EE Chronicles #1: Frog's 2015 ASW WC Strategy

Hello, everyone. Frog from the Asw Champs Magenta Manitcores. After getting my 3rd ASW victory many players have pmed me for advice. In addition I have seen comments in forums and WC that seemed a bit inaccurate. Usually, I am very protective of my strategy, but with three championships under my belt and not much to prove, I decided to make a few threads about my ASW philosophy. One thread (this one) will deal with WC strategy. Another thread will deal with my personal build and strategy. Then a couple of story threads will reveal what went on inside clan during each war.

Let’s get to it.

War Commanding in the All Star War.

War Type: 6-hour 7-10 random with 6 xstals
My strategy pertains to this type of war, and a totally different strategy would be needed if the devs ever decided to make it, for example, and Advantage KO war.

In a random war you are guaranteed that some people will be coming out of KO right until the end. And since Ko’s makes players lose a fixed % of their plunder up to that point, he who has the last xstal will win. I saw it as a game of chicken. The team that xstals first loses. Plunder in the first five hours of the war meant nothing. Ko’s meant nothing. Skoing and zeroing enemy spies meant nothing. Losing by 250b with 40 left in the war was not important at all. All that mattered was that my clan had control, and by control I mean they could perform more actions in the last 20 minutes than our enemy could.


Our enemies probably lost because the wc’s gave into pressure and had their warriors xstal too early. They treated the 6 hour war like it was a one hour war, worrying about sko, zeroing spies first, and a slew of other things that meant nothing.

My strategy was this:
① We would not xstal first, no matter what the score was.
② We would super tank. One hit, one assassin and regen. No chasing ko, no returning hits. If you were under 80% and leading us in plunder you were screwing up.
③ We would throw all our hansel attack troops and sko on top builds, forcing their bigs to xstal too early.


Late Xstalling

First ①. I have already explained this in detail. Basically it is a game of chicken. I would not xstal before my enemy, damn the plunder difference, because I knew in the last thirty minutes of the war every player would come up out of Ko at least three times and that guaranteeing KO’s and the huge late plunder they would bring would lead us victory. Even Sko became a huge plunder loss for the enemy after 6 hours of hitting.

Super tanking


Now how about ②? Why the extreme tanking? It generally takes more troops to attack someone than it does to defend. That means every time you attack someone, you weaken your position in relation to that build, while the defending build finds itself in a stronger position. To compensate for this power loss the devs give the attacking build plunder gold. This was all fine and dandy in the 2012 system wars, but with the KO system meant that reward plunder could be stolen in the late hours of the war. Well, if there is no real reward for attacking first, why attack at all? Why not tank and put your opponent in a weaker position?

So basically that’s what I told my clan. Tank! One hit and regen to full. I must have posted that a thousand times over the weekend. Even when we counter xstalled we tanked. And it worked like a charm. Here some examples: Once the enemy xstalled on me when I was full troops. I didn’t attack back once, and it took 98 actions to ko me, of which only a half dozen gave any plunder. So basically to KO me once they had to ko two of their own people and get only about 2 B in plunder for their effort.


One other example. In the last war the Vipers decided to save xstals but didn’t bother to tank nearly as well as we did. Two hours into the war they had 550 more successful attacks but only a 30B plunder lead. That means every successful attack only gave about 55Mil in plunder and that’s not including spy actions. Very inefficient.

I was a stickler about this. I pmed a few players I thought were hitting too much. I would say, “are you tanking troops?” They would say, “yeah I’m at 70%”. “70%? Are you nuts? You gave up 30% of your power? Get up back to 95% and stay there!” I told everyone, “If you find yourself leading us at plunder with four hours left and at 80% troops, you’re screwing up.” I wanted everyone high so when the enemy tried to xstal at us, we would be at 100% strength, not 70% or 50%.

③ Skoing on the bigs

No matter how hard you try to tank, some builds are gonna get koed and hansels with their small attack builds should zero their attack troops. Well, if early war plunder means absolutely nothing, you might as well sko or dump troops on the biggest build you can find. When troops reached 20% we were to sko on the biggest up target which my assistant WC D-A would post in cc every few seconds. It worked like a charm. We quickly got the enemies big builds down, which in turn prompted some of them to xstal way too early. In the first war a top five ranked Cyan Centaurs xstalled 4 times in the first 90 minutes of the war cause he probably thought, “I’m a big-ass build, I should be up making plunder, not sitting around in KO.” His pride helped seal Cyan’s fate. We got him to xstal early four times and all we threw at him was sko garbage and ps1 attack troops.
This technique at first confused a few of our players. I remember this funny Pm exchange:

Hansel build: You’re having me burn troops on their cr1.
Me: Yes, that’s right. Keep it up.
Hansel: But should I try to hit another hansel so I can get plunder?
Me: Why would you want to do something stupid like that? Who needs plunder?
Hansel: What?
Me: Calm yourself. Trust your Wc and the system. I’ve done this 6 times before. It will work.

Convincing My Clan

I knew my strategy was correct. The task was convincing others to believe in me. Luckily there were no other rival wc wannabe’s to create power struggles in the clan, and my undefeated rep helped to gain support of the clannies. And when my strategy produced an overwhelming victory in the last five minutes of the first war, it went mostly unquestioned afterwards.


(Tip to future WCs: Never let your clanmates see you being uncertain. Human nature is such that the person who acts like their idea is 100% correct will win out over others. If three out of four in a group think A is correct, but the 4th screams and hollers that the answer is B, the group will pick B)


To also pull this off, I had to be a bit of a jerk in cc. I needed total control. No one was allowed to talk. Unless they were tracker or assistant WC, I just didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass that “they are all over me”, or “3 is up”, or “cr72 spies only”. All this meant nothing. Shut up. That cc is mine. (lol I even had to tell the assistant WC to shut up from time to time. Sorry D-A).


Some people just couldn’t help themselves; they were too used to thinking that the cc was a place to chat. Perhaps they were too used to helping out in EE with their home clans. I had to pm a few to tell them “for the love of Christ, stop posting that crap in CC”. One wrote back, “okay I will shut up now, but after the war you must tell me why.”

Here’s why. The tracker has the most accurate information. The cc flies around fast enough as it is in a war involving 220 people, and your posting just pushes the tracker further up the cc. Also if you start doing it, then player X will think he can do it too. Then player Y and Z will also start posting.　Pretty soon everyone is spitting out unimportant, inaccurate crap and the WC and tracker get drowned out.


Also some posts defy the WC strategy. When you say “cr62 troops only get him” you are telling others it is OK to chase KO and not to tank. It is never okay to abandon tanking in an ASW run by Frog. This might make me seem like an arrogant jerk, but at least I’m an arrogant jerk who wins wars.

TL;DR
In short, we won because my clan trusted me enough to follow my system of waiting, tanking and skoing on the bigs. The other teams lost mostly because the WC’s caved into pressure to xstal too early thus take on plunder too early at the expense of control.


(P.S. some people have speculated that “we almost lost” or the “war could have gone either way”. Let me tell you this: Never once in my mind during the weekend did I feel we were going to lose, and I knew early on in most we were going to win, but I will discuss the specifics of each war in separate threads.)

Hope you enjoyed this 4-page read.
_____Frog____o_0


:mrgreen: :geek: :mrgreen:

 

Re: EE Chromicles #1: Frog's 2015 ASW WC Strategy

Reserved in case I have any more profound, witty insights.

 

Re: EE Chromicles #1: Frog's 2015 ASW WC Strategy

Here's a few quotations I feel apply to my strategy:

On Tanking

" it's not about how hard you can hit, it is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. "
Rocky Balboa


On taking control:

"My philosophy was when I'm on that ice, I want that puck, and you guys can just go and get your own puck"
Hockey Great Wayne Gretzky (cira 1987)