Picking Siege Targets

Good evening, cannon fodders.

I often write about PvP techniques from the first person perspective. If you want to accomplish ______, then you approach that with _______. For muggles in particular, all my articles like City Placement are given as instructions. Today I am going to talk about siege tactics, so you can see why some of those rules exist.

As a primer, you should go back and read Tink's great article on Siege 101.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Do you know the difference between strategy and tactics? Many players don't. Strategy is how you set the overarching series of objectives in a PvP campaign. Examples of strategies include:

• Target leadership players first.
• Aim for the cannon fodders first.
• Clear regions sequentially.
• Assault the perimeter.
• Prioritize cavalry players with good sov.
• Emphasize defensive tactics to cover a withdrawal.
• Create psychological pressure with diplomats and mini-blockades.
• Spread the pain by targeting multiple players, one city each.
• Focus the pain by targeting a single player, multiple cities.

Tactics are how you actually set about accomplishing those objectives.

• Siege outlying cities.
• Siege cities with bad terrain.
• Deploy a siege train.
• Launch dozens of diversionary attacks.
• Deploy stacked elite divisions.
• Use a trap siege to pin a city.
• Execute a Buzzsaw maneuver.
• Reinforced with equipped armies.

I am not going into the details of siege strategy. That depends a great deal on how a particular alliance approaches war. It's important to understand that when you plan a campaign, your strategy and tactics go back and forth in iterations. Tactics can expand or limit viable targets; strategy can rule out tactically desirable targets, or target tactically difficult cities.

Juicy Targets

From a tactical perspective, there are a few things you look for in city targets.

• Isolation.
• Pinned.
• One bad tile for the siege.
• Preferrably another bad tile for the blockade.
• City tile is easily cleared.
• Reasonable proximity.
• Fat population, preferrably legendary.

Isolation

A single city alone, for example an Iceheart mining town, can make for a much easier target. As long as the terrain-appropriate clearing troops can't reach that city within 36 hours, it should be a straightforward siege. The weight of an alliance siege force from multiple players will crush the local defenders.

There is a frequent misunderstanding about isolation. People assume that it only means a city off by itself, far from the alliance core. That's certainly true. We also look at the activity levels of surrounding friendly accounts (a bit of strategy) to decide if there could reasonably be more clearing troops or reinforcements in nearby towns. An active player with towns in the midst of 100 inactive towns can be more isolated than several faraway cities that are in close range of confederate clearing troops.

Siege Tile

You want to put sieges on tiles that favor the defenders. In approximate order of preference, I like to siege from:

• Buildings
• Mountains
• Forest
• Large Hill
• Small Hill / Lake / Loch
• Plains / Fresh Water

If you want to understand the reason for that ordering, then I suggest you spend some time on the One Chart to Rule Them All. These are the tiles where it's easiest for the defenders to neutralize cavalry (+spear, -cav). Forest has the disadvantage that it is vulnerable to infantry attacks, but infantry is so slow that you are generally safe unless you are within 300 squares of a lot of dwarves or other sword cities. I don't really favor large hill because you can suffer some nasty bow attacks from sentinels and trueshots, and that will chew up your kobolds.

Pinned

You don't want the target city to exodus away and escape. If a player has more than 9 cities, then destroyed cities are 10x more difficult to replace than an exodus. Cities can be pinned in place for a number of reasons: running research (especially delayed by t2 saboteurs), reinforcements, armies afield, another city in exodus.

One of my favorite destroyed cities in a war was RudyJr. He sent a feint from Northmarch all the way into the Long White. The sending city was isolated and had bad tiles. When we saw his army launch, we quickly calculated that we could have a siege there before his army made a round trip. That silly feint cost him the entire city.

A note to muggles under fire: don't pin your vulnerable cities.

Blockade Tile

You also want the blockade to have a good landing tile. If you are trapping a city in advance of a surprise siege, then you might end up holding the blockade for 1-2 days. The blockade is crucial because it's what stops the city from running away if it isn't already pinned by internal factors.

The blockade is also necessary to limit prestige building. Prestige building can stretch out a siege, allowing more time for clearing troops to reach the siege camps. A fast siege is especially important when the siege tile is a lame one, like a lake or small hill. More importantly, if the enemy player can reasonably destroy the blockades, then they can specifically prestige build the wall before your clearing troops arrive. This opens to door for equipped reinforcements, and also defensive maneuvers like the Ram Auger. Having a high level wall can cause considerable excess casualties.

Easily Cleared City Tile

For the same reason, you want the city tile to be easily cleared. Plains is best, although you can also target a forest if your siege team is infantry (most are, for flexibility). What you absolutely don't want is a situation where your raze force--just the troops included in the siege army itself--must face a potential battle where the raze attempt might get stopped by the city's internal defenders.

It is much easier to clear a city that is already emptied of the home defenders. Reinforcements are much less flexible, and cannot dodge incoming clearing attempts. If the defender is skilled, razing a city with a very large home defensive force can be a major challenge that requires specialized tactics.

Reasonable Proximity

It takes a long time to march reinforcements and siege armies across the map. Targeting nearby cities can go much faster. Proximity also makes high-speed blockade maneuvers much more likely to succeed, which in turn makes it much easier to trap the city and destroy it with a siege.

Fat Population

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The more population is contained in the upper buildings levels, the easier it is to destroy a city down to raze population. A legendary city is a great target, but overbuilt cities are even better, especially if they rely on 0% taxes and a Geomancer's Retreat for extra size. Those cities are brittle as glass when the siege engines start firing.

Don't Be a Target

If your cities meet any of the Juicy Target criteria, you are starting each conflict with one foot in the grave. Always remember, sieges are alliance vs. alliance battles. By correcting your city deficiencies now, you aren't just helping yourself, you are helping everyone on your team who will defend you in an unexpected conflict.


Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade

All Muggles Must Die

Valar mug-hulis, cannon fodders.

All muggles must die.

It seems harsh, doesn't it? Maybe even a little cruel. But your personal feelings don't really matter--Illyriad has entered a new era. The harvesters of carebear tears have descended in force upon the server, and it is entirely likely that the muggle style of gameplay is near an end.

Glory vs. Grief

I would define three main types of PvP strategy gamers:

• Defenders
• Glory seekers
• Harvesters of carebear tears

Defenders are easy to understand. They make strong fortresses and alliance cores for the purpose of mutual defense. Defenders tend not to seek out conflicts, but they have carefully prepared so that their cities are not vulnerable to attack. You can tell a defender alliance by the adequate troop counts, mostly active roster, acceptable city placement, and neutral stance on most issues.

Glory seekers are sometimes called "big game hunters", but this is actually a metaphorical misconception. There is nothing that a glory seeker values about shooting a lion or elephant with a high-caliber rifle. It is a one-sided fight, which eliminates all the challenge and danger, and therefore all the glory. Glory seekers desire to meet equals on the battlefield and clash in an intense test of strategy and willpower. Some glory seekers will accept a confrontation with a much larger adversary that has inferior military skills, but these wars can be easily seen as tedious and protracted. In case it isn't already obvious, The Phalanx [300] is predominantly composed of glory seekers.

The third category of PvP gamer is often called a "grief" player. Also known as harvesters of carebear tears, these gamers value strife over challenge. Griefers are different from defenders in that they proactively attack; griefers are different from glory seekers in that they intentionally target the weak, not the strong. The main goal of a griefer is the indignation and protests of their prey, the carebears. The more the carebears struggle, curse, lament, sulk, cry, and fight among themselves, the more their feeble antics amuse the griefers. It is a housecat playing with a mouse, purely for entertainment.

The Reason is <Insert Reason Here>

For years, I have been baffled by the Illyriad fascination with pretexts. People seem to believe that wars require elaborate explanations. This is not to say that wars don't have reasons, I'm just bemused by the notion that these reasons must be explained at great length to the general Illyriad populace.

Let me be clear. Defenders typically have one reason for war: they are being attacked. Glory seekers might be legitimately angry over some rationale, or they might just think you would be cool to fight. Griefers probably just see carebears who are likely to squeal in an amusing fashion.

If there is no reason, the reason will be invented. You can't stop that process. With the rise of grief play in Illyriad, all muggle alliances must accept that hostilities might arrive on their doorstep at any moment, with a very weak trigger (or without any valid trigger at all), and might proceed with all the cruelty of a coyote pulling apart a baby bunny nest.

Zombies and Museums

Contrasted against the PvP player types, several factors define a muggle alliance.

• Declaration of muggle-hood
• Carebear roster
• Corresponding lame troop counts
• Terrible city placement
• Many dead accounts

Illyriad has been in decline for several years, especially after the devs stopped running their own tournaments. Rather than give up old accounts, players have simply handed the keys over to their fellow players. The result is alliances where half the roster is players who haven't logged in during the past week. Many times these accounts are used as alliance farms, or as bulk troop mules for tournaments. Both of these situations can present hazards. To glory seekers, an alliance supporting visible troop counts in tournaments is a signal that they are active and might be interesting to fight. To griefers and scavengers, an alliance filled with barely active farms can signal cities full of loot. The timid coyotes will rifle through those cities anonymously with thieves; the brazen will simply siege them, loot the contents, and destroy the empty husk.

While it might seem unfair that predatory players will take these prizes, there is an argument to be made that active players deserve the loot. Zombie accounts contribute nothing to the game. Likewise, museum alliances devoted to storing dusty unused accounts are just taking up space. I don't really buy either of those arguments myself, but that's exactly the point I'm making--unless you are going to oppose people with troops, your opinion is largely irrelevant. In fact, if you are a muggle complaining about injustice in GC, that's probably signaling the griefers that you would be fun to target just for giggles.

Declaring your peaceful nature is a signal to griefers. Having bad city placement is a signal to griefers. Having controversial players in GC is a signal to griefers, particularly if your troop counts are obviously insufficient. Holding valuable assets without real military power is a signal to griefers. An alliance with multiple accounts showing dead growth is a signal to griefers.

While all these behaviors were commonly accepted in prior Illyriad history, they are now the equivalent of a wounded fish flopping in the water. Flop long enough or loud enough, and the sharks will begin to circle.

I do want you to understand, you don't need to be flopping in order to draw attention from a shark. Depending upon the breed, they can transition from scavenger to predator very quickly. The only real defense is vital accounts, placed correctly, with sufficient troop counts to repel attacks.

Be Your Own Rescue

A final thought before this article is over. Many muggles want to believe that they can prevail upon others to rescue them. For people thinking along those lines, I would ask them to consider two factors.

First, the distances on this map are enormous. Even if an ally decided to save you, could they really reach you in time? Probably not. Even then, your friends aren't going to send troops to die on non-plains squares. If you lack even basic city placement, you have an anchor tied to your feet, and you cannot expect even a powerful ally to rescue you.

Second, the server lives in dangerous times. Just because a loyal friend could save a carebear from the griefers, doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Alliances stepping into conflicts are by definition escalating the conflict, and that instantly generates a reason why they can be opposed. New alliances can enter the battlefield to confront the saviors, turning it into an even uglier conflict.

The best policy is to be your own rescue. All muggles must die, but defender muggles will live a lot longer.

• Place your cities cleanly.
• Keep your armies in good repair.
• Cleanse your roster of dead accounts.
• Minimize troublemakers.
• Keep a low profile in GC.
• Do not claim what you cannot reasonably defend.
• Befriend worthy allies.
• Understand the constraints upon your confeds.

If you haven't done these things already, then like it or not, you have already begun making delicious little ripples in the water.

Valar mug-hulis!


Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade

New Moon: Phase 3 Training (Magic)

Day 1: What is a blight shield, and how is it deployed correctly?

Day 3: Explain why you never dispel or identify a hostile spell. How do you identify the caster of an instant blight against your city?

Day 5: Imagine for me (briefly!) how you might use geomancy and/or blight magic as an effective attack.

Day 7: Describe the purpose of a Geomancer's Retreat. What is the bonus for using 1, 2, 3, 4 of these buildings at level 20? For a PvP player, what weakness is introduced by relying on a Geomancer's Retreat?

Day 9: What is the typical rune setting for a PvP player? Why?

Day 11: Describe the purpose of a Runemaster's Grounding. What is the bonus for using 1, 2, 3, 4 of these buildings at level 20? Under what circumstances would you expect to use this building?

Day 13: Change your previous answers to any of the above questions.

Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade

New Moon: Phase 2 Training (Diplomacy)

Day 1: Describe (briefly!) what is meant by the phrase: Discipline never sleeps.

Day 2: Describe the best wartime defense against each diplomat category: saboteurs, assassins, thieves, spies, scouts.

Day 3: For a PvP player, which diplomats are most and least important to defend against? Rank their importance, and explain your reasoning (briefly!).

Day 5: Why are defensive thieves are ineffective? What is the function of a Vault, and under what specific conditions is it useful for PvP?

Day 7: What is the main use case for embedding diplomats into a field army?

Day 9: Why should you always include a 1000 troop escort (minimum) on armies with embedded diplomats? Why not just 1 troop?

Day 11: Why is the Foreign Office as mostly useless for PvP?

Day 13: Change your previous answers to any of the above questions.

Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade

Vanguard Leather

Good afternoon, cannon fodders.

I get asked about Vanguard Leather a lot. Rather than keep repeating my opinions on that item, I decided it was time to enshrine it in an article for all future cannon fodders.

The Big Bang

Why does vanguard leather fascinate people so? Well, since the 5x equipment update, it adds +100% attack for a -10% move penalty. In other words, it can instantly double the attack power of an army.

Vanguard Leather even holds a green rating in Jagblade's Guide to Equipment. So why don't I recommend it strongly to everyone? Well, like any specialized tool, the Vanguard Leather armor has a narrow range of circumstances where it is truly useful.

The Drawbacks

If you recall the three central tenets of Jagblade's Guide to Equipment, a crafted item is useful if it:

1. Is used for city defense.
2. Amplifies the proper defenders against expected attack types.
3. Can be manufactured in bulk quantities, to equip entire armies.

Vanguard leather is an attack item. So when we use it, we expect to have 80-90% of the equipment get destroyed. It's a single-shot weapon. The remaining 10-20% will drop onto the attacked tile, where it might be impossible to recover. Or worse, when used on city attack duty, the surviving Vanguard Leather will be dropped into the enemy city's inventory, where it can be used against you.

Does Vanguard Leather amplify the proper attackers? Well, not necessarily. Looking at the One Chart, we can see that the primary attackers are t2 infantry, t2 cavalry, and orc fangs. None of those units can equip Vanguard Leather. When deployed in the field, this particular armor is equipped to t1 cavalry or t2 bow armies. That doesn't mean it's useless. Far from it. Those are medium power attackers, and they can do a lot of damage to an enemy formation like a siege camp.

Can Vanguard Leather be manufactured in bulk? An unequivocal yes. Hides and Iceheart are both extremely common materials. You can manufacture vanguard leather for about 5000 gold. If you mine your own Iceheart and do your own hunting, it can be nearly free, even in quantities of several thousand.

Is it cost effective? Not really. You're paying 5000 gold to double the attack power of a 1500 gold medium attack unit. I would never recommend that as a routine strategy. So if Vanguard Leather is a specialized tool, in what situation do you need it?

Break Glass in Case of Emergency

So why would a military PvP player maintain an inventory of Vangard Leather?  One answer: emergencies. There are times when one of your allies gets sieged at a significant distance away from you. Even clusters can span 200-300 squares. Sometimes you just need t1 cavalry speed with that double kick to get it up to t2 cavalry striking power.

One great example came at the end of the vCrow-fCrow war (300 fought on the fCrow side). Tinkinator launched a teleport war wagon deep into enemy territory to drop sieges on Ryklaw, dittobite, and other enemy cities. Ryklaw responded by sieging her battle city on multiple tiles and blockading on the rest. While our t2 cavalry was dispatched at the main sieges on plains, Tink needed to prestige build to keep the city above raze population. It was imperative that we quickly break the smaller blockade forces.

That's the situation where you use Vanguard Leather in bulk. You want to guarantee a powerful strike, so you double up the attack power on your t1 cavalry army. Elves can use their thoroughbred horses to cancel the speed penalty; other races can use a light spear instead. Battles like these can be risky affairs where the outcome is uncertain. Having one last ace up your sleeve can be the difference between victory and defeat.

Be in the Vanguard

So there you have it, cannon fodders. Vanguard Leather armor is a one-shot tool for doubling the striking power of t1 cavalry in speed-critical emergencies. When you are in a do-or-die PvP situation, cost efficiency becomes irrelevant. Vanguard Leather is a great final weapon to use, but its other constraints (casualties destroy the gear, it doesn't equip to heavy attackers) will limit its usefulness for typical PvP fighting.

Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade

Useful Crafting Materials

Good afternoon, cannon fodders.

This post will be brief. In Illyriad, most crafted items are useless. On my profile (Ten Kulch), I have listed only 16 green items for PvP, 5 green items for hunting, 15 yellow items for PvP. You can find the reasons described thoroughly in Jagblade's Guide to Equipment. The following materials are employed to craft the useful items.

Green-rated PvP materials

• Scaled Charger Vertebrae
• Giant Scorpion Exoskeleton
• Giant Rat Fur
• Wild Dog Fur
• Giant Beetle Carapace
• Iceheart
• Puma Fur
• Spidertree Leaves
• Ancient Oak
• Wolf Fur

Yellow-rated PvP Materials

• Scaled Charger Scale
• Brown Bear Fur
• Arterium
• Jaguar Fur
• Giant Palm Leaves
• Simien Wolf Fur

Green-rated Hunting materials

• Ancient Oak
• Giant Rat Fur
• Queen's Hair Leaves
• Giant Beetle Carapace
• Poisonous Crawler Exoskeleton
• Scaled Charger Scale

This list excludes materials for items that are equipped only to commanders. Those materials are necessary in such small amounts that they are not worth mentioning in the same context as equipping entire armies.

Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade

Heroism vs. Charge

Good evening, cannon fodders.

I get a lot of questions about Heroism and army power. This is only natural, as most players start using armies for hunting, and Heroism is the first commander skill they encounter. Let's take a quick refresher on what Heroism can do for a small attack army, and then examine its limitations for large-scale PvP.

Hunting Commanders, Revisited

My guide on elite hunting swarms shows the damage that properly constructed commanders can do against wildlife. Take a few moments to look at the battle reports. The most important concept to internalize is that 95% of the damage is being generated by a potent combination of commander Heroism, commander equipment, elite commander status, and multiple commanders. In short: commanders. Only 5% of the damage is from the troops themselves. They are really just there to power up the commanders.

Boss Maffs

If you are a maffs-hating muggle, feel free to skip this section.

Why are those hunting commanders so powerful? First off, let's understand the underlying mechanic of the commander personal skill. Each skill has 10 levels. Every level adds +6 base units of power to that skill, up to 61 at maximum (1+10x6). The base units are determined by the soldier type you used to create the commander. In case you don't already know, Heroism is the commander personal skill for Attack.

Our example will use Knights.

• Knight attack: 65
• Heroism 10: 61x 65 = 3965 attack points

Simple enough. Now let's add in equipment. The most common attack equipment for Knight commanders in PvP would be a terrain spear (+60%) and terrain armor (+60%). Since you have finished the elite commander research on the Military: Cavalry tree, all equipment bonuses are doubled for elite cavalry commanders and elite cavalry.

• Terrain spear, armor: +60% x2 = +120%
• Double bonus: +240%, or 3.4x
• Modified attack: 3965 x3.4 = 13481 attack points

This means that each Knight commander--when elite and properly equipped--is worth 207 standard Knights. If you use a quadruple commander army (my personal standard hunting army) then that's the equivalent of 830 Knights. All it takes is 61 Knight soldiers to power up all four commanders, so with their equipment-amplified Heroism, their little army of 61 troops will strike like 891 troops.

Little Maffs vs. Big Maffs

891 equivalent troops for only 61 actual troops? That's enough to make muggle brains asplode. You can single-shot an entire Legion of giant rats with 61 guys. Let's just build armies with super commanders and take over the world! Spoiler alert: you can't.

I'm sorry to crush your muggle dreams. (Heh, who am I kidding, I'm enjoying a warm feeling about muggle dream-crushing right now.) The reason is, alas, those devilish maffs. 891 for 61 is an optimal 4-commander assault strike, but that's also the absolute most you can stretch the commander power. At the scale of PvP armies, which are typically in the 10000-25000 range, that commander Heroism becomes a rounding error between 3-8%.

Fortunately, there is another entire category of commander skills: the division skills. Most people are familiar with Forced March. Since we are talking about cavalry in this example, let's look at Charge. The Charge skill adds 1% per level to all attacking cavalry in that commander's division. If you recall from my article about Matching PvP Commanders and Troops, the correct t2 commander can build an extra 5% in their corresponding attack skill, resulting in a 15% bonus.

At about 6000 cavalry troops, the Charge +15% division bonus is equal to the entire power of Heroism for quadruple elite commanders. The bigger the army gets, the more important maximum Charge becomes over multiple Heroism commanders. 

Best of Both Worlds?

So, can you simply use both techniques? Absolutely. You can put a Charge 15% commander over the main division of 10000+ Knights, and then make four elite divisions of 60 for the other four commanders to add their Heroism power. This approach is quite common in tournaments.

It is used less often in military PvP. Players usually like to have one commander at home, in case their army needs to be dodged away from an incoming enemy attack. Also, things go wrong during operations. Small cavalry armies are often dispatched to set up emergency blockades when the main blockade has been broken, to monitor enemy camp sizes, to smash little occupations, or other tasks where fast armies are required. At the size of 10000 cavalry armies, the quadruple commander Heroism is only another 5% of power to an army that has already gained 15% from Charge. The utility of keeping extra commanders home usually outweighs the slight extra power to the army.

Division and Conquer

Always remember, cannon fodders: once you get up past 5000 troops in an army, the division skills tend to become much more powerful than the personal skills of 4-5 commanders, including the ever-popular Heroism. When you are building big for PvP, build your attack commanders for division skills.

We will talk about stacking elite defensive commanders in a future article. That scenario is unlike attack armies, because you can use far more than 5 commanders in a multi-army defense maneuver.

Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade