When should I expect to be able to fight regularly without large casualties?

[Simpumba]

So I just entered ch4, and it seems like I'm better off catering until mid dwarves ish, until I atleast get all my barrack units to 3 stars, and have several fighting wonders to help boost the troops. I really want to be a fighting player, but I'm not really sure on how to do so. Do I use the 150% temporary buildings to help explore provinces after I explored a large chunk, and knock them all out with the troop bonuses? Or do I wait until provinces are yellow, then start fighting in general?

 

[Gladiola]

I'm also a newbie, and people with more experience can correct me, but a piece of advice I've seen often is to avoid overextending map expansion. Every advanced scout research lowers costs for catering or fighting (by lowering the number of enemies you are facing) for any province scouted after you do the research.

My plan is to open the provinces that are required to begin each chapter and save my fighting for tournaments and spire, with only occasional fights in the provinces as I expand. This means my city won't be as large initially, but I'll save a lot of goods and troops on fights that could be easier later on. I use the interim time to improve my city by building up (upgrading buildings) rather than outward, and look for culture and culture/pop buildings from events to support those upgrades.

By focusing on fighting in tournament and spire, I'm accumulating goodies that will be useful for me later such as in crafting and upgrading Ancient Wonders while saving the catering supplies for province encounters. Keeping my city compact means that the fights in tournaments and spire will be easier, since expansions play a part in the calculation of opponent difficulty.

 

[ajqtrz]

@Gladiola Good plan. I wish I would have thought of it when I started. Best advice I've heard here for a long time.

AJ

 

[Simpumba]

I'm also a newbie, and people with more experience can correct me, but a piece of advice I've seen often is to avoid overextending map expansion. Every advanced scout research lowers costs for catering or fighting (by lowering the number of enemies you are facing) for any province scouted after you do the research.

My plan is to open the provinces that are required to begin each chapter and save my fighting for tournaments and spire, with only occasional fights in the provinces as I expand. This means my city won't be as large initially, but I'll save a lot of goods and troops on fights that could be easier later on. I use the interim time to improve my city by building up (upgrading buildings) rather than outward, and look for culture and culture/pop buildings from events to support those upgrades.

By focusing on fighting in tournament and spire, I'm accumulating goodies that will be useful for me later such as in crafting and upgrading Ancient Wonders while saving the catering supplies for province encounters. Keeping my city compact means that the fights in tournaments and spire will be easier, since expansions play a part in the calculation of opponent difficulty.

Yikes, the idea that AW/expansions increase difficulty seems a bit counter-intuitive for a game like this where you can spend money. That's sort of offputting that I need to think about upgrading things because the game will make other objectives difficult...

 

[Gladiola]

@Simpumba I suggest thinking about it as a game where you want to make the most effective choices in order to accomplish your personal goals. Some people want to have big, beautiful cities. Other people want to fight and win in tournaments and spire. Other people want to get to really high ranks. Personally, I want to be a useful member of my fellowship and able to help in tournaments and spire as well as with trades. And to be massively wealthy in all goods.

If there were no constraints, the game would not be fun at all. Of course there are different opinions about what the right constraints are, but I am pretty sure that the idea that expanding too far on the world map too quickly can be disadvantageous has been baked into the game since the beginning. For example, scout times increase and difficulty increases the further we go from our cities. If it weren't, we'd all expand to the maximum immediately and then upgrade everything and then why would we be playing the game? The events are only interesting to help get things to fight, expand and upgrade! (Such as by offering buildings that support extra culture and population or resource production.)

 

[crackie]

When you reach the 10th concentric ring of neighbors on your map, you can't clear it catering unless you have orc resources, which requires a tech in the orc chapter to unlock and is the biggest built-in scouting constraint. I didn't fight any provinces from chap 3-6 as everything was always Very Hard because I started in the desert and had to scout so far to reach neighbors. These days, I don't even clear provinces unless the bossy event quest lady tells me to. As @Gladiola said, it's better to use your troops on tourneys anyway in my opinion.

I would shift perspective on thinking that 3-star troops are your saviors. By the time you get them, the enemies are 3-stars too. I have a fighting city from trying to help my FS get to higher chests in tourneys, which was a lot harder to get to 10th chest in the old system (remember when we had one training slot, boys & girls?). I learned to manual fight out of necessity to stretch my troops out since they hovered at 5x for awhile. Manual fighting lets you see what the heck is actually going on in a battle and observe how AI behaves. Battle is a lot more nuanced than just picking 5 units to fight with that is auto-fight. You can see how terrain and a unit's initiative number comes into play, then weaponize it. Manual fighting mitigates troop loss because you are less likely to fight like AI's idiotic maneuverings, but is a BIG TIME SUCK though. They do need to introduce at least 3 more speed increases to the game engine to speed through all those unnecessary animations (you can also "hybrid" fight--start manually, auto-fight mid-battle).

I would highly recommend early chapter ELF fighters to go to town on Vallaorian Valor pits (crafted in MA). Heavy range are the peskiest to deal with early chapter. On paper, you can use sorceress, banshee, treant, or Vallorian Valors against heavy range enemies. Unfortunately, Level 1 sorceress and banshee are absolute divas that die if they break a nail. Treants always show up to the battle an hour late because they forget to adjust their clocks for daylight savings so the battle's practically over by the time they reach an enemy to take any swings. Therefore, the gator guys are the way to go, esp getting to those pesky mortar guys that hang out in the back! Valors get to enemy heavy ranges a lot faster and only takes 2 chops or so to get the job done. All those early rounds your treants spent leisurely walking to the battle site, all your other units are getting blasted or mauled to bits, which means more troop loss/replacement too. I had 5 gator pits at one point. Now I'm down to 1 since my mages have leveled up and don't pull a muscle sneezing.

Yikes, the idea that AW/expansions increase difficulty seems a bit counter-intuitive for a game like this where you can spend money.

Number of techs unlocked, AWs, AW upgrades, plots, and premo plots all affect difficulty, but they are weighted differently. For example, you'll feel the difficulty increase faster with unlocking techs than wonders or wonder upgrades. It does mean you have to ask yourself questions like, "Is that Throne of the High Men really worth 24 tiles and will forgoing it mean I need to say affirmations in the mirror each night to feel better about myself because I am potentially ranked lower now in the eyes of my Elvenar peers?"

 

[jesikrey]

Never lol

 

[Darielle]

If you want to fight in the early chapters, just make sure you craft every 5-day building you can get your hands on, particularly the Unleashed Unit Upgrade. Those things are gold. I remember hearing that one guy stacked 20 of them once, in order to have a stellar week of fighting. While I wouldn't do that, since that would cost a ton of combined catalysts, you may be able to do two of three of the UUUs, in addition to maybe one of the other ones, such as mage multiplier or enlightened light range.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

When you reach the 10th concentric ring of neighbors on your map, you can't clear it catering unless you have orc resources, which requires a tech in the orc chapter to unlock and is the biggest built-in scouting constraint.

11th Ring, not 10th. And if you complete the provinces one ring at a time, that is 222 provinces before you need orcs for catering, which is enough provinces to get you into chapter 10 before needing orcs for the world map.

Slight edit: 222 provinces completes the 10th ring, not the 11th ring. So when you reach the 11th ring, you need orcs.

 

[Gladiola]

I would highly recommend early chapter ELF fighters to go to town on Vallaorian Valor pits (crafted in MA).

Takes notes.

If you want to fight in the early chapters, just make sure you craft every 5-day building you can get your hands on, particularly the Unleashed Unit Upgrade.

Takes more notes.

if you complete the provinces one ring at a time, that is 222 provinces before you need orcs for catering, which is enough provinces to get you into chapter 10 before needing orcs for the world map.

Adds another note.

 

[Lelanya]

Takes notes.

Takes more notes.

Adds another note.

I am on my 6th notebook

 

[StarLoad]

I will pitch in on the VV, I started getting every one I could craft and for the longest time I ran 20 and built up over 950K of V-Guards. I teleported them away to finish chapter 15 and now that I have, I have 30 VV pumping out V-Guards. Now I use Blossom mage, Frogs and V-guards for almost every fight.

 

[Mykan]

So I just entered ch4, and it seems like I'm better off catering until mid dwarves ish, until I atleast get all my barrack units to 3 stars, and have several fighting wonders to help boost the troops. I really want to be a fighting player, but I'm not really sure on how to do so. Do I use the 150% temporary buildings to help explore provinces after I explored a large chunk, and knock them all out with the troop bonuses? Or do I wait until provinces are yellow, then start fighting in general?

It varies for the world map based on 2 main factors:

• Have you researched the optional squad size techs - More techs = sooner, less techs = longer
• Scouting strategy. more scouting = longer, less scouting = sooner

You should start to be able to fight roughly between chapter 4-6 depending on the above. Inno does not see this as an issue, so feel free to send them a ticket just don't expect them to change it.

The biggest impact on ability to fight is the squad size ratio, 3 star units have far less of an impact. The longer you can keep your scouting to the minimum provinces the easier your fights get. At some point this becomes a pain and you just scout like crazy (for some that is chapter 1 and others it is chapter xx and some it is never).

 

[Sprite1313]

Unfortunately, Level 1 sorceress and banshee are absolute divas that die if they break a nail

ROFL... sad, but so true.

 

[crackie]

If you want to fight in the early chapters, just make sure you craft every 5-day building you can get your hands on, particularly the Unleashed Unit Upgrade. Those things are gold. I remember hearing that one guy stacked 20 of them once, in order to have a stellar week of fighting. While I wouldn't do that, since that would cost a ton of combined catalysts, you may be able to do two of three of the UUUs, in addition to maybe one of the other ones, such as mage multiplier or enlightened light range.

Since we're talking about early chapter fighting and not uber competitive tourney fighting like clearing 60+ provinces that would require an insane amount of UUUs, my observations from manual fighting is that if I am to drop only two expiring military building and my options are (A) 2 UUUs, (B) 1 UUU+1 ERL, or (C) 1 UUU+1 MMM...I tend to pick C. The reason I don't pick A is because if your troops are fighting with toothpicks, while extending their health obviously help them survive longer, it still means so many rounds before you can take an opponent down to end the fight. Those extra rounds mean more injuries and troop replacements. Using an ELR or MMM will upgrade them to fight with something beefier than toothpicks, which allows them to kill enemies much faster. The difference might be 3 rounds versus 6 rounds to end the fight, which you can't tell auto-fighting but can see manual fighting. That's 3 rounds of troops saved! I also pick MMM over ELR because my Needles wonder gives a mini steroid shot to my archers so they are at least shooting something besides nerf darts already, whereas my mages have no buffs.

ROFL... sad, but so true.

Mages are actually quite fun if you want to splurge and drop 3 MMM's. You can pretty much ignore the fighting pentagon and use mages on everyone. The animation is hilarious. The sorceress is like the girlfriend, the banshee is her pissed off sister, and together, they just go around screaming and nagging at the boyfriend until he dies. That'll teach him for not to checking in or leaving the toilet seat up again...

 

[Darielle]

Since we're talking about early chapter fighting and not uber competitive tourney fighting like clearing 60+ provinces that would require an insane amount of UUUs, my observations from manual fighting is that if I am to drop only two expiring military building and my options are (A) 2 UUUs, (B) 1 UUU+1 ERL, or (C) 1 UUU+1 MMM...I tend to pick C. The reason I don't pick A is because if your troops are fighting with toothpicks, while extending their health obviously help them survive longer, it still means so many rounds before you can take an opponent down to end the fight. Those extra rounds mean more injuries and troop replacements. Using an ELR or MMM will upgrade them to fight with something beefier than toothpicks, which allows them to kill enemies much faster. The difference might be 3 rounds versus 6 rounds to end the fight, which you can't tell auto-fighting but can see manual fighting. That's 3 rounds of troops saved! I also pick MMM over ELR because my Needles wonder gives a mini steroid shot to my archers so they are at least shooting something besides nerf darts already, whereas my mages have no buffs.



Mages are actually quite fun if you want to splurge and drop 3 MMM's. You can pretty much ignore the fighting pentagon and use mages on everyone. The animation is hilarious. The sorceress is like the girlfriend, the banshee is her pissed off sister, and together, they just go around screaming and nagging at the boyfriend until he dies. That'll teach him for not to checking in or leaving the toilet seat up again...

Yeah, I agree with you, if you have a needles, those ELRs are a great boost to that. But I love the way the UUU allows me to have troops left at the end of the battle. When I was in the early chapters, it seems I often won the fight but lost most of my troops.

ROFL on the MMMs. I think I'll try that next time just for laughs.

 

[crackie]

But I love the way the UUU allows me to have troops left at the end of the battle. When I was in the early chapters, it seems I often won the fight but lost most of my troops.

This is what I'm trying to explain (poorly so far). Conventional logic leans towards dropping UUUs to "have more troops left". I know you mean by end of the battle, but I'm referring to saving overall troops in the army camp inventory. I'm saying it might actually be better to drop an ELR or MMM instead. UUUs are a lot more critical when the enemy squad sizes are multiple times yours, but if the ratio isn't so wide, you can get away with 1 or 0 UUUs and still do fine. However, in these scenarios, an ELR or MMM might benefit more than an UUU to "save troops".

(This isn't really how the math in battle mechanics work, but for example...)
Let's say we have 1 archer with 100 health going up against another enemy with 100 health. He deals 20 damage and takes 10 damage each round. It will normally take him 5 rounds to kill the enemy and therefore, he will take 40 damage (archers go first so one less round of retaliation if you've killed the enemy).

Scenario A: +2 UUU
Our archer now has 150 health, but it'll still take him 5 rounds to kill the enemy and he will still take 40 damage. 0% troop deaths prevented.

Scenario B: +1 UUU +1 ELR
Our archer now has 125 health, but he now does 25 damage instead of 20. It will take him 4 rounds to kill the enemy so he will take 30 damage. 25% less damage and less dead troops.

Scenario C: +2 ELR
Our archer is back to 100 health, but he now does 30 damage. It will take him 3.33 rounds to kill the enemy and take 20 damage. 50% less damage and even more dead troops prevented.

Therefore, you net more troops leftover by giving them bigger sticks to fight with instead of giving them an energy drink. A big part of fighting sustainably is troop loss management. Winning battles with as few dead bodies as possible is a key part of the sustainability equation. It's the same strategy as skipping optional squad size upgrades before to have less dead troops to replace each week. Of course, UUU will blanket cover all troop types and help them all to survive whereas ELR and MMMs only benefit specific classes of fighters. So something like a fire chicken that blanket covers all troop types is not only helpful in winning the battle, but saving you tons of troops while doing it!

 

[Deleted User - 849192770]

nope your wrong sry the UUU makes it so you lose less troops because your troops have 25% more health to work with per unit that's the important part. your squads have more health per single unit than normal meaning you lose less units win more fights and have to train less.

 

[crackie]

yes but even if you have 25% more health to work with per unit and they are still fighting with toothpicks, you are still taking more whacks per battle than if you are able to just end the battle quicker. take those level 1 mages for example. it takes her like 5 rounds to take something down by herself. you boost her health, she might actually survive long enough to see round 4. you boost her attack, she can one shot kill the enemy like a big girl. she's not even scratched and the battle is over.

 

[Deleted User - 849192770]

you are right for ranged but for melee the UUU is crazy