Imperia Online International

IO - Classic and Version 4 Realms => Questions => Topic started by: Hiske on September 19, 2007, 10:22:47 AM



Title: The Low Point Strategy (Merrydown)
Post by: Hiske on September 19, 2007, 10:22:47 AM
no strategy-section can exist without the famous low point strategy from Merrydown!

The Low Point Strategy

(Also good for people who want to play but don't have much time to spare)

This strategy has quite a simple philosophy: points are bad. The idea is to keep points to a minimum so that as we pass each step there are as few people as possible that will be able to break our fort. The ultimate aim is to get a boxed in level 7 fort on a mountain (with forests) and high fortification level, but have less than 10,000 points when that happens.

Okay, for this strategy to work you really need a mountains with forests province that can be boxed in. IDEALLY this province should be to the left, right or below province 8. See, to keep with the philosophy of this strategy we only want to be building an additional 4 provinces, all unnecessary researches (such as level 5 centralisation) are pushing your points higher than they need to go.

So how to begin. Well, just like everyone else you get the level 1 fort, level 1 university, level 1 range attack, level 1 melee attack and level 1 military academy. The only extra buildings will be level 5 barracks and level 2 archery range; there is no need to build granaries as they will be wasted in this province. Farms and mines are only to be built when needed, so for now you can sit back and wait for the resources to build up.

Resist the urge to get level 1 medicine, we aren't interested in growing too fast at all and all extra points at this stage are NOT wanted. We want to keep our points down to an absolute minimum. Basically the more we drag our feet the better, we want to fall behind everyone else.

So, now that the resources have built up a bit the first set of troops to train will be 100 archers so we have something to put in our fortress to deter attackers. By the time anyone has swords we should already have our first province and a level 3 fort. But I get ahead of myself. So, the archers are in training and now we wait for the resources to build up so we have enough gold to train 800 spears and 200 archers, our first army.

It must be said that the best way to apply this strategy is to create the account at the start of the era, build the fort and enough mines to employ all the workers and then leave the account for two or three weeks to let the resources build up. You will be under 50 points so no-one can attack you and when you do log back in you don't have to wait three or four days for resources, you can get up to a level 3 fort on the second province by the end of the first day back online. (Like I said, this strategy is very good for people who don't want to spend the entire 4 months sitting at the computer 18 hours a day, it gives you a chance to relax, to take time out whenever you want without using the vacation mode. You can go offline, leave a few million gold sitting around and not worry that someone will come along and take it.)

Two things I should point out at this stage. Once you have your first army you will also need to get level 1 border outposts and level 1 spies. You can get them earlier, but seeing as you have to wait 8 hours for your first army to train you might as well save up the resources while the troops are in training. Secondly, don't bother investing in the stone quarry. Get it to level 2 so you can build the fort and then stop. All the stone we will need we will buy from the market. You can stick 1248 villagers in there just to get a trickle of stone coming in if you want, but there really isn't any need. With the strategy I am describing here our satellite provinces are NOT going to be the backbone of our economy, the central well defended province will be our workhorse and those players around us will be our farms.

So to clarify. At this point in time you have a level 1 fort with 100 archers inside and a small army of 200 archers and 800 spears. You should also be less than 100 points. Your economy is crap, but we don't mind that.

This is where the time you started the era becomes important. If you began the era on day 1 you will most likely find there are very few targets, so a lot of patience is needed. To be honest, it really doesn't matter if you make gold or not, the army is there to take advantage of opportunities and also to put off other players attacking you. The whole idea behind this strategy is that we are always growing more slowly than our enemies, who will be using medicine and building granaries and trying to grow as quickly as possible. Instead, we will be concentrating on defence. Our goals are to start our second province as quickly as possible so that we can start building our defensive centre. The idea is that once you have the resources to start centralisation one you will also have the resources to start another 500 spears. Then, once the second province has been started you build 3 or 4 levels of depot in province 8, transfer all your resources to the new province and start building up the fort level in the new province.

Concentrate solely on getting a level 4 fort. The only other things you need to build are farms and mines, but ONLY when they are reaching their caps, and depots, but only enough to be able to hide all your resources.

If you started at the beginning of the era, employed all your workers and built the minimum of building and research in preparation for training the army and then left it for 3 weeks you should be able to go straight from the one province with not much in it to two provinces, a level 2 or 3 fort and an army in training in a day. Okay, you are way behind everyone, but we don't mind this because no-one in your attack range can beat your fort. Most of the best players have been chasing net worth and have 4 or 5 provinces, 3,000+ points and will never get the chance to interfere with your empire. Having said that, we do have to contend with something possibly even more dangerous: the noob.

The number of times I had my army destroyed because of some noob crashing his army on the fortress walls is ridiculous, but even that isn't the end of the world. Sometimes it can even be a blessing. Say, for example, you have a few hundred thousand gold sitting in your province, your army sitting in the field and the fortress properly manned. You don't log in for a day and that sort of set up is going to attract attention. But!! Because of the defensive nature of our empire those that can attack us are out of range and those that want to attack us will 99% of the time find they don't quite have enough seige engines. So they train some more, sit back and wait for them to finish. That's the more experienced player, or at least the noob who thinks anyway. The noob who thinks his 1000 swords are going to take your level 4 fort is the blessing in disguise. He sends his army over, wipes out your field army and then finds his troops banging their heads against the wall. The upshot of this is that when you lost your army you also lost a whole load of points (one of the benefits of having level 0 military medicine, you only recover 17% of your troops, meaning you just lost 83% of the points they cost). Those players who were sitting back waiting for the siege equipment now find you are out of their attack range and the only way to attack is to build more siege engines. By the time all of this has happened, you have logged back in, trained up another army, built another level of fortification and hidden all your resources. Getting the idea now?

The reason we colonise the mountain with forests as our second province is two-fold. First, we need to start building up a fort to protect our resources and our army. Some of the changes made in era 3 suited this strategy down to the ground. The increased garrison from military architecture allows us to hide away a lot of our troops to protect them from the noob suiciders and the number of troops requirede to accompany the seige equipment meant players could not send 200 cats our way with a handful of troops anymore. This second rule meant that players now needed a lot more troops to be sent to take down the fortress, meaning their points would almost always take them outside the 2x attack range. The second reason we colonise the mountain province first is so we only need to get 4 levels of bureaucracy to get 100% efficiency there, our satellite provinces are NOT our source of income, our neighbours are.

Enough with the explanations. By now you should have a level 3 fort on the second province and probably around 200 - 300 points. At this point it is also a good idea to start investing in fortification. If you can get it to level 3 or 4 most players will not be expecting this and you can keep those resources you couldn't hide safe. One of the most important things to be building is the depot in both your provinces. Level 4 or 5 should be enough at this stage to hide a decent amount of gold. This kinda goes for everyone, regardless of the strategy they use. ALWAYS make sure you have enough resources in the depots to rebuild the fortress and train a small raiding party. If you come back online and find someone has managed to destroy your army then you can just buy a raiding party and start farming the locals a day later. It might seem like a good idea to always have a small raiding party in reserve, but this is wasted points for this strategy. As long as you have enough resources hidden away to buy 1000 swords you can start attacking again just 12 hours after having your army destroyed.

As for research, we don't really need to bother too much with research. You can get level 1 range attack, level 1 melee attack, level 1 war horse, level 1 armor just so you can get level 1 tactics and put your army in retreat mode. Don't bother with medicine or military medicine just yet. University can be put up to level 5 and then left alone for the rest of the era, same with architecture. Spies should be at sufficient level to be able to see the targets you are hitting, no more. Border outposts can be put up really high to lure armies to their deaths, one of the few luxuries worth spending the points on, but then again, leave it at level 1 and although everyone can see what you have you are most likely well outside the attack range of anyone who can actually beat you. Although trade is an important research to make the gold you are taking from the locals go further, level 3 is fine until you get to around 2000 - 3000 points when you can get level 4. Level 5 can come much later and it's not essential to get level 6. By the time this strategy starts to take shape the only thing you will be doing is training troops, and your meagre economy should be able to cope.

Centralisation. As you approach the next stage you should have a level 4 fort and level 4 or 5 fortification and decent sized depots. The army is still mainly a raiding party (1000+ swords, 51 archers, 100+ spears) and there are 500+ archers in the fort. You should be around 500 points. Now, the idea is to box in the second province so those players at the top end of our 2x and just outside our attack range will leave us alone. You will find that they start taking a bigger and bigger interest the more gold you leave sitting around and you just know they are thinking and planning what they need to take it from you, so probably the best way to approach the next step is something like this: Save up enough gold and stone to get a level 5 fort. Keep it hidden in the depots. You can leave a 100K or so lying around just to antagonise the neighbours, most people will leave a level 4 on a mountain alone at this stage because the losses are too high or simply can’t beat it. The fact you also have level 5 fortification also means they would 99% of the time they lose anyway, but they don’t know that.

When you have enough gold, set aside the day to launch as many attacks as are needed to complete the next step. Log in and send your army out to the fattest target at the bottom end of your attack range because as soon as you start the level 5 fort you are gonna jump some points and a lot of targets will suddenly disappear from your 2x range. Once the army is out start the level 5 fort. Over the course of the day use the gold coming in to get to level 4 centralisation. Also train 500 spears. At the end of the day, before you log out, send you army on a save, including the 500 spears, and then train another 1000 spears and start centralisation 4. Leaving it to the last minute gives you the chance to hit a few more targets that day that won’t be there tomorrow, just so you can stuff the depots.

A level 5 fort takes a little over 33 hours with level 5 architecture and level 3 military architecture, so next day log in when your army gets back and then send them back out for a short save until the fort finishes or just keep the account active. Once the fort is completed, colonise the remaining 3 provinces to box it in and sit back and relax. You now have a level 5 fort, boxed in on a mountains with forests, level 5 fortifications and 500+ archers inside along with the rest of your army and your neighbours won’t know what to do. You also have just 1000 points. I doubt there is anyone in your attack range capable of taking that down. Those outside the top end of your 2x will lose too much honor to be able to hit you and you are now relatively safe to leave resources sitting in the province. This is not to say that you should, but you can definitely sleep easier than most.

By now a month should have gone by, all the top players have five or six provinces and 10,000+ points so they are no longer a concern. Now is a good time to start investing in a few of the researches that have so far been avoided. One or two levels of medicine will help the economy to pick up a bit and cartography is worth getting to level 5. Another level of melee attack will help bring the fortress walls down a bit quicker, but we still aren’t interested in getting heavy soldiers just yet, except the heavy archer. Level 5 range attack is quite cheap and 500+ heavy archers will prove much better as you start the next stage.

Now is also a good time to start expanding our army. 400+ light cavalry is a good idea. Put them in the fort and your garrison gains some much needed strength. The raiding party can be doubled so we now have two raiding parties (the next stage is going to be VERY expensive, so we need to collect gold as quickly as possible). You still only need a few hundred spears to act as cannon fodder to pick up the occasional 2 points of honor. I know it can be frustrating because there will be a lot of big armies around that look real juicy and you will want to take a few out, but for the first 2 months this strategy is all about raiding (attacking empty or poorly defended forts) and requires a lot of patience. You can from time to time always spend a whole load of gold, build yourself up a big enough army to whack someone hard and then disband the excess troops to bring your points back down, just to relieve some of that frustration.

I think it’s time we discussed the outer provinces. For this strategy, the satellite provinces are not going to be the backbone of our economy; they are simply there to box in our main province. With this is in mind, and also to keep with the philosophy of the strategy, not much will be built there (this includes province eight). There will be NO granaries. The reason there are no granaries is because we will be capping the population in these provinces to just 20369 villagers (a level 9 farm) so there is no need to waste points on granaries that become redundant as we hit the population cap. Why cap the population? Three reasons, the first fairly obvious, the second and third not so obvious. Farms cost resources, and higher-level farms cost a lot of resources, so they will push our points too high. In case you hadn’t quite got it by now, we want to limit our net worth to keep ourselves out of range of anyone who can whack our main fort, so ultimately, when we have a level 7 fort, we should only have around 15 – 20,000 points (including army).

The second reason is to make this empire much more suitable for war. With just 20,369 villagers, anyone pillaging us during war will get just 4 war points for pillaging each of our satellite provinces. 4 war points for losing 4 points of honor is going to hurt them more than us. And seeing as we don’t rely on these outer provinces for their rubbish contributions to our economy, losing 4,000 villagers doesn’t even dent our empire. And once they have pillaged our provinces then what? Seeing as the only thing they can hit will be a level 1 fort in each province, all they can make is 0.5 points for each hit. We’re not exactly giving away the war points are we? 16 points for pillaging and a handful of points for hitting the forts, maybe 20 points altogether can be taken from the outer provinces before the enemy realises their efforts are futile. If our enemy has a level 5 fort empty, we can hit that 3x and make 24 points.

The third reason we limit the population is to limit the amount of resources they produce. It’s all well and good protecting the hundreds of thousands of gold in your main fort, but if your satellite provinces are churning out resources worth over 5,000 gold an hour and you go offline for 24 hours, you are gifting your neighbours upwards of 100,000 gold per province. With the population capped at 20,369, you can produce resources worth no more than a little over 1,000 gold an hour. Now you go offline for 24 hours and your neighbours will be lucky to make 100,000 gold for all four provinces.

This strategy is not just about protecting your resources and your army with an unbreakable fort, it’s about creating an account suited for war and chasing the military path and one that is as unattractive as possible to potential attackers. Who’s going to want to hit a level 1 fort and come away with 5,000 gold? Exactly.

As for mines in our outer provinces, although they won’t be churning out thousands of resources an hour we might as well have them produce something worthwhile. The best thing to do is place workers in the lumber mill and iron mine so that they produce two and a half times more wood than they do iron, the same ratio as it costs to train troops, because when our empire is finished that’s all we will be doing, churning out troop after troop after troop. Don’t even bother with the stone quarry, we’re going to buy all our resources at market, the reason we leave it at level 2.

As you might have guessed by now, the fortress stays at level 1. The only reason we have a fortress at all is so we can build the 4 types of barracks in the province. All four provinces will have at least level 5 infantry barracks, level 2 archery range, level 5 cavalry barracks and level 2 siege workshops. This lets you train an extra 4,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry when you need them. One of the tactics we can employ will be to build a massive addition to our army and send them off to whack a target, when they get back we disband them to bring our points back down. We will never really need to train thousands of archers, so level 2 at least allows us to train replacements as and when we need them. You can build a few extra levels of infantry and cavalry barracks just for the extra capacity, but you should keep it equal in each province and not go beyond level 10.

When it comes to training troops, it doesn’t matter if your province is a mountain, hill or plain, the population will recover fast enough. A plains province with no medicine research and no granaries grows at 59 villagers an hour. You train 1000 soldiers and it takes just 17 hours to replace them. Later on, when you have a few levels of medicine they are replaced faster, and even more later on when you have a few levels of military medicine, you won’t need to keep turning out thousands of troops each day.

The one important building that will cost quite a few points, but is actually worth it, will be the depot. This should be one of the first buildings put up to level 7 or 8 in each province, just so you can hide those resources while you are saving for the level 5 and 6 forts. Level 9 is probably the limit, but only after you have a level 6 fort in place. There is always the possibility someone will break your fort, I make no promises that it will never happen, so having 200,000 gold stashed away for such emergencies is always a good idea.

And that’s it. Once you have all of this in place you can forget about the satellite provinces, nothing ever needs to built there again. All they will be used for is training troops lost in battle.

Okay, a brief summary of where we are at the moment. A level 5 fort, boxed in on a mountain with forests, level 5 fortification is our HQ. Outer provinces with farms being built as and when needed, same with lumber mills and iron mines, level 1 forts, level 6 or 7 depots, no granaries. The only province that needs to train troops is province 8 as it already has the necessary barracks in place. There is no point in building barracks in the other provinces just yet because it just pushes our points up, we are looking to keep as many low point enemies in range as possible and we’re not churning out thousands of troops either.

As for research, range attack now up to level 5 so we can train heavy archers, melee attack up to level 2 to help take enemy walls down a bit faster, one or two levels of medicine to help the new provinces grow a bit quicker and level 5 cartography. Trade can now be put up to level 4 so we don’t need to save as much gold to buy the level 6 fort. All other research can remain the same: level 5 university, level 5 architecture, level 5 fortification, war horses, armor and tactics all level 1, bureaucracy level 4, centralisation level 4, border outposts and spies depending on how you choose to play them. Military architecture needs to increased to level 5 as a level 6 fort can’t be built until then, but there’s no rush as it will take a few days to save up the one million gold needed to buy a level 6 fort.

The army should consist of 500+ heavy archers in the fort along with 200 – 400 light cavalry, 2000+ swords, 200 – 400 spears and 1 battering ram (or catapult) to send the army on a save. With all of this you will find you are approaching 2,000 points, the very limit of our safety zone. It is possible someone at the top end of our attack range, or just outside it does have a big enough army to take our fort, but it is very unlikely. Most people spend too many points building up provinces and getting heavy troops and building up the forts in each province, medicine, military medicine and so on, so by the time they realise you have 500,000 gold sitting around they can’t build the troops fast enough. Trust me, I have done it. People constantly sending over spies, checking, or trying to check, just what exactly is between them and all that gold, you can see their points jumping and you know they are training more and more siege engines and troops, and by the time they are ready to hit you have begun the level 6 fort and there are no resources anywhere in your empire. Text book.

Those that do get enough troops and seige equipment together to break your fort suddenly find you are outside their 2x and that they lose even more morale and now they don’t have enough seige equipment, so they train more and it becomes like a vicious circle; every extra point they get taking you further outside their attack range so they need more siege equipment, but because of the rule about accompanying siege equipment they now need more troops… so to really annoy them you disband 1000 swords and now they are completely bushwhacked. Yep, been there, done that.

Let’s get back on track. So, we are around 2,000 points and starting to save for a level 6 fort. As long as you don’t leave any resources lying around no one is going to take any notice of you. But seeing as a level 6 fort is going to cost you around one million gold, the inevitable is going to happen and you are going to find your depots overflowing. Don’t panic and buy more depots, you should be able to hide at least 400,000 gold by now so at first it’s only 50 – 100,000 gold lying around, enough to attract attention, but with a level 5 fort in the way most people tend to forget about it. This is where it becomes necessary to set aside another day or two to send out as many attacks as possible to get that last half million as quickly as possible. The second night, when you now leave 200 – 300,000 gold lying around, those that ignored you before now start taking a very active interest. This is an amount of gold worth taking, despite the losses. I wouldn’t suggest going a third night because you risk losing lot as someone manages to get enough troops together.

You will most probably find some noob had a go during the night, so make sure you send those troops that don’t fit in the fort away when you log out. You can leave them there so you drop points, but you will find it more difficult to raise the gold quickly enough with just one raiding party. I got lucky and found a fat target that got me a third of a million in 6 hits and the rest were hits for between 20,000 and 50,000 gold each, so in all I hit around 20 empty or poorly defended forts to get the gold together. I even left 300,000 sitting in my main province overnight, it must have been 7 or 8 hours and all I had was one noob bang his head on the wall and a lot of dead enemy spies. I would also send out my army each night because with such low points there is always someone that quit the game four or more days ago, and occasionally you can bring back a nice haul in the morning to help get to the magic one million gold. If there isn’t a target worth 50,000+ gold, at least make sure the journey makes a profit, no matter how small.

See, if you find a target 2000+ miles away worth 100,000 gold, then it’s very likely someone closer than you will hit it first as your troops march for 4 hours to get there. If you find a target 2000+ miles away worth 10,000 gold then you are nine times out of ten going to be the only person targeting it. Okay, you don’t make a huge profit, but at least you do make one.

While saving for the level 6 fort there isn’t really much else to do. Build the occasional farm, another iron mine, that’s about it. Make sure you get military architecture to level 5 BEFORE you have the one million gold other wise you will find you have to wait 4 hours for level 5 to finish, and with the new rules when under attack you could lose a lot of gold if someone is capable of beating you in that time.

Once you have the necessary amount of gold (go to one of the smaller provinces and use the trade screen to buy however many resources it is that you need, it will tell you that there isn’t enough gold, but it will also tell you how gold you need) start the level 6 fort. A level 6 fort is worth over 1,000 points so you might want to send out your army to hit the fattest target you can find because you will find a lot of targets disappear as you jump to over 3,000 points. You will also find there are enemies now capable of breaking your fort, but thankfully not too many of them. As long as you don’t leave resources lying around you will be fine, unless you happen to be victim of someone chasing military points, but even they will most likely pass you by if it’s only going to get them 5,000 gold. Keep the bulk of your army on the move, fill up the depots, but seeing as a level 6 fort is going to take around four and a half days to finish, you can relax until it’s finished.

It should be the start of month two and your level 6 fort has finished. You should have 3,000 to 3,500 points and are pretty much invincible now. To even consider breaking your fort the enemy needs an army worth over 4,000 points, and that’s just when it’s empty. Seeing as you will have around 1,000 heavy archers inside, they will need a lot more. And seeing as they will also have 4,000+ points spent on research and buildings, the chances you are in their attack range is pretty remote; 99% of the players who can beat you are too far outside your attack range to be worth worrying about. So, with this space to breathe it’s time to increase our defence. Another few levels of fortification and filling up the garrison with cavalry and swords will strengthen our position and we can start saving for the level 7 fort.

Have you noticed the recurring theme yet? We build a fort, consolidate our defence and then save for the next level of fort. That’s essentially all there is to this strategy. Keeping the points down so no one in our attack range can take our fort is all we are doing.

Perhaps it’s time I mention the central province, the kingpin of our empire. It’s all well and good saying build a level 7 fort, but there is slightly more to it than that. The central province is not only our safehouse, it is also our economy. Once you have a level 7 fort in this province you can begin building it up. This means building granaries, as high as we can, and farms to keep the population growing. The idea is that we train spears in the outer provinces and then disband them here, building up our population much faster than it would grow otherwise. We are looking to get this province to hit the maximum population for a mountains with forests province, around 200,000 villagers. This will give an income of around 25,000+ wood and 10,000 iron, enough to train 500 phalanx or 500 elite archers or 250 guardians or 125 paladins an hour. That’s 12,000 phalanx or 12,000 elite archers or 6,000 guardians or 3,000 paladins a day. Not too shabby.

It is also a good idea to build a high level depot here. Level 12 lets you move over 500,000 resources, but level 10 (226,660) is just as good. There is no need to build any barracks in this province, it won’t be used to train troops. So basically, once the level 7 fort is finished the only thing worth building here is granaries, but even then once you get to level 20 the maximum population you can have doesn’t increase much and the points you are spending don’t really justify more levels.

So, now you have a level 6 fort. You train up a few thousand light cavs and increase your raiding parties because if you thought the level 6 fort was expensive, you ain’t seen anything yet. You are going to need something in the region of four million gold to buy a level 7 fort. I would suggest keeping your net worth under 4,000 points because there is no way you can store four million gold in the depots (well, you can, but it’s not worth spending all those points building stupidly high levels of depot). As long as you increase fortification up to level 7 or 8, and have a decent amount of cavalry and archers in the fort then no one is going to take your gold. Those that do try will just be banging their heads on the walls and adding to your gold total.

Aside from getting trade to level 5, the only research really worth doing now is the offensive research. While saving for a level 7 fort it is worth getting these up to the required levels to train heavy soldiers, just so you can whack a few small armies (raiding is probably getting a bit boring by now). You will also find you need to be able to take down level 4 and 5 forts, something light troops are not best suited for. Military medicine still isn’t necessary though; we won’t be whacking the big armies just yet.

All you can do now is wait. Each day send out the armies to collect gold and build the occasional bit of research, change the light swords for heavy swords (but still have a small group of light spears to use as cannon fodder) and just keep attacking the locals. It can take anything from a few days to more than a week to get the necessary gold together, but as long as you have kept your points to a minimum then the gold should be safe. After 29.1.2007 it should be a lot easier when the new 10x rule comes into effect.

And that’s about all there is to it. Once you have enough gold buy yourself a level 7 fort and then wait the almost 2 weeks for it to build. Yeah, okay, you can build a few more levels of architecture and military architecture to bring the time down if you choose, but this strategy is also for the player who doesn’t want to spend 18 hours a day in front of the computer. Yeah, you do need to spend the occasional day or two online quite a bit, but that’s just to help things along. This is just the general outline of how to build a defensive empire; it is very flexible and can be changed quite drastically to suit your own needs. If you don’t want to spend a few hours each day attacking the locals just build up your depots, if you can spend eighteen hours a day online or are a very experienced attacker then you can keep the points even lower to make your fort even safer. You can build a bigger army than what I recommend, hit everyone in sight, whack armies and grow a lot faster. This was only meant to give you the outline of my strategy, do with it as you please, mould it to suit your lifestyle.

Just to finish it off. While waiting for the level 7 fort to finish just fill up the depots with gold and iron, maybe train up some extra troops and whack some armies, just make sure you keep the points low and don’t leave resources lying around. If your depots fill up and there is still a few days before the fort is ready buy troops or buy and sell down to 0, just don’t leave more than 20,000 gold lying around and you should be left alone. Once the fort is finished you should be around 8,000 to 10,000 points and can finish the research to start training elite troops. Increase military medicine to level 8+ and you are pretty much finished with buildings and research, except for getting fortification up to level 10 or 11 to take the HP of your fort over 20 million. It should be around the start of month three, all the best players are topping 100,000 points and you are left to mop up those around you. You can start pouring spearmen into your main province to build up its population to the max, but even that isn’t entirely necessary, just buy all the resources you want on the market instead.

To make the best use of this setup it is probably a good idea to keep with the general theme and keep your points down. If you can keep below 15,000 points you can keep resources hidden and be perfectly safe from anyone breaking your fort. Just try to keep below 20,000 points and there shouldn’t be a single player capable of busting your fort so you can leave millions of resources in your main provinces and go offline for days at a time. You might find your field army has been massacred in that time, but seeing as you can store around 8,000+ troops in the fort it’s no big loss. Plus, if you did increase the population there using spears, the resources waiting for you when you log back in will be huge. Our satellite provinces will have been hit, but all the enemy gets away with is maybe 20,000 gold each time and you don’t even have to repair them because you will never build anything in those provinces ever again.

This strategy was developed by myself over 2 eras and everything I describe here worked for me last era and continues to work for me this era. You will never make it on the scoreboard for net worth (and with the changes to military points you might not make it onto that scoreboard either, which would be a great shame) but at least you won’t be wiped out every time you go offline and can have some fun whacking everyone in sight.

Thank you, Merrydown, for this awesome strategy!!!