Notes

Attacking, and Defense tips-OCEAN

[quote][b]Using Balloons and Gryos to launch surprise attacks[/b]

Gyros, Balloons and a single spear man can be an effective way to attack and defend towns.

Balloons can be devastating to enemy artillery and it is always better to fight against an enemy who does not have any artillery to use against you. If your enemy does not have any artillery, then you will suffer much lower losses on your front line troops. If you have the opportunity to remove some of that artillery prior to launching your main attack, I highly recommend that you do not waste that opportunity!

TO ATTACK:
launch 1 spear man, 30 balloons, 60 gyros at the enemy town. immediately launch the same number and composition again and again until you are either out of action points in your launch town or you are out of enough troops to fill entire troop "blocks" on the attack screen.

It is important to understand that you should NEVER try this without full blocks as the attack will not be very effective and you will be wasting troops.

TO DEFEND:
when you see the attack coming do not panic. stay calm and be methodical in your actions. Leave 1 spear man, 30 balloons, and 60 gyros in your town, then begin to move waves of 1 spear man, 30 balloons, 60 gyros to any town on your island. do not worry about which town you pick because they will never reach the town you choose. repeat this process until you are down to one single action point left. At this point, you must make the decision to either abandon your town to the incoming attack or to continue defending your town. This decision is situational and only you can make it. However, I recommend that you NEVER waste resources (troops are resources!!!) defending a town unless you are going to lose more of the premium resources (wine, crystal, sulfur, marble) than it costs to rebuild any troops that you lose. Use the remaining action point to move the bulk of your army either off the island or to a neighboring town.


your 1 spear man, 30 balloons, and 60 gyros are either marching in waves away from your town or toward the town that you want to attack so now what?

ATTACKING:
your spear man is going to hold the front line for one round while your balloons attack the enemy's artillery and your gryos attack the enemy's gryos. Since the very first round of any attack is instantly completed and the round is over, you will kill some of the enemy troops while losing your spear man, some of your balloons and gryos.

******** YOU WILL NOT GET A COMBAT REPORT AND ANY OF YOUR TROOPS LEFT ALIVE WILL BE SCATTERED.

This happens for every single wave that you launched even if each wave is traveling only a few seconds apart.

DEFENDING:
The enemy troops hit your town and find 1 spear man, 30 balloons, and 60 gryos defending your town resulting in an instant kill of your spear man. The round is immediately over but your balloons and gryos have taken down some of his air defenses and a few of his artillery pieces.
Begin reversing your waves that you launched toward the town on your island. Every wave of 1 spear man, 30 balloons, and 60 gryos that you reverse will fight a one round instant battle resulting in heavy losses for the enemy artillery units. If you time your waves in and out of your town very precisely, you have the opportunity to have several waves hit within a few seconds of each other. your enemy will have very little time to adjust to your counter attack and move his troops out of the way.
At this point you can either choose to reverse your main army or continue leaving the island depending upon your troops strength.

(EDIT)

I forgot to add that when using these methods that once your units have been scattered, you will regain the action points for each wave of troops launched. [/quote]



SEA BATTLE GUIDE WAVING ADVANCED:

[quote]Waving Technique -

This is how we win battles on damage, there are 2 main waving techniques, they are both trying to achieve the same thing, that is to stop the compound hit point loss of your steam ships

Technique 1
What we have to do is mixed waves, this involves sending mixed wave of fire ships & Steam Rams, you need to fill the centre 3 slots with fires & the other slots with Steam ships. This way the fires take the bulk of the damage & you lose less Steam ships (very important in a Hep forge verses Hep forge battle)

You have to adjust the amount you send depending on the size of the battle field, as each battlefield decreases less front fleet are required

Example
+ 15 Battlefield Send - 21 fire & 12 Steam Rams
+ 22 Battlefield Send - 30 fire & 16 Steam Rams
+ 29 - Full size battle field send - 36 fires & 20 Steam rams

Technique 2

This is very similar to technique 1, but is to be used where you have less AP to use & where there is a possibility they enemy may take your waving locations

What you do here is send in all you Steam rams with your first wave & then wave in & out fires for each round. EG (largest battlefield wave in 36 fires per round)

Now the most things you will lose in the above technique is Ram Ships & Fire Ships in a 20 round battle you will lose about 600 fires & 300 Ram ships so keep these sucker building all the time

Sniper Attacks

This is how to do the new sniper attacks, you send 6 balloons & 1 rams. If you hit a fleet you will lose the 1 ram & kill either 6 Rockets or 3 Submarines (for largest size battlefield, if they have Hep running you will lose 2 balloons so you then kill 4 rockets & 2 submarines.
So if you are facing a large fleet this is a good way to hammer the first strike units quick & fast with minimal losses.

But if they have hep running then stop sending sniper attacks as they will win on damage, do this by sending the 1st wave then check how many ships scattered, if 6 scatter you can keep sending as you have only lost the rams if less than 6 then they have hep running so stop sending.


Example Waving Battle - For Large Player - Technique 1

Large player
800 Fire ships
350 Steam ships only if waving
300-400 Rams ships
168 Mortar Ships
200 Diving boats
100 Balloons
200 Paddle Speed boats
90 Tender


Wave 1 -Round 1 - 30 min travel time
Send
84 Fire ships
300-400 Rams ships
42 Mortar
200 Diving boats
50-100 Balloons
200 Paddle speed boats
30 Tender

Wave 2 - to arrive round 2 - 15min travel time (Send 16min after wave 1)

36 Fire
20 Steam Rams

Retreat after arrival

Wave 3 - to arrive round 3 - 15min travel time (Send after round 1 finished)

36 Fire
20 Steam Rams

Retreat after arrival

Wave 4 - to arrive round 4 - 15min travel time (Send after round 2 finished)

36 Fire
20 Steam Rams

Retreat after arrival

Wave 5 - to arrive round 5 - 20min travel time (Send after round 3 finished)

42 Mortar (Retreat after 5 rounds)

Wave 6 - to arrive round 5 - 15min travel time (Send after round 3 finished)

36 Fire
20 Steam Rams

Retreat after arrival

Wave 7 - to arrive round 5 - 15min travel time (Send after round 2 finished)

30 tender (Retreat after 6 rounds)

Then start waving as per Wave 2 to wave 7


Example Waving Battle - For Large Player - Technique 2

Wave 1 -Round 1 - 30 min travel time
Send
350 Steam Rams
300-400 Rams ships
42 Mortar
200 Diving boats
100 Balloons
200 Paddle speed boats
30 Tender

Wave 2 - to arrive round 2 - 15min travel time (Send 16min after wave 1)

36 Fire

Retreat after arrival

Wave 3 - to arrive round 3 - 15min travel time (Send after round 1 finished)

36 Fire

Retreat after arrival

Wave 4 - to arrive round 4 - 15min travel time (Send after round 2 finished)

36 Fire

Retreat after arrival

Wave 5 - to arrive round 5 - 20min travel time (Send after round 3 finished)

42 Mortar (Retreat after 5 rounds)

Wave 6 - to arrive round 5 - 15min travel time (Send after round 3 finished)

36 Fire

Retreat after arrival

Wave 7 - to arrive round 5 - 15min travel time (Send after round 2 finished)

30 tender (Retreat after 6 rounds)

Then start waving as per Wave 2 to wave 7


Important points to remember

* If enemy has active colossus - you may need to reduce wave 1 so you could attack again if you are colossus's

* Watch you Action Points (AP) need about 10 AP for the above battle

* You can reduce size of wave for smaller battle fields but you need to watch out if they send in more fleet & over garrison - you can protect from this by send extra steam ships just in case

* As always if you are fighting Hep forge & don't have 1 retreat battle

So that has been lots of info on waving it is great fun & causes huge damage [/quote]
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WAVING AND HOW IT WORKS:

[quote]Waving

To win on damage in battles & to reduce losses the most important technique to use is waving.

Basically waving is sending certain troops into a running battle & then pulling them out before that round's counter hits zero. This way these troops only fight once & then head home to heal and re-munition. Or sending in batches of troops into battle in fixed sizes so they only fight for one round then the next batch fights the next round.

How this works, the benefits

Some units in Ikariam suffer what l call compounded Hit Point loss, so the longer these troops are in an ongoing battle the more their losses increase each round.
What happens is that after each round the total damage taken by the unit shared across all the alive units in the battle (for example, you have 1000 SG in a battle, they each have 184 hit points, you take a total of 16836 damage from the enemy, some SGs die each round, the survivors each take a shared loss of about 20 hit points each per round, so after about 5 to 6 rounds you will start to see the numbers of SG dying increases as their hit points get under 50%. If left in battle long enough, you can lose up to 86 SG every round).

Which units are most affected

Steam Giants - If you have 1,000 steam giants in battle, from round 2 onwards losses will climb as long the enemy has Catapults or Mortars firing

Balloons - from round 2 onwards losses will increase, round by round 5-6 all balloons will die every round

Gyros - These take a lot of hits before the losses mount, increase by 2 losses every few rounds after about 6 rounds

Rams Ships - The losses on these start to increase in battles that last more than 8 rounds (so only when Ares running)

Steam Rams - The losses on the start to increase after about 4 rounds & keep on increasing

What you need to get waving to work
Action Points (AP) - Every town in Ikariam has action points. The higher the town's level the more action points it will have. To see how many action points a town has, choose the town in your drop down menu, just below you will see an arrow with a number next to it; this number is how many action points you have to play with.
Now you will notice that in your own towns you have more action points than when in an alliance or occupied town. For example in your level 1 town you will have 3 AP, but if you go to an allied town you will only have 1 AP. This 2 point difference stays the same as the towns build up and gain more AP.
The reason you need lots of AP point is because of Travel time & Retreat time penalty
Here is an example of getting 1 batch of troops to battle, then retreating, travel back to town(No balloons in example)

Troops to enemy town - 15min (1 round)
retreat troops as they arrive, they battle 1 round - 15min (1round)
1 hour penalty for retreating troops - 1 hour (4 rounds)
Troops return time to home town - 15min (1 round)

Total - 7 Rounds
if you are using balloons it takes 9 rounds, as balloons take 30 mins travel time (i.e.2 rounds)


Another import point, which many players don't know is when you & other alliance players are in an alliance town or occupied town, each player gets their own action points, they're not shared.

The next thing is to time every 15min you need to wave troops in & out in most land battles for full effect, so keep this in mind. But you can always keep a big batch of Hoplites ready to send in if you have to leave the computer.

What stops waving from working
the number one problem that stops waving from working, are your other alliance members? Allied players may not talk to each other or someone hears there is a big battle & just sends all troops in & logs off. Allies need to talk to each other. Before you send troops to the current players in a battle, ask what they need. Send in 5 cooks to have a look at the battle, once you see how battle is going it makes it much easier to understand what your ally needs.
The second thing that stops waving is when towns you are waving from are attacked (but l find this is very rare as when most enemies see a battle raging they just send troops to the battle town & don't think about locking down all nearby towns). l normally like to lock down all the enemy ports on an island as this stops them bringing in more troops. Sometimes l just leave free the port of the town under attack, encouraging the enemy to send in more troops for us to kill!

Variations of waving
There are many variations that you can use for waving. You can just send in all troops apart from Balloons & Steam giants & just wave those two types. You can start off not waving & then wave when the time is right (e.g. the mortars & catapults are dead or have run out of ammo, or all the Gyros are dead).

You just have to think about how much time you have to spare, what you expect to find, what other alliance players are in the area & if they or you have Hep forge running. It sounds hard to begin with, but once you get started & try it, waving all falls into place. With practice you can start causing huge damage.


Important points
* You may need 1 extra AP point to wave in Sulphur Carabineers (252 will last 9 rounds)
* If waving from an occupied town, leave behind enough troops to handle small rebellions
Waving is good but also dangerous.
* You will need at least 2 nearby towns to wave from to have enough AP points
* If waving from another island you must keep a port open or again you may not be able to get in troops through a sea battle
* You have to be online at least every 15 minutes while waving, so don’t make plans
* Only use expensive Mortars when you are sure they are safe
* Always coordinate with allies when you are waving, if allies have Steam giants already in the battle, your troops may not take the front lines
* Send in the exact amount of troops to fill the slots on the battlefield. Do not send extra, as these will be wasted when you are waving
* Balloons- if you are not waving in any other troops but you need balloons in battle, but can't be online for a while send in a heap of batches of 30 balloons in each batch. Each batch of 30 will only fight once, so long as a new batch of 30 arrives to take the line. However, you must make sure you pull the used batches of balloons/diving boats before you run out of fresh 30 batches or else you will take huge damage since as the different used batches will not join together, but will go into further battle rounds only in reduced numbers of surviving/left over units. [/quote]
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PSYCEH BIO:

[quote]Time zone: server -1hr
Skype: psyche_an

I'm a 28 yrs old and Scottish. I was born in Africa, and have lived in Scotland, Italy and Spain, and now in England. To my shame I only speak English.

My day life is mostly spent working in IT (specialising in SharePoint), so I make an effort to keep fit by cycling to work, going to the gym and attending NIA classes twice a week. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nia_(fitness) in case you don't know what that is).

Likes? other cultures, computer games of all sorts, successful pillages, barbecues, PEOPLE, ginger cats, wolf dogs, F1, camping, spicy food, music of all sorts, science fiction, the sea, all kinds of movies and lots of other things besides.

Dislikes include; having no messages in ikariam :( leechers! (grr), traffic jams, blind dates (omg!), bad hair days, verbal driving directions of more than 3 sentences, rudeness, tomato ketchup, cold wind on my ears, SUVs, lying, plot holes, and the stuff they tell you about on the news. [/quote]
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