"2% health" strategy

[wolf bite]

 I don?t much like killing, but I thought that in a fair game all would have the same information. Few know about how this works since ?Xenocide? first found this killing strategy. Those that know it have been very good at keeping it secrete. In the new version which will be out soon, this will be fixed (hint). But then since I can?t stop people from using it and some know how to do it, I thought it best I post the defense to the strategy. This is not meant as a recommendation to use it, but how to stop it from being used on you.

There is a flaw in the original Prom code concerning making attacks. It is called the ?2% attack.? Unlike a video game, in prom you can only die when you have no land, not 0% health. So being at 0% health will not kill you. But you can attack even if you only have 2% health. (Hopefully in the new version we are working on this will be raised to 10% health, hint). Anyway, so with each army attack your health drops 6 health, and then only goes up 1 for each non-attack turn you use. Thus it takes 8 turns per army attack. People keep their health up in attacking because at full, or near full health, their armies are stronger. The lower your health the weaker your armies are. So if you have 1,000,000 rats and 50% health, your attack will only have the power of 500,000 rats.

With that understood, here is the flaw. If your enemy has little or no defenses in one type of army, then your 1,000,000 rats at 2% health still have the fighting of 20,000 rats and can beat him, but since the game can only go down to 0% health, it only costs you 2 heath per attack, not 6 health! Then if the person only takes 2 non-attack turns, he is at 2% health again and can take a new shot. So this way it is only costing the attacker 4 turns per attack not 8. A person doing this with 300 turns and wanting to at the end healed all the way back up to full health can take 50 shots. When 300 turns the normal way will only give a person 37 shots. It is like adding 1.4 as many turns!

There are some defenses that can be done to save from being killed by this stratagy.

A city. These are made to help your economy, depending on a person?s strategy they may or may not be useful in normal play. But they are hard to take away from a strong player. The person wanting to take it must be able to beat the player in all their armies and in the leader ratio. It can be done, but it is hard sometimes to do. Building a city in a killing war will make an extra step for the attackers to have to do before they can kill you.

Towers help. Since a person at 2% health has to be 50 times your strength, more strength helps defend. For example, if a person was low in rats, a few attacks would wipe out the rest and they would have no rat defense, someone with only a few rats at 2% health would keep winning fights. On the other hand, if the person has towers, then that will add to their defense of their rats. For example, lets say you have 10,000 land and 2,000 of it is in towers and you have no rats. Your defense, because of your towers have 500 DP (Defense Points), is 1,000,000 DPs. It will take over 500,000 rats to take your land. Then they attack you a lot with full health and a big army and you lose half your land, you still have 5,000 land with 1,000 towers and a DP of 500,000 from the towers. At full health they will still need over 250,000 rats to beat you. But then when they get to 2% health, it will cost them 50 times as many!!! They will have to have 12,000,000 rats at 2% health to attack someone with 1,000 towers. People will have to keep attacking you at high health until they get your towers very low before they can use the 2% health strategy. So it will cost them a lot more turns with a bigger army.

Also a side note, it is very hard to play a mostly Hut strategy in a kill war. If someone takes you very low in land, and you live, it takes a long time to fix your account.


Wolf Bite

[Wolf Snare]

 hehe. I've only used this a few times back in the day. Great explaination wolf.