Through tutoring a lot of new and small factions in strategus there are several pointers coming up over and over again, so i will try to structure here how you would prepare for a battle from choosing the target till preparing battle plans and doing rollcall.
Army compositions are a very individual thing i will put in the end some examples for armies as i think they should look like for several purposes.
I ) troop count
as attacker you should have always a bit more(20%) troops then the defenders. Exception is depending on the time limit for strat fights. 1.5k(1500) - 1.6k(1600) troops for attacks on fiefs is what we have seen as usual army size in this strat to attack fiefs as maximum.
If you go above that you may face loosing troops and gear if the time runs out before you would be able to kill all defenders or take their flags.
Another exception would be if you intercept big armies so they can't resupply fiefs more to that later.
As defender to be able to play on time having 1/3 more troops is mostly sufficient, that if you have similar gear level or even better then the attacker.
Never forget the 1/3 rule, this game mechanic was introduced so that small armies can't just lock down any bigger sized army. Basicly for overland attacks it says the attacker has to have at least 1/3 of the troop count the defending army would have. IT also applies to the garisoned troops inside of a fief(not the population tickets). So when you attack a fief you also need at least 1/3 of the troops stationed inside of the fief.
you need to buy it or through successfull attacks loot it.
To buy it you need to know where to buy what. With the addon of dotnet (http://forum.meleegaming.com/strategus-general-discussion/strategus-sorted-inventory-(greasemonkey-script)/), you can go inside a fief, choose "0" loom level and click on the chest within the Weapons Tab. That way you get an overview of what is loomed at that location. Of every place you visit write down that information so that you later on can decide where to buy what at what price. Mostly in castles and towns stuff is loomed and also has discounts, as those places can more easily handle that. Also it is advisable to speak with the Lords and the faction of those places that you have free passage there to buy stuff, they wont mind to make a bit extra cash through taxes as long you can make them believe that gear ain't used against them afterwards :lol:
III ) siege equipment
As attacker you want to build a forward spawn to reduce the time from the front line to your spawning position and keep up the pressure.
As defender if you have a nice defendable spot which you either can shield with Siege Shields or through terrain you want to build a healing tent.
Ladders are not only be used to crawl up on houses or walls, but as spawn and forward spawn protection to put them around those against cavalry or in the case of forward spawn which had been seen lately to protect the forward spawns against enemy ranged attacks.
construction sites and (materials) allow you to build
Small Siege Tower (55)
Large Siege Tower (85)
Healing Tent (25)
Catapult (45)
Forward Base (35)
if you want to built one of the above you mostly will build a
Weapon Rack (5)
first out of which you can get more materials sites or bring back weapons from the battle field to store it within.
All of those have also been applied to overland battles, Siege towers to get superior firing angles for ranged, catapults to take down enemy forward spawn positions without suicide charging those and other tactical approaches.
IV ) Target selection
IV a )
Caravan attacksIf you are without a fief and also have no trading agreements or there are no free trade places in the area you operate, there is always a possibility to take the goods from someone else ^^. if you have fiefs but still want to cripple the eco of your enemies this is also your way to do it or well S&D stealing, but it is much more gratifying to take the goods out of the cold dead hands of your enemies :twisted:
Trade caravans often go from one fixed position to another as the factions have trade agreements. Get a spotter on top of a mountain or outside of woods and have an attack force ready to stand in the caravans way.
You can identify them by excess number of crates they carry, make sure you have enough horses as those caravans may have lots of them and just run/quickmarch to the next fief or into the woods. As you are the attacker you should have more troop tickets and at least the same gear level.
So you have build up an army and now you choose a nice village as your home, but there is someone else occupying it. Well you know the deal, what they can't or won't hold ain't theirs to begin with :rolleyes: . A claim is only as strong as the troops defending it.
You want to have ladders to get on the houses, interconnect them, build Siege Shields on top of houses or as attacker in a way you can safely attack their ranged on top of their houses. Mostly Medium Ladders are enough, larger ladders perhaps to interconnect houses, that you would need to check first when you look at the pictures of that place (http://c-rpg.net/index.php?page=strategusinfolocation). Make it habit to check out the location first when you attack or defend a fief. I myself make often battle plans using google drawings and share them with others to speak over suitable strategies.
those are a complete different animal then villages. You may need double the troops as the defender has. Lots of preparations are needed.
If you have access to a server where the maps of strat are available, walk within that map to get an idear of the place you attack or defend. Every map through its environment will have a certain dynamic/flow, which can be changed by ladders and wholes in the walls or siege towers from where you can focus fire onto a wall section or ladder up onto those walls from the siege tower. Siege Towers are by far not that good in current strat as they should be. Defenders can ladder on top of them and just destroy them from the roof. The handling of Siege Towers often is pure fail and defenders can increase that risk by switching brakes or some dipshits who aren't supposed to handle it blindly do it anyways.
Defenders should put ladders from the yards onto the walls to have additional access points, ladder from walls to top of gate and keep and other hardly to reach positions to neglect the enemy those positions in the long run, use ladder to interconnect wall segments and structures to reduce reinforcement times to the one or the other spot, also still allowed to ladder from the walls to the outside so that ladders a) block incoming ladders and b) get superior firing angles to the outside of the walls to shoot down siege equipment or just shoot people in the back trying to ladder up.
Every side has a wood pile, where you can take out materials, when the attackers comes to the wood pile of the defender, they can waste there construction materials.
When you plan to take a castle have a very close look at the defenders stairs. Any attempt to take down walls should take into consideration to separate wall segments in a way those can't reached anymore without a ladder. If you achieve that you could be successfully building a forward spawn in certain locations inside of the castle/town.
Your engineering team should have a plan to what shoot first and the battle commander should position bat 4-6 to point out those targets. Battalion 3 f.e. could be used for forward spawn position, battalion 1 and 2 for rotating attack positions of the infantry where they would need to ladder up the walls or go through possible breaches in the walls.
when you are about to attack a bigger target which seems to be easy enough ^^, you don't want the enemy sneaking by and reinforcing it. For that reason besides your siege army(ies) you have interceptors. They are built for overland attacks and should have a shitload of horses on them to catch anyone. This can be very costly when you attack a bigger target, but it would be even more costly if that bigger target would reach a castle/town and reinforce it. If you would have more then one interceptor you may also attack a second time and that way get the loot. In any case neglect any attempt for reinforcements if possible. In this case i also would go so far and say "fuck nighttime battles" and just lock the reinforcements down who tried to sneak in by night.
V ) securing an area
If got a good defendable position, you need to reinfoce it straight after taking it.
Therefor when you plan to take fiefs, plan also for afterwards holding them and using them. Prepare trade caravans who can already use that newly availabel S&D, have police forces ready to take out remaining enemies who are just in small parties there, before they can regroup and make trouble.
Not every village is really a good defendable position but could be used as honey trap, i haven't seen yet a castle or town which couldn't be seen as not good defendable in comparison to villages, but a few villages are fortresses themselves. Uzgah and Tulbuk coming to mind ^^.
VI ) attack has been initiated what now
So you attacked something and you can see that now on the battle roster on the cRPG website. With that you now also have an entry in your Battle Tab on the strategus Website. There you will be able to accept Mercs who want to fight for you in the upcoming battle and also as attacker you can switch between raid and normal siege when attacking a fief.
Raids are a good option if the troop count of a fief is below strongly below your attacking forces while the enemy still would have population. If a raid is successfull you rip them of their gear which may be inside and by that then the enemy would need to defend with peasent gear and you would have additional gear. This can be countered by a vigilant defender. The defender can take out troops and gear when he sees an incoming attack and he places it only inside after the attackers reinforcement time of 2 hours. The Defender has 5 hours reinforcement time within he can get additional stuff to the place of the battle and drop it onto either the defending party or insight the fief.
As a rule of thumb, when you have accepted someone only kick him out again if he wouldn't show up for roll call. We all have lives and need to make time for special events and people are getting rightfully pissed if they are accepted, clearing their schedules only to see shortly before a battle they would have been kicked out again.
There are 2 battle descriptions. Make sure you have a teamspeak available you are allowed to use or have your own. Ndtions and also cotgs.de teamspeak if cleared before would be available. Write in the description the teamspeak address where to meat up for the battle and also depending on the size of the battle give a time people need to show up in for front for roll call. This last really is important. if you have a battle with lets say over 1k troops involved overall it becomes more interesting for players and they will more often show up and apply. So they should be on ts at least 15 minutes before. If there are overall 1k-1.5k troops involved go for 20 minutes, everything over 2k troops involved are battles where people are struggling to get into and you will get lots of applicants there they should at least 30 minutes before the battle show up on teamspeak for the first roll call. People who aren't there for roll call will be replaced simple as that as you need to make sure you have enough players for your battle, don't make any exceptions for your own clan mates, if they don't show and didn't tell you they would be late a couple of minutes take them out .
Rollcalls will be repeated till you have a full roster. So after going through all the names and applicants once and before saving the roster, you could check another time for those who haven't showed up yet and you unchecked them. That way you can make sure that if meanwhile they are there they would still be in the roster. Then you start a second rollcall again going through all the names who have been accepted, often you missed out on some with the first roll call and you now double check. When through with those names you then read the names who haven't accepted yet and take in complettly new mercs. With the third roll call you should be aware of those people who have been accepted and you can go through the names pretty much on your own only those where you are unsure give it a bit time so they can make themselves being noted. It is for several purposes not a bad idea to have a application/lobby channel and a accepted channel with sub channels for special purposes. The accepted channel should be password protected and one of your guys with enough ts power should move those into there when they have been called and confirmed. Reasons would be a) security b) sorting out the names left in the lobby will become more easy and less crowded less people talking ^^
Teamspeak configuration can be a bitch if you are new to it get someone from another faction who admins it and let him help you with it, Buba mentioned in the comments for this article that Priority Speaker would be helpful and i agree, the same thing can be annoying afterwards in normal conversations so you should be able not only to hand it out but also to remove it after the battle.
Choosing mercs also important, do you have overland battle? you need more cavalry players ask players to make their character builds available within the description.
You are defending a castle, you need more ranged ...
You want also to some extent have more high level players then lower level players, for Wolves battles f.e. we have minimum lvl 25 by default and it also should be stated in the description, only siege engineers may also have lower levels. Don't forget about your friends, you want to keep spots open till around 2 hours before the battle to take your clan mates in or those lads of your alliance.
If you are not fighting in prime time, people will be more likely to not show up at your battle, good intentions don't help with sleep deprivation and over all it is not their problem that you chose a fucked up time. So make sure in the battle description, that people still should join your teamspeak as there it is more likely that people may not show up. Those now thinking yeah well as you said so i don't need to show up .. please dudes at least one hour before a battle retract if you still don't know if you can stay awake, if you then would be still awake just be on the teamspeak server and you can get back on the roster.
VII ) The Battle
Ok we have come now that far, all the organizational marathon is behind us now lets have some fun. Within the battle you will need to address your army with commands and give them orders to make the things which may lead to a victory. The battle leader in the best case should be the dude who did the roll call before, that way people already know his voice. If he is a well known commander he still can outsource the task of the roll call and prepare himself mentality for his command.
His tools are battalions and tasks combined with those.
Setting battalions is easy, you choose a battalion by pressing "P" once for battalion 1, twice for battalion 2 and so on. If you look at your feet and press "F1" afterwards, the chosen battalion flag is put onto your character. If you face a spot somewhere while pressing "F1" you put the battalion flag onto that spot in the landscape.
Commands should be short and clear, go to Battalion X and make shield wall.
Repeat your orders slowly and in a calm voice so people respond to it. Overall if you are over exited and would show it people may get over exited and would respond less to your commands. So be firm but calm. If people repeatedly wouldn't do what you want , call them out by names, that normally in combination with everyone listening to your reminders is enough to get people to do stuff correctly .. who wants to be called out in a front of the group negatively after all. The other way round when you see people doing it exactly how you want it , give them notification about it that they did it correctly, that way others can orientate themselves after those.
I myself don't like to shout at people but if i am sleep deprivated, have lots of other tasks to do and would be in bad spot overall it can happen, after the battle i may apologize to those i shouted at personally. Within the battle , they still need to do the shit i tell them to do. Within the battle you as commander are not anymore the character you play or the person behind the keyboard, but you are responsible for the efforts of yourself and the faction you represent. The mercs are responsible for their lives and their K/D to some extent, but you as commander have to carry the weight of loosing or winning the whole match, the way you interact with your crew and your mercs will reflect strongly onto the atmosphere and therefor the psychological stability of your team. Even if you would face a NoWin situation, you still would be able to damage the enemy, after all it may be a fight but not the complete war decided by this one battle, thereby also try to get as much out of a NoWin situation as possible as in the long run it counts to Attrition.
VIII ) aftermath
If you successfully took a fief or defended it, at once take out everything out of that fief, goods, equipment gold and troops. There may be an imminent attack on that position and you would need to make a new set of gear to defend it with only as many troops you would need for it. Too many troops inside a fief and you would lose you also would waste troops. Sell of small stacks of crappy gear and replace them if possible with bigger stacks of nice gear. So that in the next fight people don't always need to switch between gear or would spawn without it.
XXXXX) i may restructure this article later as it is quite a bunch of information and there may be better ways to structure an present them. Please let me know about any mistakes i would make in terms of game mechanics.
Armor Sets(as)
They are always combined out of Head, Body, Hand and Foot gear.
The armor sets used here are catagorized in 4 stages
- light(l-as), for ranged mostly or if you really need to equip cheap
- light medium(lm-as), for flankers/skirmishers, used also for main army in the early stage of strategus, now with all the heavy gear and looemd weapons i would go all out on that anymore
- medium heavy(mh-as), core armors for infantry and cavalary, already very robust while still keeping an eye on the cost factor
- heavy(h-as), when you see them you know they are heavy, they are expensive and you should make yourself a plan how to use them if you haven't got gold in an overabundance
Depending on where you can buy what and/or other reasons some of the gear can be used for upto 2-3 different armor set types as described above, that is more of a pragmatic then a perfectionist approach. Sadly that is often the reality in strategus :rolleyes:.
Weapons&Stuff
names used to describe later in more detail the %
- OneHander
- TwoHander
- Polearm
- Shield
- Bow
- Xbow
- Ammo
- Throwing
- Horse
- Siege
Conflict Situations
These are the general situations you run into with your troops. Please let me know if you would have additional situations which don't fit into the following categories.
I included rough number estimates, also there arguable so let me know.
Village - attack (1000-1800)
You want it and you have the troops and you believe the enemy can't withstand you so go for it.
Village - defense (300-2000)
From a base security upto this is my spot and you won't get it without a fight.
Castle/town - attack (1400 - 2000)
Castle/town - defense (1800- 2500)
We are prepared, have the gear the numbers in overambundance even if we need to attack several times we still are able to then reinforce it and hold it against any counterattacks.
Interceptor (700 - 1600)
Oh crap reinforcements incoming to that castle we are about to siege... stop them now!
Trader (300-1100)
You got a fief or a contract to use the S&D of a fief this is the army you need to carry around those goods.
Bandit (300 - 1100)
We spotted a joicy slow moving tarked, damn tehy are only lightly equipd and so many goods, lets snatch those from these fools
Patrol (250-700)
The purpose is to clear out your area from not wanted S&D stealing bastards or respawing enemies or just if you are control-freak who needs to have a clear area and doesn't want to see all those parties stuck at a river or canyon.
multipurpose (1600)
Erm yeah well not sure what to do next or what would happen next, what i would need to react to, so well with this baby you are ready for everything but would need to invest perhaps into some gear you wont need in the end or the enemy may get if you loose.
also to be considered upkeep graph (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AndZsiPEJtczdFRuQjBQbHJUZ2twV1RjTHB6YmRhc1E#gid=5)
roughly 250 troops can be supported in terms of upkeep at any point in time by an actively playing cRPG player.
So as for a bare minimum base army i would always go for and let my people set their troop cap for in the strategus Info Tab is 250.
Another "arguable" sweet spot is hit around 700-800 troops and then because of the battle timers at 1500-1600 troops. Everything above 2k troops is an overkill in terms of upkeep anyhow and should only be considered when you need to abandon a place very quickly and have not enough people to share the troops onto
The next thing you need to consider is that everyone has different builds in many ways therefor they are not always able to use only that particular armor set or only that provided weapon, you should always mix in lower and higher tear weapons of the same type.
[other factors included here as you name them]
Army Compositions
These now are examples for the situations described above. I hope we get a discussion running especially on this as this is how i would do it and i have reasons for it, but everyone could make different assumptions and i would be highly interested on your take on those.
Depending on the situation you want your army prepared for you should adjust your gear combination, therefor i try to give here rough estimates in which situations you want to have what type of gear in which relation to each other.
I use here a fixed troop numbers, so you can more easily compare and get the idears behind the %/fractions. When you have different troop numbers orientate yourself at the % or fractions.
work in progress
Village - attack (1600)
Village - defense (1600)
Castle/town - attack (1600)
Castle/town - defense (1600)
Trader (700)
Bandit (700)
Patrol (300)
Multipurpose (1400)