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Post by: Shalimar(257353) 2007-02-05 16:06:07 |
My basic strategy:
1)Set Attack Retreat Level to 10 (and Defense Level to 2) 2)Explore the starting area to determine where the RES blocks are and save the message for later viewing. 3)Expand into the explored area with the initial 300 APs, taking only RES (unless the block is majority RES with COM or FPL of less than 10 or I need it to get to a good series of block. 4)You want RES, you do not want COM or FPL, at least not at the beginning. It actually takes more attackers to take COM and FPL and it doesn't help you expand at all. You have enough food and gold at the beginning of the game, there is no reason to take blocks which give you more. 5)There is no reason you should ever Rob Food Producers. Even if you do run out of food, the game automatically buys enough to feed your gang members. Likewise, there is no reason to ever Run Drugs. If you need money to pay the bills, either start taking COMs (not recommended, but feasible) or take it from 1-block gangs. 6)Lower RES blocks are better than higher RES blocks at the beginning, you lose fewer gang members and use fewer APs which allows for more expansion. 7)Simple rule of thumb for how many novices to attack with: Use 2 for each 3 RES and 1 for each 1 COM or 1 FPL, rounded up. Thus you should be successful 99 times out of 100 trying to take a 40RES 10COM 10FPL block with 46 novices. 8)Never, ever ever use anything better than novices to attack. If you don't have the recommended number of novices for the attack you want, either use 10 APs to recruit until you have enough or save your APs for the next turn. 9)Vote whenever possible, 20 extra APs per war per day is huge. 10)Start saving APs as soon as you can, 20-40 per turn so other players won't be certain of how many you have. 11)Don't sneak attack another player unless you have at least 200 APs. Having a full 320 is preferred. If you don't cripple them with the first blow, you're in for a protracted war that will help neither of you. 12)For a war with another player, explore their gang before you attack to find out what you're up against. You can also get a rough estimate of how many defenders they have per block by looking at the Ranking List. 1 novice equals roughly 20 strength, so divide their strength by the number of blocks they control and divide again by 20 to get the number of novices per block. 13)Each block is defended by that block's defenders plus those of all adjacent blocks. The minimum you attack with should be 3 times the number of defenders. More are significantly better, I rarely use less than 4 to 1. 14)Unless you're at a significant disadvantage and need every AP possible to take enemy territory, I think it's better to spend 10 APs recruiting if you run low on novices rather than using experienced gang members. One of the biggest advantages of a long string of attacks is that your promotions from novices to experienced make up for your losses and actually strengthen you as the attacks progress while your opponent is getting weaker. Recruiting when you get low on novices increases this effect. Most of this is already mentioned in Raving Tactics, and I do find that all of RD's ideas are good, but I wanted to put this down as a whole. I know I'm leaving alot out so I will edit and add to this over time. Comments and disagreements are welcome, this is obviously not the only good way to play and I am not even close to the best player at GangWar. |
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Post by: Shalimar(257353) 2007-02-05 16:40:24 |
First major point I thought of to add: Defense in this game seriously sucks, so whenever possible you want to take the initiative and attack potential opponents before they can attack you. Obvious cavaet, try to avoid fighting more than one opponent at a time.
Remember, this is GangWAR; the default relationship with all of your neighbors is war, not peace. Until you agree to ally with someone, they are an enemy, period. |
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Post by: mob(23502) 2007-02-06 16:18:42 |
This strategy is good for starting out. I can only suggest the following:
If you are in a game with more than a few active players, save some of your initial AP's rather than spending the whole lot. If you are in a game with more than a few active players, beware of block bloat and over extending yourself. Defense does not suck if you have a modest block count and high strength. Of course you may completely disagree with me. :-) |
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Post by: Shalimar(257353) 2007-02-21 21:22:59 |
Don't disagree, all 3 points are excellent ones, I just have trouble limiting myself and usually end up with the alternate strategy to 2 and 3: take tiny blocks while saving AP, that way it looks like I'm still expanding at the same rate in the Ranking Lists so I can surprise my opponent when I attack. It works great if you can isolate one weaker gang at a time, but has serious weaknesses againsts multiple opponents and stronger single opponents. |
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Post by: FloriZeus(7923) 2007-03-05 02:35:23 |
I would rather recruit novices before performing a string of attacks:
Why? Increasing your total gang size, thus lowering AP cost per block you take (only not relevant when your gang is so large that you will always have 5 ap per block when attacking with novices, but that is mostly rather late in the game when you and your allies should already have established a distinct advantage) And on a side note, when your back force of EXP's become seriously enormous (say, when you have like 10 times as much EXP as your daily gain of NOV's) it is in my opinion a waste of AP to go recruiting then. On the exploring, I have only explored an enemy once, and only four times explored a 5X5 quadrant so I don't think it is THAT valuable. |
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Post by: Three Finger Sally(164235) 2007-03-05 03:57:58 |
On the timing of recruiting, I take a balanced approach. If you recruit early, you lose the advantage of all the RES blocks you are about to take. If you recruit too late, you've spent more AP per attack than you needed to. So, if I'm already down to 5 AP per attack, I recruit late. If I'm not, and my RES count is low (say under 1000), I'll hit a few high RES blocks blocks first, to up the effectiveness of my recruiting efforts. |
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Post by: Shalimar(257353) 2007-09-04 11:00:28 |
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Post by: mob(23502) 2007-10-05 02:19:28 |