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Battle strategy
In Grepolis, no player can accomplish much on his own. You can never conquer all you enemies alone, even if you are only held back by lack of available city slots. And as long as the enemy is strong enough, you will never be able to defend yourself alone. Once you have a group of players who know this, and are willing to act as one, you can start playing as an alliance. This is where warfare becomes interesting ... and a little more complicated. This guide will explain how you handle large-scale wars and conquests with several people involved as well as walk you through the kinds and finer details of attacking or defending.
Please bear in mind that this guide will have some elements that are only relevant for conquest worlds. Any specific times mentions are based on worlds with unit speed 2.
Positioning
When you defend, you have the advantage of being able to stack your units and gain advantage in numbers. If 2000 slingers attack a defense with 500 swordsmen and 500 archers, the defense will not be particularly effective. However, if the defenders had ten times those numbers (that is, 5000 swordsmen and 5000 archers), they would be 45% more effecient. Now, if you consider that defenders already have city walls and towers which, when fully built, will give defenders 151,9% defensive bonus over the attacks, this means that you don't want to fight more defensive troops than you have to.
The reason that the positioning of cities is so important when you fight other alliances is that you don't want to give them the chance stack defense in their cities. Because of this, you will always want to have a city within one island of your target that you can lauch from. Since colony ships are slower, your clearing waves and support should be able to reach the target city in time, even if other cities are further away. When two alliances go to war, they will almost always end up with one or two big fronts against each other, with no or little mixing of cities on each side of these fronts. If you have cities in the midst of enemy cities, they will likely have many more cities that will be able to reach those cities than you will have cities that can send support in time. Thus, cities in in the middle of your enemy area will often be quickly captured or will take a lot of effort to support or sustain.
Normally, what you should do in is not just to get all alliance cities within a limited area, but also to get them on the same islands. If you are able to cluster up your cities and cover a smaller area with more alliance cities, you can cooperate more effectively. The distance of one island might not mean much, but if you don't cluster up cities, you alliance might be streched over twice the space, likely meaning that if you are attacked at one end, you will not be able to defend with over half of your cities, because they are too far away. An added benefit of having several cities on the same island is how quickly these can reach each other, should one of them be attack. If a city is under siege, other cities on the same island will be able to ignore the ships defending it and siomy try to kill the ground troops and breaking the siege in this way. It goes without saying, of course, that no player should have more than one city on the same island (as only one city per player can use farming villages), so if this ever happens, the city should be handed over to an alliance-mate.
Generally, you will want your offensive cities to be near the front, and the defensive cities slightly behind them. If any defensive cities are very far away from the front, you can send their troops in advance to those of your cities that are most likely to be attacked. Against a really strong and active alliance, it can be very hard to take a city if your colony ship takes over three hours to get there. What you can do is that you get some cities on the same island as the enemy alliance. You can colonize it if you have to, and wait a few weeks for it to build up. Then you can launch from this city. Attacks and support will likely take longer than the colony ship, so these should be sent in advance. Using this methods, you can gain ground on your enemies even when it seems impossible, since you will be able to start a siege in something between 1 and 1,5 hours, and you only need enough biremes to be able to hold the siege.
To get a proper overview of positioning, Grepolis Maps is incredibly useful. It can quickly show you wher all the different alliances have their cities located:
Conquest
More often than not, many elements will have to be involved in a successful conquest. You need planning and coordination and you need to be prepared any tricks the defender will come up with. If you are very new to attacking and want a bit of basic information, you will want to read my raiding guide.
Planning
Whenever you go for a city of an enemy alliance, it's highly recommended that you plan in advance. Very few alliances have so active and plentiful members that you can just post the arrival of your colony ship and expect a lot of clearing waves and support to arrive in time. The advantage of attacking without planning in advance would be that it doesn't leave room for any spies within your alliance to pass information onto your enemies.
In order to be able to properly plan and coordinate, it's important that the alliance agrees on certain time settings and that all members use these settings. Once this is done, you should be able to set a certain time and see whether everyone can join in. Setting a time allows everyone to build up for the attack and have full favor for the gods and full population for their attacking cities. You also need to be sure that you have the necessary amout of troops, so that you don't only have a lot of normal attacks with offensive units and light ship escorts, but also have some light ships nukes (attack consisting of big amounts of light ships - typically around 260 when fully built) to go first and break the biremes that will likely be awaiting you once you reach the target city. Likewise, you not only need to be able to start a siege in the city, but be able to have enough ground troops and biremes to defend it once the other alliance tries to break it.
Spying in advance of an attack can be a bit tricky. It can be an advantage to know what's in the city before you attack it, but normally it's not really necessary for large-scale attacks. There are only a few reasons you would want to know what's in a city. It would be useful if you doubt you have enough offensive units to break the initial defenses and would rather target an enemy city with offensive units. Also, if you launch attacks to clear the city at the same time as you send the colony ship (to kill the units early and avoid them being there to snipe the colony ship later), knowing what's in defense helps you determine how much you need to send ahead. What you should try to do is to gather as much info about enemy cities as possible. Once you have seen what cities typically send for attacks, support or light ship nukes, you can have a good idea or what kind of defense they might be able to muster. If you spy, I siggest that you do it some time before do the conquest so as to not give your intentions away if the target city has a lot of silver in the cave (which it likely will). If a city is spied a few times, some people might take precautionary action, but if nothing happens, they will likely let things go back to normal. A ground attack from the same island can also be an alternative to spying and reveal if a large amount of biremes/transports are holding in the city before you commit to an attack.
One thing you might consider in the planning is that the player who has the siege will get more battle points. The distribution of battle points is decided by the amount of population each player has in the city that is attacked, but the person who owns or occupies a city will always get at least 30% of the battle points of any battle. So, if you have some players with fairly few culture points and others with many, it might be a good idea to let those with les culture points do the siege. After all, you need less culture points to get more cities at the low culture levels, while once you get up to higher levels, each culture level will take several hundred culture points. So, the battle points gained from defending a conquest might help one player get enough culture points for six new cities will only help another player gain enough culture points for one city. In morale worlds, you can heavily abuse the morale-system by letting low-point players capture the enemy cities; this is not something I can advise you to do, of course.
In Grepolis, no player can accomplish much on his own. You can never conquer all you enemies alone, even if you are only held back by lack of available city slots. And as long as the enemy is strong enough, you will never be able to defend yourself alone. Once you have a group of players who know this, and are willing to act as one, you can start playing as an alliance. This is where warfare becomes interesting ... and a little more complicated. This guide will explain how you handle large-scale wars and conquests with several people involved as well as walk you through the kinds and finer details of attacking or defending.
Please bear in mind that this guide will have some elements that are only relevant for conquest worlds. Any specific times mentions are based on worlds with unit speed 2.
Positioning
When you defend, you have the advantage of being able to stack your units and gain advantage in numbers. If 2000 slingers attack a defense with 500 swordsmen and 500 archers, the defense will not be particularly effective. However, if the defenders had ten times those numbers (that is, 5000 swordsmen and 5000 archers), they would be 45% more effecient. Now, if you consider that defenders already have city walls and towers which, when fully built, will give defenders 151,9% defensive bonus over the attacks, this means that you don't want to fight more defensive troops than you have to.
The reason that the positioning of cities is so important when you fight other alliances is that you don't want to give them the chance stack defense in their cities. Because of this, you will always want to have a city within one island of your target that you can lauch from. Since colony ships are slower, your clearing waves and support should be able to reach the target city in time, even if other cities are further away. When two alliances go to war, they will almost always end up with one or two big fronts against each other, with no or little mixing of cities on each side of these fronts. If you have cities in the midst of enemy cities, they will likely have many more cities that will be able to reach those cities than you will have cities that can send support in time. Thus, cities in in the middle of your enemy area will often be quickly captured or will take a lot of effort to support or sustain.
Normally, what you should do in is not just to get all alliance cities within a limited area, but also to get them on the same islands. If you are able to cluster up your cities and cover a smaller area with more alliance cities, you can cooperate more effectively. The distance of one island might not mean much, but if you don't cluster up cities, you alliance might be streched over twice the space, likely meaning that if you are attacked at one end, you will not be able to defend with over half of your cities, because they are too far away. An added benefit of having several cities on the same island is how quickly these can reach each other, should one of them be attack. If a city is under siege, other cities on the same island will be able to ignore the ships defending it and siomy try to kill the ground troops and breaking the siege in this way. It goes without saying, of course, that no player should have more than one city on the same island (as only one city per player can use farming villages), so if this ever happens, the city should be handed over to an alliance-mate.
Generally, you will want your offensive cities to be near the front, and the defensive cities slightly behind them. If any defensive cities are very far away from the front, you can send their troops in advance to those of your cities that are most likely to be attacked. Against a really strong and active alliance, it can be very hard to take a city if your colony ship takes over three hours to get there. What you can do is that you get some cities on the same island as the enemy alliance. You can colonize it if you have to, and wait a few weeks for it to build up. Then you can launch from this city. Attacks and support will likely take longer than the colony ship, so these should be sent in advance. Using this methods, you can gain ground on your enemies even when it seems impossible, since you will be able to start a siege in something between 1 and 1,5 hours, and you only need enough biremes to be able to hold the siege.
To get a proper overview of positioning, Grepolis Maps is incredibly useful. It can quickly show you wher all the different alliances have their cities located:
Conquest
More often than not, many elements will have to be involved in a successful conquest. You need planning and coordination and you need to be prepared any tricks the defender will come up with. If you are very new to attacking and want a bit of basic information, you will want to read my raiding guide.
Planning
Whenever you go for a city of an enemy alliance, it's highly recommended that you plan in advance. Very few alliances have so active and plentiful members that you can just post the arrival of your colony ship and expect a lot of clearing waves and support to arrive in time. The advantage of attacking without planning in advance would be that it doesn't leave room for any spies within your alliance to pass information onto your enemies.
In order to be able to properly plan and coordinate, it's important that the alliance agrees on certain time settings and that all members use these settings. Once this is done, you should be able to set a certain time and see whether everyone can join in. Setting a time allows everyone to build up for the attack and have full favor for the gods and full population for their attacking cities. You also need to be sure that you have the necessary amout of troops, so that you don't only have a lot of normal attacks with offensive units and light ship escorts, but also have some light ships nukes (attack consisting of big amounts of light ships - typically around 260 when fully built) to go first and break the biremes that will likely be awaiting you once you reach the target city. Likewise, you not only need to be able to start a siege in the city, but be able to have enough ground troops and biremes to defend it once the other alliance tries to break it.
Spying in advance of an attack can be a bit tricky. It can be an advantage to know what's in the city before you attack it, but normally it's not really necessary for large-scale attacks. There are only a few reasons you would want to know what's in a city. It would be useful if you doubt you have enough offensive units to break the initial defenses and would rather target an enemy city with offensive units. Also, if you launch attacks to clear the city at the same time as you send the colony ship (to kill the units early and avoid them being there to snipe the colony ship later), knowing what's in defense helps you determine how much you need to send ahead. What you should try to do is to gather as much info about enemy cities as possible. Once you have seen what cities typically send for attacks, support or light ship nukes, you can have a good idea or what kind of defense they might be able to muster. If you spy, I siggest that you do it some time before do the conquest so as to not give your intentions away if the target city has a lot of silver in the cave (which it likely will). If a city is spied a few times, some people might take precautionary action, but if nothing happens, they will likely let things go back to normal. A ground attack from the same island can also be an alternative to spying and reveal if a large amount of biremes/transports are holding in the city before you commit to an attack.
One thing you might consider in the planning is that the player who has the siege will get more battle points. The distribution of battle points is decided by the amount of population each player has in the city that is attacked, but the person who owns or occupies a city will always get at least 30% of the battle points of any battle. So, if you have some players with fairly few culture points and others with many, it might be a good idea to let those with les culture points do the siege. After all, you need less culture points to get more cities at the low culture levels, while once you get up to higher levels, each culture level will take several hundred culture points. So, the battle points gained from defending a conquest might help one player get enough culture points for six new cities will only help another player gain enough culture points for one city. In morale worlds, you can heavily abuse the morale-system by letting low-point players capture the enemy cities; this is not something I can advise you to do, of course.
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