
would have a better chance of knowing whether it was a colony ship. If I
had been offline for five hours and logged in, I know that the attack
would still have at least 2:54 hrs remaining (possibly less, if the
attacking city has Cartopgraphy researched and yours does not), even if
it was launched right after I logged off. There is no way for you to
know exactly when an attack was launched at you. However, whenever an
attack in launched at you, a notification of the attack will pop up on
the right side of your screen. If you had reports or trades coming
through while you were offline, those would also be listed on the right
side. All these notification are listed chronologically, with the latest
being on top. So, if the attack notification shows between the
notifications for a trade going through and a battle report, you will
know that the attack happened within that time frame.
Defensive snipe
When you are attacked, you most often have two choices:
- Send massive support and defend against most/all attacks
- Try to snipe the colony ship
You can snipe by sending units to support from other cities, but it
can be hard to get the right timing because of the anti-timer. Sniping
is done most effectively if you have units in the city that is being
attacked. You need enough units to be able to defend against the one
attack with the colony ship. If your city that is under attack has a lot
of defensive troops, these might be sufficient to kill off the attack
with the colony ship, at least if the prior attacks do not have
catapults to take down your city walls. So, you can perform a defensive
snipe by dodging all the clearing waves, only defending against the
conquest attack.
The optimal timing for your support would be to arrive one second before
the colony ship, but worse timing than that can often be sufficient. If
you arrive on the same second as the attack does, the attack will
always arrive first. As with timing attacks, you can recall and resend
your support from other cities sevaral times to get a good timing,
especially if the offset of the anti-timer is big, allowing you to send
support that would arrive after the colony ship does, but instead
arrives before the colony ship due to the anti-timer offset. If you are
not quick enough with the mouse or don't have fast internet or computer,
you might not be able to do the recall/resend in attempt to get a
perfect timing. If a few clearing attacks arrive just a few seconds
before the conquest attack and you don't have units in the city to snipe
with, you might want to be risky and launch your support with an
arrival that is closer to the arrival time of the conquest attacks,
giving you a slightly higher chance of hitting the right timing but also
risking that your support arrives after the conquest attack and is not
able to participate. Another risk you might want to take is one that
prevents you from getting too much support killed off. If you are up
against a big alliance and know they have many more light ships than you
have biremes, you might want to avoid fighting them unless you have to.
If you have several bireme and light ship cities that can reach the
attacked city in time, you might want to recall any support or attacks
that get a bad timing. You likely need just one perfectly timed support
or offensive snipe to kill off the colony ship, so you can make several
attempts at getting that timing and save your city without many losses.
If a lot of clearing waves have been sent, it is likely that the
attackers will have gotten a good timing with a few of these despite the
anti-timer, and you might only have a few seconds between the last
clearing wave and the conquest attack. If you have a good internet
connection, you might find it easier to just dodge the last clearing
wave right before it attacks (by sending your army towards a city on
attack or support mission) and recall after a few seconds. If you want
to dodge several minutes in advance and then recall, this tool might
make it easier for you to make calculations (get the specific arrival
time of the conquest attack by clicking its icon and insert this time as
'time of return'). Just remember, you cannot recall 10 minutes after
your army has been sent somewhere, so make sure to do it before that.
And if you send your troops to a nearby city and let them stay in
support there, recalling them will count as a new support mission, so
you will suffer the effects of the anti-timer. See an extensive example
of a defensive snipe from the same city here). I recommend you test how
the recall works on your setup before you use it for a snipe.
Here is an example of how a bunch of incoming attacks might look like,
where the colony ship arrives seven seconds after the last clearing
wave:
Here is another attack, where the timing is much tighter:
In this situation, I still managed to snipe, but forgot to make a
last-second enlistment of militia. You will want to prepare exactly what
you want to do and keep windows such as farm for militia open (though
minimized) if you think they will be necessary for you to make it.
In the following you can see an example of me sending my defensive troops away and then recalling to snipe:
As you can see, the timing of the snipe was unecessarily tight, since
the colony ship arrived 31 seconds after the last clearing wave,
leaving a lot of time to snipe. Sniping can be risky business, since you
can end up getting your troops back too late, in which case they will
attack the city and the occupying troops. This part naturally leads us
to the offensive snipe.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you have lots of attacks incoming
at the time where you need to recall, you might need to open the attack
window to cancel your attack/support mission from there, since the troop
movement window will be jumping up and down, making it very hard to
cancel from there.
Offensive snipe
An offensive snipe works much like a defensive snipe. You send your
units away and then recall them to arrive at a specific time. An
offensive snipe works best when you have offensive ground troops and a
low city wall or light ships in the city. Your aim will be for your
offensive units to arrive back in your city just after the colony ship
and before the first support wave arrives. If your units get back too
late, too much support might have arrived, and you will not be able to
kill off the colony ship. But if you have 100 light ships in the city,
those will normally easily be able to defeat whatever ships are sent
with the colony ship. Some players include triremes or biremes in the
attack with the colony ship, which means that they will have some to
defend right away, but it will normally not be enough to defeat as many
as 100 light ships. Most players will only include light ships in their
conquest attack, and these will very easily be killed off by just a few
light ships, allowing you to kill the colony ship. If you have some
offensive ground troops, these might also be able to defeat the
offensive units sent with the colony ship and this break the siege
(colony ship will also be destroyed if all supporting land troops die).
This can also be done by sending attacks towards your own city from your
other cities - just mind the anti-timer. There is no risk in attacking
your own cities, since it's only possible for the attack to actually
happen if you city is under siege. So, if you attack your own city but
the conquest attack hasn't broken through, your troops will simply have a
cup of tea and head back home.
Dealing with inactives
In any war, members going inactive will likely be a deciding element.
If you have a tight knit alliance, everyone who wishes to leave the
game will inform their alliance-mates in advance and make sure they can
take all their cities at the same time, not leaving time for any enemies
to take them once they discover the player is quitting. However, you
might find yourselves in a situation where someone goes inactive and you
don't know whether they are coming back or cannot take their cities
right away. In this case, it is highly recommend that you send a
tripwire to the city. A tripwire typically consists of a single
transport ship and single unit. Sending these in support to a city means
that you get a report notifying you of your support being attacked if
someone sends an attack against the city. If your land unit dies but you
ship survives, it cannot be a conquest attack since it would require
both land and naval units. If the transport ship also dies, it means
that all units in the city were gone or killed, and there's a good
chance that someone has started a siege in the city, and you should send
your light ships to attack the city. Often, people will not expect that
they have to defend against a lot of light ships when they conquer the
city of an inactive, so there is a good chance that you can break the
siege with a single light ship nuke and keep them off the city. You
would have to move quickly to take the city after that, though, as they
will not make the mistake of sending limited support the next time. It
is important to take the cities of your own inactive since you will
otherwise leave holes within your own lines. If enemies get a city in
the middle of all your cities, this can act as a launching platform for
conquest attacks or as a place from which they can send quick attacks to
kill off your offensive armies or light ship nukes.
It can also be a good idea to tripwire various inactive players
and ghost town in your area if no one from your alliance is taking them
just yet. If you decide to tripwire active players from your own
alliance, you should send a bireme or unescorted transport ship
(anything that won't accidentally kill off the light ships of your
alliance-mate) to the city if the tripwire goes off. Once you get the
battle report, you can see whether the city is currently occupied. Might
be a good idea to send them a message if you're attacking them as well.
