Advice

Shadow · March 04, 2012, 08:39:09 AM

tip of the day:

destruction is much more important in 3.0. You guys are all used to land passing, and indiers not being able to get ahead, but things are different. An indier could hold land for a run, flood the market, and have an influx of cash that lets them defend effectively for another two or three runs. If someone is way ahead and you don't do some smashing, they will get farther ahead.

Murder is your friend! It's easy to do, and it makes them take heavy losses, and it doesn't cost toward maxxing. Throwing some murders at someone also makes them spend the first turns of their run healing instead of attacking, which means that their attacking army spends that much longer consuming their resources.

If you don't smash the guy in first, he can start to pull ahead. It's not enough to break for land to break a lock, because locks are sneakier affairs in 3.0 - even holding a little bit of land makes a difference.

RWL was a long term game. 3.0 is a short term game - losing out on one run of production to do destruction won't set you back much long term.

cloud · March 04, 2012, 01:15:59 PM

Also people seem to forget the land farm makes cash/food now. I was able to steal a few billion $, and a few million food, from him this last run which gave me a nice boost to the start of my run.

Raggon · March 04, 2012, 01:23:54 PM

I do that a lot, and nobody else cares. :D

Shadow · March 05, 2012, 10:29:57 AM

Lots of people are forgetting to raise defenses.

I think it's because nobody has really learned how to do a takedown in 3.0 yet, but if you catch someone with no defenses and murder then 20 times... the results of a few standard attacks don't bear thinking about.

Firetooth · March 05, 2012, 01:13:11 PM

Messing around with farming, it seems a bit underpowered to me. Maybe I just suck. :P

Shadow · March 05, 2012, 01:20:42 PM

it works on a bit of a delay because you have to sell food to be successful. No more than two or three farmers will be able to be really successful because competition will drive prices down. But if the farmers got together and controlled prices... could easily make more than a casher long term.

Firetooth · March 05, 2012, 02:20:11 PM

Huh, guess I'm just going for short term, I'm not playing competitively. Am findi9ng the market useful, I guess, but I do think in comparison to money made on the same land, food per run seems quite low. Maybe when I run on more land it will be less of an issue.

Shadow · March 05, 2012, 02:37:24 PM

Success of farming depends a lot on the state of the rest of the game - you are dependent on buyers. There are a lot of farmers this round, so it drives prices down.

Peace Alliance · March 05, 2012, 02:42:20 PM

Prices were lower last round

Shadow · March 05, 2012, 02:42:49 PM

it's early yet, they haven't bottomed out.

Raising output won't make farming any more competitive, since it will just lower prices further. I think troop food consumption needs to go back up (it was nerfed slightly about a year ago).

Shadow · March 06, 2012, 02:59:04 PM

tip of the day:

all races are reasonably good at all strategies - you are not locked into one of them. Right now there are a ton of cheap troops on the market - why not switch over to cashing for a run. At those prices, you can almost certainly make more than an indy.

Once the market is wittled down, switch back.

You should not be an "indier" or a "casher" or a "farmer". You should be whichever one happens to fit the game situation at the time. Right now, be a casher for a few days.

Shadow · March 07, 2012, 11:29:25 AM

The results of some standard are not killing as many troop as expected, I took a look at the code and found out that there is a line that says (roughly) you cannot kill more of a troop type than you send of that troop type. Which means that if you are standarding someone at low health, it is best to do it with a balanced army, instead of all rats.

For those who are interested, the amount by which losses are increased when someone has low health is sqrt(100/health), which means that at 50% health, the defender takes about 40% extra losses, while at 10% health, they take about tripled losses. I a considering making this effect more drastic, but I'll leave things as they are for now.

So when standarding to do damage - use a balanced army for maximal destruction.

The Obliterator · March 07, 2012, 01:37:14 PM

I had a problem where i was taking stupidly bad losses. Like for instance. I was breaking and getting land but i lost around 900k rats and they lost 56 rats. Isn't this a bit stupid. I had a totally overwhelming force and they only had about 47k land. Shouldn't they take equal if not more losses?

Vargarth · March 07, 2012, 01:48:07 PM

They probably had a ton of towers or ou had low health

Shadow · March 07, 2012, 03:45:59 PM

Tip of the day:

let's say you are buying a solid defense, and you notice that you have some cash left over. Your rats could always use some more padding, but wait! Is it actually better to buy rats, or is it better to buy weasels? (Remember that when you have towers, weasels defend against all types of attacks). Turns out that they are actually pretty close. Weasels give just slightly more defense than an equal number of rats when you are around 75% towers. Of course they are twice as expensive as rats, but remember that they also defend your stoats, whereas the effect of rats on stoat defense is minimal at best.

Buy the weasels.

Frankly they are a steal at half the price of stoats. As far as I am concerned they are better than stoats for 3.0.

Weasels and (surprisingly) rats have a much better DP:cash return than stoats and skiffs when towers are included in the picture.