The Stoat Shuffle

[taekwondokid42]

I'm not doing this right now, but I might try it out next round. The reason that stoat gets picked:

1. +10% build, not as fast as rat, but rat has a huge leadership de-buff
2. +10% leadership, comes in handy for both defense and offense
3. +15% workers, which makes it decent at everything.

This also works with rat and magpie if you are willing to make the leadership sacrifice, and it works with Wolf if you are willing to spend more turns building and demolishing. It's called the shuffle because you move your buildings around a lot.

First we assume that you start your run at low land, 100% huts, and a high ratio. Set your tax rate to 70% because workers will be fleeing like mad anyway, so you should get as much out of them as you can.

Your first move is to espy the people with the most land. This strategy focuses on massing food and cash (unless you are a rat, but then you have probably made a lot of tweaks), so getting tons of land is not imperative. You are going to want to break the guy with the most land but if you'll need to hold 5m troops for 150 turns to add 30% land, it's probably not worth it. This run should be low expense.

If anybody has anything worth stealing, you should be at full ratio so take it. If the major land holder has tons of troops and is blocking your run, pull out the murder stick and beat them with it. Teach them a lesson. If they have their shields up and whatnot murdering probably won't get them to a point of vulnerability in a reasonable amount of turns.  So spend 100 turns or so making their life miserable (leave them at reduced health too) and then come back later.

Before attacking anyone, do some math to see exactly how many troops you'll need. Spend a few turns beating down their health so you don't have to get too many. Be careful you don't get too excited though, you want to spend your turns on lots of land.

Right out of the gate attack consecutively down to around 50% health. Don't use standard attacks because they cost 6% health instead of 4% and it's not really worthwhile. 50% health means 1/2 production but you don't have any workers yet  so it's better to get as much land as possible. More land = more workers.

Attack to a point of 'break even,' where building full turns will put you at almost exactly 100% health (this probably means about 60% health), set your tax rate to 11% and build 100% tents. You'll build the tents first and spend the turns second, so you'll get to spend about 40 turns on a ton of tents and a low tax rate. This should help you to hit a max amount of workers in a very short amount of time.

Okay, so now you have a bunch of workers, you've moved your tax rate back to 41%, and you're actually producing for real right now. This means you gotta keep your health as high as possible, so alternate between attacking twice and building for 8 turns. If you can build 100% in less than 8 turns, then go ahead and demolish those tents, 1 turn at a time (you demo the buildings first, then spend the turns).

Depending, you'll either be building markets or foragers. If you are stoat, then markets might be favorable because of the -5% income as opposed to the -20% foraging. But I'll be building mostly foragers because I want food NW not cash.

Attack until you've gotten as much land as is reasonable. Then market your troops and merc-sell the rest, to get expenses as low as possible.

Ideally, you already have enough huts to get the full leadership buffs, but keep a close eye on your loyalty, because you want to end with a few million so that you can murder and steal at the start of your next run.

At this point you either keep on attacking (but attack opponents that don't require many units to break), or you go up to 100% health and spend the rest of the run in full production.

If you do happen to run low on loyalty, it's back to shuffling your buildings around. I haven't figured out yet if it's worth doing this last step, but I'll mention it because it might be worthwhile. At about 120 turns left, demo all of your non-huts and build 50-80% huts. Remember, demo 1 turn at a time, build all at once. When you are at full huts, no spells!

Keep enough turns around to demo the huts again, and all of your other buildings, because you want to end your run at a 175 ratio, so nobody can steal from you. Drop the land. Doesn't really matter how much land you end with, because we aren't going to bother buying troops to defend ourselves. Too expensive, we'll just accept that at the start of every run lots of leaders will be deserting. We'll get them back. [on a side note, if you get taken down too low and don't have enough leaders to benefit from the full leader buffs while you run, move this step to the first step, before the tent building. It's almost as good. Make sure you still end your run at 175 ratio].

You also want to be unclanned, so that the amount of times you can be sacked is limited to twice per hour. You'll have lots of food and cash, and smart people will sack the daylights out of you.

That's about it!