Strategy Tips and Ideas |
The single biggest thing to remember when playing this game is to be flexible. Every situation is different, so no one approach will work every time. A few basic ideas to keep in mind: - Do the math. Combat values and production are all based on simple math formulas stated in the rule book. It helps if you can get the numbers in your favor. - Use your fighter planes to scout your frontiers as much as possible. You can not know too much about what is happening around you. - Use your bombers to slow your enemy and weaken his forces. Take care not to lose too many in the process as they are expensive to replace. - Go for as many cities as you can defend. The question is not so much if you can take a city, but if you can hold it. Sometimes it can be better to let your opponent get a city and attack as soon as possible so his forces will be weaked by the defenses. - Get up to tech level 4. Levels 3 and 4 are the most important, but none of them are useless by any means. Any advantage is a good one, but empires that dont get to level 3 fast will rarely last very long. For more on tech levels check out the tech page, and don't get too far behind in the arms race. - Diplomacy can be crucial. Even if you dont set up treaties you can send messages and possibly buy time to gain an advantage. You may not need to form an alliance with someone, but it is usually a good idea to make friends with one of the players near you early on. - Production in your cities will probably change throughout the game. Before you go making lots of tanks, consider your income and what you are trying to accomplish. With 3 factories in each city, assuming you have the income to support building anything, in two turns you can build 6 infantry at a cost of 6 production points for an attack value of 12 and a defense value of 18. Producing tanks will only make 3 at a cost of 15 production points for an attack value of 18 and a defense of 12. Artillery is a great way to boost your army's effectiveness without spending a bundle by having one factory building them. They boost your attack value and add anti-aircraft power which can be critical. Just consider what your empire's needs will be and plan your production by what you hope to accomplish. Also plan on letting production run on automatic for the most part because it will take a lot of orders if you want to shift it around, and there are never enough orders to do everything. As for the units, I have a few pointers about them that you might want to consider: - Infantry are the basic building block of your army. Cheap and effective, they will and should make up the majority of your army. Unfortunately for them, they are also the most expendable so I would not plan a career here if you are looking forwards to retirement. - Trucks have two main uses as scouts or making mechanized infantry units. Some players use them to advance quickly and capture territory early on in the game, which is probably the best use for them at first. Later in the game when you can support a higher production rate, combining your trucks and infantry is a very effective way to cause havoc in your opponent's interior by capturing rails or lightly defended cities. - Engineers are most useful at higher tech levels. They are not good fighters and vulnerable to air attacks, so either hide them inside a city or plan on making more of them. They are best for searching ruins to look for research points or production points, but finding something each turn is not guaranteed. Keep searching ruins until the game tells you that they are obviously empty. - Artillery is what I call the poor man's tank. Cheaper than tanks, they have the same attack value and less defense but include anti-aircraft capability. I combine them with my infantry whenever possible. Cheaper than tanks, I believe that the infantry provide the defensive value if you are attacked.by land units. These are great to have if you are taking the combined arms approach to conquering your nice neighbors. - Tanks are the most powerful land units in the game. As such, they are also the most expensive. If you decide to use them I suggest keeping a lot of infantry with them as they are easier to replace. - Ships can be useful if you have a coastal position. Capitol ships can be very effective in bombarding opposing cities to make them easier to capture. If you have transports they had better be escorted if you plan on them getting to the other player's beaches. They are essentially defenseless and will only make good coral reef if they are not protected. - Fighters are most useful as recon scouts. They enable you to see what is happening around the map. It would be almost impossible to do very well without doing some recon flights fairly often. - Bombers are self explanatory. Most effective on small units in the open, they start to have trouble on large formations with or without artillery or on units in major terrain like forest. Large formations are more effective, but like a navy an air force is expensive and time consuming to build and they dont actually capture any land. I would not make these a priority as it will probably be easier to capture them than to make them until much later in the game. As with any list of opinions, eveyone who plays will have something else to say or add. This list is by no means exhaustive and will be updated as time goes on or as I get good suggestions in the guest book (hint hint). |
Popular Strategies |
In a continuing effort to help new players in game 35, this is intended to give those of you with less experience an idea of the ways that more experienced players have found to deal with their friendly neighbours. Just remember that these are meant as suggestions, and with each situation being different it would be best to consider these as possibilities for your own upcoming campaigns. It is also a good starting point for you to develop some strategies of your own. If you would like to make any suggestions feel free to use the message board. Dine and Dash This is a fairly popular style where the invading army takes cities, but does not put a lot of effort into keeping them. Generally the main idea here is to disrupt your opponent's production while inflicting what losses you can. One occasional bonus from this approach is if the airbase has not been evacuated before the city was conquered. The downside of this tactic is that it may be difficult to reinforce the lead armies of the invasion, and you may have to retake cities several times before finishing off your opponent. Great Wall A classic style, it requires a large amount of troops arrayed in a line to advance into enemy territory. This works best when your empire gets fairly large, or if your opponent is relatively small compared to you. The main idea here is to have more main attacks than the poor schmuck you are wiping out can defend against. Even if one group is stopped, another will be able to take the next city while others will continue to advance. This is good for taking a lot of land while invading, and you can consolidate your groups if a really big one is needed or if losses take too much of the bite out of your bark. Harass and Interdict This becomes more effective after rails have been built everywhere. By using advance troops and carpet bombing you are able to divide your opponent's empire into small pockets of resistance which are easier to eliminate. This requires a lot of recon flights and a few smaller forces that run around in front of the main army by whatever distance is needed to be effective. This can be anywhere from 10 to 40 sectors, depending on the situation and how expendable the advance groups are. The major drawback to this method is that it takes a lot of orders to coordinate everyone, and with only 15 orders per turn you had better not have anything else significant to accomplish before you attack if you hope to get it done. Slow but Sure When you prefer to keep the cities you take, this is the most likely approach. To do this, you throw just about everyone you can spare into holding every city you take until you can make sure you keep it while you move on another city. This can be harder than it sounds when the defender is willing to make suicide attacks in an effort to recapture the city. Unless you can get more reinforcements into the city before the defender throws every spare units at the walls then you might as well not book any hotel rooms there for your next holiday. Being able to build rails along with your invading army helps this a lot, but remember that those rails are sitting ducks for bombers. |
(For those of you who like some mobility with your firepower) Courtesy of gunnery.net |