Guide: Defence & Offence 1.2

From Ikariam the board
http://board.ikariam.org/thread.php?threadid=24937


Guide: Defence and Offense 1.2.1

Feel free to discuss this guide and make suggestions for improvements here:
For commenting on Guide: Defence and Offence


First of all i want to say thank you to all the people on the forum who helped me by posting in this guide and to all people who posted on the forum about problems covered in this guide(my research included more than 50interesting threads about these problems and only a couple of them are mentioned in the interesting links).So THANK YOU TO ALL OF YOU.

As you can see i changed the name because talking about defense is useless without offence because everybody builds an army for both of them,not only for offense or only for defense(although people are more oriented towards one of them).
If you have anything to ask or you think I miscalculated or misthought something please send me a PM with the problem (and an explanation why you think that).

A couple of things I have to add before starting the guide:
I started from the idea that a luxury good costs 30gold and lumber costs 15 gold. I needed to do this so I could compare gold with lumber and sulphur for example.
Any idea can be questioned and i would like any idea to be questioned actually,because this is how i found a lot of mistakes in what i thought and what i wrote in this guide.
Also this guide has been made considering that resistance and assault work with upgrades also(for example a phalanx with all the upgrades will have 91defence when defending a city and not 82)


1) Land Defence.
Here appears the problem of how to calculate the value of a unit. Two formulas accepted in our case are
[attack value +defense value*resistance skill]/upkeep for defence Resistance is a skill that gives 30% extra defense to a unit that is defending(for example it gives 12more defense to a phalanx
[attack value*Assault +defense value]/upkeep for ofence.Assault is the counterpart of Resistance(30% extra damage when atacking)
The cost of the units isn’t taken into consideration because in the long run the upkeep is all that matters.
What you should keep in mind from all of this is that a bigger number is better.
So a phalanx will have a 2.667value when atacking(4.667 with all the upgrades) and a 3.167 value when defending(5.5416 with all the upgrades)
An archer will have a 2.5 value no matter if he atacks or defends (4.375 with all the upgrades).
A steamgiant will have a 3.53 value when atacking(5.735 with all the upgrades) and a 4.14 value when defending(6.75 with all the upgrades)
Please keep in mind that if we make a number of archers,a number of phalanxs and a number of steamgiants so that each of these take the same upkeep the cost will look like this steamgiant>archer>phalanx.Also keep in mind that upgrades look the same steamgiant upgrades>archer upgrades>phalanx upgrades.
While the increased cost of the unit itself and the upgrades is worth it for steamgiant(which is a lot better in terms of upkeep than the phalanxs),the archer has a lower value per upkeep and a higher cost,so he isn't worth it.

So the conclusion regarding this is that the best choice,until you can build steam giants are the phalanxes and only phalanxes. For more info and more detailed calculations and examples visit the links recommended at the end of this guide.
As soon as you have researched Robotics start replacing your phalanxs with steamgiants.


2) Town wall.

A town wall MUST ALWAYS HAVE THE SAME LEVEL AS THE TOWN HALL (as can be seen in this table: http://ikariam.wikia.com/wiki/WallDefense). What can we draw from here is that we ABSOLUTELY NEED a town wall the same level as our town hall.
How town walls work:
If the defender of a town being attacked has a town wall it has numerous effects:

* All defending units receive a 10% bonus on their armour protection for each town wall expansion stage
* The town wall increases the total damage of the defender by 3 per expansion stage.
* All attacking units receive a 10% damage bonus for each defeated breach.

Units possessing the special ability Battering Ram can cause breaches in the town walls. At least once every two rounds a breach is caused. As many breaches as there are expansion stages on the town wall can be caused. With enough battering ram units all available breaches can be caused in the first battle round.
Tip: Breaches in a town wall are automatically closed up after a battle.

So you must ALWAYS have a town wall the same level as your town hall.
A counter argument to this would be what if the atacker has such a number number of siege units that it can destroy your town wall really,really fast(1-2 rounds).
For a level 10town wall with a level 10 town hall he would require 10siege units to take down your wall in 2rounds.When atacking a town with a level 10 town hall you aren't expecting to get much.At most 600resources and 1000-2000gold.So is it worth it to use more than 500upkeep only in siege units for attacking that wall?No it isn't unless the player that is atacked upgraded his dock to level 3,4,5,which he shouldn't have.
For a level 20 town wall with a level 20 town hall,things change a little.The upkeep for having the siege required to take down the wall in a maximum of 2rounds is 1000-1500 gold which isn't that much at this point,so the town wall becomes less usefull.
The town hall also has an attack value which is somewhere between 14 and 39.In other words if you attack an undefended city with just one slinger or swordsman it will die and you lose the battle,but if you attack with one phalanxs it will survive and win you the battle.


3) Naval defense. In most cases you will know/be friends with all the players on your island (or at least the ones that are stronger than you) and as such most of the attacks will come from another island. As such ships will help a lot, but what ships should you get? After calculating the value of the ships(using the same formula as the one from land units) we realize that the best early game ship(first month) is the ballista ship and late game the best ship is the mortar ship
One more thing that should be considered is speed: mortar ships have a speed of 4(which is decent) and balista ships have a speed of 8 which is the best speed outhere.
Using the same formula as for land units here are the values:
Ram ship 1.6
Balista 2(2.35in defense)
Flamethrower 1.77(2.04 in atack)
Catapult ship 2.1
Mortar ship 2.46
Paddle-wheel-ram 1.66(1.93 on atack)
Dving boat 2.1(2.47 in defense)
So the conclusion here is that early game the balista ship is the best and late game the Mortar ship is the best.

4) Special units (cooks and doctors).The actual effects aren’t that well known for these units at the moment. Cooks will increase the stamina of the units a little per battle ground, while doctors have a chance of preventing units from being killed. Stamina works like this (copied from the game guide):

If a unit is hit and survives they will lose stamina. If the stamina falls below a certain level the unit worsens or tries to flee. With bigger battles, which span for multiple rounds, stamina can decide the outcome!
3/4 Stamina - Damage and armour protection are reduced to 80% of their value
1/2 Stamina - Damage and armour protection are reduced to 60% of their values and the units lose all special abilities
1/4 Stamina - Damage and armour protection reduced to 40% of their value. What is more is that there is a 60% chance per round that the unit tries to flee.
As we can see cooks are more important in long battles that take more at least 3-4 rounds and battles in the defense with phalanxes and a high level town wall take a lot because you have a huge defense and a only a ‘decent’ attack and as such it will take a lot to repel the enemy army considering the armies are evenly matched. So cooks are very important in our case.

Doctors are important when there are a lot of units and we will rarely see more than 50phalanxs in the defense because by then you would have researched the steam giant. (Steam giants only receive half the bonus from doctors.


5) Unit upgrades. Regarding upgrades I can only sintetise what is known about them. They don’t appear in the battle report, Game operators from ikariam.org (our server) say they work, while Game operators from other servers say they don’t work (ikariam.com as an example given by somebody from the forum).Now on to some calculations: The first upgrade for phalanxes cost about 23000gold (considering as said crystal is 30gold a piece).This is equal to the upkeep of 40phalanxes for 1day which is really good considering the benefits. As a rule here I would go with a first upgrade sometime when you have 30-40 phalanxes, but seeing we aren’t sure that upgrades work I really can’t recommend anything.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:I HAVE INFORMATION TO BELIEVE UPGRADES DO WORK.A friend of mine is going to give me a report that should prove that upgrades work.As soon as i get it i will publish the result here.


6) Spies. Spies allow you to catch people spying on you and as such they can't find out what troops you have (unless they send a probing army), what resources you have, if you are online etc, so always have some spies in your towns.
A general rule would be keep that the number of spies should, at most, equal half of your town hall level.


7) Have a low level trading port. Pillaging works like this:
A) They get some gold which is limited by the level of your town hall (and by how much gold you have of course: D)
This is the actual formula (Town Hall Level *(Town Hall Level - 1))/100.
So for a level 10 town:
(10*(10-1))/100
(10*9)/100
90/100
0.9% of the gold you have
b) They get the resources that they can load in the 20 minutes pillaging takes. This means that a no port town can lose as much as 60resources, a level 2 port town can lose as much as 600 resources and so on. My advice would be to keep a level 1 or 2 port.


How many units/ships someone should have is hard to say(all of this is just a personal opinion which clearly isn't infalible), but I would go with having a couple more phalanxes than the level of your town hall. You should also have a number of ships which should equal at most half the level of your town hall (this is all in my opinion and it remains debatable of course).You should also have more troops in the town(s) that you use for storing resources and for trading. You also must have a town wall the same level as your town hall (or bigger)

You should have enough units to stop somebody who is more powerfull than you from atacking but here is a catch also.Someone who is, lets say 10times more powerfull than you won't attack if he can only get 1000gold and 600resources from you(due to low dock and low gold reserves).So the idea here is to just make sure that you have an army big enough so it isn't worth to be atacked for the resources they can get from you.
Nobody will risk losing units which cost 624lumber and 384sulphur(that's six phalanxs) for a loot of 600resources(wood and luxury combined) and some gold.


All of the information here comes from the ikariam.org forum, the game guide and my experience and logic. As such some of these ideas aren’t mine and should be attributed to the right people (who are so many I couldn’t write them all down, but you will find them and the ideas mentioned in the links given at the end).


Hope I have covered most of it. For more info on the problem (and the game) you can check one of these links:

http://board.ikariam.org/board.php?boardid=68

Guide: Town Defence

Guide: The Costs Of Town Defending - A Mathematical View

Effect Of Cook/Stamina (?)

On Cooks, Doctors, and Other Things...

chefs and doctors

Cooks and doctors on defense?

This last link (and any link that looks like http://s1.*) will not work unless you have an account on the Alpha server on the UK group - To make it work change the .org to your languange group (.com for the US group, PL for the Poland group, DE for the German Group, ...) and the s1 needs to be changed to your server number as well.