Does anyone else ever use the Attack Only or Transfer Only commands? They can be quite useful.

For example, If an enemy is bordering two territories, I will put a few onto one, and most on the rest, counting on a first turn annihilation. The smaller number of armies will be given a last move Transfer Only order. By doing this, I don't throw away the defenders if my initial attack is repulsed, but I am able to move them towards the front if the attack IS successful.

Although, I must admit, I use Attack Only much less often. Does anyone have any ideas regarding the use of Attack Only?

If you and an ally need to invade one territory, and your ally needs the territory, then you attack only, destroying the enemies defence, then you ally invades.

Your post just shows you have no idea how Attack Only really works @ Mylor

Timinator your post just shows that your not helpful at all. i have never used the attack only command and mylor's post seems like a good possible use for the attack only feature. can anyone tell me why that that scenario is not?

Useful only on very rare occasions and hard to explain.

For example:
3 Territories: A, B, C.
You control A and B, your enemy is in C. C can attack you in A or B.
You are stronger than him deploy in one territory but you want only attack late, when you are sure he has taken the territory.
Attack only because you dont want to send your troops to a inferior place if not absolutely neccesary.

Agressive, Mylor is wrong because Attack Only means your armies will not transfer, such as when an ally takes a territory before you (and you don't want him to have your troops!), or if you really need to take out a territory, but you don't want to send those troops unless it is absolutely necessary (such as if you had an enemy surrounded and really wanted to destroy that spot, but didn't want to send troops unless you HAD to).

While Tim might have been a tad rude in his response, it IS true that I was kind of asking people who knew how to use the features in the game, rather than people to kind of guess at what the feature means based on the name.

What i mean is, if C has a territory and A and B are allies, B needs it for his bonus, and A can easily invade C but not B, A invades and uses attack only so he destroys C armies. Then B invades, and gets the territory.

Again, that isn't how Attack Only works. You are describing a situation in which Player A attacks C, so that there will be no more armies there when Player B attacks. This is mistaken. You can't say "I want to attack that player, but just kill all of his armies, don't actually occupy the territory".

Or are you trying to say that by using Attack Only, you can weaken Player C, so that when Player B attacks later, C is unable to defend and Player B captures the territory? While this is a good team strategy, this isn't something you need to use Attack Only for, just maybe some well-played Delay or Priority cards.

Mylor... the initial intent made sense but the situation just doesn't make sense in the context.

There is no use for the Attack Only command in your scenario. Player A uses a standard attack while player B uses a standard attack, just with the teammate treated as an enemy.

A better example would be if player needed the territory but wasn't certain he had the strength to take it. He could attack standard while B used attack only. Therefore, A would get the needed territory if he succeeded and B would keep his armies. If A failed, B would take it instead to defeat the opponent and free it for A on the following turn.

Needless to say, I frequently use the attack/transfer only commands. I'd estimate I average once a game for one or the other, though I use the attack only more often.

I do wish there were some tweaks to it though...
1 - Attack only ignoring neutrals -- useful if you expect an opposing player to invade a strategic point but don't want to take the neutrals first.

2 - Overcommit armies in attack-only mode -- Have a large army adjacent to two threatened territories. Have attack only flagged for both territories, allowing for either to be reconquered in the event of an attack. Obviously only one attack could be made but the option would let you commit to both and thus overcommit.

Shame on you for the double post!

I am now intrigued. I myself find the "transfer only" order to be far more useful, but you say you find "attack" only to be more useful? I am kind of wondering if you can explain it a little better, I don't quite get your example.

I'm guessing you only need the "attack only" option if you are attacking a teammate. Because you'll never transfer to an enemy or neutral. And as normally you'll not attack teammates that often I almost never use this option.

But when it's usefull:
Your teammate attacks a neutral with 2. Normally he will break it down to 1 for you to easily take it with a 2 attack. But in rare situations a 2vs2 will actually win, so to be 100% sure get the territory you should issue an "attack only", so you either attack the 1 neutral or your teammates 1 that took the territory first (instead of automatically tranferring it too him, which happened to me in the past).

I'm not sure if this is posted as an option for attack only:

Use with people you are at "Truce" with.

Keep low armies on the border, with high armies behind. Issue an Attack Only order from the large stack to the bordering territory.

If he decides to move in on you, BAM! your large pile will take him out (provided that you have enough armies, and that his attack move executes before your attack only move.)

This way, he'll never see how many armies you have unless he decides to get frisky.

Keep low armies on the border, with high armies behind. Issue an Attack Only order from the large stack to the bordering territory.

If he decides to move in on you, BAM! your large pile will take him out (provided that you have enough armies, and that his attack move executes before your attack only move.)

John, that sounds quite useful for some rare situations unless you play a lot of FFA games.

Actually, for FFA games, that strategy seems very useful! Cool! Although this isn't so useful to me, as I rarely play FFA.

So happy to see a proper Warlight strategy discussion on here, rather than people listing numbers of brownies, or touting their 3-man clan.

V, what you expalined earlier only needs the "treat teammates as enmies", if you press attack only, it wont attack

But Hedja, If the territory is enemy (or neutral), you won't have the option of treating teammates as enemies, unless you have that set as the default (which I find causes more problems than it solves).

you're wrong Texas, you always have that checkbox with "Treat Teammates as enemies"

You can set the game to ALWAYS treat teammates as enemies, and then you will NEVER transfer to teammates, only attack. However, I don't use this setting, and I suspect most people don't either.

If you have the teammate warning set, you have to select attack teammate or transfer to teammate each time you attempt to move armies to a teammate-controlled territory. If you are attacking a neutral or enemy territory, this option doesn't exist.

Ok, there seems to be a confusion about attack-only option and when it is useful, so let's break it down to basics:

Standard attack mode is attack or transfer meaning attack only should be used only if you see some value in keeping your troops in one place INSTEAD of transferring them to a certain territory. That implies that you (or your teammate ) have to attack specified territory earlier from some other territory or just have it in the beginning of the turn. Let's start with the first case:

Since you generally attack towards enemy not transferring troops using attack-only mode should be used for defensive purposes. The most obvious one is dealing with enemy on multiple fronts. For example suppose on strat 1vs1 you complete central russia while your opponent completes west russia. For the sake of the argument suppose that you have either income or troop stack advantage on the border, but you suspect, you won't get last order. Very common strategy would be deploying 3-4 to Dudinka, rest to Omsk and attacking Ufa late exploiting your income or troop stack advantage (Ufa is strategically more important). Now, for the execution of strategy the best way is to attack late first from Omsk. Now, if you take Ufa with that first attack there is a good chance opponent decided to deploy more to Vorkuta, trying to counter from there. If not, then attacking Ufa from Dudinka will happen making it more likely to take it. If the first attack was succesful, you don't want to transfer troops from Dudinka since you want to defend against the possibility of counterattack there. That may seem convoluted at first, but it's easy to observe why 1st attack on Ufa is being succesful is directly correlated to counterattack from Vorkuta being possible.

Second case is when you want to use attack only from your territory on your territory. That means that you want to defend against a possible attack from opponent, but on the offchance it does not happen, you don't want to move major troops out of a better positioned spot. That is rarely the case, because that type of defense is very ineffective in a balanced position, but sometimes you may be forced to do it, mostly when you have leftover troops and your income is needed elsewhere. Suppose You just finished australia with major leftover troops in Western Australia while your opponent has Indonesia and India (suppose you know that from intel gathering). Also you fight elsewhere, in africa for example. Suppose you know you can force last order, but you are at a disadvantage in africa, where you can't die for some reason, so majority of your income is committed there. Also you judge that attacking indonesia will be too risky for some reason (it is very abstract, but there are scenarios where the math pictures sth like that). So you'd like to defend australia bonus, but you can spare only 2-3 troops in australia. If you move your troops from western australia 1st order, you are vulnerable from a late counterattack in western australia. If you just attack normally from western australia to Queensland late order, that is a good method of defense, however every time you'll end up with majority of forces in Queensland, but Western australia seems like a better place to attack from due to proximity of india. So we can decide to use attack -only, that way deploying 3 in Queensland defends on its own against attack of possibly even 6 (with 0% luck guaranteed 5) and on that offchance you remain pressuring indonesia and india indirectly.


Those 2 examples can be extended to multiple other scenarios, but in their essense they will be the same. From my experience attack-only is very rarely used and I don't remember any game where it was decisive whether I used attack-only or attacked normally. Using attack-only very rarely can create and advantage, because the circumstances needed are very rarely seen, most of the time there are other, strategically better options. I hope this helps :)