Have posted a thread and waiting to get it approved in the general forum. Will put this up in the meanwhile, feel free to give feedback and will edit and add recognition accordingly.
LATE GAME DEFENDING - THE NEMESIS123
[spoil]
Introduction
Some people love to send hundreds of nukes and nobles and crush their opponents into the ground. You may call me a masochist, but I am the sort of person who derives great enjoyment at watching those same hundreds of nukes and nobles hit my villages. What I really enjoy though is seeing those nukes and nobles hit stacks and imagining the expression on my opponents face when he spent all his nukes and didn’t even manage to remove a single level from my villages walls. This, I think, is quite sadistic. I do not consider myself a brilliant defender, but I do believe I understand the theory well enough to help people who don’t quite know how to defend properly. This brings me to a few weeks ago when friend asked me for a recommendation of a good guide on defending for use by his tribe. Naturally, I turned to the Tribal Wars Forum’s guide library to look for one. I was quite surprised to find that most of them were outdated, didn’t contain explanations for modern defensive strategies such as web support and none I felt captured the essence of being a strong defender. It was for these reasons that I decided to write this guide.
This guide is not going to teach you how to snipe, backtime, stack, tag, renoble or any other of a plethora of techniques used whilst defending. I feel that these concepts are explained adequately in other guides and that you should read them before coming here. It is also not going to explain much about earlygame and is going to focus on more middle-late game. Instead, this guide teaches you to laugh at tribal Ops, closerange nobling, mass faking and the best attackers this game has to offer whilst drinking a cold beverage on a tropical beach completely relaxed contemplating having another eight-hour snooze. Like the sound of that? Then this is the guide for you.
What is defending all about?
You wake up to find a plethora of incomings. You called for support from your tribe and they sent you some defense. You lose loads of villages anyway. This is because most modern offensives, both on a player level and a tribal level rely on the defender not being adequately prepared, inactive or not skilled enough to take on an attack. If you had to call for support, then you were not properly prepared. You were playing as black in chess, reacting rather than taking the initiative, meaning your chance of winning is lowered in high level play. Top-level defenders never play as black, they always play as white. Beyond the basic techniques, defending is about preparing a counter in advance for all possibilities of enemy attack. Most of the hard work is not done whilst battling, but before the war even begins. Your job during battling is to watch as your enemy flounders on your carefully planned preemptive counters and see your hard work fulfilled in enemy failure. With that said, let’s move onto how we go about that.
Before the Conflict begins
Your job as a defender starts long before the conflict even begins. Have a quick look around your map and assume that if they aren’t in your tribe or aren’t your mother that they are going to attack you some time in the future. Note down which villages are within an 8 hour noble distance from an enemy front. Now you are armed with that knowledge, you can start pestering your leader (if you aren’t the leader) about prestacking. Prestacking is essentially the same as stacking except it takes place before a conflict begins. Because there is no conflict yet, it is best to use web support as the method of support. Web/packet support is explained briefly in
Googly’s defensive techniques guide and is a stacking technique that spreads out defensive losses around a tribe.
In the strongest defensive tribes in the middle/late game, all fronts should be stacked preemptively incase of enemy launch. This does weaken concentration of troops and is not recommended unless you have a considerable backline, but will put your tribe in much better stead incase of the worst-case scenario. If your tribe is unable to do that, then you prioritize. You stack against your biggest threats first. How much should you stack? That is depending on the period of the game and is something you will have to figure out yourself. My recommendation is to have 50-75% of your backline troops on the front at all times with 25-50% in reserve to top up defense during the war and defend against attacks behind the frontline. Tribes should avoid scenarios where frontliners support themselves as much as possible so they have more mobile defense to use for quick term support in wars.
Most people will feel safe defending if they have 5-8 full defenses in each of their villages their frontlines, which will stop 10-20 full Os in their tracks for any village and force the opponent to nuke from longrange, making defending a piece of cake. This is easier done than thought, as long as mandatory prestacking is enforced by your leader. This also gives your frontliners confidence, which allows them to perform better and go on the attack more in wars as they aren't in a significant amount of danger. Make sure that all players in the tribe are treated equally proportional to the threat of the front as discrimination in prestacking will hurt morale. How deep should you stack? I personally try to stack around 8 hours noble distance in from the frontline. This allows you to have a break or some sleep and not have to worry too much about villages being taken close-range.
I have written a bit on stacking and have spoilered it below. Basically, the higher the stack, the better.
[SPOIL]
Why Stacking is so Overpowered - A guide to crushing offensive opponents with superior defensive numbers
Everyone knows that stacking is a technique to defend against Offense, but most people do not realise how strong stacking is. I consider myself quite a strong defensive player and think I know what I am doing when it comes to defence. What I'm basically going to crunch some numbers to show how strong stacking really is and why defense is stronger than offense in the late game despite offense having quicker build times. To start off, I'm going to use the TW simulator to simulate some Defense vs. Offense clashes.
All simulations will be controlled as followed:
- Nuke (6164 axe, 2926 lcav, 300 ma, 220 ram) - 20468 farm space
- Defence (6468 spear, 5000 archer, 1500 hcav) - 20468 farm space
- 100% morale
- 0% luck
- Level 20 wall.
The next part is not that interesting but is necessary proof for graphs to come later.
Simulation of Nukes vs 1 full Defence + Level 20 wall:
You lose 1 nuke and take the rest of the D out easily on the second. To put it as a number, you lose 1.26 full O's to take out the enemy's full D. Lets now double this.
Simulation of Nukes vs 2 full Defences + Level 20 wall:
It takes 3.08 full Os to take out 2 full Ds. Now lets this again with 3 full Ds.
Simulation of Nukes vs 3 full Defences + Level 20 wall:
Damage by rams: The wall has been damaged and downgraded from level 20 to level 19
We can conclude that 5.15 full Os kill 3 full Ds.
Simulation of Nukes vs 4 full Defences + Level 20 wall:
It takes 7.57 full Os to kill 4 full Ds
Processing the Raw Data
Now we have the raw data for the first four full Ds, we can analyse that data to discover meaningful results. By dividing the number of full Os died by the number of Ds, we can find the number of Os killed per full D killed for different number of starting Ds. Ive also added in 5-8 full Ds to get more data points.
1 full D: 1.26 Offenses died per full D killed
2 full Ds: 3.08/2 = 1.54 Offenses died per full D killed
3 full Ds: 5.15/3 = 1.71 Offenses died per full D killed
4 full Ds: 7.57/4 = 1.89 Offenses died per full D killed
5 full Ds: 10.09/5 = 2.02 Offenses died per full D killed
6 full Ds: 13.23/6 = 2.20 Offense died per full D killed
7 full Ds: 17.17/7 = 2.45 Offense died per full D killed
8 full Ds: 21.27/8 = 2.65 Offense died per full D killed
This just gives you an idea of how stacking kills off more and more Offense per D village as the stacks get bigger. This does eventually slope off into the higher numbers as it is not an exponential growth. That said, you can use this to give you an idea of what you should stack with. Your opponent has 1.5 times as many Os as you have Ds? You should stack with 2+ defenses. Your opponent has twice as many Os as you have Ds? You should stack with 5+ defenses.
Anyways, this gave me an idea to find the number of Os it would take to kill off a theoretical number of Ds. I made a graph of the above data and added a polynomial best fit line as it suited the data:
Using the equation of the best fit line, one can find out the number of Os needed to clear for a theoretical number of Ds. For example with 15Ds:
y = 0.205
x[SUP]2[/SUP]+1.079
x
y = 0.205(225)+1.079*15
y = 62.31 Os
I calculated an actual value of 58.31Os so it is a bit off, but for modelling 1-12Ds (it is unlikely you will encounter villages over 12Ds), it is very close to the mark.
Conclusion
In conclusion, stacking, co-ordinated with web support is killer. The bigger stack, the better. Have fun killing enemy O for cheap.[/SPOIL]
You then want to do other things to help you prepare for an upcoming war. If you don't have a coplayer, now would be a good time to look for one that can cover the times when you are off and make your life easier. If you can't find a coplayer, try get a system set up of sitters to defend accounts on the frontline. No matter how bad the situation is, make sure an account is never left unattended. Often the difference between victory and loss is the difference in the activity of the two sides frontliners so make sure your tribe is in the better position. Finally you are ready, or at least you are as ready as you can be for the upcoming war.
The War
The war has began and your enemy has started attacking. You are tagging using opera (or if lucky you have got a mass tagger and press it once in a while) and waiting for attacks to arrive. Your job here is to study your opponent, which will make your life easier in future. Communication with your tribe is vital as they can tell you habits of your opponents (such as faking with defensive villages) that will make your sleep longer. Look for patterns like which village your opponents are sending attacks to, who sends fakes, who doesn't, how they like to noble, which areas does such and such a player have villages around your front. I don't have time to go into every detail and couldn't give a solution to every situation but be flexible to your situation. Move your local D around to villages being nuked so that they lose less defense and move them infront of close range trains to cripple your enemy's advance in that area.
In a few days, you will notice that your defensive troops are gradually falling. You will want to be in constant contact with players in order to get top ups. Again, play as the white player in chess and do not wait for the village to get cleared before you restack it. If it looks like there is 8 nukes incoming to a village with 7 full Ds in, you are probably going to lose 3-4 full Ds so arrange for another 3-4 to replace them in advance and put your own D in there until their D gets there. That way your opponent is not able to take advantage of your loss of defense. You will be dodging offensive troops (which you will do by sending them all to attack enemy villages and then forgetting about them), but if all goes well defensively, your job is quite limited and you will have a lot of free time and will be under little stress.
This is because you will ideally doing none of the time consuming parts of defending where you have to be on the computer at all times and instead treating it as a normal day of TW. The two techniques I am referring to that you should avoid like the plague are sniping and renobling. These are delay tactics instead of defensive tactics when you have lost all stacks in a village and are advised only as last resorts if they allow you to delay the opponent long enough to get stacks into the village. You should avoid them because they are a waste of your valuable time. Ensure long breaks from TW by having coplayers and having stacks so you don't need to be glued to a screen any more than you usually are.
Depending on your opponent, you will get to a point where your opponent wound up by your defensive actions. They might even moan in the public forums that you prepared for the war in advance or you are too stacked. This is a compliment and you should take it as such. The best part is that you aren't doing anything special and there is little skill or timing involved. Your job is just to ensure your frontline is stacked to the number of Ds you need and let them do all the work. You will find that most players give up attacking against stacks before you give up defending those stacks (as you don't have anything to do except rack up ODD and laugh at your opponents). They might be the opposite and try a tribal Op, but your response is the exact same, except with extra D and you should be able to pattern out an attack in advance and relax in the knowledge that your front is well defended.
Counters
Stacking is the strongest kind of defense in TW and is even stronger in paladin worlds with weapons due to the bonfire. Attacking a player with loads of bonfires is an even bigger nightmare as it makes stacking a lot easier. That said, it isn't foolproof. Like all defensive techniques, they are useless if the player is inactive or does not take the initiative to replace lost troops. If you have enough troops, you can break through the stacks and this defensive strategy really depends on the enemy not hugely outnumbering you. If you are at a late enough stage of the game, you can go against disadvantages in size better due to the increased effect of larger stacks. Other things to be wary of are weak points. It is the defenders job to patch up weak points before the attacker notices them, especially big weak points like players lacking defense. There is also the issue of commitment in that if the tribe is not committed to defending its mates, then the front will be weak all around. A strong frontline relies on the full participation of the tribe, volunteering simply doesn't work. Backline catapulting also helps a bit too but only when you have tribal commitment to it otherwise the player will just recover with no advantage taken. With account manager nowadays, this strategy becomes less and less effective because it drains the server rather than draining the defender's energy in rebuilding.
Conclusion
If you know what you are doing, keep calm and relax, you can deal with most threats quite easily by just having stacks ready in advance and restocking as needed. It is the enemy's job to make you quit and therefore get easy villages and stacking and co-ordinating with your defensive co-ordinator or duke to organise topping up regularly (there is a script out there for this) is the best counter to this as it is not energy intensive for the defender and therefore the defender is less likely to succumb under pressure. At the end of the day, if you don't quit and your enemy counterpart does, then your tribe will probably win the war. Best of luck in your fights and I hope this guide helped you.
Dylan Atkin[/spoil]
