Advanced Scout Bomb (PvP) Offense - Tactics

[arislan1999]

WARNING: This guide was written a long time ago, I have not kept up with the game and updates. So this probably does not work anymore. I do not plan on updating it.

Advanced Scout Bomb (PvP) Offense - Tactics


Author's note:

I'm going to quit this game so I thought I'd share some of the tactics that I use to PvP. I've used these tactics in order to defeat some very tough opponents, and I consider this an end-game guide rather than a beginners guide. Special thanks to pokey for developing scout bomb tactic originally, this really just builds ontop of it. I'll also say that most of this article focuses on tactics, and not strategy. There are greater aspects of this game with regards to strategy, resources, diplomatics, which someone else can write a guide about. This focuses on battle tactics, and a very specific one at that.

My perception of current game mechanics leads me to believe that defense is heavily favored over offense. The only advantage of offensive tactics is the element of surprise / initiative: choosing the time of the attack while the defender is not online. Every strategy offensively can be countered defensively if the other player is online, and knows what they are doing. In addition to the added bonus of walls, which makes offensive attacks extremely challenging. The other big factors that contribute to the imbalance is : 1) reflief station's ability to reinforce more quickly, and 2) beacon tower's telling of exactly what is coming and when it is coming.

I'll also make it a point to note that the honor system is fairly broken, and the only way to "win" as defined by the destruction of cities / conquering of cities, is to lose honor, at the end game, at least.

My contention is also that if your opponent realizes these strategies that I listed here, there is a counter for everything.


Some Concepts:

Scout Bomb - Priority Targetting - Exercises

- One key tactic that much of this guide is based on is the usage of the scout bomb tactic (as originally developed by Pokey after the wall/defense changes). That is, sending in 100k scouts on a kamikaze mission to attack an enemy base with gates open, killing about 20k archers (varies) , to be used repeatedly to eventually wear down the enemy enough, for your real 100k archer/rams/calv force to clear all troops. You can refer to that thread here: <add link that i can't find right now>
- One aspect of this depends on the game mechanics of priority target. That is: with all things being equi-distant reachable by range, the attacking units will choose the unit that is most "valuable" as defined by # * resource cost.
- It may somethings be difficult to figure out what your units will target, especially when you see something like 80k swords , 100k archers defending (for example), what will the scouts attack?
- The way to find out, is to use Exercises from your rally point. Exercises from rally point, will almost always tell you, exactly what your scouts will attack, given the correct reading of defending troops. The # of kills will be wrong, but who to attack is always right. This way you can plug in #s, and find out which unit will be killed by scouts, and find out when to stop sending scouts.

Gates Open/Close

- It's important to realize that scout bombing does not work when gates are closed.
- It is also important to note that scout bombs do NOT work when there's any other unit in the attack force. So sending in 99k scouts , and 1 warrior, will effectively nullify the scout bomb effect (of attacking archers)
- Additionally, if the defending opponent has Archer towers up, your scouts will break on them, 100k scouts, even with 20% attack bonus will only kill about 700 ATs (some of which gets instantly repaired depending on his tech). If he has 18k , you are looking at a lot of losses for little gain.
- I do not think this is winnable with brute forcing a closed gate with 18k ATs up. (Though i've never tried)
- It is my proposal, that it is best to use maneuvers as described below post to overcome this, to detect player online/offline and gate open/close is key.

Losing Heroes

- It is important to note that even with loyalty 90+, you can still lose your heroes on attacks with scout bomb kamikazes.
- This is based on if the defending city has empty spots available in their feasting hall.
- Attackers need to be extremely careful sending in their prized 200+ ATK heroes on scout bombs. You need to either know that the guy is offline, or his heroes in feasting hall is full
- Yet, the amount of archers you kill is directly proportional to the ATK power of your hero. So it is best to send a strong ATK hero, if you can risk it. You could always send fodder , hired heroes (ATK 60/70), but those will take more scouts to kill the same # of archers.

- To mitigate the risk, one tactic here is: before your 100k scout bomb lands, send in a bunch of small, 1 scout, or 1 - whatever attacks. have them land 1 second before your 100k scout bomb attacks. Use crappy heroes as fodder. That way the person has not enough time to go to his feasting hall and "release" his captured heroes from the small fodder attacks.
- If he has scouts and open gates, then even better, send in your scout on scout missions with a hero, which will also get your bad fodder heroes captured, and ensure the survival of your good hero when your real attack lands.


Distance/Forward base

- It should be obvious by now that the effectiveness of your attack depends on the relative distance of you vs the attacker, in order to achieve the element of surprise.
- It is best to position an attack base / city at the next tile of the enemy.
- You can do this by either setting up and building a forward city, or conquer a lvl 10 NPC.
see this thread about how to conquer a LVL 10 NPC over great distances : http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?...hlight=forward
- The distance to your enemy is directly inversely porportional to your rate and chance of winning the conflict.

Marking a Target / Element of Surprise

- Because of the beacon tower advantage, fighting an online opponent is extremely hard, they can see your attack timed to arrive down to the second, and do all sorts of maneuvers to counter it.
- What I've found is useful is to "mark" the target of attack with a 1 worker attack, camped at 99 hrs.
- This will initiate an attack of time: 100 hr on the target city.
- Your opponents UI for reports button will start blinking continuously for the next 100 hours.
- He will need to have the reports menu open the whole time in order to see when a "real attack" is on its way, instead of be notified by the blinking birdie.
- The purpose of this is to 1) get the player complacent about the blinking birdie, and 2) put him on edge so he has to worry about it 24/7, and 3) hide your real attacks.
- Doing this greatly increases your chance of success because you have the element of surprise. I typically send the 100 hr attack 24 hrs before I land in my forward base, so they get complacent, the down side of this they know you are about to hit them and they teleport away before you even get there!

Honor Points

- Don't worry about honor points.
- I've realized that it's best to be at 0 honor. After a few scout bombs you will up the defender's honor, and lower your own to the point that they will only get 10% back on Heals, while you get 50%
- This is actually to your advantage if you want to "win" by conquest. (note: will will lose by honor points, if you use that metric)

Manuevers

Feint/Multiple Cities:

- This is farily standard and doesn't even rely on solely on scouts bombs. The idea here is to attack multiple targets of your enemy and use camp time to have them land at the same time.
- This forces your oppoent to defend two positions instead of 1, and thus have to split his forces. Allow the attack to land on the undefended city, and recall the attack on the defended city at the last moment.
- This tends to not work well at the end game, against big players, since everyone has enough defending armies in all cities to defend against your simultaneous attacks.

Gate open / close Detection:

- The situation here is that your opponent is online 24/7. (Or perhaps he's got friends who can play his account all the time.)
- He will see your scout bombs coming and close the gate at the last second, and always open the gates on archer attacks. (see above on why this is bad)
- note that: distance / marking target really helps with this situation (as described above)

Gate open/close can be detected by this way:

1) Relying on enemy scouts:

• If the enemy has scouts defending his base, that is sometimes a *good thing*.
• Even if you outnumber his scouts and can kill them, don't... leave them there
• Instead use those enemy scouts to your advantage to indicate whether or not the gate is open or closed at the last second.
• This resolves into a Simple Tactic, which is key:
  
  • send a 1 scout , scout mission.
  • if his gates are open, and he has more than 1 scout, your scout will die. red bar dissapears
  • if his gates are closed, your scout will return. red bar becomes blue bar.

[arislan1999]

Opponent Online/Offline Test:

You can combine the above maneuvers to see if the person is online / offline during a given period by doing a test:

- If the gates are open. Send a 100k scout bomb at the target. Then send a 1 scout , scout mission to land at the same time. Pull your 100k scout bomb at the last second. If you see a toggle in gate, you know the guy is online.

- If the gates are closed. Do the opposite, send a 100k archer attack to the target, and send a 1 scout mission (or attack for method). To land at the last second. See what happens. Does he open the gate at the last second?

- Special note here: that if you use attack method (as opposed to the scout method), you need to be aware that most high end players have friends playing their account in the same alliance. So these guys will scan war reports while they are on their main account.. and if they see your "test" attack land, they will go and logon to their friends account.

- Always pull your troops last second to avoid unintentional losses. Remember this is just a test to see if he is online. If he knows you are doing a test, he might counter it by faking... but he takes a chance either way, because maybe you are not testing and let it land.
- Depending on how paranoid you feel you can test once/twice/three times... before you make your real move.

Pincher (ATs up, online):

- The situation here is: the defender has 18k archer towers, and lots (even 900k) archers on defense, you have 3 million scouts you are ready to unload, but he is online and flipping gate open/close status

If he is offline things are easy:

• gate closed - send 100k archers to remove ATs, then go to town to drop loyalty to 5, then bomb.
• gate open - just straight up scout bomb it.

The hard part here is if he's online trying to prevent the scout bomb. (open gate when scouts are about to hit, close gate when archer has to hit.
This requires a pincher maneuver.

Here is the tactic:

• Send either a 100k archer/100k calv wave. Let say that lands in 6 mins.
• Over then next minute send a 100k scout wave, to land at exactly the same time your archers land, to the second. Using camp time.
• Next minute, send another 100k scout attack wave, using camp time.
• Repeat, as much as you are willing to risk with scouts.

You now force the defending player to choose:

• open the gate - and suffer archer losses, due to the scout waves
• close the gate - and get his ATs destroyed. (Losing your ATs is extremely hurtful, tacitcally in the long run)

- You must time this to land on the same second. To the point where the guy's click of open/close is not granular enough to differentiate the multiple attacks.

There is also a way you can optimize your losses, and recall the correct attack(s) at the last second.
Feint-Pincher:

Optimization Option 1) use your scouts gate detection.

This method requries the enemy to have a scout advantage, and also to not know about sending away his scouts to prevent this tactic)

• The idea here is to send a 1 scout, scout mission, 1 second before your attacks land.
• If you know he has scouts in his base. Your scout mission will return if the gates are closed, and the scout mission will die , if the gates are open.
• You have no time to click the report, and read the report.. what you will need to do within that 1 second is:
• OPEN your feasting hall menu. Assuming here you know which hero is on what attack.
• Watch the lower left corner of the screen for the RED/BLUE bar.
  
  • If the red bar dissapears, your scout mission failed, and he died (gates open)
  • If the red bar turns to blue, your scout mission succeed, and the gates are closed.
• You use this feedback and watch at the last second, to pull whichever attack you want. This will prevent your troops from dying unncessarily

Optimization Option 2)
- Take a gamble, it's like rolling a dice: 50/50. Try to predict which way the guy will go. And pull the attack you think he won't avoid. (This may not be that worthwhile). If you know your player, it may work.

Calv Attrition: (ATs down):

- Once ATs are down, the defender is at a huge tactical disadvantage.
- Your scout bombs, even if he closes the gates, will not all die, they'll just return... (remember you still need to worry about losing your heroes).
- At this point, the defender will probably leave his gates *closed* by default, and only open them on real attacks (100k archer/calvs).
- What I usually do here is to use attrition and send 100k calv waves to slowly "catch him" on a closed gate to loot his resources.
- This requires careful online, gate open/close detection. To protect your calv for running into an open gate.
- Running into an open gate with calv isn't completely disastrous, depending on defensive configurations, you'll take something out.. (but its usually not worth it.)
- The best bet is to loot them by detecting their gate status, and only let your attacks land when you detect the gate is closed.

Calv tactical superiority
- Sending in calv is best because : they are fast (sneak in 1 minute attacks to catch them off guard), and they can loot 20m resources, and even if they hit an open gate they have a chance to damage the enemy due to their speed. Always good to have 100k calv lying around to do this.

Dealing with Heavy Meat defense - priority targetting:

- Eventually everyone will understand priority targetting, and they will arm their defenses with something like 300k swords, and 280k archers. Scout bombs will trade 100k scouts for maybe 4k swords.. which will make it extremely expensive to attack the enemy. (vs 100k scouts , and 20k archers)

- In this case you need to be willing to trader archers for killing swords/pikemen. If battle range starts at 5000 (if abistis are up), you will have around 4 rounds of opportunity for archers to hit their pike/swords, before your archers are annihilated. But you must also send rainbow layers. The best defense for this ironically would not be 18k ATs, but a combination of rolling logs , etc to take out layers.

- In this case you will need to send archers FIRST, to clear some swords/pikemen, before you can start scout bombing. This adds a new layer of complexity, and the defender can always send his swords away on a reinforce mission at the last second. So you'll have to combine this with surprise or pinchers using archer/scouts.

Win by Attrition:

- This is more of a strategic realization, but one must sometimes realize that it may sometimes just not be possible to win by doing one massive 4 hr sitting. Because the defender comes online and does everything to counter, everything you do.

- In these cases, the best bet is slowly attack them with repeated feint/pincher maneuvers over a several days period. Send attacks at random times, some at noon, some in the middle of the night. There is no way that he can be online to catch them all.
- refer to "marking the target", helps a lot with this. There's no way that he's looking at the reports screen every second.

Know your opponent:

- Finally, in true Sun Tzu style: know your opponent, research him, figure out how he plays and more importantly: WHEN he plays.
- Find out what timezone he plays in , and when he sleeps.
- One thing I've used: for the frequent forum posters, is to search through his forum posts on evony forums (just go "search by poster") to figure out his play times. I've successfully used this to estimate when one opponent of mine, at his weakest time availability, and caught him offline sleeping in.


Assuming you have overwhelming resource advantage, or allies. You will eventually win against your toughest defender, with patience. No one is invincible. Have fun with the game everyone

[MattTheGreat]

Great post dude, great post.

[redwhiteandblue]

Wow - this is a detailed and awesome post. Thanks.

[DonnyD]

Very, very good information.

[effel]

Great! Now I know what they are trying to do to me

[ThugLife]

bravo this is a great PvP guide

[primalhuntjtr]

Nicely done, partner.

[Faena]

I only have one thing to say about this guide: f*cking epic

[Shwin]

Awesome guide, I hope to get a chance to use it!