Hey guys, ive skcurted over the forum, and cant seem to find any gweneral Stratagy threads, so i thought ide make one, The thread is mainly for multiplayer Strategys But if you are strugling/Or have any good stratagies For the levels/chalanges The Feel free To post, Or if you have a good stratagy for a certain map also feel free to share! :D also this will help the newer players with there stratagy,

Translated into English:
Hello, good fellows. I have skirted the contents of this forum, and I find myself unable to find any threads on general strategy, so I thought that I'd make one. This thread is mainly for multiplayer strategies, but if you are struggling or have any good strategies for the levels or challenges, then feel free to post. Alternatively, if you have a good strategy for a certain map, then feel free to share. I feel that this will help the newer players with their strategy.

Please, please, learn to spell! Or at least learn to misspell consistently. It's strategy and strategies, not Stratagy, Strategys, stratagies, or stratagy.

Wordlbeing, I think you misspelled "strategery"

You're welcome.

Strategery #109: Don't attack walls. If they're going to have more troops there than you, it's going to hurt.

lol @ hedonism bot,

Strategy is better learned by example in game than through forum chat, I think, but here are a few tips anyway.
1)In a 1v1 game, spread your picks to multiple continents, that way you have something secure even if one or two end up close to the enemy.
2)Learn to utilize attack only and transfer only moves, so that your reinforcements traveling to the main line don't run into brick walls.
3)Small attacks of two or three attackers into unoccupied enemy territories (ones) can go a long way towards your victory
4)Use the History function to determine when your enemy is using his card(s), to figure out what his income might be, and to collect a ton of other handy information.
5)Regions should be evaluated based on their defense potential (number of access points), reinforcement bonus, number of neutral territories to capture in order to secure that bonus, and expansion/interference potential into neighboring regions.

If anyone ever wants a tutoring match, feel free to invite me to a 1v1 with manual picks, preferably strategic but not necessarily.

fred send me a match we havent played in a while i could be wrong but i think im 4-2 against you (do normal strategy with abandons)

and all good advice. and some additional advice, although this mainly applies to 1v1 large world (i generally play with strategy settings and abandon cards, but this works for almost all versions of world)

bonuses to avoid early: australia, south america, antarctica, east russia (along with most 5-7's besides caucus)

figure out when to wait a turn instead of attacking to get defensive bonus

for abandon card games- generally go one country past your border (especially with a one country border) even if you dont want to take bonus (if i have africa ill take brazil even though i prob wont want to conquer south america), since that way if you need to abandon you can abandon outside your bonus.

if you know where your enemy is, stack up and head his way so you meet him with big army instead of having to deploy once you get there.

and general advice for big newbs: fighting in stacks and defending gives you advantages.

Don't forget about timing. Now there's a delay order card, but if you don't have one, make your own by moving lots of single armies around before executing your attacks to ensure they go off after your opponent's attacks. A lot of games end up decided by something as small as who's attack went off first. Two roughly equal positions (say 20 each -- 1st attack kills 12 loses 14, second attack (8 on 6) kills 5 loses 3 -- final numbers 1st attacker has 1, second attacker has 5. Make it a 1st attack with 18 and a defender with 20 and the 18 is totally gone and the second attacker takes it with a 5.

Pink was suggesting not attacking to get the benefit of 70%, that works, but a properly timed exchange can decide the game.

Fred emphasized intelligence. Always look at your picks and see which ones you chose were skipped. Those you know your opp has. Assume they are also the first bonuses they'll go for. When you run into each other early, look at their deployments every turn, estimate their income and figure out how much they're allocating to expand (versus fighting with/defending against you). If you are taking most (or all) of their income, and you are able to hold position and still expand elsewhere, you'll eventually overwhelm them once you pick up a larger bonus.

Some random tips:

If you have a long border (3 or more territories) with an enemy, it's often better to have an assymetric defense, where for instance 2 of your territories may have only 3 armies or so, and the last one may have 20. Shift the large army around randomly, moving it sometimes and keeping it still at others, so that your opponent will have a hard time guessing when and where to attack. This is pretty much the ONLY way to hold off someone who has a big deployment advantage against you. If you split your forces evenly and leave the defense static, it's easy to deploy and assault that defense.

Don't waste your deployment on a losing defense. If you are breached on one side of your empire and don't have the deployment or extant armies to close the breach back up, then strike your opponent somewhere else and breach him in return. Match the hurt he has put on your deployment by inflicting some back on him. In a multiplayer game this is especially effective, as often people will be unable to maintain their offensive against you since they need to keep their own lands secure lest their other enemies jump on them while they are weak. This can turn a slow but certain loss into a stalemate from which you have a chance to emerge the victor.

Build up stacks of armies behind your lines where your opponent can't see them. When you see that they are deploying up to put the hurt on you, try and guess when and where they will strike, and then move your stack there on the first move. This is a guerilla game, tricking your opponent into overextending themselves, then breaking their army and leaving your own large army sitting unopposed on their border for an attack next turn.

Further to devil's point, anytime your moves are predictable you'll lose. If you know where and when the attack is coming it's easy to defend (and cause disproportionate losses to your opp). Being unpredictable and aggressive are crucial. Let's say you arrive on your opp's border with a 10 and he has a 1, 2, and 4 that you can attack on the next turn. He only has the income to stop you if he guesses where you'll strike. A beginner will usually send everything at the 1, an advanced player would split their attack or send everything at the 2 (he wouldn't pick the 4 in case the opp tried to take him out first with his own stack from there and he wouldn't pick the 1 as it's the most likely place to be defended). But it's all about what that particular player likes to do, maybe you try a delayed attack with everything on the 4, in the hopes that you'd get the defense bonus against a stack attack and then take it out.

I won a 1x1 game because I figured out that my opp had to have gone for Causacus as his first bonus, so I raced there and busted it. He gave it away when he deployed 11 on turn 3. No way he took two 3s since I had Scan and CA, so the only possible 6 he could have that early was Causacus. Had he reinforced with 10 instead of 11 I wouldn't have guessed it. Disguise your income and attack where they don't expect it. Showing up with a stack where you opp has only 1 is pretty much a guarantied bust of that bonus. Randy just caught me in NE US by cutting through Greenland, usually the attack comes from Africa or Hawaii. He also came the longer way around to give himself multiple targets when he hit the border so I couldn't easily defend it.

Another player I lost to when I started out (John Tack) always did the same attack. He played strategy and came at you with a large (and growing) stack as early as possible. He then exploited the larger stack to pound away (killing slightly more than the defenders) until he busts your bonus and then won. It was relatively simple, yet I couldn't beat it. I lost my first 3 1x1 games, then played different settings and won. Then played 2 more with his settings (a 100+ games later) and won both.

Ruthless was another player who had my number until I stopped trying to hold my bonuses and saw blocking his as just as good. He still beats me more than I beat him, but it's close.

A good way to learn quickly is to go to the profiles of good players and copy their starting picks and opening strategies. Just click on their games and look how they deploy based on the settings and board. Watching the game on Barney's profile convinced me to never try the Africa 1st strategy again.

Duke makes a good point about income screening. It's an advanced tactic, and runs along the same vein as 'intelligence gathering' through the history function. If a player is good enough to intentionally screen income and succeed with it more often than not, then he's likely good enough to use all or most of these other strategies we've discussed. Studying players through their posted games is a smart strategy, even if it feels like an invasion of privacy... Some players will hide games that show their general strategies just because they fear opponents using this tactic. It lends weight to the phrase "Pride is the never failing vice of fools", as those who are too proud of their victories will most often reveal their own biggest weaknesses.

The last strategy that Devilnis mentioned I find to be very risky, and I dislike utilizing it. If you do decide to use it, always always always use transfer only movement, and never use it when you have to make a first priority move elsewhere for whatever reason. The first strategy he mentions about an asymmetrical defense works depending on the opponent. Some people in the attacking position will send small groups into each region hoping the enemy will deploy asymmetrically, but when they don't, the attacker is disadvantaged. As for his second tip, I also recommend using the analyze function together with the history function to see how many defenders you may need to deploy to insure that you stop the enemy from breaching your defenses.

In most forums, this is the kind of thread that gets "pinned" or "stickied", so anybody can see it posted up near the top of the page when they browse through the forums. We ought to implement something along those lines

Brilliant Guys keep em coming ;)

A nice game for me here, most of the boots where the oposite team :s and the green was onyl booted because he told me he had voted to end and would refuse to surrender or carry on and he was elaving. shame tbf. http://warlight.net/App.aspx?GameID=1050922

anything you guys would have done differently here?

EmpZ - You got the benefit of the player next to you getting booted in the early game allowing quick unimpeded expansion. Then a second booted player took out your closest competitor. I wouldn't rely on that happening in other games.

Here's a trick I've suggested to a lot of players, open Excel, make columns 1 & 3 1-500, make column 2 = (column 1 x .6) and make column 4 = (column 3 x .7). Then you can quickly see how many armies you need to take or hold a given territory (assuming luck is set on the low side, if luck is high use more armies to be sure).

Also optimize attacks and defenses by multiples. A defense ending in a 1 or 4 gives a 70% or 80%, respectively, chance of picking up an extra kill. An attack ending in 1, 6 or 8 gives a 60% or 80% chance of an extra kill. Pretty much every time I'm attacking or defending I use these numbers. Over the course of hundreds of attacks it makes a difference.

With zero luck knowing the odds and your opponent's income allows you to perfectly optimize your defense. Just add up their bonuses and income, multiply by .6, average up to the nearest whole number and make sure your defense is one higher than that number and you cannot lose that territory. This allows you to properly allocate armies and use as much as you can for your attack, as opposed to feeling you have to leave them all on defense to hold a key spot.

It sounds like a lot of work, but after doing it for awhile mechanically, it becomes second nature and you stop even having to think about it. I don't consult a chart or calculator unless I'm checking how many I need to take out a very large defender or when I want to almost take out a stack, but not completely. Like using a very risky play of abandoning where you are very confident the opp is going to attack and you think you know with how many armies, so you abandon, but with just enough armies in the abandon to stop the attack leaving a handful behind and then you attack where you just abandoned to recapture the territory the same turn you abandoned it (this attack is usually with a small number of armies to avoid compounding a mistake). It's great when it works, but you feel stupid when they don't attack or attack with a lot less armies than you expected. I try this sometimes where abandons are more than 200%, an opponant is repeatedly throwing everything at the same spot each turn and I'm fairly certain they're going to do it again.

from watching the game it seems like you made peace with one of the other teams and honestly never go for romania as your first bonus that was retarded didnt really focus much after that because once someone gets booted it generally gives one of the remaining teams an unfair advantage

great tips duke, i hadn't thought of optimizing deployments based on the randomized remainders.

It bears mentioning that the tactics I was describing are meant for high-risk scenarios, basically ways to pull out of a tailspin when you're already going down in flames. If you're in the catbird seat, you should have neither need nor inclination to play things so risky, time is on your side.

So what picks do you recomend for certain maps?
I for one Like Africa On large earth :) from there into europe/antartica/south america, :)

For a basic map? Territories such as Scandinavia, India, Mexico, East China, East and West Africa, Caucasus are all solid. North Africa is also good to harass the enemy in Africa.

I don't think Scandinavia is as good as everybody advertises it - it has no small or even medium bonuses neightboring, you only have Greenland (for 4 points, pathetic considering its size), huge Europe or West Russia. And if somebody happens to be in any of these places, or one bonus further and then expanding there, you have no chance fighting him. I saw a "Scandinavian" lose painfully once - examine this game and Servixxs play in it: http://www.warlight.net/App.aspx?GameID=1036952. Even though he managed to destroy Radieux at the beginning, he was blocked in Europe, soon also blocked in West Russia, and Greenland is hardly worth expanding to.