This was originally done by Balmont, not me. --KullIntroductionIf you do not know me, my game name is
Balmont. I was fortunate enough to be an Alpha tester for Strife. I have also been the leader of [Beta], and KFC for several ages. I have picked up a few things, hopefully you guys will get something out of it, and make you all better players.
This will be updated when I get time to type it up.
Table of contentsIf you press Ctrl+F you will be able to search for something on this page.
Section---------------Unique code (this is what you put in the text box)
Reference------------1.0.1
THE GUIDE-----------1.1.1
Clan Leadership-----1.2.1
Allies-----------------1.2.2
War-------------------1.2.3
Strategies------------1.3.0
Infantry---------------1.3.2
Horses----------------1.3.3
Archers---------------1.3.4
Warboats-------------1.3.5
Magic-----------------1.3.6
Super Magic----------1.3.7
Farm------------------1.3.8
Market----------------1.3.9
All Out Indy----------1.3.10
Miscellaneous--------1.4.1For Reference-1.0.1
CB= Crystal Ball
Sts=Mage Towers
Mts=Mage Towers
MUF=Magic User Fight
Mass Attack=Getting attacked over 5 times in less than an hour.
Gts=Guard Towers
Strat=Strategy
The Guide-1.1.1
Clan Leadership-1.2.1
As the Leader of the clan you are responsible for many things, clan membership, clan affiliations, etc.
When first starting, I suggest getting 3-4 of your good friends, that have MSN, AIM, or some other instant messenger service. The more you communicate the better chance that your clan as a whole will do well. If you are starting, you'll also be able to talk with your friends about what works well in the game, and what you or they are doing to make an empire better.
I would also suggest becoming an active member in the forums. As an active member, you'll be able to voice your opinion on suggestions, as well as see what new things are happening in the game!
Sending information to your players is key to victory. In all my clans there is a CB topic. After taking a Crystal Ball, players are encouraged to post the CB in this topic. There have been many times where this topic has been deleted and remade!
Be as organized as you can.
1. Have a contact list; complete with past names, and email addresses
2. Have an Aid thread; clan members post here if they require aid
3. Have a CB thread; clan members post CB's of other empires here
4(optional, as i know the Admin will not like this one) have a bar, this will lower the Spam content in other topics that are serious.
EDIT: It's not that we don't like it, we just wonder what's the point. The clan forums are for sharing information, not a chat room. But it's there for you players, use them as you see fit. --KullAlways have shared defense on. It's very beneficial to your empire, and the wellbeing of your clan.
How shared defense works:
10% of your units are used to help defense clanmate's empires in defense from enemy empires.
If you do not opt to share defenses with your clan members, then they will not send a portion of their forces to your defense.
Magic defense is never shared. This includes magic user fight.
At most, share defense can
double your defense. It will not add more than you are capable of accomplishing alone.
Allies-1.2.2
Make sure your clan knows who your allied clans are.
If your allied clan will not go to war with you, and there is no real reason to have them as your ally. Keep in constant communication with your allies, let them know what you are planning so they can help!
Make sure that if you have your allies that you really need them. If you have to drop them in the future it can get messy.
(Thanks Khel)Wars-1.2.3
Declaring war will give you an attack bonus (+20%), but there is a war tax (This tax is based on how many clan members there are and the total networth of your empire, and it will go up for each additional clan you're at war against.).
Do NOT declare war on more than 2 clans at once.
Make sure your clan knows you are going to war.
Wait about 24-48 hours before you declare war on another clan, so your clan can build up some turns. Send Aid to smaller empires so they don't get massed early on, and might later have a chance at taking land.
In fact, get CBs of the entire clan you are facing, and run some numbers. See how many units it's going to take to break each empire. Then assign clan members to each empire. It's best to take out enemy clan leadership and their highest ranking members, other than just picking the small empires off.
Strategies-1.3.0
I can only show you some building numbers, and a general idea of how to run a strat. It takes experience and patience to master these strats.
Basic Beginners Guide - 1.3.1
KhelD4R's Guide is good
Basic Indy Strat-1.3.2
This strat should work well with any indy empire. There's nothing special about this strat.
Race: Orc, Dwarf, Troll, Goblin
Age: Iron
Unit: Any, but Paladin is preferred.
Sts - 10%
Farms - 20%
Blacksmiths - 70%
10% Spirit towers allow you to have enough mana to cast Spell Shield (which you will have to keep up, keep at 48 hours). Farms should provide enough grains to keep you from losing too many per turn. Blacksmiths to produce units. At the start of your run (you should have full turns every time you make a run) sell off as many of your units onto the black market as possible. This amount of money should allow you to make a full run, or pretty close to one anyways. Sell extra grain on the public market.
Obviously this strat isn't used for defensive purposes. You're indy though, what do you need land for anyways.
Andrei/Apocalypse's Indy StratSame as above only:
Camps - 30%
Blacksmiths - 60%
Farms - 5%
Sts - 5%
Tweaked to perfection. We used this to earn the top spots in RoG last age. I, personally, produced over 500 million palys. For those of you who thing that magic and indy are unbalanced really should try this strat. (Untested on reg)
Magic-1.3.6-Difficulty-
AdvancedRecommended Races-
1. Elves -2. DrowsShould give you really nice mages at a low netoworth, but you will use a lot of turns, for gaining money and grains.
At the start you will want to start off with, this is before you get out of protection:
Markets: 40%
Sprit towers: 45%
Farms: 10%
Guard Towers: 5%
You should be making a good chunk of change
, anyways, explore some more, and build only Guard Towers, and Farms.
After you come out of protection you will want a ratio of 50, so you can MUF people around you, some of which will only have 10k mages, that is more than enough for you to embezzle even!
When you get land, now only build Guard towers and Mage towers.
You can AE, but you will want to save some mana, you will need it later.
At about 30,000,000 networth, you will want to take one day and set your empire up like this,
Mage Towers: 60%
Guard towers: 40%
The ONLY way you will be able to make money is by useing Tree of Gold, buy grains form the public market. Cornicopia is a rip off, it costs mana, plus it's cheaper just to buy it off the pub market.
At about 40 million networth you should have about 2.1-2.6 million mages. Makeing 120million+ gold for every TOG. You should be able to, at the very very least, fireball everybody in your area.
Just watch out for the Heavy Indy guys, they can, and might tear you apart.
Super MageRace: Elf, Drow
Elf: Elves get a 6% higher rune/turn rate than Drow. Elves suffer from a negative offensive racial bonus.
Drow: Drows have a positive offensive racial bonus. They are good for ToGing, then using the gold to buy units to attack with... or you can just attack with your mages.
In ProtectionGo to manage empire, set tax rate to 14%. (Max Health will be 98%)
Click on 'Reduce Output' (if that's the way you play)
Click on Gain Resources, and explore for about 50 turns.
Build about 200 Tradeposts
Build about 280 Farms
(You want these just to keep your expenses in the green, you'll demolish them later)
Then build everything else Spirit Towers.
Explore again for about 30 more turns, build Spirit Towers...keep doing that, until you are out of turns.
Note: Don't build any guard towers yet, cause you don't need them in protection, only build them when you pop out of protection and take some land. Only go out of protection when you have more than 100 turns, so you can get, and build on your land.
After your initial 250 turns, continue to explore and build Spirit Towers. When it says on your main page "1 turn til out of protection" stop using turns, and wait 'til you have 250 turns on hand.
Post-protection1. Get a friend to be a gremlin. Have him sell grains on the market for <$20 a piece. This will help you so much. Have him message you the times at when the grains will be arriving on the pub market, and buy them at that time.
When you have your 250 turns: ToG for a few turns, and then buy some grains on the public market. Demolish all your builds except the spirit towers. Then build up to 100% sts.
Look for a Troll, Dwarf, or Orc who has a lot of land. Take a CB, and then use this formula to find your Offensive Spell Ratio:
(Your_magic_users/((Your_Land + Enemy_Land)/2))/(Enemy_magic_users/Enemy_Land). If the output of this formula is above a 2.4, and your utility spell ratio is 50, then you will be able to attack them with your Mages, a Magic User Fight (MUF).
Attack them 3-5 times, rinse and repeat.
ToG and buy some more grains...you don't want to have any -3% turns. When you get down to about 100 turns left start thinking about building the following setup: 65% STS/ 35% GTS. Make sure you have 110 milita per guard tower.
It's pretty easy after that. Just before you make a run, go to 100% sts, then build your gts back up before you run out of turns. Everything else is experience. Enjoy.
Post-Protection 2OR
Destroy all your buildings, and go 100% sts. For your first 250 turns, only ToG (get around 1-1.5 billion gold) and CB. Get good targets because, next you are going to buy archers. Make sure you have enough money to use turns after purchasing units. Attack for some land, then ToG.
Basically, Attack a little, then ToG. After ToGing buy units for defense. This is the strat that I've been using recently, and it's my personal favorite.
Farming Strat-1.3.8
Extensive
Farming Strat by
Geert:
I thought i should post it, because I typed the entire thing a few weeks ago, and I didn't type it to spend the rest of its days in my map of documents. I've used this strat many many times, and you can check the chronicles, from the 3/4 times i played gremlin, i ended in top 10, 2 times, so it's a good strat
so here we go:
It's rather long, lol
--
This is what your stats look like in protection:
Tradeposts : 5-10%
Huts : 0%
Barracks : 0%
Blacksmiths : 0%
Magic Towers : 30%
Farms : 60-65%
Guardtowers : 0%
This is the first and only time a gremlin builds Tradeposts in the entire age! When you start your empire, you're low on money, and borrowing money helps a bit, but this only pushes yourself more into debt. So you build some TP's to keep yourself in green, and build some Mage Towers (ST's) so you start producing some mages, because once you leave protection the horrible fight of mages against gremlins begins, and with the turns you got when you leave protection isn't enough to build a decent mage army.
In protection, all you do is grain, grain, grain and, most important, grain. (Of course you have to get your land to about 2-3k first).
Once you reached the border of protection, you wait till you have about 100 turns, with those 100 turns, you don't attack, this only makes you a bigger target, but you grain some more, and explore some more to get up a little, in those 100 turns, you also switch to:
Tradeposts : 5-10%
Huts : 0%
Barracks : 0%
Blacksmiths : 0%
Magic Towers : 40%
Farms : 30%
Guardtowers : 15-25%
So you make some extra mages, and have some defense, because you need to keep as much land as possible to make enough grain, after you used the 100 turns you put on [to the public market] the grain you made, on a price you think is good, this is different every round, $15 is pretty much the average of most rounds I think. Try to by some infantry, I haven't figured out the perfect way to do this, possibly Tree of Gold, but buy till you have enough!!
Now you wait till you reached 250turns, if you didn't get hit to hard, wait till 250turns and a 100 stored. When you start using turns, you switch to:
Tradeposts : 0%
Huts : 0%
Barracks : 0%
Blacksmiths : 0%
Magic Towers : 30%
Farms : 70%
Guardtowers : 0%
The grain you sold should give you enough money to do this, otherwise you can try to Tree of Gold or in the worst case build some TP's.
Now you buy some more infantry (Horsemen or Archers are also possible), I use infantry because they are cheap, and horsemen are expensive for their dark age offense. Try to get some land (preferably, someone who got massed because he went out of protection to soon) don't try to do hero things, just grab land, and don't push to far, or don't buy too many troops because you can't break someone. If you fail, you pick a new target.
After this you build the land in farms, and farm 50-100 turns till you have about 60-80 turns left, and switch back to 'defense mode':
Tradeposts : 0%
Huts : 0%
Barracks : 0%
Blacksmiths : 0%
Magic Towers : 30%
Farms : 30-50%
Guardtowers : 25-40%
This is what you keep doing the entire age, and after a while you'll end up in one of these situations:
a) You're the 'stagnator', and have to feed your fellow 'stagnators'.
When you're one of the lower guys in your clan, you keep doing the same, and try to get up in ranks by maybe gaining some land, when you get high enough, and safe of all the people that are trying to kill you, you can switch to this:
Tradeposts : 0%
Huts : 0%
Barracks : 0%
Blacksmiths : 0%
Magic Towers : 35%
Farms : 50%
Guardtowers : 15%
You now save till 250 turns too, then you delete GT's, and build farms of them and if you're low on mages ST's too to speed productions of your mages. You make as much grain as possible, and delete farms and ST's again (till ratio of 120-150, <b>BEWARE</b> Max ratio of a gremlin is 150!!!!!) and wait till you have 250 turns again.
b) You're the 'unstagnator'/'slayer' and you feed your fellow 'antistagnators'/'slayers'.
You switch to 'no defense mode', building no guard towers, only 40% Mage towers, and 60% farms, you can (if you want) save up till 250 turns, this isn't needed, you can just get your land up and wait a day, and continue, you now live of pure offense, and don't watch your empire, all you do is try to make money, and keep your mages high at all costs, because all the slayers are out for money! When you think you have enough money to break someone, you buy paladins, and try to break the person, after this, you put as many troops as possible on market, drop the land, and sell some pally's on the black market, so your NW drops enough to be out of the enemy's hitting range, so they can't get your dropped land or your life!
Notes
- Gremlin is an offensive race, so you live off your offense, not your defense!
- All the money you get you spend on troops and or buildings.
- The best troops to buy are paladins.
- So go to Iron.
- Put a spell shield on, and renew it when needed, gremlins are poor on magic!
- This strat asks a little more patience, but it pays off a lot!
-1.3.9
Strat needed.
Miscellaneous-1.4.1
Balmont's Magic CalculatorStill working on some minor updates for it. Use this to see what offensive spells you can cast on opposing empires.
I believe these are correct, these were taken at Beta 2, things may have changed.
1 infantry = 1 NW
1 mounted = 2 NW
1 siege = 4 NW
1 naval = 6 NW
1 mage = 2 NW
1 pop = 3 NW
1 unbuilt land = 600 NW
1 built land = 500 NW
1 million gold = 400 NW
1 million grain = 30000 NW
(Thanks J.C.)I got a long way to go, so hold your horses .-Balmont
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