How to: Execute a protection strategy

Hi there

One of the more difficult things for a new player is to do a proper protection, there is alot that could go wrong and the outcome has big impact on how competative your tribe will be. In this article Im going to try and write down the basic way of creating a decent/good strategy for your first 48hours ingame, also called the Protection Period.

First of you will have to decide which race, what class and what kind of main strategy you wanna go for (attacker, mage, thief, explorer). The choices you make here has great impact on how you should go about creating your protection strategy.

The main thing that race pick effects is exploration cost, this has to do with how cheap/expensive your specific basic soldier is, the cheaper the earlier and more acres will you be able to safely explore.

Sage is the one class that makes the most difference for your protection strategy, the extra income can really be a nice boost for your acres and army.

Now regarding if you are going attacker or an exploring mage/thief. Regardless direction you want to gain acres. But while explorers can focus to explore more acres and only train def attackers on the other hand has to get some offence aswell.

There are a few vital moments during a strat, first one is the explore section taking place during the first 24 hours, big misstake newbies do is that they do several small explores, the key is to make one big. The second vital part is the last 8 hours of the protection, here is where you train your basics at update 40 and at update 44 train them into defence (and offence if being an attacker).

Here is a basic strategy:

• Update 0
• Raze: 14 homes, 10 farms and 6 guilds.
• Build: 137 mines.
• Explore: 20 acres.
• Update 4
• Build: 20 homes.
• Update 11
• Train: X amount of basics, explained below.
• Update 15
• Explore: Max amount of acres that you can.
• Update 19
• Build: 5-6% farms, if you can’t build all your acres then the ones you cant afford should be going into homes, this is more explained below, whats not farms nor homes goes into mines.
• Update 20->
• Build: If you couldnt afford all your acres then keep building homes here.
• Update 40
• Train: Y amount of basics, explained more below.
• Update 42
• Raze: 20 mines
• Build: 10 guilds and 10 hideouts.
• Update 44
• Raze: If you are going for ml5 then now is when you should build them, raze 5.5% mines.
• Build: 5.5% academies.
• Train: Z amount of military, explained below.
• Update 48
• Out of Protection!
• Standard Attack: Try to find some free acres here, some people mess up their strategies and comes out of protection with no or low def. Can be a proper smorgasbord.

X: Here you need to do a quick calculation to see how much acres you can afford to explore 4 ticks later. The calc goes like this: (Current cr + (current income – ~14000)) / (1350 + Basic soldier cost * 10). This might look little bit complicated maybe but what you do is making a rough prediction on what your total amount of cr is gonna be the tick you can explore. Those ~14000 is a rough guess on how much you income will lower once you train your basics, you can be much more precise, just have in mind, each basic you train means a 2.2cr loss (one citizen produce 2 cr plus the income selfspell Quanta).

Generally this amount comes down to somewhere between 5800 to 7800. Big Note: If you know you have a high cost basic then you can wait 1-3 more ticks. Your main goal should be to end up on 850 – 1100 acres, you shouldnt wait anymore then 3 ticks, the later you explore the later will you have max citz to gain some proper cash, also dont explore earlier then tick 15, thats when you earliest got max citz and you need to have max citz or you’ll lose vital income later on

Y This one is kinda the same as X, what you do is that you take your current cr + the coming 4 hours of income, have in mind that you will have your income lowered due to trained basics so dont over train.

You want to make sure that you have atleast 60000 raw defence for your 1000 acre tribe, if you are around 850-920ish then you can maybe get away with things like 55000 raw defence but with this small playerbase you’re living on the edge, a proper Oleg Hai can come oop and grab anything at all due to their harpies. Dwarves can come oop with around 60-70k sendable mod offence, Ravens around 55-60k sendable.

If you are an explorer then this should be kinda easy to reach, some races even got the possibility to do a second explore around here, Wood Elf and Eagle both got the possibility to reach 1450 acres 4 ticks after oop the latest easily if only training defspecs. My general advise is to train so you have around 64k raw defence, having that said if you know there is no early attackers like dwarves, olegs, ravens and even high elves then you can lower this amount a bit.

If you are an attacker then its a little bit more tricky, you need the defence just as the explorers but you also need the offence to grab acres with, key here is not to explore to much, never explore above 1k, most attackers can settle for 850-1000 acres, if you have the offence but not the defence then you wont be able to hold your acres so dont go that way.

Z this amount is pretty much already covered in the Y section, train the defence required, you can also train a few thieves (like maximum 500), to get higher chance to succeed on gathering intel.

This strategy thats been explained above is just a general strategy, it can be finetuned for each race, but there is a few exceptions amongst the races.

Dragon, due to it low amount of citz you wont be able to explore that much, aim for having a total of 350-450 acres OOP, and they should be explored as early as possible but in sections.

High Elf, Uruk Hai, Mori Hai and Brittonians, these all have various citz bonuses or restrictions, have that in mind when you do your explore. For example Mori Hai, run them with 30% homes in the start and after your big explore just graduatly add the homes up to 45%, they wont do you any good if your citz is still recovering after the explore, have them in mines at first.

A note about the farms, since some races requires more food then other dont be to strict on the razing 10 at the start, this could resort in food shortage which is a big no no in running a protection period.

Always have your selfspells running, always, no exceptions, the difference between running a protection strategy with and without selfspells are huge

I think that pretty much covered the basics, there is several schools in how to do a proper protection strategy, some people releases military to either explore more or to release into citizens for more citizens, I havent included that here just to have it little bit more simple.

If you think I missed something or got questions about something here then either comment on the article or send me a email @ admin[at]orkfia.biz or contact me on irc.

Cheers

~Acwder