DeletedUser
Guest
I think that this world has a lot of potential but the information isn't getting out to enough people on standard and advanced tactics. I am almost certain that the majority of players don't go to the main forum to search for guides so the only ones they have seen are from previous tribes.
I will be putting up my guides and other guides that i think are extremely useful and would like players to read over them and give some feedback. I also ask for players to post their own guides not matter the standard and hopefully the skill level of the world will improve.
[Guide] A Guide to Premiums
[spoil]Made by Mihaip edited by Thorgar
I know that many of you have premium accounts, but i also know that almost all of you don't know how to use it's advantages to the maximum. This topic will teach the ones that have a premium how to really use it. If you don't have a premium, stop reading this now.
I will start from the settings. Here is how my settings look like:
Notice that i changed the Window width number. What does this do? Well, if you have a village which name is a long one, the name of that village will be put on 2 rows when you look at the overview of the village. Something like this:
This isn't nice, and that is why you must put a higher value in there - i use 1200 for example. It looks like this now:
Secondly, notice that i marked the option to show the quick menu bar. This is very important, because you can put a lot of useful links in it. Here is how mine looks like:
I think you can figure out what each link does:
Recruit - this one does the same thing as the recruit button in the village overview.
Farming - This is a script made o make farming easier. Will go into more deatail later.
LC Script - This is a script that when you get a report back from a farm it tells you exactly how many LC are needed to clear all the res from the farm.
Quick Dodge - Is where you enter in a set of predetermined coordinates be it a barb or one of your own villages, you use it from the rally point and it selects all the troops in the village and inputs the village coords for you. You just send the attack. Handy for when you get online and see an attack landing in a few seconds.
W 30 Forum - you go directly to the forum of this world.
W30 TW Stats - link to tw-stats on this world.
World map - This is the guide for this map. It is an ultimate tool and your best friend in TW.
At the end of this topic, there are all the links that you need to use so that you will make your quick bar the same way.
I have marked the show dynamic menu bar. This is the drop down menu when you go over the ver top links such as Tribe and Rankings for easier navigation.
Map size: This a very nice feature on a premium. You can make the map bigger. I use 15x15, i like to see what's around me. Later on, i will get into details with the map.
Last login: This is where you see the last login along with the IP number of the person who logged in. If you see another IP than your own, change your password right away.
Ignore attacks: Handy if you are getting constant attacks that you know are fakes. With this option, you can go and hide the attack, it's just like you aren't under attack. To ignore an attack, you go in the village which is under attack, you click on the rally point and there you know what to do.
The graphic package: i have not seen any made for the new tribalwars.
It is for Changing the theme of tribalwars. Making it snow in the village or even have it underwater.
HERE are the graphic packages.
Now, moving on the same menu bar, you have the reports department. You can use filters in the reports, so that you get only the reports that you want. Here is how mine looks like:
Notice that i have marked a lot of options at the market. It's because i use it a lot, and i don't want to get a report showing that the x player merchants have arrived and they brought me x resources. The other options that i have marked just help me, by not getting useless reports.
You can create groups here too, and you can save reports this way. Just click on create groups from the far right of the group menu, and from there it's easy:
After this, we have the mail department.
In here, You have an address book and also you can make groups. It's very easy to make a group when you are in the mail menu:
You have 2 ways to put a mail in that group:
When you are in that mail:
And when you are in the overview of the mail, you can put multiple mails in a group at the same time:
By doing this, you save that mail, and it will not be dragged down when you receive other mails.
The notebook option - in here you can put reminders for yourself to send an attack a a certain time or leave instructions for sitters. It's very useful if you use it.
Friends - you can add players in this section, and check the menu to see if they are online. Do not add players outside your tribe in which you don't trust completely
Now, moving along i reach the thing that is the most important one: the groups for the villages.
I have my villages per page set to 5 or sometimes 10 so i can quickly count the amount of villages i have in a certain category.
The all in the group overview will show you all your villages. Villages per page is for quick reference to how many you have. It's easier to have a single page with your villages.
Now, here is how my groups look like:
Here is the explanation for each group:
Attack - all offensive villages.
Defence - all defensive villages.
Full Nuke - Villages with fully built nukes(max population offence).
Full Defence - All villages will full D.
Nobles - villages that have nobles.
Scouts - villages that have scouts.
Snipe - vilalges with pure HC to snipe nukes and defend from long range.
You can also have ones such as
Under_construction - villages that aren't fully built.
The K groups - villages from the respective K's.
_Demolish_attack - attacking villages that need demolishing.
_Demolish_defense - defensive villages that need demolishing.
When i get a village, i decide what kind it will be, based on location, it's built etc. So, i mark the Attack. Secondly, i mark the continent in which the village is. Then, you can mark the Under_construction group if i need to make any kind of buildings in it. Lastly, you mark the Demolish_attack, if i need to demolish something in it. Now, you can put other groups in it, like nobles if you plan on using nobles in the village. With time that passes, you will finish building it, and you can deselect the Under_construction group. You will finish demolishing it and you deselect that group too. After you finish building troops that village will only make gold coins, until something happens and either you lost your attacking troops, or you are under attack. At that point, you remake this whole thing all over again.
To add groups to a village, click on the edit button just under group association in the overview of a village:
A pop up appears, and you just click on the groups that you want, then hit the save groups button:
Using this system of groups will minimize the time you spent on this game, except of course when you need to make coordinated attacks.
Here is how you make the groups:
You go to Groups from your overview, the you click on the groups button in the left side of the screen:
A pop up appears, and there you create new groups or edit existing ones:
I know that adding all of your villages into groups like these ones will take you a LOT of time, but trust me, it's worth it after you do it.
Tip on demolishing buildings:
When you are in the right group (demolish_attack or demolish_defense), you just go into the demolish menu. Now, a lot don't know this: when you are demolishing a village, you can only add 5 demolishing commands at once. You don't need to press once, and wait for the command to show in the building queue, you can press the mouse 5 times real quick on the building that you want to demolish, and after a few seconds, the demolishing commands will appear. You can speed it up, and press the next village:
You can easily demolish villages like this, and with the groups of demolish.
Returning to the map:
When you look at the map, you have 2 buttons just below it:
In the first one, you have the players that you have marked with different colors.
To mark a player with a different color, just click on the player you want, and press highlight on map.
You will go into a menu where you select the color for that player's villages. You can edit a group, and show multiple players with another color.
The second button that you can use, is the pop up menu. I like to mark all options, except the last one (it occupies to much on the map, and i don't want to see all that it gives):
Here are the links of the quick menu bar:
You add them like this:
Recruit:
{graphic}/buildings/barracks.png
{game}&screen=train
Farming:
http://forum.tribalwars.net/staemme/statusicon/user_offline.gif
javascript:sp=0;sw=0;ax=00;scout=1;lc=100;hv=0;cat=0;ra=0;coords='90|524 76|526';var%20doc=document;if(window.frames.length>0)doc=window.main.document;url=document.URL;if(url.indexOf('screen=place')==-1)alert('This%20script%20needs%20to%20be%20run%20from%20the%20rally%20point');coords=coords.split("%20");index=0;farmcookie=document.cookie.match('(^|
?ssa=([^;]*)(;|$)');if(farmcookie!=null)index=parseInt(farmcookie[2]);if(index>=coords.length)alert('last village');if(index>=coords.length)index=0;coords=coords[index];coords=coords.split("|");index=index+1;cookie_date=new%20Date(2009,11,11);document.cookie ="ssa="+index+";expires="+cookie_date.toGMTString ();doc.forms[0].x.value=coords[0];doc.forms[0].y.value=coords[1];insertUnit(doc.forms[0].spear,sp);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].sword,sw);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].axe,ax);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].spy,scout);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].light,lc);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].heavy,hv);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].ram,ra);insertUnit(doc.forms[0].catapult,cat);end();
LC Script:
http://en30.tribalwars.net/graphic/buildings/stable.png?1
javascript:function%20attack(){var%20tbls%20=%20document.getElementsByTagName('table');for(var%20i=0;i<tbls.length;i++){var%20thead%20=%20tbls.getElementsByTagName('th')[0];if(thead){if(thead.firstChild.nodeValue%20==='Defender:'){var%20defVill%20=%20tbls;var%20anchor%20=%20defVill.getElementsByTagName('a');anchor=anchor[anchor.length-1];var%20link=anchor.getAttribute('href');link=link.split("=");link=link[link.length-1];var%20url="game.php?village=$2&screen=place&mode=command&target="+link;return%20url;}}}}function%20removeHTMLTags(strInputCode){return%20strInputCode.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g,"");}function%20farmers(){var%20trow=document.getElementsByTagName('tr');for(var%20i=0;i<trow.length;i++){var%20thead=trow.getElementsByTagName('th')[0];if(thead){if(thead.firstChild.nodeValue==='Resources%20scouted:'){var%20tcell=trow.getElementsByTagName('td')[0];var%20finText=removeHTMLTags(tcell.innerHTML);finText=finText.replace(/\./gi,"");finText=finText.split("%20");var%20resources=0;for(k=0;k<3;k++){var%20haul=parseInt(finText[k]);resources=resources+haul;}var%20lightCav=resources/80;lightCav=Math.ceil(lightCav);var%20answer=confirm("Total%20resources%20scouted:%20"+resources+'\n'+"Light%20cav%20required:%20"+'\n\n'+lightCav+'\n\n'+"(Clicking%20ok%20will%20take%20you%20to%20the%20rally%20point)");if(answer){var%20link=attack();window.location.assign(link)}else{break;}}}}}farmers()
Quick Dodge:
http://forum.tribalwars.net/staemme/buttons/report.gif
javascript:coords='582|367';var%20doc=document;if(window.frames.length>0)doc=window.main.document;url=document.URL;if(url.indexOf('screen=place')==-1)alert('This%20script%20needs%20to%20be%20run%20from%20the%20rally%20point');coords=coords.split("%20");index=Math.round(Math.random()*(coords.length-1));coords=coords[index];coords=coords.split("|");doc.forms[0].x.value=coords[0];doc.forms[0].y.value=coords[1];insertUnit(doc.forms[0].ram,%200);javascript:Array.prototype.contains = function(obj) {var i, listed = false;for (i=0; i<this.length; i++) {if (this === obj) {listed = true;break;}}return listed;};function getGameDoc() {getdoc = window.document;if(! getdoc.URL.match('game\.php')) {for(var i=0; i<window.frames.length; i++) {if(window.frames.document.URL.match('game\.php')) {getdoc = window.frames.document;}}}return getdoc;};units = Array('spear','sword','axe','spy','light','ram','catapult','knight');doc = getGameDoc();form = doc.units;inputs = form.getElementsByTagName('input');for (var i=0; i<inputs.length; i++) {if (inputs.type == 'text') {if (units.contains(inputs.name)) {next = inputs.nextSibling;do {next = next.nextSibling;} while (next.nodeType != 1);s = next.firstChild.nodeValue;insertUnit(form.elements[inputs.name], next.firstChild.nodeValue.replace(/\(/g, "").replace(/\)/g, ""));}}};en
W 30 Forum:
http://forum.tribalwars.net/images/icons/icon1.gif
http://forum.tribalwars.net/forumdisplay.php?f=169
For external ones such as this and TW stats check the box marked Open forum in a new window
W30 TW Stats:
http://static.twstats.com/image/global.png
http://www.twstats.com/en30/index.php
World map:
http://tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:N-YbBOZoFKLfKM:http://www.opus.eu/assets/images/mini-globe.gif
http://en30.tribalwarsmap.com/
Here you go, a complete guide on how to effectively use a premium account.
If you can't do something from this guide post here. Also, i can make these things to anyone who requests (except putting the villages in groups - i let you do the real work)
[/spoil]
[Guide] Art of war: A few basic tactics
[spoil]Art of war: A few basic tactics
This is a little thread to give you the best chance against anyone we come up against. An obvious starting point is of course your army.
Specialization is key in this game. There is no point in have any attack troops in a defensive village or vice versa... It doesn't make sense.
You have usually 4 types of villages... Attack,, Defence,, Noble and Scout.
Attack: I usually have 2900LC, 275 MA, 230 ram, 30 catapults and the rest axe approx 6.5k. Then there is my personal favourite of 5000 LC 219 rams. The the is the full MA about 4000, 219 rams gets full pop and there are many, many other variations of these and you can find your own. This is just a guide for the newcomers.
Defence: I have found that the most solid defence is 10k swords 10k archers . Run it in the sim basically nothing beats it. It does take forever to build though. There is also the support-defence village which consists of aprox 7k spears 3K archers and the rest HC. This is mainly support not overly strong but quick to build, quick to move and does the job.
Scout: They usually have 5k scouts, 5k spears and 5k swords or all scout.
Noble: In an offensive village or for the more defensive player HC heavy as they can be used in both attack and defence pair them with spears or archers so you can hold the village once you take it.
War!!!
When fighting in a war it is always a given that you scout out the targets and from the information decide which attack force you will use. But the points that people often forget, even experienced ones.
1. When a squad is taking out a target all villages must be cleared before any are nobled to avoid morale penaltys later.
2. Fakes: again very obvious but must be done everytime you are up against a player. For newcomers a fake is sending an attack consisting of 1-2 units usually a spear axe or 4 rams in a row to make them think you are trying to noble the village. This causes confusion and will disorientate the players defences. Making it more likely he will make a mistake. It also helps if you send 1 scout (or 4 depending on world settings) with a fake in the event that they try and dodge it/ don't have scouts in the village... then you will get a scout report. It is rare that this happens but it does happen. Also there are support fakes too. A player can see if you are sending support to a village to keep it after nobling so if you send a fake support (1 sword) to arrive after the 4 fake rams they will usually fall for it.
3. When you take a village in a big war, against big players. If you have demolished the wall and you cannot fill the village with a very heavy stack, you must withdraw all troops from the village as any attack force sent against it will take it out. If/when they retake the village they always send support and that is when you strike. You wipe out their support and can retake the village or leave it and attack again every day until you have sufficiently damaged his troop count.
4. If you are being attacked by a player and he has wiped out your defences in your village. "The best defence is a good offence" sound familiar. Attack yourself. Much like in chess lose the bishop/knight/rook and take the queen. You must attack your own village with a train of 3 nobles. This will lower the loyalty of the village to a point where the enemy will take it on the first attack of their train. When their train hits their first noble will take the village. The second will kill/be killed by the support of the first and will continue till the last noble strikes where the support will be the greatest and he will be killing his own troops with defensive troops and will suffer heavy losses. That is when you swoop in to take back your village. Again if the wall is demolished try and rebuild it but refer back to point 3.
5. I always prefer to single out the village i will lose the least troops on and i take it out as efficiently as i possibly can without demolishing the walls. Then i stack it with 2-3 villages worth of heavy defence troops (approx 9k spears 24k swords 24k archers 2-4k scouts). This way he cannot scout the village to tell what he is up against, The level 20 wall with the mass of troops will crush many waves of attacks without budging and when they finally do manage to take the village back refer back to point 3 and the damage will be immense, and crippling not only to his army but also to his/her hubris.
Guide by Thorgar[/spoil]
[Guide] Backtiming
[spoil]The only defence in my mind, at this point of the game! Guide by Simz1987
My guide to countering an attack Ok while doing this I am making a few assumptions
1) you were online when the attack was sent and know what speed it is coming at (ram/noble)
2) This is not a train, so is only 1-2 incomings Before actually taking any of the steps to countering, make sure you have filled up all your building/troop queues to use all your spare resources the attacker could take, and any remaining resources, you market dodge (send them to another village, but cancel it after the attack, bare in mind you only have 5 minutes to do this before you can no longer cancel).
The Steps – Noble Attack
1) You need to write down the exact arrival time of the attack (you have to do this before the attack lands as reports don’t provide an accurate time of arrival since they only round to the minute)
2) Then you need to work out the time it would take for the attacking unit (ram or noble) to travel from your village to the attackers
3) Then you need to add these times together, and you will be left with the time his troops will return home after this attack
4) Now work out how long it would take for your rams to travel from your village to the attackers village and subtract that from the arrival time of his army
5) You should now be left with exact time you need to launch your attack Example Incoming landing at: 17:15:51 ST The time it takes for a noble to reach you village: 0:50:00 Therefore the time the attackers army will return home is 18:05:51 Time for rams to reach attackers village: 0:42:51 Time you need to launch your counter: 17:23:00 You want to launch your attack as close to that time as possible without going under it. So launching at 17:23:01 would be perfect.
Ram Attack This one can be a little bit more tricky if you want to make sure that you get it right.
1) As soon as you see an incoming attack, check to see if you can send 1 scout at the attacker (make sure it is the same village he is attacking from) and have it land before his attack. If you are able to do this it will make things much better, but is not necessarily a requirement.
2) Once your scout attack has landed view the report and copy the link “Attack again with all troops” and make a QB link like the quick dodge link (see Guide to Quick Bar Links)
3) Now once the attack comes close you need to split your troops into 3 groups; group 1 will be the troops you don’t want to attack with (spears/swords/archers/nobles); group 2 will be a small group of axes and cats (about 50 axes and 20 cats should be sufficient); group 3 will be your main offensive troops (axes/LC/MA/rams)
4) Group 1, you D troops, you will send off to dodge the incoming attack, and only cancel the dodge much later
5) Group 2, your axes and cats, you will send at the attackers village 1 minute before his attack lands, with your cats targeting his rally point
6) Group 3, your offensive troops, you will dodge the attack with, but cancel their dodge so that they arrive home 1 second after the attack arrives (BE CAREFUL, make sure you don’t accidentally have your troops arrive home before his attack lands) then as soon as your troops return home click on the QB link which you made earlier which will bring up a confirmation screen with all your offensive troops to attack the other guys village. Click ok as fast as you can, and you are done.
7) Once all this is done THEN you can cancel group 1’s dodge so they return home safely.
NOTE: All counters can be countered unless you make them land very soon after their troops return.
In this example you should have destroyed the opponents rally point preventing them from countering your attack, however, if they have defense at home and/or don’t decide to dodge your first attack then you may not destroy their rally point. If you then have left a 10-15 second gap between their returning troops and your attacking troops they can easily dodge and counter your troops.
If you don’t have a premium account, or your scouts cannot get to the attacker in time to be able to create a QB link to attack your opponent, then you will have to open up a new tab with rally point and your opponents coordinates already entered and attack as fast as you can. However, as stated above, if your opponent doesn’t dodge your cats then this may back fire, so it is a risk you will have to weigh up.
The other option is to counter with only axes and LC, where you follow the steps for the noble attack exactly, except you exchange the ram travel times for axe travel times. The down side to this is if the attacker has a lot of defense and/or a high wall you could lose a lot, if not all your troops. Which is why generally you just need to dodge the attack, and carry on as normal. Additionally, keep in mind that counters can be countered too. So, you may want to send some ram/axe/LC fakes which are timed to land at the same time your opponent should be sending his/her counter attacks. Minimally this should cause a screen refresh, which could delay them sending the counter. Better yet, perhaps they didn't realise it was a fake and decided to dodge.
For those of you who don’t use premium accounts and cant workout the time it will take for troops to move between villages quickly, the attack planner in http://www.twstats.com/index.php will help you do this relatively quickly (see Guide to Quick Bar for more details on TW Stats Attack Planner).[/quote][/spoil]
[Guide] Population
[spoil]Population
Village size seems to be a very hot topic and i am not going to say what is the best because different villages suit different playing styles. I am however going to talk about the dreaded 12k point village. Its downfalls and how it decreases the power of a tribe by such an immense amount you wouldn't even believe. The number of population taken up by a full 12,154 point village is 4188. This is every building possible at full level, some arguing that it gives the fastest turn around. 1 you're an idiot, shut up!. 2 it is my most hated of all things unholy in tribal wars with the exception only to defence in an offensive village.
First off Village HQ never needs to be more then level 20 (for academy) simple enough. It would be of a suitable speed at level 15 but it's handy if someone catties the academy you'd have to rebuild it to level 20 before you can rebuild the academy.
Warehouse and farm takes up no population so that should obviously be at full as should your res buildings. Wall should always be level 20 in every village. Exception is you can keep the warehouse lower if you are active enough to manage the res effectively and this will help you out with moral in both attacking and defending.
The hiding place should not be made unless you are in the first month or two of the game, before players have multiple nobles, it is a waste of space and an eyesore.
Markets should not be above level 20, They take up a surprising amount of population.
Statues are only 10 population, they can be amazingly handy for building a paladin in a village which is more then 6 hrs away to support. Whether it be to relocate your paladin to the edge to give it whatever defensive weapon fits best with your troop count or if you only have only noble in a village and want to make sure you get a close by village in 4 runs. Those are just 2 examples of statues being good there are many more.
Smithy can be downgraded to as low a level as you like depending on what troops you are using in the village. You will still be able to mint coins but you will not be able to build a noble and if an enemy finds out that you downgraded your smithy they can catapult your academy and you will have to rebuild the smithy back up to level 20 before you can rebuild the academy which costs time and res. You have to decide whether the extra troops are worth it.
Stables and barracks can be downgraded to level 15 and 20 respectively and not add a massive amount of time onto building queues for the reward of an extra troops. All the buildings add up. I personally prefer to keep them maxed out because i am always making troops.
Also the highest level the workshop should ever be is level 2 unless you build a catapult village which very few people do and use effectively. So try and keep it to level 2.
I build my villages to 9,617 points regardless of whether it is attack or defence so it keeps the enemy guessing as to what your village is. I also swap the names of the villages as frequently as possible in attacks by swapping their names around or naming them all the same thing. It makes it far harder to coordinate against and makes fakes look better. My favourite is to name them all Noble so people with premium accounts that can rename attacks will get extra confused and forget which have been renamed.
Final conclusion: My personal village of 9,617 points brings in a total of 3,270 population for buildings. That is a reduction of over 918 population. You may be thinking that 918 is alright but its not a huge amount of troops. Well to you i put forward the following.
Take Bio! as an example and round it up for convenience: 8,500 villages.
Now a little bit of math.
8,500(villages)*918(extra troops) = 7,803,000(extra troops for the tribe)
Now if that doesn't impress you and make you change your way nothing will.
Guide by Thorgar[/spoil]
[Guide] How to build an ultimate defense complete with ratios
[spoil]Here are some great suggestions on how to build an ultimate defense complete with ratios:
I would like to propose that the use of the offense/defense simulator should be reserved only for one purpose, and that is to test the result of your attack before actually making it. I would like to propose that the use of the simulator will tend to confuse you if you make extensive use of it to determine the best ratio for defensive units. It will also tend to confuse you if you are trying to pick the best offense units ratio. I will discuss offensive units ratio in the next section. If you do not use the simulator, how do you determine the best defensive units ratio? The answer is actually more simple and straightforward than you could imagine.
For all units, there are 3 defense parameters.
They are General Defense (GD), Cavalry Defense (CD) and Archer Defense (AD).
Let's look at the GD/CD/AD of the 3 barracks defensive units:
Spears: 15/45/20 Total of GD/CD/AD added up is: 80 Cost: 90 resources and 1 villager
Swords: 50/15/40 Total of GD/CD/AD added up is: 105 Cost: 130 resources and 1 villager
Archers: 50/40/5 Total of GD/CD/AD added up is: 95 Cost: 190 resources and 1 villager
2 questions:
1. Does the total of the GD/CD/AD matter?
2. Why is it that every single unit has some kind of weakness? For the first question: Does the total of the GD/CD/AD matter?
The total of the GD/CD/AD does matter!! The GD/CD/AD is the judges the defensive resistance against the 3 attacking categories. The larger the number, the more you are able to withstand the 3 kinds of offensive attacks. Now, take note of which two units have the highest GD/CD/AD total. -- For the second question: Why is it that every single unit has some kind of weakness? -- This question is the very reason for a defensive unit ratio. Each of the 3 defense units alone will have a weakness, but if you put 2 or more of these units together, their defensive strength averages up and the strength of one defensive unit cancels out the weakness of another! Another way to look at this is that when you combine 2 or more different units together, you essential created a new kind of unit with the defensive strength of the average of the 2 or more kind.
For example, if you put a spear and a sword together, you get: spear: 15/45/20 sword: 50/15/40 Together: 32.5/30/30 GD = (15+50)/2 = 32.5 CD = (45+15)/2 = 30 AD = (20+40)/2 = 30 Therefore, when you put the spear and the sword together, you have created or designed a new unit with GD/CD/AD of 32.5/30/30.
This might be a paradigm shift for some of you, but I want you to keep this concept in mind. -- Since the number of villagers for each village is limited by a level 30 farm, which supports 24,000 villagers, you have to be extremely selective about the kind of defensive units you have so as to maximize your defensive strength.
Now let's look at 3 reasonable and common ratios for defensive units: -- spears/swords 1:1 ratio GD/CD/AD: 32.5/30/30 Total GD/CD/AD: 92.5 spears/swords/archers 1:1:2 ratio GD/CD/AD: 41.25/35/17.5 Total GD/CD/AD: 93.75 swords/archers 1:1 ratio GD/CD/AD: 50/27.5/22.5 Total GD/CD/AD: 100 –
Remember I told you that you should not use a simulator when determining defensive unit ratio? The simple reason is that you could average up the GD/CD/AD of the ratio you chose and determine the best ratio just by looking at the GD/CD/AD of the ratio you created. Another point is that the total GD/CD/AD is very important as the higher your total GD/CD/AD, the more defense you have generally (This is especially crucial if your attacker could not scout you successfully.)
If we classify defense strength as follows: 10 - 20: poor 20 - 30: average 30 - 40: good 40 - 50: excellent The "spears/swords 1:1 ratio" has a low good defense for GD and average defense for everything else. The "spears/swords/archers 1:1:2 ratio" has excellent defense for GD, good defense for CD and poor defense for AD. The "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" has godly defense for GD, and average defense for both CD and AD. However, notice that the CD is higher than AD. Now, isn't this much simpler and clear than running a few hundred simulations? I will promise you that it will become even more clear if you read my section on the offense ratio.
I would propose that we should pick the ultimate defense ratio based on 2 criteria:
1. Total GD/CD/AD.
2. The villagers/performance ratio of the offense units. If we based our decision solely on the total GD/CD/AD, the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" wins. What is the villagers/performance ratio of the offensive units?
The villagers/performance ratio of the offensive units is the amount of offensive strength you get for each villager you use on an offensive unit. Therefore, here are the villagers/performance ratio of axemen, light cavalry and mounted archer:
Axemen: villagers; 1, offensive strength; 40 villagers/performance ratio: 40/1 = 40
Light cavalry: villagers: 4, offensive strength: 130 villagers/performance ratio: 32.5
Mounted archer: villagers: 5 offensive strength: 120 villagers/performance ratio: 24
Based on the villagers/performance ratio, if we know that the largest offensive force can only consist of an army made up of 23,000 villagers, we could have 23,000 axemen OR 5,750 light cavalry (23000/4) OR 4,600 mounted archers (23000/5).
Total maximum offensive strength of axemen = 23,000 * 40 = 920,000 Total maximum offensive strength of light cavalry = 5,750 * 130 = 747,500 Total maximum offensive strength of mounted archers = 4,600 * 120 = 552,000 Based on the information provided by the maximum offensive strength of each offensive units, you want a lot of defense for axemen, followed by a lesser amount for light cavalary and an even lesser amount for mounted archer.
The "spears/swords 1:1 ratio" has only a low good defense (GD: 32.5) against axemen, so it will suffer greatly against an axemen attack, so this ratio is out.
The "spears/swords/archers 1:1:2 ratio" has excellent defense against axemen (GD: 41.25) and good defense against light cavalry, but it is fatally weak against mounted archers (AD: 17.5). I would not pick this ratio based on the fatal weakness.
The "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" has a godly defense against axemen (GD: 50), very nice! Furthermore, it has average but adequate defenses against the light cavalry and mounted archers. I guess it is pretty clear based on the total GD/CD/AD and also the villagers/performance ratio that the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" is the best ratio for defensive units.
How then to pick the ultimate offensive units ratio?
If a defender has 123 spears, 251 swords, 80 archers, 50 light cavalry and 200 axemen, how do you pick your offensive units ratio? Would you use the simulator again? Is there an easier way? The answer is yes! Some people recommend that you should use light cavalry against swords, axemen against spears and mounted archer against archer. But unfortunately, life is not so simple when you face 123 spears, 251 swords, 80 archers, 50 light cavalry and 200 axemen. Furthermore, the combat system in TW is such that when you face such a diverse army, it is not the case that your axemen will fight only against the defender's spears and slaughter them only, but that your axemen has to fight spears, swords, archers, light cavalry and also axemen all together!
Units like swords and archers will slaughter your axemen. So, what is the best way to determine the best offensive force to use against a diverse defensive army? The easiest and most effective way is to total up all the defensive strength (GD/CD/AD) for all the defensive force and use only one type of offensive unit that is best against the weakest total defensive strength of the diverse army. I know this might sound complex, but let me give you a simple example: -- If you face a diverse army of 1 spear, 2 archers and 3 swords, here are their GD/CD/AD:
spear: 15/45/20 sword: 50/15/40 archer: 50/40/5 (3 swords is 150/30/120) (2 archers is 100/80/10) Total for 1 spear, 2 archers and 3 swords is: 265/155/150 This means that this diverse defense force is the weakest on AD (150 only), so you should send in only mounted archers.
Some might ask: should I also send in my extra axemen? This is a very crucial question and the answer is: "Not if you can help it". For this case, if you have enough mounted archers to nicely defeat the defender, then you should never send in any other offensive units. This is because for example, if you send axemen in addition to mounted archers, your axemen is fighting against a stronger GD (265!!) while your mounted archers is fighting against a weak AD (140 only). Your axemen will suffer a larger casualty compared to your mounted archers and therefore sending your axemen will mess things up and increase your overall casualties. If you don't believe this, run a few simulations and you will see the light.
As an attacker, keep this powerful thought in mind: You get to pick the defense (GD/CD/AD) that you fight against. Pick the weakest!!! -- All these offensive strategy is based on the assumption that you could successfully scout your enemy. Therefore scouting is of paramount importance, it is like winning half the battle. I guess it is understandable that people devote a whole village to producing scouts. Also, try your best not to let your enemy scout your village, but however, even if they managed to scout your village, the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" ensures that you have the best chance of survival. In fact, in the next section you will learn that no single offensive force exist in TW to defeat the ultimate "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" defense force.
Finally We are Running some Simulations
Let's run simulations on our best defensive units ratio against the 3 largest offensive force possible. The defense force and offense force will each comprise of 23,000 villagers. Based on the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio", we have 11,500 swords and 11,500 archers, protected by a level 20 wall. 23,000 axemen vs 11,500 archers/11,500 swords (level 20 wall):
Attacker: 23,000 axemen Attacker casualties: 23,000 axemen
Defender: 11,500 archers/11,500 swords Defender casualties: 2,765 archers/2,765 swords
WOW!! The defenders lost so little and slaughtered the largest axemen army in TW. In fact, the defenders could slaughter 3 such armies in a row and only get slaughtered by the 4th army of 23,000 axemen.
If you run the simulator a few times, each round decreasing the number of defenders casualties. 5,750 light cavalry vs 11,500 archers/11,500 swords (level 20 wall):
Attacker: 5,750 light cavalry Attacker casualties: 5,750 light cavalry Defender: 11,500 archers/11,500 swords Defender casualties: 4,962 archers/4,962 swords
4,600 mounted archer vs 11,500 archers/11,500 swords (level 20 wall):
Attacker: 4,600 mounted archer Attacker casualties: 4,600 mounted archer Defender: 11,500 archers/11,500 swords Defender casualties: 4,254 archers/4,254 swords
When attacked by light cavalry or mounted archers, the defenders lost less than 50% of the army. Also, the defenders are able to slaughter 2 full rounds of mounted archers attackers and almost 2 full rounds of light cavalry before getting annihilated.
Some concluding thoughts:
Imagine you have 2 villages with 11,500 archers/11,500 swords in each village. Imagine that these 2 villages are only next to each other. When one village is under massive attack, you send all the 11,500 archers/11,500 swords from the village not under attack to support the attacked village. What kind of offensive army will be needed to defeat this strategy? What if you have 3 such villages? Your attackers will be so depressed when you keep slaughtering their forces.
AND also presenting...! Heavy cavalry are the game's pariah. They are attractive to players who marvel at their enormous stats. They are also the second most expensive unit in the game (next to a noble). The real problem with Heavy Cav, is that you can't train enough of them to make it worthwhile. The most you can have would be approximately 3,800. Not enough to defend a village by themselves. They would last half as long as a village maxed out with archers and swords. Heavy Cav are slower than Light Cav, and they carry less. They're rather expensive to be considered for use as farming troops anyway. The only thing they are good for is fast defensive support. They can get to a village in distress much faster than swordsmen or archers. That's all. That's the only reason you might consider training Heavy Cav. Not a good enough reason to spend all of those resources and occupy 6 villagers. Especially since you can now speed up the travel time of support troops by including your paladin. If you feel the need to train an expensive unit that eats up population, I recommend training a few catapults.
They defend well when you're not using them to attack, and they are the only tool in the game that allows you to affect your enemy's capacity to fight back. If you have 100 catapults, you can pretty much flatten a level 10 building in one attack. If you have 250 catapults, you can usually (in one attack) reduce his farm to below the point where he will need to upgrade it again before he can replace any of his troops. The population required to operate the buildings in a village are fed by the farm as well. If the farm level drops below the point that his village buildings require, everything in the village stops. All training, research, and construction is cancelled until the farm gets upgraded to the appropriate level. The next time you think about spending all those resources on Heavy Cavalry, remember the catapult. It'll save you some resources, and give you a much more devastating weapon. All the best on building your very own devastating army.
Guide by unknown[/spoil]
[Guide] burns the voice of experience
[spoil]Introduction— READ THIS FIRST
This is not a traditional “guide”. It discusses three primary topics and the various aspects of them. It is very long, so I’d suggest just reading the parts that interest you. Most of my experience comes from my time in the original TW tribe of World 1 (The before and infinitely better version of T:V), so you will find that many of the examples use TW.
This has been reviewed by Mimelim and qwe4rty.
About this Guide
Part 1 discusses how to measure skill of players and tribes- (good for Advanced Players)
Part 2 discusses how to go about exposing others and be an intelligent poster- (good for normal/intelligent posters)
Part 3 discusses abandoned taking and faking tactics- (good for any player)
Part 1: Skill? How do I measure how good someone is?
Why did I write this? I got tired of people talking about how good one player is, especially when they have no idea what characteristics a “top” or “best” or even “good” player has. Contrary to popular belief, OD statistics do not mean someone is good.
What does ODD actually mean about skill?
As one of the most misleading statistics regarding skill, this simply indicates who has been attacked the most. Because of the nature of support, players can be stacked to the brim and have high ODD without really having any skill in defending. Good examples of this are Blondeamon (World 1), UnDo (World 1), and tamo (World 1). Thus, there are many unskilled players with high ODD and plenty skilled players with low ODD. This statistic is not a good measure of anything.
What does ODA actually mean about skill?
A high ODA statistic at the beginning and middle of the world is not a sure indicator of skill unless it is constantly maintained. Anyone can chuck armies at other players and accumulate troop kills, especially if the other players don’t know how to effectively stack and defend properly. However, at the later stages of the world, it becomes indicative of a player who is not only aggressive but also efficient in rebuilding his armies. There is a substantial time and therefore attack efficiency difference between producing an army in 16.2 days (the fastest possible in speed 1) and producing a slightly more powerful one in more time. Thus, high ODA stats do not necessarily indicate good players, but good players will have high ODA stats.
What establishes the different tiers of players?
There are three primary categories that determine how well a player will do in a world, namely activity, skill, and the player’s tribe, in no particular order. However, in determining who the “best players” are, we need to disregard activity and player’s tribe and isolate only skill. Obviously, we will only see the “best players” if they are active. What it comes down to, however, is efficiency. Anyone can learn all the tactics, given that albeit many, there is a finite number of tactics to be utilized. Due to the nature of the game (gaining more and more villages), the game shifts from micro to macro. There is no one best player, because it is impossible to directly compare players unless they are right next to each other.
How efficiently can one farm 500 villages? How efficiently and quickly can one rebuild 100 armies? How efficiently and correctly can one decipher 500 incoming attacks and react?
1 hour of farming vs. 3 hours of farming
1 hour of rebuilding vs. 3 hours of rebuilding
1 hour of deciphering vs. 3 hours of deciphering
There are two different types of expert players.
There are beginning experts (examples include Mimelim and vpar2) who are both active and skilled at the beginning and pull ahead of everyone else. I’m not talking about the very beginning, when anyone can be #1, but rather once the nobling capacity has been reached such that one can be consistently maintain the #1 position if he remains active. They know when to build the next farm level, when to conserve their early armies, when to noble, and efficiently farm so that they don’t waste time. This is a game very focused on micro.
In contrast, there are middle and late game experts (refer to Top 5 at the end) who know the micro and macro aspects of the game cold. 99% of the tactics that one can think of are already a given. If you ever thought you could rebuild armies efficiently or manage lots of villages well, you haven’t seen anything unless you’ve seen these village setups. Every button click saves time, especially when repeated 100 times. Rebuilding has been perfected such that every action is optimized to conserve time. With the new additions of Mass Recruitment screens and the like, this aspect is getting toned down a bit, though it does exist.
Any mixture of not knowing most of the tactics, or not knowing all the nuances of quick rebuilding separates the next tiers of players.
Mimelim’s Addendum:
To be honest, there is no single, "best" player because it’s impossible to compare people directly unless they played near each other. The top players rarely do this, just because the worlds are too big.
Top Tier Players - Players that adapt and learn this game constantly and can consistently outplay any opponent. Their only limitation is how active they are. They approach optimal performance consistently and don't have any major or minor flaws in their games. When you talk to them you can tell that they really do have such a strong grasp of the game that they can react to new situations with ease. I would say in my experience and extrapolating from my interactions with thousands of players on every world, there are maybe 2-6 people like this per world currently playing. Maybe 70 total and that seems very high to me right now. Signs of TTP, stellar game performance, novel approaches to the game/tactics, etc. One example of novelty would be Openeye’s hcav strategy. It’s probably been done before, but never on such a systemic and wide scale. They don’t follow rigid guidelines, and they know what they’re doing.
Good Players - Players that know the fundamentals of the game, but really don't have a core understanding of how to optimize and beat new opponents. They are a bit like the TTP without the creativity. Understand how to attack and defend, but really lack the ability to change gears at the drop of a hat and survive in very different circumstances. Maybe 30-50 of these per world, no idea how many total. Signs of GP, decent growth, but nothing stellar, can follow standard growth easily, aka, when things are easy and going well can grow quickly, but when things get complex they start to falter etc.
What establishes the different tiers of tribes?
Why did I write this? After being in many tribes since TW on World 1 (24/7 and –R– on World 12 for example), I realize that the general player quality had risen, but the general tribe quality had crashed. Consequently, I conclude that TW is the best tribe Tribalwars.net has seen, though perhaps if you chose a random player alone from the original 800 Tribalwar.com players, you probably wouldn’t be too impressed (please remember that the tribe limit in W1 was 500 members).
The community, the communication, the striving for optimization, and the lust for war simply can’t be matched. That having been said, those are the four categories that define the strength of a tribe. How well do players communicate with their teammates? How good are the leaders at steering the tribe? How much is each player willing to sacrifice for his tribe and how much does he trust his tribe? How many players really seek to optimize their system and how good are they? How often is your tribe at war, and were the wars against other good tribes?
Having come from a gaming community beforehand, many of the 800 players from TW already knew each other. Because of this, the vast majority, like myself, always saw any village lost as their own village lost. Heck, I once had only 2 villages with defense in them, because all of my other villages’ defenses were out supporting tribemates. How many players in how many tribes would be willing to do that? Do they trust their tribe enough? Do they trust their leaders enough?
In communication, because we (TW) were a closed community, we had basically no spies until very late. Thus, we effectively and actively used our forum, and our irc channels were full. How many tribes can say the same and to what degree? Since tribes that lack an outside community are obviously everywhere, the trick is simply to have competent, trustworthy leaders and a successful system for spykeeping. Remember, TW was a tribe with 800 members (though this quickly dropped to 500 within the first couple months due to boredom; the member cap of World 1 was 500). Most worlds have 100 member or fewer tribe limits. Look how many problems leaders have in keeping a rein on just those 100. Now multiply that by 5-8x.
The majority of what establishes the tribe is the individual members. In a slow world such as W1, inactivity was always a problem. However, this is easily solved through optimization, in order that the game doesn’t take as much time. One less button click that needs to be repeated 300 times, is at least 15 minutes saved. The sum of a tribe’s parts certainly doesn’t equate to the whole, but if the sum of the parts isn’t very big, then the whole won’t be very big either.
In the last regard for measuring the tribe is the aggressive nature of the tribe. This is the culmination of all three previously stated characteristics. This is what proves to everyone else that your tribe is indeed the best. How many tribes can a tribe defeat? How many at one time and at what odds? How soundly? I haven’t seen a more aggressive tribe than TW. Ever. Even when everyone in our tribe had only 1-2 villages, we still made tribes disband (see Destny). From then on, we were constantly at war with at least ¼ of the top 20 at every point in time for the next year. We took W1 by storm and never let go.
In conclusion, the level of one’s tribe depends on the strength of each of the four afore-named factors.
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1810719&postcount=61
Qwe4rty’s Addendum on Community:
There is one aspect that I see is prevalent in today's game play that I think is seriously damaging to the sense of community in a tribe. In order to support a community, there needs to be a basis of stability. To me, the merging and the constant recycling of members really makes this difficult. An error that I see many tribes make are the constant merge wars to gain members/territory. What they fail to realize this merging essentially leads to winning with no risk attached. Territory is gained without wars, and people are gained who have little to no previous experience working with the tribe and building that foundation of community.
A great example of this would be -R- on W12. After several top tribes disbanded (XiG, etc), -R- began recruiting the high-pointed players who now had no home. This went on for some time, with -R- eventually gaining another half-continent of territory with no fighting. They then merged with GAM and ESQ, giving them another 2+ continents on the map. People at the time congratulated them for their merges, for maintaining their high rank, despite the fact that it takes no skill to accomplish a merge. They didn't war for quite some time, as they were getting territory at a faster rate than what would be possible if they had to fight for it. Essentially, they took the easy road, and their original members or members who enjoyed war became bored with it all and slowly started going inactive or moving to other worlds. Once they started to war again, their coordination, communication, and trust between members were all in shambles. The quality of -R- had greatly diminished, yet players on the externals still held them up to their previous standard. Their reputation on the boards was slaughtered, morale was low, and the tribe fell apart.
Part 2: How to expose others using logic and evidence; how to be an intelligent poster
People bullshit. Anyone can. It’s up to you to expose them and make the look downright foolish. It’s simply a question of using logic. This is hard to do on an online forum, however, here are some examples where the correct usage of data successfully exposes these people.
TWStats, TWPlus, Mail Archives, Looking up forum posts, and Screen Capturing should all be your friends.
However, there are a lot of guidelines that one should generally follow, so as to make your argument at least readable and more able to be agreed with by others.
1. Know what you are talking about.
a. If you don’t know what you are talking about, don’t post. Any post that doesn’t add anything meaningful to the conversation or that can’t be backed up is useless and can only hurt you.
2. Don’t curse.
a. Very simple. Very rarely is the F word needed, and certainly never in this game or on the forums. “Shit” should really only be used when no other word can be used to fully express something.
3. Longer is not better
a. If you write a long post, not a lot of people will read it (one exception is perhaps this guide). Some people will, and they tend to be the more logical ones, but the vast majority won’t. If you write concisely and clearly, you’ll find that you can appeal to a wider part of your audience, which allows more people to agree with you.
4. Settle for the majority.
a. Don’t argue every point with a player, especially if he is intentionally misquoting and giving you the run-around. Keep your goal on track, and destroy his credibility without losing your own.
5. Read and Re-read.
a. Make sure you read every post in the thread you are replying to. If you haven’t, new information may come up that will blow your post out of the water and make it look like a joke. People don’t respect others who don’t read. Before you post, re-read your paragraphs and think about the possible responses to it. What do you hope others will say about that post? Know what you're talking about.
6. Respect others.
a. This should be obvious. There’s no need for real-life insults, and it sheds poor light on whatever argument you are trying to make. Any intelligent person who is reading the thread will understand from the content of everyone’s posts who is an idiot. Use your content to do something, not your insults. Most people are guilty of this at some point, heck, I am too. Just make sure it doesn’t pervade many of your posts.
7. Content > Form (but only slightly)
a. No one wants to read “i cn’t believ u r actully riting this.” There’s really no excuse for it. “Oh, but I’m foreign.” If you’re foreign, then it makes a lot more sense to be practicing your English rather than destroying it. If you’re native, writing like that shows that not only are you immature, you think you’re so above everyone else that you can’t be bothered to write coherently. All of these reactions result in people not wanting to read your post, which is bad if you have good content.
See 2EZ4ME (World 1 forums)- some nobody who claimed to be from original TW, but was really just some random T:V player:
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1627150&postcount=147
Explanation: Short, Logical, Precise, and relatively un-emotional.
See Dark Chaos (World 1/2 forums)- Player who claimed World 2 was more aggressive than World 1
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1583318&postcount=10
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1586580&postcount=18
Explanation: World 2 OD should be off the map compared to how much more game time they have been playing. But it’s not. The top 3 attackers from W1 are still bigger than the top 3 attackers from W2. Read the posts to find the logic. Once again, Short, Logical, Clear, and pretty un-emotional.
See Krakkan (World 12 forums)- former leader of several #1 tribes in a couple of worlds before they fall apart:
3 Threads: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45128
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45149
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45446
Imp Post #1: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=953763&postcount=1
Imp Post #2: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=954477&postcount=1
Imp Post #3: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=954688&postcount=25
Imp Post #4: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=954920&postcount=31
Imp Post #5: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=959639&postcount=71
Imp Post #6: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45446
Imp Post #7: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=963339&postcount=40
Explanation: You’ll find that the vast majority of posts in all three threads are support of me. If you are simply so sure, due to overwhelming evidence and being completely straight-forward, people won’t be afraid to support you. Remember, almost no one on that forum had ever heard of me before. Thought-out posts garner reading and reading intelligent posts garners respect and support. Everyone who disagrees with me you’ll find was basically a friend of Krakkan’s, ie. Real-life friends or friends from past worlds. They can’t find anything to defend him factually, so they result to personal insults and garbage posts to de-rail the thread. If the evidence is obvious, you’ll find that other people will be unafraid to fight your battles for you. It’s also very clear who didn’t read all the threads before responding by the content of their posts.
Part 3: Gameplay Advice
When and why should certain abandoned villages be taken? What differentiates carebear tactics from skilled player tactics?
Carebears are players that are disinclined to attack. Pointwhores are players who build max out their villages for the sake of more points (see Proonstar). There are plenty of players who clear villages for others but only take in-tribe/abandoneds. However, there are far more that only take in-tribe/abandoneds without clearing villages; how this is fun, I have no idea, but this is what a carebear is.
In war time, abandoneds on a tribal level generally shouldn’t be taken. Not only are your nobles not contributing to the war effort, it shows that you’re not really focusing on the war. If you have 30k bundles, and you’re surrounded by tribemates, then yes, by all means go ahead and take abandoneds. After all, the more villages you have in safe zones, the more total troops you can afford to send to the frontlines. Abandoneds on the frontlines should also be taken, since one more village on the frontline is one more village that can be used against the enemy.
If your job in your tribe is to snap-up in-tribe/abandoneds, then obviously it’s okay. In TW, we had a couple purely defensive players and purely (ie. 90%) offensive players. All the offensive players captured villages only from the enemies, and all the defensive players soaked up in-tribe/abandoneds. Thus, there were relatively small, offensive players and large, defensive players, thereby allowing groups to bypass the morale problem this game poses in the later stages.
What are all the faking tactics? Here they are!
There are many factors to take into account when sending fakes. The best way to think about how to send fakes is to imagine what you least would like to see when someone attacks you. What would be the worst conditions for you to be in if someone attacks you? Time of night? Lacking nobles? Too many attacks to read? Every second you spend making your attacks harder to read is more than a second for your opponent.
This having been said, here’s a pretty complete list of fake tactics we developed in TW in W1 by May 2007. Use all of them, or use some of them in different combinations:
Sheer numbers: Seeing a 1000 attacks incoming isn’t something someone blinks at. Have your tribemates who are as far away from your target as you send some fakes.
DON’T send a ton of fakes from one village (not scary, and very easily ignored)
Change your village names: Make them all the same (“Incoming Support” worked well when the normal incoming support to a village was titled “Incoming Support”; the only thing different was the icon. Now, “Generic” works. Or, make the village names into coordinates that don’t necessarily correspond to the real coordinates.
Scouts: Most people don’t have scouts in each village. Send your fakes with 1-50 scouts to get a read on a couple of villages. (The obvious way to counter this is just to leave a small number of scouts in each of your villages).
Fake Nobles: Once resources are no longer a problem, start sending fake noble trains with real nobles alone. The attacks are certainly more realistic and are certainly worth the cost of four packages.
Send fakes in groups of four: This makes the noble trains less obvious, especially if the defender isn’t online when you attack. He has to read every fake train, and it becomes much more difficult to snipe.
Fakes and Reals: When mixing fakes and reals in groups of four, instead of sending the army first and follow with three rams/cats, send the army last and precede it with these three fakes. This way, if the defender tries to snipe this “train”, you’ll kill his defense without a wall (assuming you already sent a clearing army, if not, you’ll still hit his defense).
Act like a noob: Before the real attack, send random bits of offense armies or even some spears/swords. Then, when you really attack, he’ll have no idea what skill level to expect. This is usually more effective at the beginning of the world (100k).
Send fakes from both offense/defense villages: If one sends fakes from both types, then it makes it harder for the defender to keep track of offense villages, and it allows for more fakes from more villages.
Send fake supports of 10 units: These fake supports sometimes look as though they are coming to support a soon-to-be-nobled village. They ALSO serve as indicators of how many troops are killed in those enemy villages when you finally attack them (since you will get a report back indicating the % of units lost).
Salt the earth with catapults: When a good number of villages have been cleared, but there aren’t enough noble trains, small waves of catapults disguised as other fakes work great for taking down farms and warehouses.
Combination: Fake noble trains in combination with real armies and catapult waves that look like nobles. Fake nobles will be defended and the other villages will get demolished by what looked like ram fakes.
Destroy Rally Point: Fake catapults to hit the rally point and force the other player to have to be rebuilding all over the place.
First arrivals are reals: Make the first arrivals of all your armies real attacks so that the remaining attacks seem more devastating. Fake out the opponent’s nearby tribemates and the opponent; have the first attacks land on the tribemate so that support is rushed to that tribemate, and then the later attacks land on the real target.
Part 4: About Me
I come from the original TW tribe of W1 which was made up of solely Tribalwar.com players. After defeating every worthwhile tribe of the world, and thus having Nothing Left to Prove, TW transformed into T:V because so many of the original TW.com players had left and moved on to better things and been replaced by newer players. POE_Blitzkrieg, KoalaBear, and I led the eastern TW Ks through original TW’s span and T:V’s. My main worlds were World 1, World 2, and World 12. Now, I peruse the forums and help noobs and expose people who like to bullshit information (Krakkan would be a famous example in W12). If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything, feel free to PM me on the forums.
In case anyone was wondering:
Dream Team Top 5: Mimelim, burns, POE_Blitzkrieg, herbaltea, DMAUL
Mentions are Openeye, Jamm, vpar2, Thargoran, and qwe4rty
Top Intelligent Posters: POE_Blitzkrieg, herbaltea, Mimelim, qwe4rty, KoalaBear
Top Programmers by far (Oh the times before rules were so precise!): DMAUL, DVADER, mlindley
Top Tribe in any world: Original TW of World 1.
Guide By burns[/spoil]
[Guide] Tribe Tactic Outline Volume 1
[spoil]This outline is intended for everyone that is not already using this strategy. Also, this is just as I said... an outline. Simple variations or additions to the following is acceptable.
For the sake of a name, I will call this our Onion tactic. If you were to view your growth like an onion it would be a series of rings with of course a core. Growth will always be outward from where you originally started... otherwise referred to as a player's core. As you conquer new villages you will be assigning them to your village specialization (Offense,Defense,Scout,etc).
Standard Growth
- Each time you take a village, assign it as an offensive village rather than a defensive village.
- You will typically be losing nukes as you clear your targets. In the event you take a village, convert the village that lost most or all of its troops in the clearing, to a defensive village. Even if it means you have to suicide the small remainder on one of your next targets.
The idea behind this is to keep the travel times of your new targets to a minimum... if you have to rebuild a nuke anyways, then it might as well be closer to the action rather than far in the back. Everyone knows the longer your travel times are, the more time he has to stack his villages. You need to be supporting your nobled villages from your "core"... your safe area that is surrounded by tribemates.
New Clusters
When you are making a long distance attempt against an enemy, or if you have getting a group of free villages from internal tribe nobling, make them all offensive! If you are a long distance from another hit, then you need to get attacking them again ASAP. Support them from way far back or local tribemates until the heat is off.
Then from that point you can start implementing the standard growth tactic after you have an offensive base cluster. Once these villages are usable as nukes you can start attacking and converting them to defensive villages as needed.
This will help to keep you aggressive and keep your enemies at their knees!
I understand that this might seem risky... but in actuality it is safer. You will be using your offense as your defense in most cases... meaning you can dodge/snipe a noble train with nearbye LC, or you can readily retake the village with all your nearby offense. Don't view losing a village as a bad thing... it is only bad if you cannot retake it!
If you happen to lose a village, do not make your lost village the first concern unless you can have nobles land immediately after his! Assess whether or not you can noble the village he nobled yours from first... then retake what was yours! By removing his ability to attack, it will keep you one step ahead of him! Keep in mind exchanging villages is sometimes common practice and not something to be looked down on.
I encourage any additional thoughts or questions that may better explain this outline.
Guide by G0liath[/spoil]
[Guide] A complete explanation of Rams
[spoil]Another useless guide on game mechanics, from the desk of cheesasaurus
A brief look at rams
Training time = (4800 seconds)/(world speed) * 2/3 * 1.06^(-(workshop level))
Rams attack the general defense, with a whopping 2 points. As exciting as it may be to impale someone with a giant log, it’s a rather difficult feat to pull off. Ever tried it? …Definitely not easy, especially when the other guy’s prancing about. Rams are built to fight walls, not troops.
Rams do two things when attacking; they negate some of the bonus a wall provides for the fight, and then downgrade it.
Ram’s Special Abilities
Special effect 1: negate some of the wall bonus
The rams treat the wall as if it were a lower level when calculating the defensive power (with a maximum lowering capability of one half the wall’s actual level).
Formulas:
# of rams needed to treat the wall as if it were a lower level
Note: this number is rounded to the nearest whole number.
# of levels lowered
Note: this number is rounded to the nearest whole number.
Wall bonus
Special effect 2: demolition
The demolition of the wall has no bearing on the outcome of the current battle.
The number of rams you have are compared to the number of rams you need for the closest downgrade amount. If there are enough rams present to do the closest downgrade amount, they will do it. Otherwise, they will downgrade the wall by 1 level less than the closest downgrade amount.
If you win the battle
Formulas for a battle won:
If you lose the battle, the number of rams used = the amount of rams you started with * (defender’s defense lost)/(defender’s original defense)
Formulas for a battle lost:
How many rams you need:
Closest downgrade amount:
Note: this value is rounded to the nearest whole number
How many rams to use
The purpose of attacking with rams is to decrease the amount of defense remaining in the village by as much as possible.
* If you’re attacking an undefended village, you don’t need to send more than the bare minimum to downgrade it all the way. Rams do work similarly to catapults, in that you can send a series of attacks with small numbers of rams to downgrade the wall more, with less. (lvl 20 -> 0 with 66 rams in series, instead of 219 at once, for example)
*If you’re attacking a village that doesn’t have enough defense to kill your entire army, and you don’t expect it to be supported soon, just send the minimum number of rams to lower the wall bonus as much as possible. You can remove the rest of the wall later. Sending extra rams will just get them broken.
*If you’re attacking a reinforced village and can’t kill all the defenders in one shot, remember, the goal is to decrease the amount of defense remaining in the village by as much as possible. Try and get a good balance between offensive strength; bonus negation; and demolition. It all depends on what’s defending.
unit stats
more unit stats
how tech levels work
time factor for training units = 2/3*1.06^(-(building level))
battle system basics
more battle system basics
There it is. Everything you need to know to optimize your attacks. Do the math.
many thanks to 4leaf, for sharing the "battle won" ram damage formula!
And now, the version with pretty pictures (and less math):
1) First, the wall is treated as a lower level for the battle. You can't lower the level by more than half.
By glancing at the table, you can see that attacking with at least 213 rams will treat a level 20 wall as if it was only level 10. There's no way to lower it less than that, since taking it to level 9 would be less than half of 20.
2) After the battle, the wall is damaged.
If you won the battle:
coming... someday
If you lost, the rams damage the wall according to this next chart:
But wait! You lost the battle, and therefore have no surviving rams! How many rams will attack the wall?
Divide the number of troops the defender lost by the number of troops the defender started with. Now, multiply the number of rams you started the battle with by this number. The resulting number is the amount of rams that attack!
How do tech levels come into play? Multiply the number of rams you need by the attack power of one level 1 ram, and divide it by the attack power of one ram of the level you're sending. But there's a catch. The attack power listed in the help file isn't completely accurate. You can read more about tech levels here.
REEEEEEEDWAAAAAALLLL!
er.....
...
i mean...
....no wall
I swear, I have never watched that show! Honest!
ok...
maybe once or twice..
...alright, so I never miss an episode. Does this make me less of a man?
^^just kidding^^
I swear.
Thanks to cheesasaurus for this guide[/spoil]
[Guide] Timing Troop Movements
[spoil]Originally, I was going to make a short guide to help out some tribesmates. But I've got a lot of time on my hands today.
This is a detailed guide on how to time unit movements. This is not a guide for the uses of timing; making spreadsheets; arranging your windows; fast clicking; what kind of clock to use; cheating; or killing small animals.
Before reading too far, ask yourself these things:
If you answered no to any of those questions, you might have a bit of trouble following this guide.
And now, without further delay, I give to you the cheesy timing guide!
Timing Troop Movements
Timing is a big part of Tribal Wars. Something that a lot of so-called 'experienced' players still seem to have trouble with. Therefore, I'm going to try and go into as much detail as possible here. Some things might seem painfully obvious, but please bear with me.
Contents
1: the game clock
2: calculating duration
3: when to send your troops
4: calculating when troops will return from an attack
5: predicting attacks
The Game Clock
First of all, take a look at the bottom right of your screen. It'll look something like this, but without the bright green:
The part I circled is the game clock, which displays the game time to the nearest second. If anyone mentions 'server time,' this is the time they're talking about. I believe it coincides with GMT+1.
Now go to your rally point and send some of your units to a nearby village. Click on the command, and check out the details:
Take a close look at the arrival time, and you will see some lighter-colored numbers behind the hours:minutes:seconds. Those numbers are the milliseconds of the arrival time. We now know that arrival times are much more precise than 'to the nearest second.'
If you're going to time well, you have to understand the measures of time the server uses.
There are 24 hours in one day.
There are 60 minutes in one hour.
There are 60 seconds in one minute.
There are 1000 milliseconds in one second.
So a time of 3 hours, 24 minutes, 18 seconds, and 871 milliseconds would be written like this:
03:24:18.871
Calculating Duration
The goal of timing troop movements is to get your troops to arrive at some location at a certain time. To start off, there are 3 things you need to know:
1) where they are going (destination)
2) how long it takes them to get there (duration)
3) the time you want them to arrive
#1 and #3 are both things that a player can decide. #2, however, is generally not, and you will have to calculate this yourself if you want to be accurate.
To figure the duration, you have to find:
1) how fast your troops will move (speed)
2) how far away the destination is (distance)
The first part is easy; just look at the units section in the help page for the world you're playing:
I'll use the stats in this picture for any examples I use.
The part listed as unit "speed" is actually the time(in minutes) it takes for that unit to travel one field. Keep in mind that units travel at the speed of the slowest unit they're with. If you send support with a paladin, they will move at the speed of the paladin.
You now have the speed, and need to get the distance.
Take a look at your map. You'll see numbers to the left of and right below the close-up view.
The numbers on the left are the y coordinates, and the numbers on the bottom are the x coordinates. Every village has a unique location, shown in the game as "(X|Y)". The village at the center of this map is located at 503|843.
Now, I'll define a few things to make what I'm about to say a little easier to follow.
Destination: the village you are sending the troops to.
Origin: the village you are sending the troops from.
Distance: the number of fields between the origin and the destination.
Xo: the x coordinate of the origin village.
Yo: the y coordinate of the origin village.
X: the x coordinate of the destination village.
Y: the y coordinate of the destination village.
Here's the formula for finding the distance (taken from the Pythagorean Theorem)
Say we want to find the distance from 503|843 to 502|844.
Just put the numbers into the right spots, and then solve the expression. I use a calculator to get an approximate answer.
So the distance is about 1.41421356 fields. Let's say I'm attacking with a scout ('speed' 9)
To find the duration, multiply the 'speed' (9 minutes/field) by the distance (1.41421356 fields).
(9 minutes/field) * (1.41421356 fields) = 12.7279220 minutes
That's nice, but we want our time to read "hours:minutes:seconds.milliseconds". This means more math :icon_wink:
We know there are 60 minutes in one hour, but the duration is only 12.7279220 minutes; quite a bit less than 60 minutes. So the number of hours is 00. We've now got a duration of 00:??:??.???, with 12.7279220 minutes left over.
There are 12 whole minutes in 12.7279220 minutes, so put those into the minutes slot.
We now have a duration of 00:12:??.???, with 0.7279220 minutes left over.
We need to know the seconds next (60 seconds in one minute), so multiply the remaining minutes by 60 to get the number of seconds.
0.7279220 * 60 = 43.67532
that's 43 whole seconds for the seconds slot, giving us a duration of 00:12:43.???
To find the milliseconds multiply the leftover seconds (0.67532) by 1000 (1000 milliseconds in one second, remember?), and you have the number of milliseconds.
Well, we finally have it. The duration of a scout speed command from 503|843 to 502|844 is 00:12:43.675.
Doing these calculations over and over can get to be a pain in the :lightcavalry: , so you may want to make a spreadsheet to do them for you. No, I'm not going to give you a premade one.
When to send your troops
Ideally, you'd just subtract the duration from the arrival time.
There's still one more thing to take into consideration before we can know when to send the troops: lag.
Every internet game has it; tribal wars is no exception. When you click the 'ok' button on the confirmation screen, your computer has to process that click, send the information across the internet to the server, and be processed by the server. This all takes time.
The lag fluctuates and cannot be completely controlled by you, but there are things you can do to influence its stability. Try to keep your computer's workload low. Don't have a bunch of applications running at once.
Minimize your use of network resources. Don't start downloading something right before you want to send a timed command.
Before sending the troops, make a couple tests to predict the lag.
Choose 2 villages, at least one of them yours. Figure out the duration between them, and send a few attacks. (When I do this, I click at the moment I see the second counter change.) Write down the times you send them and the times they actually arrive.
Now calculate the times they should have ideally arrived (sending time + duration) and write these down.
Subtract the ideal arrival times from the actual arrival times; and write the answers down. These are the delays.
Find the average lag time by adding up the delays and dividing the answer by the number of attacks you sent.
here's a sample test I did:
If the difference between the highest delay and the lowest delay is higher than the time frame you want your troops to arrive within, then good luck :|
The time you want to actually send your troops is:
(arrival time) - (duration + average lag)
Actually clicking at the right time is entirely up to you and your sense of time (unless you're cheating).
I mentally split each second into fifths; any more than that and I tend to lose consistency with my mental counting.
When Troops Return from an Attack
To figure out when troops return to a village after attacking, you need to know:
1) the arrival time of the attack
2) the duration
Add the duration to the arrival time, and ignore the milliseconds. The game truncates them, so an expected returning time of 3:13:37.999 results in an actual returning time of 3:13:37.000.
Predicting Attacks
You can predict what an incomming attack might be by figuring out its speed. Divide the remaining time by the distance, and compare your answer to the speeds of each unit. If you check the attack soon enough after it was sent, you'll know if it's moving too fast to have certain units.
-------------------------------------end-------------------------------------
Well, I hope this is helpful. If I made a mistake somewhere, please point it out. If you think I left something out that belongs in the scope of this guide, speak up! And yes, I know there are numerous online tools available that can do some calculations for you. That's not what this guide is about.
Thanks to the following people for improving this guide
Qwe4rty - pointed out that milliseconds are now truncated for returns
dondonna - pointed out my lack of transcribing abilities
Thanks to cheesasaurus for this guide[/spoil]
[Guide] Building formulas
[spoil]You can use the interface php to get info about units and buildings for each server. If you wanted the info for world 42:
building info: "http://en42.tribalwars.net/interface.php?func=get_building_info"
unit info: "http://en42.tribalwars.net/interface.php?func=get_unit_info"
You can also find it on the twstats website, like allyboo said.
buildings: "http://www.twstats.com/en42/index.php?page=buildings"
In the help page, if you look at the total points, you will see a pattern. Each successive level is worth about 1.2 times the points of the previous level. Knowing this, you can calculate how many points a building is worth.
The amount of population a farm supports follows a similar pattern. This one took a little more effort to figure out. Each successive level supports about 1.172103 times the population of the previous level (I'm not sure what the exact value the game uses is, but it's pretty darn close)
similar thing for the warehouse
and the timber camp, clay pit, and iron mine (except at level 0, they make 5 resources an hour):
and the hiding place:
and the wall:
If the market is less than level 10, the number of merchants is equal to the market level.
If the market is level 10 or higher:
The time it takes for something to be built depends on the level of the building it's made in. All times are in seconds.
Buildings are constructed and expanded in the village headquarters. Multiply the duration of creation by the time factor of your village headquarters to get the actual amount of time it takes to make a building. The exact time factor is equal to 1.05^(-[level of the village headquarters])
Units are built in the barracks, stables, workshop, and academy. Multiply the build_time by the time factor of the building the unit's made in to get the actual amount of time it takes to make that unit. The exact time factor is equal to 2/3*1.06^(-[level of the building]).
spear - made in barracks
sword - made in barracks
axe - made in barracks
archer - made in barracks
scout - made in stable
lcav - made in stable
m.archer - made in stable
hcav - made in stable
ram - made in workshop
catapult - made in workshop
nobleman - made in academy
Research is done in the smithy. Multiply the duration of a research by the time factor of the smithy. The exact time factor is equal to 1.1^(-[level of the smithy]).
On a ten tech world, each successive research level takes 1.75 times the duration of the previous level. On a 3 tech world, each successive research level takes 3 times the duration of the previous level.
As far as I can tell, these are the research times for level 1 techs, without the smithy time modifier:
spear - 3960 seconds
sword - 5940 seconds
axe - 6930 seconds
archer - 7950 seconds
scout - 3960 seconds
lcav - 8910 seconds
m.archer - 9900 seconds
hcav - 9900 seconds
ram - 7910 seconds
catapult - 9900 seconds
The game speed is a setting that changes the durations (you can see what its set at in the other information section of help). Multiply all research times by 1/[game speed].
well, there you go. All the basic information about the buildings.
You are wrong.
Is it necessary? No.
Is it useful? Yes. This is a logistics game; Whether you've got 1 village or 4000 villages.
Thanks to cheesasaurus for this guide[/spoil]
[Excel] Risk Assessment File
[spoil]
A file to assess risk of a village when it is on a war front.
http://www.mediafire.com/?imkwfam2lti
[/spoil]
[Excel] Tribe Training Pyramid
[spoil]
If a tribe wants to start training their tribe. They can use this file to delegate responsibility.
http://www.mediafire.com/?5mmzyvjtmyz
[/spoil]
[Excel] Troop Ratio File
[spoil]
This file allows the user to see the different defensive strengths of different units and see the effect that paladin weapons play on those builds.
http://www.mediafire.com/?3n4zymnz0hj
[/spoil]
[Excel] Tribalwars Bank
[spoil]
This file is a banking system for tribes.
http://www.mediafire.com/?2nutjd5mmey
[/spoil]
I will be putting up my guides and other guides that i think are extremely useful and would like players to read over them and give some feedback. I also ask for players to post their own guides not matter the standard and hopefully the skill level of the world will improve.
[Guide] A Guide to Premiums
[spoil]Made by Mihaip edited by Thorgar
I know that many of you have premium accounts, but i also know that almost all of you don't know how to use it's advantages to the maximum. This topic will teach the ones that have a premium how to really use it. If you don't have a premium, stop reading this now.
I will start from the settings. Here is how my settings look like:
Notice that i changed the Window width number. What does this do? Well, if you have a village which name is a long one, the name of that village will be put on 2 rows when you look at the overview of the village. Something like this:
This isn't nice, and that is why you must put a higher value in there - i use 1200 for example. It looks like this now:
Secondly, notice that i marked the option to show the quick menu bar. This is very important, because you can put a lot of useful links in it. Here is how mine looks like:
I think you can figure out what each link does:
Recruit - this one does the same thing as the recruit button in the village overview.
Farming - This is a script made o make farming easier. Will go into more deatail later.
LC Script - This is a script that when you get a report back from a farm it tells you exactly how many LC are needed to clear all the res from the farm.
Quick Dodge - Is where you enter in a set of predetermined coordinates be it a barb or one of your own villages, you use it from the rally point and it selects all the troops in the village and inputs the village coords for you. You just send the attack. Handy for when you get online and see an attack landing in a few seconds.
W 30 Forum - you go directly to the forum of this world.
W30 TW Stats - link to tw-stats on this world.
World map - This is the guide for this map. It is an ultimate tool and your best friend in TW.
At the end of this topic, there are all the links that you need to use so that you will make your quick bar the same way.
I have marked the show dynamic menu bar. This is the drop down menu when you go over the ver top links such as Tribe and Rankings for easier navigation.
Map size: This a very nice feature on a premium. You can make the map bigger. I use 15x15, i like to see what's around me. Later on, i will get into details with the map.
Last login: This is where you see the last login along with the IP number of the person who logged in. If you see another IP than your own, change your password right away.
Ignore attacks: Handy if you are getting constant attacks that you know are fakes. With this option, you can go and hide the attack, it's just like you aren't under attack. To ignore an attack, you go in the village which is under attack, you click on the rally point and there you know what to do.
The graphic package: i have not seen any made for the new tribalwars.
It is for Changing the theme of tribalwars. Making it snow in the village or even have it underwater.
HERE are the graphic packages.
Now, moving on the same menu bar, you have the reports department. You can use filters in the reports, so that you get only the reports that you want. Here is how mine looks like:
Notice that i have marked a lot of options at the market. It's because i use it a lot, and i don't want to get a report showing that the x player merchants have arrived and they brought me x resources. The other options that i have marked just help me, by not getting useless reports.
You can create groups here too, and you can save reports this way. Just click on create groups from the far right of the group menu, and from there it's easy:
After this, we have the mail department.
In here, You have an address book and also you can make groups. It's very easy to make a group when you are in the mail menu:
You have 2 ways to put a mail in that group:
When you are in that mail:
And when you are in the overview of the mail, you can put multiple mails in a group at the same time:
By doing this, you save that mail, and it will not be dragged down when you receive other mails.
The notebook option - in here you can put reminders for yourself to send an attack a a certain time or leave instructions for sitters. It's very useful if you use it.
Friends - you can add players in this section, and check the menu to see if they are online. Do not add players outside your tribe in which you don't trust completely
Now, moving along i reach the thing that is the most important one: the groups for the villages.
I have my villages per page set to 5 or sometimes 10 so i can quickly count the amount of villages i have in a certain category.
The all in the group overview will show you all your villages. Villages per page is for quick reference to how many you have. It's easier to have a single page with your villages.
Now, here is how my groups look like:
Here is the explanation for each group:
Attack - all offensive villages.
Defence - all defensive villages.
Full Nuke - Villages with fully built nukes(max population offence).
Full Defence - All villages will full D.
Nobles - villages that have nobles.
Scouts - villages that have scouts.
Snipe - vilalges with pure HC to snipe nukes and defend from long range.
You can also have ones such as
Under_construction - villages that aren't fully built.
The K groups - villages from the respective K's.
_Demolish_attack - attacking villages that need demolishing.
_Demolish_defense - defensive villages that need demolishing.
When i get a village, i decide what kind it will be, based on location, it's built etc. So, i mark the Attack. Secondly, i mark the continent in which the village is. Then, you can mark the Under_construction group if i need to make any kind of buildings in it. Lastly, you mark the Demolish_attack, if i need to demolish something in it. Now, you can put other groups in it, like nobles if you plan on using nobles in the village. With time that passes, you will finish building it, and you can deselect the Under_construction group. You will finish demolishing it and you deselect that group too. After you finish building troops that village will only make gold coins, until something happens and either you lost your attacking troops, or you are under attack. At that point, you remake this whole thing all over again.
To add groups to a village, click on the edit button just under group association in the overview of a village:
A pop up appears, and you just click on the groups that you want, then hit the save groups button:
Using this system of groups will minimize the time you spent on this game, except of course when you need to make coordinated attacks.
Here is how you make the groups:
You go to Groups from your overview, the you click on the groups button in the left side of the screen:
A pop up appears, and there you create new groups or edit existing ones:
I know that adding all of your villages into groups like these ones will take you a LOT of time, but trust me, it's worth it after you do it.
Tip on demolishing buildings:
When you are in the right group (demolish_attack or demolish_defense), you just go into the demolish menu. Now, a lot don't know this: when you are demolishing a village, you can only add 5 demolishing commands at once. You don't need to press once, and wait for the command to show in the building queue, you can press the mouse 5 times real quick on the building that you want to demolish, and after a few seconds, the demolishing commands will appear. You can speed it up, and press the next village:
You can easily demolish villages like this, and with the groups of demolish.
Returning to the map:
When you look at the map, you have 2 buttons just below it:
In the first one, you have the players that you have marked with different colors.
To mark a player with a different color, just click on the player you want, and press highlight on map.
You will go into a menu where you select the color for that player's villages. You can edit a group, and show multiple players with another color.
The second button that you can use, is the pop up menu. I like to mark all options, except the last one (it occupies to much on the map, and i don't want to see all that it gives):
Here are the links of the quick menu bar:
You add them like this:
Recruit:
{graphic}/buildings/barracks.png
{game}&screen=train
Farming:
http://forum.tribalwars.net/staemme/statusicon/user_offline.gif
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Here you go, a complete guide on how to effectively use a premium account.
If you can't do something from this guide post here. Also, i can make these things to anyone who requests (except putting the villages in groups - i let you do the real work)
[/spoil]
[Guide] Art of war: A few basic tactics
[spoil]Art of war: A few basic tactics
This is a little thread to give you the best chance against anyone we come up against. An obvious starting point is of course your army.
Specialization is key in this game. There is no point in have any attack troops in a defensive village or vice versa... It doesn't make sense.
You have usually 4 types of villages... Attack,, Defence,, Noble and Scout.
Attack: I usually have 2900LC, 275 MA, 230 ram, 30 catapults and the rest axe approx 6.5k. Then there is my personal favourite of 5000 LC 219 rams. The the is the full MA about 4000, 219 rams gets full pop and there are many, many other variations of these and you can find your own. This is just a guide for the newcomers.
Defence: I have found that the most solid defence is 10k swords 10k archers . Run it in the sim basically nothing beats it. It does take forever to build though. There is also the support-defence village which consists of aprox 7k spears 3K archers and the rest HC. This is mainly support not overly strong but quick to build, quick to move and does the job.
Scout: They usually have 5k scouts, 5k spears and 5k swords or all scout.
Noble: In an offensive village or for the more defensive player HC heavy as they can be used in both attack and defence pair them with spears or archers so you can hold the village once you take it.
War!!!
When fighting in a war it is always a given that you scout out the targets and from the information decide which attack force you will use. But the points that people often forget, even experienced ones.
1. When a squad is taking out a target all villages must be cleared before any are nobled to avoid morale penaltys later.
2. Fakes: again very obvious but must be done everytime you are up against a player. For newcomers a fake is sending an attack consisting of 1-2 units usually a spear axe or 4 rams in a row to make them think you are trying to noble the village. This causes confusion and will disorientate the players defences. Making it more likely he will make a mistake. It also helps if you send 1 scout (or 4 depending on world settings) with a fake in the event that they try and dodge it/ don't have scouts in the village... then you will get a scout report. It is rare that this happens but it does happen. Also there are support fakes too. A player can see if you are sending support to a village to keep it after nobling so if you send a fake support (1 sword) to arrive after the 4 fake rams they will usually fall for it.
3. When you take a village in a big war, against big players. If you have demolished the wall and you cannot fill the village with a very heavy stack, you must withdraw all troops from the village as any attack force sent against it will take it out. If/when they retake the village they always send support and that is when you strike. You wipe out their support and can retake the village or leave it and attack again every day until you have sufficiently damaged his troop count.
4. If you are being attacked by a player and he has wiped out your defences in your village. "The best defence is a good offence" sound familiar. Attack yourself. Much like in chess lose the bishop/knight/rook and take the queen. You must attack your own village with a train of 3 nobles. This will lower the loyalty of the village to a point where the enemy will take it on the first attack of their train. When their train hits their first noble will take the village. The second will kill/be killed by the support of the first and will continue till the last noble strikes where the support will be the greatest and he will be killing his own troops with defensive troops and will suffer heavy losses. That is when you swoop in to take back your village. Again if the wall is demolished try and rebuild it but refer back to point 3.
5. I always prefer to single out the village i will lose the least troops on and i take it out as efficiently as i possibly can without demolishing the walls. Then i stack it with 2-3 villages worth of heavy defence troops (approx 9k spears 24k swords 24k archers 2-4k scouts). This way he cannot scout the village to tell what he is up against, The level 20 wall with the mass of troops will crush many waves of attacks without budging and when they finally do manage to take the village back refer back to point 3 and the damage will be immense, and crippling not only to his army but also to his/her hubris.
Guide by Thorgar[/spoil]
[Guide] Backtiming
[spoil]The only defence in my mind, at this point of the game!
Guide by Simz1987My guide to countering an attack Ok while doing this I am making a few assumptions
1) you were online when the attack was sent and know what speed it is coming at (ram/noble)
2) This is not a train, so is only 1-2 incomings Before actually taking any of the steps to countering, make sure you have filled up all your building/troop queues to use all your spare resources the attacker could take, and any remaining resources, you market dodge (send them to another village, but cancel it after the attack, bare in mind you only have 5 minutes to do this before you can no longer cancel).
The Steps – Noble Attack
1) You need to write down the exact arrival time of the attack (you have to do this before the attack lands as reports don’t provide an accurate time of arrival since they only round to the minute)
2) Then you need to work out the time it would take for the attacking unit (ram or noble) to travel from your village to the attackers
3) Then you need to add these times together, and you will be left with the time his troops will return home after this attack
4) Now work out how long it would take for your rams to travel from your village to the attackers village and subtract that from the arrival time of his army
5) You should now be left with exact time you need to launch your attack Example Incoming landing at: 17:15:51 ST The time it takes for a noble to reach you village: 0:50:00 Therefore the time the attackers army will return home is 18:05:51 Time for rams to reach attackers village: 0:42:51 Time you need to launch your counter: 17:23:00 You want to launch your attack as close to that time as possible without going under it. So launching at 17:23:01 would be perfect.
Ram Attack This one can be a little bit more tricky if you want to make sure that you get it right.
1) As soon as you see an incoming attack, check to see if you can send 1 scout at the attacker (make sure it is the same village he is attacking from) and have it land before his attack. If you are able to do this it will make things much better, but is not necessarily a requirement.
2) Once your scout attack has landed view the report and copy the link “Attack again with all troops” and make a QB link like the quick dodge link (see Guide to Quick Bar Links)
3) Now once the attack comes close you need to split your troops into 3 groups; group 1 will be the troops you don’t want to attack with (spears/swords/archers/nobles); group 2 will be a small group of axes and cats (about 50 axes and 20 cats should be sufficient); group 3 will be your main offensive troops (axes/LC/MA/rams)
4) Group 1, you D troops, you will send off to dodge the incoming attack, and only cancel the dodge much later
5) Group 2, your axes and cats, you will send at the attackers village 1 minute before his attack lands, with your cats targeting his rally point
6) Group 3, your offensive troops, you will dodge the attack with, but cancel their dodge so that they arrive home 1 second after the attack arrives (BE CAREFUL, make sure you don’t accidentally have your troops arrive home before his attack lands) then as soon as your troops return home click on the QB link which you made earlier which will bring up a confirmation screen with all your offensive troops to attack the other guys village. Click ok as fast as you can, and you are done.
7) Once all this is done THEN you can cancel group 1’s dodge so they return home safely.
NOTE: All counters can be countered unless you make them land very soon after their troops return.
In this example you should have destroyed the opponents rally point preventing them from countering your attack, however, if they have defense at home and/or don’t decide to dodge your first attack then you may not destroy their rally point. If you then have left a 10-15 second gap between their returning troops and your attacking troops they can easily dodge and counter your troops.
If you don’t have a premium account, or your scouts cannot get to the attacker in time to be able to create a QB link to attack your opponent, then you will have to open up a new tab with rally point and your opponents coordinates already entered and attack as fast as you can. However, as stated above, if your opponent doesn’t dodge your cats then this may back fire, so it is a risk you will have to weigh up.
The other option is to counter with only axes and LC, where you follow the steps for the noble attack exactly, except you exchange the ram travel times for axe travel times. The down side to this is if the attacker has a lot of defense and/or a high wall you could lose a lot, if not all your troops. Which is why generally you just need to dodge the attack, and carry on as normal. Additionally, keep in mind that counters can be countered too. So, you may want to send some ram/axe/LC fakes which are timed to land at the same time your opponent should be sending his/her counter attacks. Minimally this should cause a screen refresh, which could delay them sending the counter. Better yet, perhaps they didn't realise it was a fake and decided to dodge.
For those of you who don’t use premium accounts and cant workout the time it will take for troops to move between villages quickly, the attack planner in http://www.twstats.com/index.php will help you do this relatively quickly (see Guide to Quick Bar for more details on TW Stats Attack Planner).[/quote][/spoil]
[Guide] Population
[spoil]Population
Village size seems to be a very hot topic and i am not going to say what is the best because different villages suit different playing styles. I am however going to talk about the dreaded 12k point village. Its downfalls and how it decreases the power of a tribe by such an immense amount you wouldn't even believe. The number of population taken up by a full 12,154 point village is 4188. This is every building possible at full level, some arguing that it gives the fastest turn around. 1 you're an idiot, shut up!. 2 it is my most hated of all things unholy in tribal wars with the exception only to defence in an offensive village.
First off Village HQ never needs to be more then level 20 (for academy) simple enough. It would be of a suitable speed at level 15 but it's handy if someone catties the academy you'd have to rebuild it to level 20 before you can rebuild the academy.
Warehouse and farm takes up no population so that should obviously be at full as should your res buildings. Wall should always be level 20 in every village. Exception is you can keep the warehouse lower if you are active enough to manage the res effectively and this will help you out with moral in both attacking and defending.
The hiding place should not be made unless you are in the first month or two of the game, before players have multiple nobles, it is a waste of space and an eyesore.
Markets should not be above level 20, They take up a surprising amount of population.
Statues are only 10 population, they can be amazingly handy for building a paladin in a village which is more then 6 hrs away to support. Whether it be to relocate your paladin to the edge to give it whatever defensive weapon fits best with your troop count or if you only have only noble in a village and want to make sure you get a close by village in 4 runs. Those are just 2 examples of statues being good there are many more.
Smithy can be downgraded to as low a level as you like depending on what troops you are using in the village. You will still be able to mint coins but you will not be able to build a noble and if an enemy finds out that you downgraded your smithy they can catapult your academy and you will have to rebuild the smithy back up to level 20 before you can rebuild the academy which costs time and res. You have to decide whether the extra troops are worth it.
Stables and barracks can be downgraded to level 15 and 20 respectively and not add a massive amount of time onto building queues for the reward of an extra troops. All the buildings add up. I personally prefer to keep them maxed out because i am always making troops.
Also the highest level the workshop should ever be is level 2 unless you build a catapult village which very few people do and use effectively. So try and keep it to level 2.
I build my villages to 9,617 points regardless of whether it is attack or defence so it keeps the enemy guessing as to what your village is. I also swap the names of the villages as frequently as possible in attacks by swapping their names around or naming them all the same thing. It makes it far harder to coordinate against and makes fakes look better. My favourite is to name them all Noble so people with premium accounts that can rename attacks will get extra confused and forget which have been renamed.
Final conclusion: My personal village of 9,617 points brings in a total of 3,270 population for buildings. That is a reduction of over 918 population. You may be thinking that 918 is alright but its not a huge amount of troops. Well to you i put forward the following.
Take Bio! as an example and round it up for convenience: 8,500 villages.
Now a little bit of math.
8,500(villages)*918(extra troops) = 7,803,000(extra troops for the tribe)
Now if that doesn't impress you and make you change your way nothing will.
Guide by Thorgar[/spoil]
[Guide] How to build an ultimate defense complete with ratios
[spoil]Here are some great suggestions on how to build an ultimate defense complete with ratios:
I would like to propose that the use of the offense/defense simulator should be reserved only for one purpose, and that is to test the result of your attack before actually making it. I would like to propose that the use of the simulator will tend to confuse you if you make extensive use of it to determine the best ratio for defensive units. It will also tend to confuse you if you are trying to pick the best offense units ratio. I will discuss offensive units ratio in the next section. If you do not use the simulator, how do you determine the best defensive units ratio? The answer is actually more simple and straightforward than you could imagine.
For all units, there are 3 defense parameters.
They are General Defense (GD), Cavalry Defense (CD) and Archer Defense (AD).
Let's look at the GD/CD/AD of the 3 barracks defensive units:
Spears: 15/45/20 Total of GD/CD/AD added up is: 80 Cost: 90 resources and 1 villager
Swords: 50/15/40 Total of GD/CD/AD added up is: 105 Cost: 130 resources and 1 villager
Archers: 50/40/5 Total of GD/CD/AD added up is: 95 Cost: 190 resources and 1 villager
2 questions:
1. Does the total of the GD/CD/AD matter?
2. Why is it that every single unit has some kind of weakness? For the first question: Does the total of the GD/CD/AD matter?
The total of the GD/CD/AD does matter!! The GD/CD/AD is the judges the defensive resistance against the 3 attacking categories. The larger the number, the more you are able to withstand the 3 kinds of offensive attacks. Now, take note of which two units have the highest GD/CD/AD total. -- For the second question: Why is it that every single unit has some kind of weakness? -- This question is the very reason for a defensive unit ratio. Each of the 3 defense units alone will have a weakness, but if you put 2 or more of these units together, their defensive strength averages up and the strength of one defensive unit cancels out the weakness of another! Another way to look at this is that when you combine 2 or more different units together, you essential created a new kind of unit with the defensive strength of the average of the 2 or more kind.
For example, if you put a spear and a sword together, you get: spear: 15/45/20 sword: 50/15/40 Together: 32.5/30/30 GD = (15+50)/2 = 32.5 CD = (45+15)/2 = 30 AD = (20+40)/2 = 30 Therefore, when you put the spear and the sword together, you have created or designed a new unit with GD/CD/AD of 32.5/30/30.
This might be a paradigm shift for some of you, but I want you to keep this concept in mind. -- Since the number of villagers for each village is limited by a level 30 farm, which supports 24,000 villagers, you have to be extremely selective about the kind of defensive units you have so as to maximize your defensive strength.
Now let's look at 3 reasonable and common ratios for defensive units: -- spears/swords 1:1 ratio GD/CD/AD: 32.5/30/30 Total GD/CD/AD: 92.5 spears/swords/archers 1:1:2 ratio GD/CD/AD: 41.25/35/17.5 Total GD/CD/AD: 93.75 swords/archers 1:1 ratio GD/CD/AD: 50/27.5/22.5 Total GD/CD/AD: 100 –
Remember I told you that you should not use a simulator when determining defensive unit ratio? The simple reason is that you could average up the GD/CD/AD of the ratio you chose and determine the best ratio just by looking at the GD/CD/AD of the ratio you created. Another point is that the total GD/CD/AD is very important as the higher your total GD/CD/AD, the more defense you have generally (This is especially crucial if your attacker could not scout you successfully.)
If we classify defense strength as follows: 10 - 20: poor 20 - 30: average 30 - 40: good 40 - 50: excellent The "spears/swords 1:1 ratio" has a low good defense for GD and average defense for everything else. The "spears/swords/archers 1:1:2 ratio" has excellent defense for GD, good defense for CD and poor defense for AD. The "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" has godly defense for GD, and average defense for both CD and AD. However, notice that the CD is higher than AD. Now, isn't this much simpler and clear than running a few hundred simulations? I will promise you that it will become even more clear if you read my section on the offense ratio.
I would propose that we should pick the ultimate defense ratio based on 2 criteria:
1. Total GD/CD/AD.
2. The villagers/performance ratio of the offense units. If we based our decision solely on the total GD/CD/AD, the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" wins. What is the villagers/performance ratio of the offensive units?
The villagers/performance ratio of the offensive units is the amount of offensive strength you get for each villager you use on an offensive unit. Therefore, here are the villagers/performance ratio of axemen, light cavalry and mounted archer:
Axemen: villagers; 1, offensive strength; 40 villagers/performance ratio: 40/1 = 40
Light cavalry: villagers: 4, offensive strength: 130 villagers/performance ratio: 32.5
Mounted archer: villagers: 5 offensive strength: 120 villagers/performance ratio: 24
Based on the villagers/performance ratio, if we know that the largest offensive force can only consist of an army made up of 23,000 villagers, we could have 23,000 axemen OR 5,750 light cavalry (23000/4) OR 4,600 mounted archers (23000/5).
Total maximum offensive strength of axemen = 23,000 * 40 = 920,000 Total maximum offensive strength of light cavalry = 5,750 * 130 = 747,500 Total maximum offensive strength of mounted archers = 4,600 * 120 = 552,000 Based on the information provided by the maximum offensive strength of each offensive units, you want a lot of defense for axemen, followed by a lesser amount for light cavalary and an even lesser amount for mounted archer.
The "spears/swords 1:1 ratio" has only a low good defense (GD: 32.5) against axemen, so it will suffer greatly against an axemen attack, so this ratio is out.
The "spears/swords/archers 1:1:2 ratio" has excellent defense against axemen (GD: 41.25) and good defense against light cavalry, but it is fatally weak against mounted archers (AD: 17.5). I would not pick this ratio based on the fatal weakness.
The "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" has a godly defense against axemen (GD: 50), very nice! Furthermore, it has average but adequate defenses against the light cavalry and mounted archers. I guess it is pretty clear based on the total GD/CD/AD and also the villagers/performance ratio that the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" is the best ratio for defensive units.
How then to pick the ultimate offensive units ratio?
If a defender has 123 spears, 251 swords, 80 archers, 50 light cavalry and 200 axemen, how do you pick your offensive units ratio? Would you use the simulator again? Is there an easier way? The answer is yes! Some people recommend that you should use light cavalry against swords, axemen against spears and mounted archer against archer. But unfortunately, life is not so simple when you face 123 spears, 251 swords, 80 archers, 50 light cavalry and 200 axemen. Furthermore, the combat system in TW is such that when you face such a diverse army, it is not the case that your axemen will fight only against the defender's spears and slaughter them only, but that your axemen has to fight spears, swords, archers, light cavalry and also axemen all together!
Units like swords and archers will slaughter your axemen. So, what is the best way to determine the best offensive force to use against a diverse defensive army? The easiest and most effective way is to total up all the defensive strength (GD/CD/AD) for all the defensive force and use only one type of offensive unit that is best against the weakest total defensive strength of the diverse army. I know this might sound complex, but let me give you a simple example: -- If you face a diverse army of 1 spear, 2 archers and 3 swords, here are their GD/CD/AD:
spear: 15/45/20 sword: 50/15/40 archer: 50/40/5 (3 swords is 150/30/120) (2 archers is 100/80/10) Total for 1 spear, 2 archers and 3 swords is: 265/155/150 This means that this diverse defense force is the weakest on AD (150 only), so you should send in only mounted archers.
Some might ask: should I also send in my extra axemen? This is a very crucial question and the answer is: "Not if you can help it". For this case, if you have enough mounted archers to nicely defeat the defender, then you should never send in any other offensive units. This is because for example, if you send axemen in addition to mounted archers, your axemen is fighting against a stronger GD (265!!) while your mounted archers is fighting against a weak AD (140 only). Your axemen will suffer a larger casualty compared to your mounted archers and therefore sending your axemen will mess things up and increase your overall casualties. If you don't believe this, run a few simulations and you will see the light.
As an attacker, keep this powerful thought in mind: You get to pick the defense (GD/CD/AD) that you fight against. Pick the weakest!!! -- All these offensive strategy is based on the assumption that you could successfully scout your enemy. Therefore scouting is of paramount importance, it is like winning half the battle. I guess it is understandable that people devote a whole village to producing scouts. Also, try your best not to let your enemy scout your village, but however, even if they managed to scout your village, the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" ensures that you have the best chance of survival. In fact, in the next section you will learn that no single offensive force exist in TW to defeat the ultimate "swords/archers 1:1 ratio" defense force.
Finally We are Running some Simulations
Let's run simulations on our best defensive units ratio against the 3 largest offensive force possible. The defense force and offense force will each comprise of 23,000 villagers. Based on the "swords/archers 1:1 ratio", we have 11,500 swords and 11,500 archers, protected by a level 20 wall. 23,000 axemen vs 11,500 archers/11,500 swords (level 20 wall):
Attacker: 23,000 axemen Attacker casualties: 23,000 axemen
Defender: 11,500 archers/11,500 swords Defender casualties: 2,765 archers/2,765 swords
WOW!! The defenders lost so little and slaughtered the largest axemen army in TW. In fact, the defenders could slaughter 3 such armies in a row and only get slaughtered by the 4th army of 23,000 axemen.
If you run the simulator a few times, each round decreasing the number of defenders casualties. 5,750 light cavalry vs 11,500 archers/11,500 swords (level 20 wall):
Attacker: 5,750 light cavalry Attacker casualties: 5,750 light cavalry Defender: 11,500 archers/11,500 swords Defender casualties: 4,962 archers/4,962 swords
4,600 mounted archer vs 11,500 archers/11,500 swords (level 20 wall):
Attacker: 4,600 mounted archer Attacker casualties: 4,600 mounted archer Defender: 11,500 archers/11,500 swords Defender casualties: 4,254 archers/4,254 swords
When attacked by light cavalry or mounted archers, the defenders lost less than 50% of the army. Also, the defenders are able to slaughter 2 full rounds of mounted archers attackers and almost 2 full rounds of light cavalry before getting annihilated.
Some concluding thoughts:
Imagine you have 2 villages with 11,500 archers/11,500 swords in each village. Imagine that these 2 villages are only next to each other. When one village is under massive attack, you send all the 11,500 archers/11,500 swords from the village not under attack to support the attacked village. What kind of offensive army will be needed to defeat this strategy? What if you have 3 such villages? Your attackers will be so depressed when you keep slaughtering their forces.
AND also presenting...! Heavy cavalry are the game's pariah. They are attractive to players who marvel at their enormous stats. They are also the second most expensive unit in the game (next to a noble). The real problem with Heavy Cav, is that you can't train enough of them to make it worthwhile. The most you can have would be approximately 3,800. Not enough to defend a village by themselves. They would last half as long as a village maxed out with archers and swords. Heavy Cav are slower than Light Cav, and they carry less. They're rather expensive to be considered for use as farming troops anyway. The only thing they are good for is fast defensive support. They can get to a village in distress much faster than swordsmen or archers. That's all. That's the only reason you might consider training Heavy Cav. Not a good enough reason to spend all of those resources and occupy 6 villagers. Especially since you can now speed up the travel time of support troops by including your paladin. If you feel the need to train an expensive unit that eats up population, I recommend training a few catapults.
They defend well when you're not using them to attack, and they are the only tool in the game that allows you to affect your enemy's capacity to fight back. If you have 100 catapults, you can pretty much flatten a level 10 building in one attack. If you have 250 catapults, you can usually (in one attack) reduce his farm to below the point where he will need to upgrade it again before he can replace any of his troops. The population required to operate the buildings in a village are fed by the farm as well. If the farm level drops below the point that his village buildings require, everything in the village stops. All training, research, and construction is cancelled until the farm gets upgraded to the appropriate level. The next time you think about spending all those resources on Heavy Cavalry, remember the catapult. It'll save you some resources, and give you a much more devastating weapon. All the best on building your very own devastating army.
Guide by unknown[/spoil]
[Guide] burns the voice of experience
[spoil]Introduction— READ THIS FIRST
This is not a traditional “guide”. It discusses three primary topics and the various aspects of them. It is very long, so I’d suggest just reading the parts that interest you. Most of my experience comes from my time in the original TW tribe of World 1 (The before and infinitely better version of T:V), so you will find that many of the examples use TW.
This has been reviewed by Mimelim and qwe4rty.
About this Guide
Part 1 discusses how to measure skill of players and tribes- (good for Advanced Players)
Part 2 discusses how to go about exposing others and be an intelligent poster- (good for normal/intelligent posters)
Part 3 discusses abandoned taking and faking tactics- (good for any player)
Part 1: Skill? How do I measure how good someone is?
Why did I write this? I got tired of people talking about how good one player is, especially when they have no idea what characteristics a “top” or “best” or even “good” player has. Contrary to popular belief, OD statistics do not mean someone is good.
What does ODD actually mean about skill?
As one of the most misleading statistics regarding skill, this simply indicates who has been attacked the most. Because of the nature of support, players can be stacked to the brim and have high ODD without really having any skill in defending. Good examples of this are Blondeamon (World 1), UnDo (World 1), and tamo (World 1). Thus, there are many unskilled players with high ODD and plenty skilled players with low ODD. This statistic is not a good measure of anything.
What does ODA actually mean about skill?
A high ODA statistic at the beginning and middle of the world is not a sure indicator of skill unless it is constantly maintained. Anyone can chuck armies at other players and accumulate troop kills, especially if the other players don’t know how to effectively stack and defend properly. However, at the later stages of the world, it becomes indicative of a player who is not only aggressive but also efficient in rebuilding his armies. There is a substantial time and therefore attack efficiency difference between producing an army in 16.2 days (the fastest possible in speed 1) and producing a slightly more powerful one in more time. Thus, high ODA stats do not necessarily indicate good players, but good players will have high ODA stats.
What establishes the different tiers of players?
There are three primary categories that determine how well a player will do in a world, namely activity, skill, and the player’s tribe, in no particular order. However, in determining who the “best players” are, we need to disregard activity and player’s tribe and isolate only skill. Obviously, we will only see the “best players” if they are active. What it comes down to, however, is efficiency. Anyone can learn all the tactics, given that albeit many, there is a finite number of tactics to be utilized. Due to the nature of the game (gaining more and more villages), the game shifts from micro to macro. There is no one best player, because it is impossible to directly compare players unless they are right next to each other.
How efficiently can one farm 500 villages? How efficiently and quickly can one rebuild 100 armies? How efficiently and correctly can one decipher 500 incoming attacks and react?
1 hour of farming vs. 3 hours of farming
1 hour of rebuilding vs. 3 hours of rebuilding
1 hour of deciphering vs. 3 hours of deciphering
There are two different types of expert players.
There are beginning experts (examples include Mimelim and vpar2) who are both active and skilled at the beginning and pull ahead of everyone else. I’m not talking about the very beginning, when anyone can be #1, but rather once the nobling capacity has been reached such that one can be consistently maintain the #1 position if he remains active. They know when to build the next farm level, when to conserve their early armies, when to noble, and efficiently farm so that they don’t waste time. This is a game very focused on micro.
In contrast, there are middle and late game experts (refer to Top 5 at the end) who know the micro and macro aspects of the game cold. 99% of the tactics that one can think of are already a given. If you ever thought you could rebuild armies efficiently or manage lots of villages well, you haven’t seen anything unless you’ve seen these village setups. Every button click saves time, especially when repeated 100 times. Rebuilding has been perfected such that every action is optimized to conserve time. With the new additions of Mass Recruitment screens and the like, this aspect is getting toned down a bit, though it does exist.
Any mixture of not knowing most of the tactics, or not knowing all the nuances of quick rebuilding separates the next tiers of players.
Mimelim’s Addendum:
To be honest, there is no single, "best" player because it’s impossible to compare people directly unless they played near each other. The top players rarely do this, just because the worlds are too big.
Top Tier Players - Players that adapt and learn this game constantly and can consistently outplay any opponent. Their only limitation is how active they are. They approach optimal performance consistently and don't have any major or minor flaws in their games. When you talk to them you can tell that they really do have such a strong grasp of the game that they can react to new situations with ease. I would say in my experience and extrapolating from my interactions with thousands of players on every world, there are maybe 2-6 people like this per world currently playing. Maybe 70 total and that seems very high to me right now. Signs of TTP, stellar game performance, novel approaches to the game/tactics, etc. One example of novelty would be Openeye’s hcav strategy. It’s probably been done before, but never on such a systemic and wide scale. They don’t follow rigid guidelines, and they know what they’re doing.
Good Players - Players that know the fundamentals of the game, but really don't have a core understanding of how to optimize and beat new opponents. They are a bit like the TTP without the creativity. Understand how to attack and defend, but really lack the ability to change gears at the drop of a hat and survive in very different circumstances. Maybe 30-50 of these per world, no idea how many total. Signs of GP, decent growth, but nothing stellar, can follow standard growth easily, aka, when things are easy and going well can grow quickly, but when things get complex they start to falter etc.
What establishes the different tiers of tribes?
Why did I write this? After being in many tribes since TW on World 1 (24/7 and –R– on World 12 for example), I realize that the general player quality had risen, but the general tribe quality had crashed. Consequently, I conclude that TW is the best tribe Tribalwars.net has seen, though perhaps if you chose a random player alone from the original 800 Tribalwar.com players, you probably wouldn’t be too impressed (please remember that the tribe limit in W1 was 500 members).
The community, the communication, the striving for optimization, and the lust for war simply can’t be matched. That having been said, those are the four categories that define the strength of a tribe. How well do players communicate with their teammates? How good are the leaders at steering the tribe? How much is each player willing to sacrifice for his tribe and how much does he trust his tribe? How many players really seek to optimize their system and how good are they? How often is your tribe at war, and were the wars against other good tribes?
Having come from a gaming community beforehand, many of the 800 players from TW already knew each other. Because of this, the vast majority, like myself, always saw any village lost as their own village lost. Heck, I once had only 2 villages with defense in them, because all of my other villages’ defenses were out supporting tribemates. How many players in how many tribes would be willing to do that? Do they trust their tribe enough? Do they trust their leaders enough?
In communication, because we (TW) were a closed community, we had basically no spies until very late. Thus, we effectively and actively used our forum, and our irc channels were full. How many tribes can say the same and to what degree? Since tribes that lack an outside community are obviously everywhere, the trick is simply to have competent, trustworthy leaders and a successful system for spykeeping. Remember, TW was a tribe with 800 members (though this quickly dropped to 500 within the first couple months due to boredom; the member cap of World 1 was 500). Most worlds have 100 member or fewer tribe limits. Look how many problems leaders have in keeping a rein on just those 100. Now multiply that by 5-8x.
The majority of what establishes the tribe is the individual members. In a slow world such as W1, inactivity was always a problem. However, this is easily solved through optimization, in order that the game doesn’t take as much time. One less button click that needs to be repeated 300 times, is at least 15 minutes saved. The sum of a tribe’s parts certainly doesn’t equate to the whole, but if the sum of the parts isn’t very big, then the whole won’t be very big either.
In the last regard for measuring the tribe is the aggressive nature of the tribe. This is the culmination of all three previously stated characteristics. This is what proves to everyone else that your tribe is indeed the best. How many tribes can a tribe defeat? How many at one time and at what odds? How soundly? I haven’t seen a more aggressive tribe than TW. Ever. Even when everyone in our tribe had only 1-2 villages, we still made tribes disband (see Destny). From then on, we were constantly at war with at least ¼ of the top 20 at every point in time for the next year. We took W1 by storm and never let go.
In conclusion, the level of one’s tribe depends on the strength of each of the four afore-named factors.
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1810719&postcount=61
Qwe4rty’s Addendum on Community:
There is one aspect that I see is prevalent in today's game play that I think is seriously damaging to the sense of community in a tribe. In order to support a community, there needs to be a basis of stability. To me, the merging and the constant recycling of members really makes this difficult. An error that I see many tribes make are the constant merge wars to gain members/territory. What they fail to realize this merging essentially leads to winning with no risk attached. Territory is gained without wars, and people are gained who have little to no previous experience working with the tribe and building that foundation of community.
A great example of this would be -R- on W12. After several top tribes disbanded (XiG, etc), -R- began recruiting the high-pointed players who now had no home. This went on for some time, with -R- eventually gaining another half-continent of territory with no fighting. They then merged with GAM and ESQ, giving them another 2+ continents on the map. People at the time congratulated them for their merges, for maintaining their high rank, despite the fact that it takes no skill to accomplish a merge. They didn't war for quite some time, as they were getting territory at a faster rate than what would be possible if they had to fight for it. Essentially, they took the easy road, and their original members or members who enjoyed war became bored with it all and slowly started going inactive or moving to other worlds. Once they started to war again, their coordination, communication, and trust between members were all in shambles. The quality of -R- had greatly diminished, yet players on the externals still held them up to their previous standard. Their reputation on the boards was slaughtered, morale was low, and the tribe fell apart.
Part 2: How to expose others using logic and evidence; how to be an intelligent poster
People bullshit. Anyone can. It’s up to you to expose them and make the look downright foolish. It’s simply a question of using logic. This is hard to do on an online forum, however, here are some examples where the correct usage of data successfully exposes these people.
TWStats, TWPlus, Mail Archives, Looking up forum posts, and Screen Capturing should all be your friends.
However, there are a lot of guidelines that one should generally follow, so as to make your argument at least readable and more able to be agreed with by others.
1. Know what you are talking about.
a. If you don’t know what you are talking about, don’t post. Any post that doesn’t add anything meaningful to the conversation or that can’t be backed up is useless and can only hurt you.
2. Don’t curse.
a. Very simple. Very rarely is the F word needed, and certainly never in this game or on the forums. “Shit” should really only be used when no other word can be used to fully express something.
3. Longer is not better
a. If you write a long post, not a lot of people will read it (one exception is perhaps this guide). Some people will, and they tend to be the more logical ones, but the vast majority won’t. If you write concisely and clearly, you’ll find that you can appeal to a wider part of your audience, which allows more people to agree with you.
4. Settle for the majority.
a. Don’t argue every point with a player, especially if he is intentionally misquoting and giving you the run-around. Keep your goal on track, and destroy his credibility without losing your own.
5. Read and Re-read.
a. Make sure you read every post in the thread you are replying to. If you haven’t, new information may come up that will blow your post out of the water and make it look like a joke. People don’t respect others who don’t read. Before you post, re-read your paragraphs and think about the possible responses to it. What do you hope others will say about that post? Know what you're talking about.
6. Respect others.
a. This should be obvious. There’s no need for real-life insults, and it sheds poor light on whatever argument you are trying to make. Any intelligent person who is reading the thread will understand from the content of everyone’s posts who is an idiot. Use your content to do something, not your insults. Most people are guilty of this at some point, heck, I am too. Just make sure it doesn’t pervade many of your posts.
7. Content > Form (but only slightly)
a. No one wants to read “i cn’t believ u r actully riting this.” There’s really no excuse for it. “Oh, but I’m foreign.” If you’re foreign, then it makes a lot more sense to be practicing your English rather than destroying it. If you’re native, writing like that shows that not only are you immature, you think you’re so above everyone else that you can’t be bothered to write coherently. All of these reactions result in people not wanting to read your post, which is bad if you have good content.
See 2EZ4ME (World 1 forums)- some nobody who claimed to be from original TW, but was really just some random T:V player:
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1627150&postcount=147
Explanation: Short, Logical, Precise, and relatively un-emotional.
See Dark Chaos (World 1/2 forums)- Player who claimed World 2 was more aggressive than World 1
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1583318&postcount=10
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=1586580&postcount=18
Explanation: World 2 OD should be off the map compared to how much more game time they have been playing. But it’s not. The top 3 attackers from W1 are still bigger than the top 3 attackers from W2. Read the posts to find the logic. Once again, Short, Logical, Clear, and pretty un-emotional.
See Krakkan (World 12 forums)- former leader of several #1 tribes in a couple of worlds before they fall apart:
3 Threads: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45128
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45149
http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45446
Imp Post #1: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=953763&postcount=1
Imp Post #2: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=954477&postcount=1
Imp Post #3: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=954688&postcount=25
Imp Post #4: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=954920&postcount=31
Imp Post #5: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=959639&postcount=71
Imp Post #6: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=45446
Imp Post #7: http://forum.tribalwars.net/showpost.php?p=963339&postcount=40
Explanation: You’ll find that the vast majority of posts in all three threads are support of me. If you are simply so sure, due to overwhelming evidence and being completely straight-forward, people won’t be afraid to support you. Remember, almost no one on that forum had ever heard of me before. Thought-out posts garner reading and reading intelligent posts garners respect and support. Everyone who disagrees with me you’ll find was basically a friend of Krakkan’s, ie. Real-life friends or friends from past worlds. They can’t find anything to defend him factually, so they result to personal insults and garbage posts to de-rail the thread. If the evidence is obvious, you’ll find that other people will be unafraid to fight your battles for you. It’s also very clear who didn’t read all the threads before responding by the content of their posts.
Part 3: Gameplay Advice
When and why should certain abandoned villages be taken? What differentiates carebear tactics from skilled player tactics?
Carebears are players that are disinclined to attack. Pointwhores are players who build max out their villages for the sake of more points (see Proonstar). There are plenty of players who clear villages for others but only take in-tribe/abandoneds. However, there are far more that only take in-tribe/abandoneds without clearing villages; how this is fun, I have no idea, but this is what a carebear is.
In war time, abandoneds on a tribal level generally shouldn’t be taken. Not only are your nobles not contributing to the war effort, it shows that you’re not really focusing on the war. If you have 30k bundles, and you’re surrounded by tribemates, then yes, by all means go ahead and take abandoneds. After all, the more villages you have in safe zones, the more total troops you can afford to send to the frontlines. Abandoneds on the frontlines should also be taken, since one more village on the frontline is one more village that can be used against the enemy.
If your job in your tribe is to snap-up in-tribe/abandoneds, then obviously it’s okay. In TW, we had a couple purely defensive players and purely (ie. 90%) offensive players. All the offensive players captured villages only from the enemies, and all the defensive players soaked up in-tribe/abandoneds. Thus, there were relatively small, offensive players and large, defensive players, thereby allowing groups to bypass the morale problem this game poses in the later stages.
What are all the faking tactics? Here they are!
There are many factors to take into account when sending fakes. The best way to think about how to send fakes is to imagine what you least would like to see when someone attacks you. What would be the worst conditions for you to be in if someone attacks you? Time of night? Lacking nobles? Too many attacks to read? Every second you spend making your attacks harder to read is more than a second for your opponent.
This having been said, here’s a pretty complete list of fake tactics we developed in TW in W1 by May 2007. Use all of them, or use some of them in different combinations:
Sheer numbers: Seeing a 1000 attacks incoming isn’t something someone blinks at. Have your tribemates who are as far away from your target as you send some fakes.
DON’T send a ton of fakes from one village (not scary, and very easily ignored)
Change your village names: Make them all the same (“Incoming Support” worked well when the normal incoming support to a village was titled “Incoming Support”; the only thing different was the icon. Now, “Generic” works. Or, make the village names into coordinates that don’t necessarily correspond to the real coordinates.
Scouts: Most people don’t have scouts in each village. Send your fakes with 1-50 scouts to get a read on a couple of villages. (The obvious way to counter this is just to leave a small number of scouts in each of your villages).
Fake Nobles: Once resources are no longer a problem, start sending fake noble trains with real nobles alone. The attacks are certainly more realistic and are certainly worth the cost of four packages.
Send fakes in groups of four: This makes the noble trains less obvious, especially if the defender isn’t online when you attack. He has to read every fake train, and it becomes much more difficult to snipe.
Fakes and Reals: When mixing fakes and reals in groups of four, instead of sending the army first and follow with three rams/cats, send the army last and precede it with these three fakes. This way, if the defender tries to snipe this “train”, you’ll kill his defense without a wall (assuming you already sent a clearing army, if not, you’ll still hit his defense).
Act like a noob: Before the real attack, send random bits of offense armies or even some spears/swords. Then, when you really attack, he’ll have no idea what skill level to expect. This is usually more effective at the beginning of the world (100k).
Send fakes from both offense/defense villages: If one sends fakes from both types, then it makes it harder for the defender to keep track of offense villages, and it allows for more fakes from more villages.
Send fake supports of 10 units: These fake supports sometimes look as though they are coming to support a soon-to-be-nobled village. They ALSO serve as indicators of how many troops are killed in those enemy villages when you finally attack them (since you will get a report back indicating the % of units lost).
Salt the earth with catapults: When a good number of villages have been cleared, but there aren’t enough noble trains, small waves of catapults disguised as other fakes work great for taking down farms and warehouses.
Combination: Fake noble trains in combination with real armies and catapult waves that look like nobles. Fake nobles will be defended and the other villages will get demolished by what looked like ram fakes.
Destroy Rally Point: Fake catapults to hit the rally point and force the other player to have to be rebuilding all over the place.
First arrivals are reals: Make the first arrivals of all your armies real attacks so that the remaining attacks seem more devastating. Fake out the opponent’s nearby tribemates and the opponent; have the first attacks land on the tribemate so that support is rushed to that tribemate, and then the later attacks land on the real target.
Part 4: About Me
I come from the original TW tribe of W1 which was made up of solely Tribalwar.com players. After defeating every worthwhile tribe of the world, and thus having Nothing Left to Prove, TW transformed into T:V because so many of the original TW.com players had left and moved on to better things and been replaced by newer players. POE_Blitzkrieg, KoalaBear, and I led the eastern TW Ks through original TW’s span and T:V’s. My main worlds were World 1, World 2, and World 12. Now, I peruse the forums and help noobs and expose people who like to bullshit information (Krakkan would be a famous example in W12). If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything, feel free to PM me on the forums.
In case anyone was wondering:
Dream Team Top 5: Mimelim, burns, POE_Blitzkrieg, herbaltea, DMAUL
Mentions are Openeye, Jamm, vpar2, Thargoran, and qwe4rty
Top Intelligent Posters: POE_Blitzkrieg, herbaltea, Mimelim, qwe4rty, KoalaBear
Top Programmers by far (Oh the times before rules were so precise!): DMAUL, DVADER, mlindley
Top Tribe in any world: Original TW of World 1.
Guide By burns[/spoil]
[Guide] Tribe Tactic Outline Volume 1
[spoil]This outline is intended for everyone that is not already using this strategy. Also, this is just as I said... an outline. Simple variations or additions to the following is acceptable.
For the sake of a name, I will call this our Onion tactic. If you were to view your growth like an onion it would be a series of rings with of course a core. Growth will always be outward from where you originally started... otherwise referred to as a player's core. As you conquer new villages you will be assigning them to your village specialization (Offense,Defense,Scout,etc).
Standard Growth
- Each time you take a village, assign it as an offensive village rather than a defensive village.
- You will typically be losing nukes as you clear your targets. In the event you take a village, convert the village that lost most or all of its troops in the clearing, to a defensive village. Even if it means you have to suicide the small remainder on one of your next targets.
The idea behind this is to keep the travel times of your new targets to a minimum... if you have to rebuild a nuke anyways, then it might as well be closer to the action rather than far in the back. Everyone knows the longer your travel times are, the more time he has to stack his villages. You need to be supporting your nobled villages from your "core"... your safe area that is surrounded by tribemates.
New Clusters
When you are making a long distance attempt against an enemy, or if you have getting a group of free villages from internal tribe nobling, make them all offensive! If you are a long distance from another hit, then you need to get attacking them again ASAP. Support them from way far back or local tribemates until the heat is off.
Then from that point you can start implementing the standard growth tactic after you have an offensive base cluster. Once these villages are usable as nukes you can start attacking and converting them to defensive villages as needed.
This will help to keep you aggressive and keep your enemies at their knees!
I understand that this might seem risky... but in actuality it is safer. You will be using your offense as your defense in most cases... meaning you can dodge/snipe a noble train with nearbye LC, or you can readily retake the village with all your nearby offense. Don't view losing a village as a bad thing... it is only bad if you cannot retake it!
If you happen to lose a village, do not make your lost village the first concern unless you can have nobles land immediately after his! Assess whether or not you can noble the village he nobled yours from first... then retake what was yours! By removing his ability to attack, it will keep you one step ahead of him! Keep in mind exchanging villages is sometimes common practice and not something to be looked down on.
I encourage any additional thoughts or questions that may better explain this outline.
Guide by G0liath[/spoil]
[Guide] A complete explanation of Rams
[spoil]Another useless guide on game mechanics, from the desk of cheesasaurus
A brief look at rams
Training time = (4800 seconds)/(world speed) * 2/3 * 1.06^(-(workshop level))
Rams attack the general defense, with a whopping 2 points. As exciting as it may be to impale someone with a giant log, it’s a rather difficult feat to pull off. Ever tried it? …Definitely not easy, especially when the other guy’s prancing about. Rams are built to fight walls, not troops.
Rams do two things when attacking; they negate some of the bonus a wall provides for the fight, and then downgrade it.
Ram’s Special Abilities
Special effect 1: negate some of the wall bonus
The rams treat the wall as if it were a lower level when calculating the defensive power (with a maximum lowering capability of one half the wall’s actual level).
Formulas:
# of rams needed to treat the wall as if it were a lower level
Code:
Rams needed to lower the level for calculating defense = (2*1.09^(wall lvl) + 4*1.09^(wall lvl)*((levels lowered) - 1) + 0.5) * ((strength of level 1 ram)/(strength of a ram, at the level of the sending village))# of levels lowered
Code:
Levels lowered = (((number of rams)*((strength of a ram, at the level of the sending village)/(strength of level 1 ram))( –0.5 - 2*1.09^(wall lvl))/(4*1.09^(wall lvl)) + 1Wall bonus
Code:
Total defense = (def troops’ gen def + def troops’ cav def + def troops’ def archer + (20+50*(wall level))*((att’s gen str)/(total off str)*[gen def] +(att’s cav str)/(total off str)*[cav def] + (att’s archer str)/(total off str)*[archer def])) * (1.037^(wall level))Special effect 2: demolition
The demolition of the wall has no bearing on the outcome of the current battle.
The number of rams you have are compared to the number of rams you need for the closest downgrade amount. If there are enough rams present to do the closest downgrade amount, they will do it. Otherwise, they will downgrade the wall by 1 level less than the closest downgrade amount.
If you win the battle
Formulas for a battle won:
Code:
Levels downgraded = (((rams remaining after losses)+ 1 - (rams lost/ 2)) * ((strength of a ram, at the level of the sending village)/(strength of level 1 ram))) - 1*1.09^(wall lvl))/(2*1.09^(wall lvl)) + 1If you lose the battle, the number of rams used = the amount of rams you started with * (defender’s defense lost)/(defender’s original defense)
Formulas for a battle lost:
How many rams you need:
Code:
number of rams = (2*(1.09)^(wall lvl) + 4*1.09^(wall lvl)*(levels downgraded – 1)) * ((strength of level 1 ram)/(strength of a ram, at the level of the sending village))Closest downgrade amount:
Code:
Levels downgraded = ((number of rams)*((strength of a ram, at the level of the sending village)/(strength of level 1 ram)) - 2*1.09^(wall lvl))/(4*1.09^(wall lvl)) + 1Note: this value is rounded to the nearest whole number
How many rams to use
The purpose of attacking with rams is to decrease the amount of defense remaining in the village by as much as possible.
* If you’re attacking an undefended village, you don’t need to send more than the bare minimum to downgrade it all the way. Rams do work similarly to catapults, in that you can send a series of attacks with small numbers of rams to downgrade the wall more, with less. (lvl 20 -> 0 with 66 rams in series, instead of 219 at once, for example)
*If you’re attacking a village that doesn’t have enough defense to kill your entire army, and you don’t expect it to be supported soon, just send the minimum number of rams to lower the wall bonus as much as possible. You can remove the rest of the wall later. Sending extra rams will just get them broken.
*If you’re attacking a reinforced village and can’t kill all the defenders in one shot, remember, the goal is to decrease the amount of defense remaining in the village by as much as possible. Try and get a good balance between offensive strength; bonus negation; and demolition. It all depends on what’s defending.
unit stats
more unit stats
how tech levels work
time factor for training units = 2/3*1.06^(-(building level))
battle system basics
more battle system basics
There it is. Everything you need to know to optimize your attacks. Do the math.
many thanks to 4leaf, for sharing the "battle won" ram damage formula!
And now, the version with pretty pictures (and less math
):
1) First, the wall is treated as a lower level for the battle. You can't lower the level by more than half.
By glancing at the table, you can see that attacking with at least 213 rams will treat a level 20 wall as if it was only level 10. There's no way to lower it less than that, since taking it to level 9 would be less than half of 20.
2) After the battle, the wall is damaged.
If you won the battle:
coming... someday
If you lost, the rams damage the wall according to this next chart:
But wait! You lost the battle, and therefore have no surviving rams! How many rams will attack the wall?
Divide the number of troops the defender lost by the number of troops the defender started with. Now, multiply the number of rams you started the battle with by this number. The resulting number is the amount of rams that attack!
How do tech levels come into play? Multiply the number of rams you need by the attack power of one level 1 ram, and divide it by the attack power of one ram of the level you're sending. But there's a catch. The attack power listed in the help file isn't completely accurate. You can read more about tech levels here.
REEEEEEEDWAAAAAALLLL!
er.....
...
i mean...
....no wall
I swear, I have never watched that show! Honest!
ok...
maybe once or twice..
...alright, so I never miss an episode. Does this make me less of a man?
^^just kidding^^
I swear.
Thanks to cheesasaurus for this guide[/spoil]
[Guide] Timing Troop Movements
[spoil]Originally, I was going to make a short guide to help out some tribesmates. But I've got a lot of time on my hands today.
This is a detailed guide on how to time unit movements. This is not a guide for the uses of timing; making spreadsheets; arranging your windows; fast clicking; what kind of clock to use; cheating; or killing small animals.
Before reading too far, ask yourself these things:
If you answered no to any of those questions, you might have a bit of trouble following this guide.
And now, without further delay, I give to you the cheesy timing guide!
Timing Troop Movements
Timing is a big part of Tribal Wars. Something that a lot of so-called 'experienced' players still seem to have trouble with. Therefore, I'm going to try and go into as much detail as possible here. Some things might seem painfully obvious, but please bear with me.
Contents
1: the game clock
2: calculating duration
3: when to send your troops
4: calculating when troops will return from an attack
5: predicting attacks
The Game Clock
First of all, take a look at the bottom right of your screen. It'll look something like this, but without the bright green:
The part I circled is the game clock, which displays the game time to the nearest second. If anyone mentions 'server time,' this is the time they're talking about. I believe it coincides with GMT+1.
Now go to your rally point and send some of your units to a nearby village. Click on the command, and check out the details:
Take a close look at the arrival time, and you will see some lighter-colored numbers behind the hours:minutes:seconds. Those numbers are the milliseconds of the arrival time. We now know that arrival times are much more precise than 'to the nearest second.'
If you're going to time well, you have to understand the measures of time the server uses.
There are 24 hours in one day.
There are 60 minutes in one hour.
There are 60 seconds in one minute.
There are 1000 milliseconds in one second.
So a time of 3 hours, 24 minutes, 18 seconds, and 871 milliseconds would be written like this:
03:24:18.871
Calculating Duration
The goal of timing troop movements is to get your troops to arrive at some location at a certain time. To start off, there are 3 things you need to know:
1) where they are going (destination)
2) how long it takes them to get there (duration)
3) the time you want them to arrive
#1 and #3 are both things that a player can decide. #2, however, is generally not, and you will have to calculate this yourself if you want to be accurate.
To figure the duration, you have to find:
1) how fast your troops will move (speed)
2) how far away the destination is (distance)
The first part is easy; just look at the units section in the help page for the world you're playing:
I'll use the stats in this picture for any examples I use.
The part listed as unit "speed" is actually the time(in minutes) it takes for that unit to travel one field. Keep in mind that units travel at the speed of the slowest unit they're with. If you send support with a paladin, they will move at the speed of the paladin.
You now have the speed, and need to get the distance.
Take a look at your map. You'll see numbers to the left of and right below the close-up view.
The numbers on the left are the y coordinates, and the numbers on the bottom are the x coordinates. Every village has a unique location, shown in the game as "(X|Y)". The village at the center of this map is located at 503|843.
Now, I'll define a few things to make what I'm about to say a little easier to follow.
Destination: the village you are sending the troops to.
Origin: the village you are sending the troops from.
Distance: the number of fields between the origin and the destination.
Xo: the x coordinate of the origin village.
Yo: the y coordinate of the origin village.
X: the x coordinate of the destination village.
Y: the y coordinate of the destination village.
Here's the formula for finding the distance (taken from the Pythagorean Theorem)
Say we want to find the distance from 503|843 to 502|844.
Just put the numbers into the right spots, and then solve the expression. I use a calculator to get an approximate answer.
So the distance is about 1.41421356 fields. Let's say I'm attacking with a scout ('speed' 9)
To find the duration, multiply the 'speed' (9 minutes/field) by the distance (1.41421356 fields).
(9 minutes/field) * (1.41421356 fields) = 12.7279220 minutes
That's nice, but we want our time to read "hours:minutes:seconds.milliseconds". This means more math :icon_wink:
We know there are 60 minutes in one hour, but the duration is only 12.7279220 minutes; quite a bit less than 60 minutes. So the number of hours is 00. We've now got a duration of 00:??:??.???, with 12.7279220 minutes left over.
There are 12 whole minutes in 12.7279220 minutes, so put those into the minutes slot.
We now have a duration of 00:12:??.???, with 0.7279220 minutes left over.
We need to know the seconds next (60 seconds in one minute), so multiply the remaining minutes by 60 to get the number of seconds.
0.7279220 * 60 = 43.67532
that's 43 whole seconds for the seconds slot, giving us a duration of 00:12:43.???
To find the milliseconds multiply the leftover seconds (0.67532) by 1000 (1000 milliseconds in one second, remember?), and you have the number of milliseconds.
Well, we finally have it. The duration of a scout speed command from 503|843 to 502|844 is 00:12:43.675.
Doing these calculations over and over can get to be a pain in the :lightcavalry: , so you may want to make a spreadsheet to do them for you. No, I'm not going to give you a premade one.
When to send your troops
Ideally, you'd just subtract the duration from the arrival time.
There's still one more thing to take into consideration before we can know when to send the troops: lag.
Every internet game has it; tribal wars is no exception. When you click the 'ok' button on the confirmation screen, your computer has to process that click, send the information across the internet to the server, and be processed by the server. This all takes time.
The lag fluctuates and cannot be completely controlled by you, but there are things you can do to influence its stability. Try to keep your computer's workload low. Don't have a bunch of applications running at once.
Minimize your use of network resources. Don't start downloading something right before you want to send a timed command.
Before sending the troops, make a couple tests to predict the lag.
Choose 2 villages, at least one of them yours. Figure out the duration between them, and send a few attacks. (When I do this, I click at the moment I see the second counter change.) Write down the times you send them and the times they actually arrive.
Now calculate the times they should have ideally arrived (sending time + duration) and write these down.
Subtract the ideal arrival times from the actual arrival times; and write the answers down. These are the delays.
Find the average lag time by adding up the delays and dividing the answer by the number of attacks you sent.
here's a sample test I did:
Code:
launch actual arrival ideal arrival delay
1) 17:06:40 17:19:25.242 17:19:22.553 00:00:02.689
2) 17:07:40 17:20:25.253 17:20:22.553 00:00:02.700
3) 17:08:40 17:21:25.121 17:21:22.553 00:00:02.568
4) 17:09:40 17:22:25.367 17:22:22.553 00:00:02.814
5) 17:10:40 17:23:25.343 17:23:22.553 00:00:02.790
average lag: 00:00:02.7122
variance: 00:00:00.246The time you want to actually send your troops is:
(arrival time) - (duration + average lag)
Actually clicking at the right time is entirely up to you and your sense of time (unless you're cheating).
I mentally split each second into fifths; any more than that and I tend to lose consistency with my mental counting.
When Troops Return from an Attack
To figure out when troops return to a village after attacking, you need to know:
1) the arrival time of the attack
2) the duration
Add the duration to the arrival time, and ignore the milliseconds. The game truncates them, so an expected returning time of 3:13:37.999 results in an actual returning time of 3:13:37.000.
Predicting Attacks
You can predict what an incomming attack might be by figuring out its speed. Divide the remaining time by the distance, and compare your answer to the speeds of each unit. If you check the attack soon enough after it was sent, you'll know if it's moving too fast to have certain units.
-------------------------------------end-------------------------------------
Well, I hope this is helpful. If I made a mistake somewhere, please point it out. If you think I left something out that belongs in the scope of this guide, speak up! And yes, I know there are numerous online tools available that can do some calculations for you. That's not what this guide is about.
Thanks to the following people for improving this guide
Qwe4rty - pointed out that milliseconds are now truncated for returns
dondonna - pointed out my lack of transcribing abilities
Thanks to cheesasaurus for this guide[/spoil]
[Guide] Building formulas
[spoil]You can use the interface php to get info about units and buildings for each server. If you wanted the info for world 42:
building info: "http://en42.tribalwars.net/interface.php?func=get_building_info"
unit info: "http://en42.tribalwars.net/interface.php?func=get_unit_info"
You can also find it on the twstats website, like allyboo said.
buildings: "http://www.twstats.com/en42/index.php?page=buildings"
Code:
timber cost of a building = [wood]*[wood_factor]^([level of the building] - 1)
clay cost of a building = [stone]*[stone_factor]^([level of the building] - 1)
iron cost of a building = [iron]*[iron_factor]^([level of the building] - 1)
amount of villagers a building uses = [pop]*[pop_factor]^(level of the building] - 1)
duration of creation = [build_time]*[build_time_factor]^(level of the building] - 1)
Code:
points of a building = [points of the building at level 1]*1.2^([level of the building] - 1), rounded to the nearest integerThe amount of population a farm supports follows a similar pattern. This one took a little more effort to figure out. Each successive level supports about 1.172103 times the population of the previous level (I'm not sure what the exact value the game uses is, but it's pretty darn close)
Code:
population the farm supports = 240*1.172103^([level of the farm] - 1), rounded to the nearest integer
Code:
Capacity = 1000*1.2294934^([level of the warehouse] - 1), rounded to the nearest integer
Code:
production per hour = [30]*1.163118^([level of the building] - 1)
Code:
hidden resources = 150*(4/3)^([level of the hiding place] - 1)
Code:
factor for defending troops = 1.037^[level of the wall]If the market is less than level 10, the number of merchants is equal to the market level.
If the market is level 10 or higher:
Code:
number of merchants = (market level - 10)^2 + 10The time it takes for something to be built depends on the level of the building it's made in. All times are in seconds.
Buildings are constructed and expanded in the village headquarters. Multiply the duration of creation by the time factor of your village headquarters to get the actual amount of time it takes to make a building. The exact time factor is equal to 1.05^(-[level of the village headquarters])
Code:
actual build time = [duration of creation]*1.05^(-[level of the village headquarters])Units are built in the barracks, stables, workshop, and academy. Multiply the build_time by the time factor of the building the unit's made in to get the actual amount of time it takes to make that unit. The exact time factor is equal to 2/3*1.06^(-[level of the building]).
Code:
actual build time of a unit = 2/3*[build_time]*1.06^(-[level of the building the unit is created in])spear - made in barracks
sword - made in barracks
axe - made in barracks
archer - made in barracks
scout - made in stable
lcav - made in stable
m.archer - made in stable
hcav - made in stable
ram - made in workshop
catapult - made in workshop
nobleman - made in academy
Research is done in the smithy. Multiply the duration of a research by the time factor of the smithy. The exact time factor is equal to 1.1^(-[level of the smithy]).
On a ten tech world, each successive research level takes 1.75 times the duration of the previous level. On a 3 tech world, each successive research level takes 3 times the duration of the previous level.
As far as I can tell, these are the research times for level 1 techs, without the smithy time modifier:
spear - 3960 seconds
sword - 5940 seconds
axe - 6930 seconds
archer - 7950 seconds
scout - 3960 seconds
lcav - 8910 seconds
m.archer - 9900 seconds
hcav - 9900 seconds
ram - 7910 seconds
catapult - 9900 seconds
The game speed is a setting that changes the durations (you can see what its set at in the other information section of help). Multiply all research times by 1/[game speed].
well, there you go. All the basic information about the buildings.
You are wrong.
Is it necessary? No.
Is it useful? Yes. This is a logistics game; Whether you've got 1 village or 4000 villages.
Thanks to cheesasaurus for this guide[/spoil]
[Excel] Risk Assessment File
[spoil]
A file to assess risk of a village when it is on a war front.
http://www.mediafire.com/?imkwfam2lti
[/spoil]
[Excel] Tribe Training Pyramid
[spoil]
If a tribe wants to start training their tribe. They can use this file to delegate responsibility.
http://www.mediafire.com/?5mmzyvjtmyz
[/spoil]
[Excel] Troop Ratio File
[spoil]
This file allows the user to see the different defensive strengths of different units and see the effect that paladin weapons play on those builds.
http://www.mediafire.com/?3n4zymnz0hj
[/spoil]
[Excel] Tribalwars Bank
[spoil]
This file is a banking system for tribes.
http://www.mediafire.com/?2nutjd5mmey
[/spoil]
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