 kaizen
Joined: Jan 24, 2007
Posts: 54
Location: Guildford, England | Heres a few methods to help you control your fleets better and not miss easy oportunities. This is intended more for less experienced players, but others may find like to try these ideas too.
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1. Using what I think of as "waypoints". When you attack, drag the group of planets you're launching from, and pick a planet, either in your cluster or preferably one thats in between your's and theirs, and send the ships there. Then, switch to 100% and launch groups of ships from that planet as they land, attacking many planets at once. This way you keep more control of your ships than if you'd set a low shipping rate and sent waves from your own cluster. All your attacking ships can gather on one planet, and its easy to control almost exactly how many you send to attack each of their planets (you just watch the number on your "waypoint" planet), or to call off the attack if something changes.
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2. When a player has the most ships, but less planets, what often happens is that they dont spread out quickly enough and lose the advantage. If you see a player leaving weakly defended small clusters that aren't imediately reachable, send a hundred ships down to that cluster. While those ships are on their way keep concentrating on the main fight for the best areas of the map. When you see them land you can spare a couple of seconds to quickly claim that cluster and then get back on with it. It's all to easy to get distracted from the best areas of the map (or mega cluster). By doing this you'll either take those planets easilly or distract the other players attention while you claim the rest.
I often use the "stockpile loads of ships secretly and then pop out and win later" strategy and I also use this techniqe to deal with the smaller players that are lurking around. Same method: Send enough ships to wipe them out to one of their planets, and either they'll defend and you can eat up all their ships without even looking, or they'll evacuate and you can claim the cluster. If they do evac then you do the same thing again. It only takes a second and always ensures that you have enough ships to deal with them where ever they are, even if you're not concetrating on fighting them.
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3. This is kinda similar to the last one. In an all out battle between 2 big players (one of which is you), send a couple of hundred ships off to their flank (or both), and then keep concentrating on the main fight. As they launch ships from their side and back planets, snatch them using your small fleets. Again, they have no choice but to waste their attention on these and lose ground in the main areas, or keep attacking while you steal their planets.
Working your way round the back of a player is absolutely deadly, unless they're very careful how many ships they send back to defend, so a) do it, and b) dont let them do it to you :)
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4, If you launch a big attack on someone, and they imediately attack back, make sure that your ships are in the best of the two areas (yours or theirs that is). If you had lots of ships on rubbish planets, keep going. If you had a great cluster but they had lots of ships, send enough ships back to defend and grab the planets they leave behind using a handful of ships. You cannot do this quickly if you've simply grabbed a bunch of planets and launched, as you'll have too many fleets to re-order. If you use the waypoint idea it's easy :)
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5. Wiping out another player quickly at the start of the game - If you see a player spend too many ships on neutrals at the start, you can normally kill them and take their planets. (I'll probably do this for certain if they spend more than half their ships, and if they have a nice position and theres no other players that can backstab, I might do it when they spend their first 20-30 ships or so).
The key to doing this is speed, and i mean just 10 seconds or so. If you're slow, you not only run the risk of getting backstabbed as the prolonged fight draws attention, but also if they took good planets then their production will catch up and you wont be able to beat them.
I take the philosophy that the quicker I destroy all their ships the quicker I can take the planets, so I might send 80% imediately to their best nearby planet. The normal response to this is either to run, in which case you have it easy, or to imediately send all their ships to that planet to try and defend, and of course the other 20% which is already on it's way will have no problem claiming the other planets ;) The other method is to send 100, which will capture the planet, and once you see that you have the same ammount of ships landing as they do, relaunch some ships from that waypoint type planet to claim the rest.
Pretty much the only thing that can slow you down is if they send their ships back to your starting planet, in which case you should carry on grabbing their planets using just a few ships, and reassess the situation. if you can still finish them off without risk, do so, but be careful that no-one is now ready to backstab.
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Hope some people find this useful. My appologies for wasting your time reading all that if not! :)
Emlyn. |
