| Alliance Tactics |
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* Essentials * Mob Limit * Group Attacks * Fake Attacks * Isolationary Attacks * Low-ETA Attacks * Stealth Attacks * Cooperative Attacks * Counter Attacks |
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Essentials:
Alliances are a very important part of Bushtarion (though not necessary - you can play solo!). If, however, your alliance is uncoordinated, and seldom work together than you will be at a severe disadvantage. Teamwork is an important aspect of making successful attacks and rising in rank. These tactics are just a selection of the many ways to work together as a team, ranging from ways to best land on opponents, or win inter-alliance wars. Remember though, that this list is by no means exhaustive, and you can often devise effective tactics yourself - these all started that way! Most of these tactics are designed to be used when you know the IDs of your enemy alliance, and so can coordinate them properly. All attack tactics leave you open to counter-attacks; beware of this. Mob Limit: This is a rule used by many alliances to ensure that people will always be able to defend: because of the 5-mob limit in the game, many alliances will insist that you only ever have 4 attacks out at a time, so you always have one for defending if the alliance comes under attack. Group Attacks: This is one of the most common and useful ways of helping everyone in the alliance through attacks. It's used when you know an enemy alliance's IDs. Each player who's partaking will take a target from the enemy alliance and attack them, everyone attacking at the same time. This means that a lot of people in that alliance will have incoming so it's very hard for them to defend against all of it. Advantages * People are more likely to get land from their attack than while just making standard, unorganised attacks. * Your alliance can gain quite a lot of land (and therefore income) overall, in just a few hours. Disadvantages * Can cause enmity between your alliances, and they may retaliate. * Gives your alliance's ID list to the alliance you're attacking. Fake Attacks: This is used to make the alliance you're attacking uncertain of whom to defend. You send several mobs, of the same size, to several targets within their alliance, but only one (or two) mob(s) contain(s) your real lethal units. The rest are just flak and some Geo-Phys Thieves (to make the ETA of the mob match the ETAs of your real/lethal mobs). The defending alliance doesn't know whom to defend properly as they don't know which mob has your lethal units in. You can recall your fake mobs just before the first tick of battle leaving just your real mob(s), and only then do the attacking alliance know whom to defend. This can be particularly effective when combined with Group Attacks. Advantages * Your attack is less likely to be defended against, and therefore more likely to land. * If your fake mobs have enough flak you may be able to continue with some of them if the target gets no defence, and get some land. Disadvantages * Mistakes can be made in sending the wrong numbers of troops (e.g. if you sending 10,000,000 gardeners and 1 Thief then it's quite obvious that that's a fake mob (unless you want to double-bluff)) - you need to make sure that your mobs are exactly the same. * Some people will send their mobs in specific orders, (e.g. real mob first), you need to make sure that people are random. * The defending alliance can just send fake defence to all of them - it's exactly the same problem for both of you - you don't know which are real defence mobs and which are fake! Isolationary Attacks: These are generally used on the top alliance(s), and are when you try and take out the weaker members of the alliance, as these members are generally less active. These attacks tend to be going in to kill the player (rather than just steal land) so that they can't help in the alliance's retaliation, as the higher players are likely to be too big to attack you. Advantages * Can weaken strong alliances enough to make it possible to attack the main players with a degree of success. * Especially effective when combined with a Low-ETA attack. Disadvantages * Defending alliance can defend the player if they're active enough, meaning you'd have to try and kill the stronger players' units too. * Requires a lot of forethought and planning to know when the target won't be online. Low-ETA Attacks: These are fairly self-explanatory - you send low-ETA units either to kill or steal land off the player. The low-ETA can either be a result of adrenaline rushing or lower-ETA units (e.g. the thug Thief unit). Low-ETA lethal attacks can also be very useful in alliance wars, as the defending alliance will find it tricky to send any useful defence in time, especially if you can use adrenaline rush too. Advantages * The defending alliance will find it very difficult to defend against these. * They can catch offline players out, so they can't send their troops away. Disadvantages * Hard to organise well. * Don't work well against some routes. Stealth Attacks: These are when you only use stealth units (but can be combined with Cooperative Attacks), so the enemy won't know what's coming until it's normally too late to defend effectively. These are especially useful in alliance wars, to kill their players' units so they can't defend in future - you can attack their army in just small parts, rather than all at once (similar to Isolationary Attacks). Add some stealth Fake Attacks (of 1 stealth unit) to make the defending alliance unsure of who to defend until ETA 2). Alternatively, use Stealth Harvesters as flak. Advantages * These are very hard for the defending alliance to defend against. * Can effectively kill players of the opposing alliance. Disadvantages * Stealth flak (Stealth Harvesters) have a stealth ETA of 3, meaning the enemy alliance will know it's a real attack with plenty of time to send defence. * You have a limited selection of units to send (only stealth units). Cooperative Attacks: These are used to avoid high-ETA defence. If you send just a small number of geo-thieves (e.g. 10,000) your target is unlikely to be defended ( - why defend against 10,000 men?). When you reach ETA 2 though, a friend can send flak along, allowing you to just flak yourself through their defences, as they won't be able to get many defences there in time. Advantages * The defending alliance won't be able to send very effective defence. Disadvantages * You can't send many units, and so no lethals or other high-ETA supporting units as they'd warrant defence. Counter Attacks: These can be used very effectively when under attack. If the attacking side has sent most of their lethals and other units you can attack their weakened state - they will then either have to recall to defend or let you land. Advantages * Can make the attacker recall when you haven't got enough to beat them in combat. * Can get you easy land. Disadvantages * If their attack is just flak or not all of their army they may be able to defend against your counter and make a successful attack as your troops are attacking them. |