Section 1; Basics around 'TW'
Made by Jamm; Entirely.
Basics you should know
Well, after playing this game for a couple of years I came back to play one last round, which was kind of disappointing, but I don’t want to leave without give you guys some final advice. I’ll try to cover on the 7 most common mistakes from my point of view only, as nor I have time for a long guide and neither do I think anyone would read some douzen pages just to improve his gameplay, espacially cause some basics are pretty boring to the players that have been here for more than a couple of days...
First something about animals:
Lambs and Wolves
Turtles
Rams
Cheetahs and Horses
Lions
Ducks
Symbionts
First above all: Forget the rankings for a moment. Points do fight in my point of view, but they are not important. If you play right points will come. If you play just to get a top spot in some ranking you have allready lost. Keep this in mind. It’s the most important lesson you will ever get.
1; Lambs and Wolves Before you begin to play decide what you want to be, prey or hunter. The game is called tribalwars and it hints which 2 things make you successful in this game:
Working together and
Attacking. A lot of players start STW and all they ever do is build defense and build out there villages, never reaching a good position in the ranking. Sorry, but you’d be better of with a nice single player game and an additional chat program. If you want to play TW you better be ready to interact with other players: Attack others, defend against them, support friends and tribemates who are attacked. If you don’t care about that at least I don’t understand why you are playing this game at all. Furthermore a lot of players herd together like lambs. Large tribes are formed, but when the wolves attack everyone is for himself and the lambs run around. If you form a tribe be sure you got a tribe where you really coordinate. Don’t form a tribe just for the sake of having one. You might get a good ranked position which will attract even more players but as long as the tribe doesn’t work together in offense and defense you will just fight and bitch around in your tribe. Nothing is more frustrating than being attacked and noone sends you help. So the morale in your ranks will drop and your tribe will fall apart. Herding like lambs doesn’t help against wolves.
2; Turtles When you start playing and at a certain point find that someone around you is growing faster than you, you have two options again. Either to fit in the role of the lamb once more or to try and do something against it. If you decide to go for all defense: you have already lost, your downfall may come a little later, but it is inevitable. Offense builds faster in TW, is cheaper and you can farm with it effectively, so being defensive will only save you if the bigger players targets are less defended than you are. But if you want to take your fate into your own hands this game will become real fun. Send a few scouts (depending on the style of the world 2-5) to each village around you. Yes, even the biggest ones. If someone around you is that much bigger he has probably bashed some targets and is getting resources from them now. Attack those too and get the resources yourself. if you find villages with low points (not the grey ones) but high wall that have no troops left, send defense and set up traps for the high point players (prefer spears when setting up traps, but never send only spears). When you build defense never build one kind of defense only. Spears are the most effective defense in the beginning, but a defense consisting only of spears is extremely easy to destroy. Swords and archers are very effective considering use per farm space, but again, pure defenses are cracked easy.
Do build defense!! Building just scouts (the white wall) will help you against certain players (actually the bad ones), but if you have a good player near you, he might just attack you cause he just knows his offense is able to destroy everything. Furthermore you will need the defense of others to block attacks once someone decides he wants your village. Sure you could hope that you are the only one who is hiding without any real defense and in need the others who have defense will send you. Sorry, the others think the same way and thus you won’t get defense. So, start making a difference and build defense. And start defending others that build defense, not those who claim doing so.
3; Rams Defense is good, defence behind a high wall is better. It will double your defensive rating, and depending on how much offense your opponent sends it may easily double or triple his losses and on the other hand your losses will be far less. Defending villages without a wall is far more difficult as you might imagine. On the other hand the attacker has a way of lowering your bonus and the sad part is, about 95% of the players playing this game don’t use it. Rams. Build them, for gods sake, please never attack a village that has troops and a wall without rams. It will not neglect the whole bonus a wall gives but most of it. The best number is (again depending on the settings between 153 and 219, usually 219). I do understand this is an odd number but if you play a little with the simulator you will find out why it is this and neither less nor more. And it might teach you to use the simulator, which is always important. While we are at it: Look at the stats for your troops. Notice how low the attack rating for spears is? Never, ever attack with spears. They just arn’t made for attacking. They are for farming in the very early game and for defending against cavalry, thats it. Don’t send spears to accompany your nobles. It’s clueless since they would just die against any kind of troops.
4. Cheetahs and Horses If you have to run for a long distance, will you want to sprint 50 meters then be exhausted for a minute than run 50 meters again? Keep it steady. A lot of players build headquarters, stable, barracks and the workshop to a high level, which then has 2 benefits: they have more points and thus the ranking is better and they have the ability to produce more in less time. Sorry, you just fell for the biggest mistake you could ever make. If you haven’t got the resources to keep that building producing all the time you just wasted resources which would have been better used producing something in that building. You have also gained points and thus helped your bigger neighbour having a better morale when he is attacking you. There is no problem with a queue that is long. I have a level 5 barracks, a level 3 stable and a level 2 workshop at least till I have 2000 points and still I always had the biggest armies on the servers I played.
5; Lions Hunt in packs, defend in packs. Playing alone will get you to a certain point and you might even get quite high in the rankings, but against any good tribe you will have no chance at all. The sad part is: everybody knows that and still there has been less than a handful temporary actions from tribes with excellent teamwork, let alone tribes who really do that. On the other hand about every single tribe in this game claims to have superb teamwork
The problem is that in TW 99,9999% of the players are interested in their own rankings above all else. Superb teamwork is not possible if there is no-one willing to sacrifice this interest. Period. Most players may think that supporting each other makes them an excellent tribe. Actually thats far from the truth. It just shows their tribe is not totally pathetic. While we are at it: If you are in a tribe don’t be the ******* who only builds offense, cause you can grow faster that way. you too will need defense eventually and since we know that defending alone is not possible you will have to contribute, too. The usual thing you can observe is that high ranked players have a lot of kills and quite some offense (and problems with morale). Low ranked players fear attacks by high ranked players and hide behind their defense, till all the targets that have less defense than them are allready taken care of. Then it is their turn.
Lesson one: Morale Bashers
Actually it is far more beneficial if the high ranked player had defense for him and the small guy and the small one was all offense. The smaller would be defended by the larger one permanently and every village he attacks would be nobled by the big one.
Lesson two: Resources
It is quite easy for a big player to get a fixed amount of resources since he has multiple villages. the small guy has a hard time getting enough resources to build troops, coins, nobles, whatever. On the other hand it is so much harder for the big guy to gain points and very easy for the small one. So by supporting the small one with resources their combined points grow faster.
Lesson three: Defending
Offense is really really strong in this game. Still defense has one effect that makes it even stronger. It can be stacked, the more the better. Prepare for defending your tribe mates. Defense travels faster when sent with a paladin, so about everyone in your tribe can reach the village that is currently nobled. remember: the more the better. So the attacker has no problem to destroy small amounts of defense ten times, but the same amount at the same time is a hurdle he cannot take. So, coordinate your defense
Lesson four: Offense
Coordinate your offenses. Attack the same player in all his villages at once. No, do not send at the same time. Arrive at the same time. Even better arrive at multiple players villages at the same time and take them out at once so they have harder time defending themselves.
6; Ducks I guess I’ll have to explain timing first. You see the server time in the lower right corner and you see the current lag right in front of it: page was generated in 'xxx' milliseconds. At certain times this lag becomes higher but is still stable at other times it is not controllable and is between 9 and 20000 milliseconds. If it is like that forget timing. It’s impossible. This doesn’t happen too often though. Everytime you send troops out you can click on the order and will find a time of arrival like this 21:43:56:443. the last three numbers are in grey and a little smaller. So if you want to arrive with troops at the same time you will have to arrive in the same millisecond. you know the time your troops need from A to B so it’s just a matter of preparation to calculate the time when you would have to send theoretically. Practically you still have a problem. From the moment you want to click till you click you have your reaction time, from the time you click till the click is transferred you have the lag (but we can test the current lag by just making any click in another window and get a good estimate) and finally that click needs to be transferred all over the world to that server somewhere in Germany, which then has to execute it. good thing is there are just 3 things that influence this time and both are about the same every time - your distance from the server, your computers ram and CPU and the browser you are using. the only way to find that is testing testing testing. click an attack every full minute and look at the order when it arrives. if you do this a couple of times you will find your computers lag. For me it was 1.45 seconds in average. So now we know that we have to click for example 1.6 seconds before we calculated. Next we have to find a way to really click in the perfect moment. I count from 1 to 5 each second to get a feeling for 0.2 seconds. If you get a feeling for it and don’t feel stupid talking to yourself any more you might even click on a early 2 or a late 3 to improve your timing even more. So now that we know how to time we can not only attack in the same second but also send our defense out before the first attack hits and let it return before the other 4 are coming in, which is called ducking an attack. be careful though. there are some trick plays that destroy your rally point. think about it for a while and you might see the benefits. additionally ducking will make you loose your village, so if you are able to get at least about 4 times your current defense till your attacker returns it’s well worth it.
7; Symbionts Please specialize your villages. you will need defense and you will need offense, which work together quite fine, but mixing both in one village is highly inefficient. Since a offense is stronger the more attack power it has you will want to maximize that by building a high amount of axes, LC and rams (219, remember?) in it while keeping the farm slots wasted for stupid buidlings (hq 30 and market 25 is incredibly stupid) and for defensive troops (that have really low attack ratings anyway) low. On the other hand you don’t want your enemies to know where your offensive villages are so they should look the same as your defensive ones from the outside and you should a few (maybe 5 or 10) scouts in each village. Imagine someone sending 4 scouts to each of your villages while you are offline. he will be blocked in all your defensive villages that have scouts, but will see all easy targets. you can do that via support too, but at least I tend to forget so at a certain point in the game. So if I still find any moron that;
builds only offense and no defense without telling it to his tribe in advance
attacks with spears
attack without rams
hides behind a white wall
has a mixed village with spears, axes and about everything in it
doesn’t support his tribe mates
only builds defense and nothing else
I’ll get you slus, and put a nole on you
P.S.: you want to know what a nole is and whats a slu? Sorry, you have to dive into the sick world of Jamm for that: Some hints though: A slu can be cheap, but never free. A nole is incredibly strong but will loose every fight.
Intermediate Gameplay
This won’t cover every aspect of the game but I hope it will hint you in the right direction and you can take it on from here by yourself. I will speak about the notebook a lot, but if you have no premium you can create an external html site with the same effect.
Farming
Well, this one will require either a lot of work , some basic knowledge of Excel OR some more than basic knowledge of SQL. Sorry I won’t cover how this works in here. Try to learn to use Excel (especially the vlookup function) and the import of text files (world data can be found in the help section of the game). When farming you have some options:
Farm abandoned
The first is the easiest, but quite a few players do it, but it can be very profitable, so you will want to do it without putting too much energy into it. It’s completly risk free in worlds where you can only support within your tribe, at least till nobling begins.
Calculate the distance from all grey villages to your own (via pythagoras) and their resource production for each 10 minutes or whatever interval you will want to send out troops. Calculate the amount of LC needed for that and send exactly that amount of LC to all of those villages with a couple of scouts. Store that report in your archive. Copy the link "send again with same amount of troops" to your notebook. Open all those links each 10 minutes in a own tab. just go through them and click on ok. If you are using opera you can easily go through a hundred farms within one or two minutes that way. you will get tired of this though and sitting in front of your computer too much isn’t advisable so don’t go for to small timeframes and do take care not to send too few LC cause walls and morale can be pretty nasty, so keep those in mind. You should check for new abandoned every once in a while.
Farm those bashed by others! To farm those others have bashed send around a few scouts around to every village near you. obviously those who are farmed by others have no troops at all. This is risky and non-abandoned players can receive tribal support or get support so be sure always to scout before you send troops in. I created a quicklink for the scouting of the farms I found that way and put that in the notebook too, then went through the scout reports and sent the necessary amount of LC.
Bash and farm your own!
Once you have a decent amount of LC (and have produced some axes and rams) you might want to kill some of those who haven’t read any guides or still think a few hundred spears/swords behind a level 10 wall are enough defense to leave the computer for a couple of hours. Be careful with those. They are the most profitable but most risky, too.
Defending; Building no defense can work, but you will always be at risk. I am aware there are some tactics to survive with no defense at all and in a world of lambs where you never get attacked the chances to go to a high rank with it aren’t slim at all. I can’t stand such behaviour though:you won’t be able to help your tribemates when they need defense and this will cause quite some arguements. In the end this should be fun and leaving the game in a bad mood cause none of your tribemates where sending you help in need isn’t the best way to start a good day.
You will get bashed if you have a good player close to you.
So let’s assume you are one of those well mannered players who is building LC to farm and defense to help himself and his tribemates we go on.
Defense is 90% precaution and 10% action. Perparation happens on a psycholgical level:
Your enemy has to think you are online, your tribemates are online and willing to support you and above all that you have enough defense.
On a informational level:
Build (or support all villages with) a couple of scouts (up to 50) in all of your villages. Your enemies will scout through all of your villages at some point and if they are only blocked by scouts in some of your defensive villages, but can take a look at your easy targets (i.e. offensive villages) it won’t be very productive, will it? especially if you are offline at that time.
Finally the material level:
There is hundreds of guides on the forum regarding what defense is better, and what ratio one should built and all of them are wrong and right. It depends on what the attacker will attack with and that is not really predictable over a long timeframe. A spear-sword ratio of 2:1 can be good, an archer: HC ratio of 5:1 can be good. It all depends on what your attacker will attack you with. Only one thing is really really important. Never ever build one defensive type alone. You make yourself vulnerable against certain types of attacks. always mix 2 defensive types. Remember I say defensive types. This is still no reason to mix defensive and offensive troops in the same village. Let’s say we are prepared but the enemy has got a scout report or is attacking blindly. What to do now? Above all, keep calm. Take a deep breath and look if you can identify what kind of attack is heading your way. Is it slow enough to be ram or noble speed? If it is faster most of the times it is cleverer to ask for defense in the tribe and duck the first attack, till the defense has arrived. Be sure to post a full report for your tribemates. They will want to know what kind of defense they should send and if you are worth the defense at all. You can figure out how to duck the initial attack and duck in the middle of a line of attacks for yourself I guess and since this is supposed for intermediate players i’ll jump to large scale attacks. Once not only a few attacks (<10) is arriving but maybe hundreds or thousands the real fun begins. You will need to find out quickly if the attacks coming in are scouts, LC/HC, spears/axes, swords, cats/rams or nobles. Your opponent might rename villages or have them all with the same name while the attack is running to confuse you so identify villages only by their coordinates. If you think that certain attacks are fakes, ignore them. Duck the attacks that are faster than ram speed and block all scout attacks with your own scouts.
Cross Defending; If you need to send out troops at a specific time and need them to be back at a specific time you will usually prepare a window and wait till those times come. The higher the speed, the less time you actually have for such behaviour. You may want to send the defense from village a to village b and form b to a. even if you mess up the timing, you still have other villages to send the support from and you’ll only have to wait for one time not two.
Recycling; If attacks don’t hit at the same time try to use the defense multiple times. Even if its original village is under attack there is no reason not to use it elsewhere and send it back in time.
Offensive defending; Listed in the attacking section
Counter Attacks; If you have an offensive village that will be nobled you will want to put the offense to better use than just use it as defense. Write down the second your opponent hits you, add the time he needs to get back and exactly one second later hit him, giving him no chance to pull his troops out. counterattacks are also used to arrive exactly at the second when the opponent should send his nobles or just to confuse him. Mix in a real offense every once in a while or he will just ignore the attacks.
Attacking; You want to get the other one village or his resources or just smash him to pieces. but you want to do it with the least possible losses. So, lesson one is to get the most possible troops (look into the basics guide), make it harder for your opponent to get support, hit him when his wall is down, not get more losses by morale and if possible tricking him into giving you the village for free. Pretty obvious till this point. The funny part starts here: How to get the wall down without loosing troops, how to get villages for free and so on... Basically if your opponent is offline or just ignores you, you’ll just have to bash him. It’s when he thinks he is a good player that you are able to kill him a lot easier. Let’s start with the easiest of trick plays:
Catapulting the rally point you send 5 attacks each with quite some distance in between, none with too many troops so you won’t loose too much if it doesn’t work out. The enemy might try to send out his troops before the first attack, plan to cancel afterwards and be home to kill those 4 nobles. Problem is: Once is rally point is catapulted he cannot cancel until it is rebuilt. this strategy works best with 6 attacks, the first 2 being catapults targeting the rally point with some distance between them and to the following nobles. You can still cancel in front of the first attack though. Quite similiar and nice against close targets is the
5 noble attack, within cancel reach or where you sacrifice one noble. send a bash (which contains a noble), then send 4 nobles from another village, one that arrives before the bash, 3 afterwards, cancel the one in front and resend it, alone without company. The enemy will think you totally messed up and will duck the first 4 attacks. Once you have the village you can cancel the last noble run. Another move is the
lure defense technique. I haven’t used this too often and it works best against players with few villages. Attack a far away village with four nobles and prepare to time 4 nobles against one or more of the defensive villages of your enemy 2-3 seconds before your bash hits. the supporting troops will vanish once you got the village, thus leaving the village which you attacked initially with less troops. Once your enemies understand you keep ducking their bashes and killing their nobles they might send full armies with nobles. Now the real fun starts:
Offensive defending. Send 3 nobles at your own village. the full offense will stay in the village once the noble takes it and will be crashed by the next offense with a noble, four times. and you will have an easy play destroying the last troops and re-nobling it. Think about what the enemy can do when you time your noble to attack one second after they take the village. Also think about nobling yourself when your loyalty went down to 3 or 4 after a noble train. The enemy will send over 2 nobles when he thinks the loyalty is somewhere between 35-40, but it will be around 60. This might buy you some more time.
Morale killer; Imagine you have a pesky low morale village nearby. Give him one of your large villages (without wall) for free. Once he takes it his morale should be far better and even better he will try to defend the big new village with his defense. By the way. The easiest way to kill a turtle (who won’t fall for any trick plays anyway) is to keep catapulting any new village they take. They might even try to defend at wall 0, thus being helpless when you take their main one.
