More on Mech Waves

A comment someone posted with a great war report got me thinking about adding a few more things about different types of mech waves and defending them. I’ve got some really good WR’s to show you now. (click on the pictures to expand them)

• Naked Mechs:  you can send mechs without layers. If the city you’re attacking has layers that can be done successfully:

• Ballista/Scout Mech Defense:  The important thing to note here is that you need lots of ballista and lots of scouts.  The scouts are cover for the ballista.  Without them a bunch of scoutbombs will attack the ballista as the highest attack value troop and killing them off leaves you undefended:

• Ram Slam:  Rams are overlooked as attack units.  But take a look at their durability.  Those buggers keep chugging along, taking forever to kill.  Check out this attack:

• 1 Abat Defense:  If you don’t have ballista in range to defend and your walls are down you can quickly get this defense in place.  You get a range of between 150k to 230k archers in the city and 1 abatis.  I have seen this done very well and although I haven’t got a war report to show, here’s the dxcalc so you can get the idea.  That range is important, too many archers or too many AT’s can render it useless (some AT’s are ok).  And you must have all layers out of the city.  Mechs want layers.

 

Hey guys just a quick word of warning

Had this passed along to me. Quite a few people are having problems with Evony so read this and be careful about spending money on the game because they can close your account without notice and you’ll lose everything you bought.

http://evonycheater.blogspot.ca/

Defending against Mechs

I’ve had some requests to go more into detail about mech defense.  I love seeing mechs incoming because you have lots of time to work out your defense and they are very easily neutralized if you know what you’re doing, while giving the attacker expensive losses.

Here’s a war report showing a poor defense for an incoming mech wave:

The defender had mechs and archers, no layers.  He was part way there but he needed to go with one or the other.  The scouts are last to fight so they are not a factor.  

Ok, let’s try some different defenses.  First, let’s take the archers out so all you’re left with is your own mechs defending.  Now all you lose is a few wall defenses, and look what your attacker has lost.

Let’s say you don’t have mechs in your city and need to defend with just the basic troops.  Here’s where you want the archers in and minimum layers.  This defense will work with as little as 100k archers in the city.  And you gotta like the 10 hour rebuild time for you and 6800 hour rebuild time for the attacker.

With respect to hero levels, while its always good to bring in a high hero for any attacks you having incoming, in this particular attack they wouldn’t make much difference.  Running it with a 100 or 800 attack hero didn’t change the outcome.  However, in some mech attacks they will.  If you have incoming, and you don’t have a great hero, ask one of your alliance mates to scout one in.  They’ll be happy to do that because their hero gets great experience for defending. 

Here’s an example where using one of the above techniques, along with a better hero, would have altered the outcome of an attack.  First, here’s the attack as it occurred:

Now, let’s put in a better hero and use the mech only defense strategy.  Leaving nothing but ballista in the city, they shred the incoming mechs.  And this is without much for wall defense.  As long as you have one 5k range setter (trap, abatis, or treb) you will lose next to nothing.   You want the battle to start far enough away for your ballista to do their thing.

And that’s how its done folks.

Notible Phract Smack

I go into detail on how this attack came out in Attack Methodology but here’s the screen shot for those that just like to see those:

Attack Methodology

Attacks will change depending on the situation, the defense and the skill of your opponent, but the following will give you an idea of an effective attack strategy.  This is an attack I carried out the other day.

Get close to your target.  Preferably right beside them.  You can insta-cap a 10 from hundreds of miles away.  In this case I capped a 10 right next door to him using troops from 3 of my cities.  25 waves, timed to land within 5 seconds, and the 10 is mine with losses of only 13K cavs and 24K scouts.

Get your troops moving in and get a scout on the target.  Keep on scouting throughout your attacks so you can be aware of any changes in his defense.

Not too shabby for resources but even without them, he’s “red” so he’s “dead”.  I begin with small attacks to clear his range setters, lower my honor and raise his, plus it will often tell you if he’s online if there’s a reaction to the attacks:  100 each of workers, warriors, scouts, pikes, swords, 10 archers, 1 cav and 1 phract does the job and its very cheap for me.  In about 30 or 40 hits, he’s clear of logs and traps.  10 scouts, 100 cav and 10 phracts clear the abatis away after that (they do also clear some troops).  He’s not reacting so I know he’s offline.  His alliance is reinforcing him.  That’s not a problem, they’re blind to incoming attacks and it won’t work well for them in the end.  I have a plan.

Abatis take longer to clear, I keep up with the cav runs until there’s nothing left.  Now I want to deal with the swords.  One 99K cav/1K scout wave takes out all the swords. A few more small cav/scout attacks and this is what I’m left with:

This is a perfect time to use a jaq attack.  Only AT’s on the walls, no layers and a LOT of archers to kill.  I didn’t bring in a great hero for this but all the same, I fire off 9 junk waves to fill his feasting hall (so I don’t lose my hero) and to take care of any abatis that may pop up.  He could come online any time, its good to take precautions.  Even being right beside him, because of the use of mechs in a jaq, you’re looking at an 8 minute window where the scenery at the destination can change.

His mechs help him a little but its not a bad hit.  Also remember, I’ve been spamming him so my honor is at zero, his is in the millions.  I’m healing 50%, he and his alliance members reinforcing him are healing only 10%.  My next hit is the money shot:

I like this attack not only because I killed off close to a million enemy troops, but better still because I only lost 50% of my 100K doing it.  The remaining troops were easily dealt with by sending a cav run.

I took the city shortly thereafter.  The key things to take away from this would be to get as close as possible to your target, run your attacks on dxcalc or evocalc on another window if you’re unsure, and keep your honor low or at zero.  I’ve never spent a dime on Evony so when I use my troops, I need to use them carefully.  I don’t have a bunch of speedups or hero’s jacked up on Excaliburs.  I fly economy on this game so I had to learn to play smart.  Hopefully this helps some players out there.

Mechs are Sexy

What?  They are!  They can take out an enormous number of troops if the attacker really knows what they’re doing.  I mean, what attacker doesn’t like their war report look like this:

This was a nice hit both by the amount of troops it killed as well as the negative honor.  This hit worked well because the defender was either offline or did not know how to defend on a mech wave and get his layers out.

Here’s another.  The layers in the defending city make the mech a success for the attacker.  Normally swords are good for defense but mech defense is different.  The defender was obviously online because they were building wall defences one by one.  In fact, it would have been better for the defender NOT to have any range setters in this attack – traps, abats, trebs, or logs.  The mechs would have done less damage.  They also would have been been better off moving layers out and trading that amount of swords for archers instead.  How someone can have almost a million swords and a level 57 hero defending is beyond me, they could have at least had an alliance mate scout a better hero in.  Troops were going to die on the defender’s side but it would have been greatly minimized if he’d been more skillful.

If you have an incoming mech and you’re not sure how to defend against it, you should pull up evocalc or dxcalc on another window and run some defense trials to see what you should be moving in or out.  The nice thing about mechs is, unless the attacker is right beside you, they are super slow and you will have lots of time to organize your defense.

Mechanics of Defending

If you want to do more than just defend, you want to defend well, you’ll need to get familiar with the mechanics of the attack.  Troops may all go out at once but they don’t all fight at once.  There are factors such as range, speed, attack value and even the exact types of troops which can greatly affect the outcome of a battle.  Battles are broken down into rounds and which troops fight in which rounds will determine the outcome.

This is a good page to get you started with the mechanics of battles:  http://inspiralmedia.com/guide/mechanics/

Here’s some examples of my own.  My attacker wanted to drop honor but also obviously kill something with the 100K of troops he was sending.  It didn’t work out for him very well:

Besides the difference in hero this attack still should have taken out more than 200 horsies and a few wall defenses.  The reason it did not is because in the 7 or 8 minutes the attack was inbound I moved out 60K of swords and all but 100 cavs and 100 phracts.  With small layers in the city the attack was neutralized, the scouts and cavs fought my cavs/phracts only and tripped over some traps and abats.  Normally I swear by my swords for defense but in this case I did not need them to be the higher value attack troop.

By round 2 the attacker’s cavs got their speed boost and met with my cavs.  Had I left all in the city, all would likely have been killed because I had less than he had.  My cavs were also killing his cavs in this round and my archers were killing them in quantity while he killed only the 100 I left in the city.

In round 3 the scouts got involved but were easily picked off by my archers.

For the sake of argument, lets say I had left my swords in.  They would then have become the highest value attack troop and been targeted.  I would have lost thousands instead of 200 in troops.

OK, same attacker shortly after.  He apparently did not learn from this because he did scout and knew what I had in the city before the attacks so if he’d been playing smarter he would have realized I was modifying my defense to meet his attacks but anyhow, here he went again:

Slightly more scouts this time but the outcome is the same.  And notice on the first attack I got an amulet and on this one a city teleporter.  Nice perk to a good defense.

He then tried a pure scout bomb, which was ridiculous since he knew I was online as I was spamming him from two cities to drop honor.  And what does one do when one is online and sees a scout bomb headed in?  You close the gates and he drops much less honor and you lose a few wall defenses (with all my techs maxed out to 10 a good number were rebuilt automatically).  Had I left the gates open I would have likely lost at least about 8K archers.  However, I could have moved out my archers, leaving 1K only, and left the 60K of swords which then would have become the higher value attack threat and his scouts would have targeted them.  I probably would have lost half the amount of swords as I would the archers because they are great on defense.  Its a toss up but I chose to go with wall defenses because I have a good political hero and can rebuild them fast.

For 300K in troops, these are dismal results.  He was doing what he thought he was supposed to do, because these are well used attacks in Evony.  The unknown factor is how the defender will react because the tables can be turned and damage can be minimized greatly by knowing even just some of the mechanics of the game.

What about archer waves?  The same can be done, remove unnecessary troops and you’ll get a similar defense report:

 

Nice Cav Smack

Here’s a nice cav smack report.  This was particularly effective because their was no layering in the defender’s city, basically just archers.

Mech Waves

Here’s a typical mech wave.  There is some advantage to the attacker with respect to the hero level but otherwise this was a good hit.  Almost all troops and most of the walls are destroyed so a simple archer wave can come in and take care of the rest.  Because the attacker technically lost, he also did not suffer the honour gains.

The Reason for 100K Transports

You don’t come across it every day but once in a while you find a big fat payday.  If you don’t have the transports to get in and out quickly with all the resources you risk losing out the defender coming online, getting reinforced or even spies in your own alliance taking advantage and scooping the resources before you can get them all out.  That happened to me in one alliance.

I found a player with billions and started attacking with the few thousand transports I had, after going through the trouble to wipe his walls and troops.  The amount of resources there seemed to indicate he had not been hit in ages but all of sudden as my reports showed up in alliance war reports, the resources started being scooped right out from under me before I could get them out.  Obviously someone in the alliance saw the reports and either had a second account not in the alliance (as they were not in war reports) or told a friend.  All told close to a billion in resources was taken out, not by me.

Get in quickly, and take it all.