I was having a looooong break from IO for spring and summer time but finally my desire to play once again overwhelmed any rational arguments
I saw there were new rules for some realms - no online status (big big improvement!!!), some changes in prices etc. ; 8 months era have started in r5 and a very interesting blitz realm was running
so I decided to join both ..but I had to wait till next blitz era... which was era 4 .
I didn't have any particular plans what I'm going to do
so I just selected my nick and decided to see what scheme I'll get and play according to it. Now I'm so happy about this decision :p The scheme was like the worst nightmare for any farmer ;p with only province 8 being plains and province 25 - plains with forests - all other provinces were hills and mountains ...I named my empire Stone
and the game gave me stone
so it was clear that it will be an interesting era for me >:]]] and players around.
I was quite busy druing the first 3-4 days so I couldn't start well enough...I even had to use vacation mode because I had to travel
anyway after some time I built some army and started robbing around...soon I had enough to colonize my main province - p13 which is mountain...a lil bit more gold and it had it's fort 3
which is not so easy to beat in early stage...certainly not worth because of the losses. I continued robbing weak players to get enough for 3 more provinces (just to box my mountain...I never planned to develop them..you'll see the scheme and understand me :p ) and to get lvl5 fort in my rocky capital. But before I get centralization 4, which is needed for heavy and elite troops I already had increased my military upgrades ...I think it is really important when light troops are fightning...having 5-7 attack/armor against enemy with only 1-3 is decisive
Once I got my boxed lvl5 fort and heavy troops the interesting part began - first I went for army enough to destroy boxed lvl5 plains...then boxed lvl5 mountain
some people lost their savings for lvl6...I built some depots for this stage ;p Next of course was lvl6 fort
which, combined with my quite low networth made me almost invincible
I continued robbing around to build up bigger army and plenty of catapults (I think i had 500 at the point when only a few players were saving for lvl7 forts and most of the rest were saving for lvl6...) so there were a lot of nicy battles and crying enemies ...I used the incomes to produce more soldiers and postponed my lvl7 fort a few days. I could build it quite early but having more than 4000 static networth points would reduce a lot of my targets or make the morale penalty too big to handle. My plan worked good because in few days more and more people started saving for lvl7 fort
so one day I spent some time to take their gold and build my own fort
... after that my empire looked like a small military machine :> I just upgraded troops to phalanx, elite archers and trebuchets...actually I never managed to get guardians and paladins lol
My army size never passed 100 000 soldiers , but when I had enough time I could easily do 3-5k military points/day...usually ~2k/day
I had the "chance" to be in area dominated by turkish cheaters - they all get banned, but some of them quit playing before ;p Guys like CEZA and his 4 supportive accounts, CECEN, sokarov etc... all got destroyed several times
before he got deleted CEZA gave me impressive defensive victory with his paladins and guards against what was remaining from my army after destroying his pushing account totojan just a few minutes before (which also had some decent army)...he actually attacked me with CEZA when he saw I'm going to totojan...he didn't even try to remove resources or save totojan's army...he thought that I'll lose enough in battle with totojan, bring his 10m gold to my province and then he would pass over me and kill my army and take all gold ...or in the worst case take only the gold if I remove my army :p but he didn't expect lvl12 fortification :DDD He also get destroyed more times before :p I won't get into details because there were too many interesting/funny cases. I just want to tell people that cheating won't help
one have to learn playing to be good
and once you're good player cheating becomes unnecessary
Some honest players also quit playing
because it's impossible to play when you lose your army 2-3-4 times a day and get robbed in every province :>> Attacks agains me were quite rare...my poor empire barely produced a total of 110k GE/h at the end of era and my capital was unreachable for long time. However after some time it became possible for 140-180k players to destroy me during block...so I adopted new strategy
Instead of simply fighting normally and rebuilding losses I started fighting till my army is reduced to 10-15k :p first several normal battles with heavy losses for defender (1:2 or 1:3 loss ration), then several tough battles with about 2:3 loss ratio, because my army lacks swords, spears and archers since they die much easier in the first battles. When my army is reduced to such point that it's no longer able to fight (like having ~15k cavalry and ~5k sum of all other types) I simply send 10k cavalry to garrison and disband the rest
of course barracks are full so I can have brand new army the next day
and the next day is again rebuilding army till I get 90-100k (starting from 50k (40k new and 10k garrisoned) if noone attacked me or 40 in case my 10k cavalry are totally erased) then destroying it in battles I won
and again....
Most of the battles were quite interesting, because my superiority was based largely on use of phalanx and elite archers instead of using heavy spears and archers... not the typical "I have 2m population and 2-3 times bigger army so u suck" kind of gameplay
this way I was able to win agains much larger in size armies
like 60k vs 90k with great advantage in swords for defender, winning with equal armies agains enemies with 2 times more cavalry
Of course keeping enough trebuchets is essential
I've seen too many people having more than 150k army and less than 300 trebuchets
I kinda befriended a lot of people I destroyed
some remained silent, some cursed me, some tried to retaliate, some of them asked me to destroy their enemies too :DDD and I did it in some cases
then of course came back to destroy them once again ;p to pay for the favour.
I lost my army only once...in day 43 i think...
I was fighting but after 4 or 5 battles during night I fell asleep while waiting my remaining forces to return :p and when I woke up the sun was shining and some turk was killed my poor remaining soldiers
hopefully I've lost more in the previous won battles. Anyway
congratulations to this guy - BEYAZULKE - he showed that noone is invicible
because to play Imperia is important not only to know the game but to suit it to your lifestyle ...and I kinda overplayed this night ;p ...I know there were other players who wanted to attack me..but for most times I kept my points too low during block to be suitable target
of course leaving no resources also helped ;p There were also few ones who didn't attack me because of sympathy
I suppose GREATEST is one of them and probably his allies also. (alliance "ludite" - pretty good players ...at least from what I've been observing during this era) Thanks for that
I also took part in one alliance "bg_boys" but the quality of players were too varied...some were really good...some lost entire wars in few hours
I personaly don't like to fight serious wars with not serious players ... my alliance in r5 is with newbies..so we don't fight..it's pointless
some people devote themselves to gain points and then another guy makes 1 stupid lost battle and the whole alliance is again -500 points ;o but since I was not leader I didn't make political moves... so at one point I left
maybe after 1 era I'll try again with the worthy guys
but now I'm going to rest and drink
I'm sorry that I forgot to copy links to the more interesting battles
stupid me...so I only include screens of my empire ...and sorry for bulgarian screen ...I forgot to swithc but I think everyone knows the graphs
these are my final building and researches and my province scheme
my final economic stats
and final military stats (btw my army is not wiped out... I still had a lot of troops at the end
unlike some other marshals who won their stars after their armies were slaughtered)
For final I'd like to congratulate myself
my allies from "bg_boys" - Romanos, trepa4, drivkolev and mitinho , alliance "ludite" and GREATEST for their good game, alliance kalipso..which gained it's members in the last days
they made some impressive battles and kalipso himself had 12 provinces at the end ...but for me is important that one of them destroyed BlueWolf and 2 of them finished ahead of him (bluewolf is not a good person...he insulted me for no reason that's why I dislike him) :DDDD also alliance LietvousDK - I think they won alliance ranking
and my ally cortez for entertaining me in the last week
and of course to the guys who invented this great game
Aline@r10e4, witch-bitch with stone heart