Offensive Strategy

[[[This article is based on OPINION]]] Also see War tips

Offensive Strategy

In this game, the defender has the upper hand: there is a limit on the size of the attacking army, whereas there is no limit on how many troops could defend, and the defender also has wall defences to his/her advantage. And sending waves is nonsensical; as someone once put it: "it's like being attacked by one million angry ants. Normally, you'd be overwhelmed by the numbers and not stand a chance; however, in Kingdoms of Camelot, some crazy little man decided that it'd be better if the one million angry ants were divided so only ten ants could attack at a time." Now, c'mon, even the weakest among us can stand up to 10 ants. So, some strategy for the attacker is needed here.

Notice: this is mainly meant for warring with another alliance; please don't use this (except for maybe the first tidbit) to ruin your farm's day. That's just bullying.

One possible strategy that is used by some experienced players is to get a portal of order, and move next to the city of another "high might" player you are in a war with while hes off line, and then take all of their food and kill all of their troops.

Cleaner Waves

The bane of any good attackers existence are the wall defenses: crossbows, spikes, caltrops, traps, trebuchets; no one likes these. So, you have to know how to get around them.

Notice: these tips are optimal only when you are attacking a player who is in sanctuary and is trying to hide from you. If they are on defend, you need to prepare accordingly. You will have to take more casualties than these tips entail.

Traps

Traps, of course, are simple. Send in as many Militmaen as there are traps and if there are only traps all traps will be gone. Again, good attackers scout; so, if you scout, notice Scouts in the city but don't kill any, you can automatically infer that they are on sanctuary. Use this to your advantage; take out any Caltrops and Traps at the same time with your meatshield wave (either the aforementioned 1 Scout, 1 Supply Troop, or 100 more Militiamen than Traps (to be safe)). Then, when your second wave comes in, everything is nice and pretty.

This tactic is now essentially worthless with the new updates as of 4/15/10. Simply put, the only way to clean out Traps these days is to send in the meatshields (Militiamen and the likes). Sorry; I'm disappointed these days, too.

In case your enemy only has Traps but nothing else you may send in Rams with a ratio of 1:10 to take out these and win the battle. This means if your enemy has 100 Traps, you can send in 11 Rams and win the battle with one remaining Ram. However this is not cost-effective, and I would advise those players who are resource-restricted to not use this method of Trap tripping.

Caltrops

You can clear Caltrops without losses easily by sending in three times as many Militiamen. Keep in mind that if there are Traps present, you will have to sum these up with the Caltrops and use the same tactic.

Spiked Barriers

For Spikes, you'll have to do one of three things:

1) send in no Cavalry, Wagons, or siege weapons (if you're looting, you'd better hope you have plenty of Supply Troops) or

2) send in the Cavalry to take out the spikes if you believe you can loot a lot from this guy and need carts, or you need to get siege weapons in.

3) If there are no Crossbows, spikes are rather simple to take out. Send in Rams or Heavy Cavalry, I'd suggest about 1.5 to 2 times the number of spikes; they'll just eat up the spikes like a fat boy eats cake.

• • • Heavy Cavalry will take out Spikes with no losses, tried and tested numerous times***

this is the battle report in which i sent all ballistas and 1k militia to hold off any troops in the case that he was defending.

For crossbows send in as many ballistas as there are crossbows,as ballistas have the higher range they dont get hit.I have tested this theory myself and it does work.Send in 1k militia in the case that they were defending with an army,they were there to hold them off while the ballistas did their work from a range.

Trebuchets

Now, defensive Trebuchets are a lovely creation, and here's why: they are very powerful with a good defense to back them up, but send in the right mixture of troops, and they're obsolete. Through varying battles, I have found that Trebuchets with an army in sanctuary and limited Crossbows die proportionally at a rate of 7:1 when fought with Rams (meaning, 7 Trebuchets are required to kill one Ram). I have also seen them get, of course, closer to 1:2 with a good defense, so be smart.

If you don't use Siege Engines at all, you can safely ignore Trebuchets. They will only attack those units. Other units will walk right past them unmolested.

Scouting

The advice on wall defenses does no good unless you actually know what the wall defenses are. Scouts are cheap, insanely quick, and the only drawback to scouting is that it gives the enemy five minutes more warning and requires a knight to lead the scout. As a rule: most enemies under 200K might will have less than 500 scouts, so 500 scouts will bring back a report almost without fail. Also, if you scout an enemy who's hiding in their sanctuary, (as of now), the game occasionally tells you that you are under attack and then issues a report from your watch tower about the enemy. Thus a player with Eagle Eyes of 1 and a level 9 watch tower can still scout out the enemy's army.

To gain advantage when Eagle Eye is at lower level, unassign any high ranking Alchemist Knight ( e.g. Level 74) and send it with scouts to gain better results. Also when sending scouts to normal scouting accompany them with a high ranking Knight, it will give you advantage over enemy's defensive scouts. You will kill more then loose scouts. :)

Wildernesses

These here, while seemingly worthless to attack, can be good for two reasons:

1) if you're up against a bigger player, they need food, LOTS of food, and chances are, they rely heavily on their wilderness bonuses; knock out those farms and you could kill off their army not through combat, but starvation (but try to catch them at a time when they're offline, more time for damage to be done) --also, remember, you have to have wilderness spots open in your castle to be able to truly take a wilderness from someone, otherwise, you just attack it and then come home. Lame.

2) This one is my fun way of annoying someone and then winning, seriously is the best; do the same as number one, but hope you are attacking the person while he/she is awake. That way, they'll want to take back their wildernesses, and you'll be able to keep doing this. Where the beauty really comes into place is when you do this for awhile and pull out your troops (abandon a few, recall from a few so as he loses troops to the wilderness, and you get an idea of when he's taking back his wildernesses), the attacker gets into a rhythm: after sometime, just leave your troops there and watch as the attacker loses his beautiful army (well, some of it anyways). This is best done over extended periods of time, though, and realize you can probably only do this once in awhile with a certain player, or even a certain alliance. People, as strange as it may sound, are smart.

Footnote: Wilderness raiding is not a recommended strategy. Stronger players (like the humble author of this footnote) will usually exterminate these pests. Best way to fight the kids raiding wildernesses is to post attacker coords on alliance forum and raid them down to one city. After that - keep periodically zeroing it so they can't build up again.

Warning: make sure if you choose to do number 2, you have your troops in your castle on sanctuary and your resources taken care of; chances are, the player you're annoying will attack you... a lot.

Sanctuary

Yes, I did just condone this only about a line or two before, but sanctuary really is a cheap function, especially when it's used by a large might player in an alliance at war (or even at peace, for that matter). Some may argue it's smart; I just think it's downright pathetic. But, nevertheless, it exists, so we have to do something about that, don't we?

One of my favorite techniques requires little time, no troops (yet) or resources, and is so easy to execute: taunting. So many times I have found that players, when taunted about being wimps and pathetic for using the sanctuary, will use their troops to defend, and even sometimes call in for reinforcements. Now, you must be prepared for this (scouting parties, sent in medium numbers, will help you no matter the results: win, and you can see the defender's troops and reinforcements, as well as if they are set to defend; lose, and you know that they are defending. Yay!) If you lose, I'd suggest sending in a nice size army, but not your entire army. While many alliances that use the sanctuary function will ultimately not send a retaliating attack, there are those times where you need to be ready. Just play your cards right and think of how you'd react (psychology always helps to understand).

I'd suggest using this technique if you are trying to destroy the might of a smaller player who is bothering an alliance member; don't do this in a one-on-one might contest, nor against someone smaller just because they're smaller; do it for respectable causes.

Annoying Attacks

Frankly, I don't think these types of attacks do much when done by unskilled alliances, though when applied correctly, it could be pretty lethal. One member of our alliance (the third largest might in the server) was being attacked by an "infinite" number of waves of 1 swordsman, 1 pikeman, for hours and days on end. And, needless to say, he got very annoyed by them, but also brushed them off as just a pest and left his troops to destroy them (he called it his own personal "target practice") However, they never did anything with these attacks. It really turned out to just be a nuisance. Moral of the story? Sending a few ants over an infinite period from an infinite number of cities results in lack of attentiveness by the defender. So, what he never realized (and I told him soon after) was that a large, true attack could have been synchronized to lie within the hundreds of attack alerts, and he never would have known. Food for thought.

Counter: Do contact their alliance leader and ask them to kick them or loot them. If they don't agree, have the whole alliance do same to their chancellor. Don't leave nuisance acts unpunished - these are dishonorable and people employing them should be exterminated from the game with extreme prejudice.

Troops to Train

There are some troop tips at the page, War tips . Of course, a healthy balance of anything is good for you, so why not in this game? If you're going to truly attack someone, instead of farming or attacking someone you're guaranteed to win against, this is important stuff. First: archers are a must. They have long range, they're quick and nimble, they're deadly, can take out troops from long distances, are third least affected by crossbows (first being rams, second being swordsmen), and have the best affect on your might (they are cheap, more or less easy on the food, and bring your might up 4 per unit). It's no wonder they are the unit of choice. Though, you can also use this to your advantage by making your second most troop the swordsman, because he is like fire on oil when he meets up with archers, even huge armies of archers. The rest of the troops really are up to you, but here's what you should stay away from:

Cavalry rank second only to Supply Wagons when carrying loot, and at a fraction of the time. Secondly, when attacking Spiked Barriers, send a wave of 250 supply troops and 250 calvary. They will take out ALL spiked barriers (I discovered this when I lost 6000 spiked barriers to a 250/250 attack).***. Swordsmen are not very effective against archers, regardless of what the game says. I have personally seen the report where 97K swords were annihilated without loss by the defender, who had primarily archers (300K). Swordsmen are great at the medium level, where people have less than 100K archers, but once your opponent has truly massive armies of archers, you can't make headway with only swords.

I disagree with the ballista comments as well. Of course the trebs will kill the ballistas, but at a greater resource cost. This is just like with traps and militia. It's worth it to the attacker to just trip the defenses by sacrificing some people. And because trebs will fire before anything else... you can send the ballistas just like a militia trap-wave.

Cavalry are one of the most effective methods of attacking small cities. They move fast enough to get there before reinforcements, they will take few if any losses if they have a good ratio to the spikes, and they have an excellent load. Also, they are effective against pure archer armies. Many people build almost nothing but archers, and you can slaughter them with a good cavalry force.

Repeated Attacks

Now, this is a dangerous tactic for two reasons: 1) you make a lifelong enemy and 2) you risk the chance of an alliance catching on to the repetition in attacks and reinforcing the city. However, the benefits can be substantial. You succeed in keeping the city from building up too many wall defenses (wouldn't you hate it if you lost a lot of troops to take out some crossbows, only to find out that a couple of days later, there they are back again?) and can, in certain cases, find yourself a very annoyed player who quits the game and, in effect, hands you one massive farm. Also, you succeed in keeping one more member of an alliance you may be at war with down and out. This is definitely a good tactic when you find yourself fortunate for destroying a large player's defense, and don't want him to have the chance to retaliate.

Online?

While maybe a cheap abuse of the whisper function, I have come to accept this as a fun way to get an idea of when a player is online. Simply whisper them, and if it goes through, they're online. If it doesn't... well, obviously they're offline. You can throw this in with the taunting technique; just try to make it as inconspicuous as possible. Don't want to let them know what you're doing. alot of people just put a . as the whisper, if you do that they know what you are up to.