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Top 10 Map/Discussion

DeletedUser2369

Guest
Before I start, a disclaimer: I am not in any of the top tribes so this is a discussion from an outsider's perspective. I only get insider information from time to time and often context removed. So don't take what I say as fact, only a personal opinion.
mate, if you were in a top tribe with more accurate information, youd just get called biased, at least being outside of the top tribes the worst you can be called is ignorant lol.
 

DeletedUser5162

Guest
Also, something interesting to mention is that you all smell of rabbits.
 

DeletedUser4818

Guest
Haven't really checked his stats so can't comment on them but he isn't exactly wrong, all though Peak seems to have locked down the core for now and stopped the bleeding, but their allies don't seem to be able to handle it instead with GoB and IDP provinces falling rapidly. It is also interesting to see how many people are ready to turn their backs on the #2 and #4 tribe, Peak seems to have more loyal players tbh but what can you expect with IDP being MRT and GoB just completely took over P_R.
_X_ Completely ate LoK when they tried advancing as one big unit, really impressive tbh. Will be interesting to see what they can bring to the server now after cleaning up LoK and will have to cross path with the other big tribes.
 

DeletedUser5141

Guest
Great observation, and we will see how things goes.

PEAK have got few of their village back and took over some F.G inactive member's village. I think that give them some hope and push them to keep fighting, Unfortunately that's under a score of 150 vs 10, besides that single province, they are basically losing everywhere else and thing does not look great for them.

In another and IDP shows no growth and dropped back to rank 3, and under heavy coordinated OP from F.G. In general seems to do very badly, but I might be ill informed as I did not follow too much regarding IDP.
 

DeletedUser5160

Guest
More update maybe next week. Now I can track points changes, bash changes, and conquest history plus a clearer map.
21049580166c1e8d2603ec09a07e96b8.png
 

DeletedUser430

Guest
Going forward everyone please stay on topic. Please read over the forum rules as those that are actually updating the thread do not welcome the spam that has occurred.
 

DeletedUser5160

Guest
Eh I might write one up today or tomorrow. For now here's a screenshot of FG smashing everyone

ff8c5d1c47294ff45565f889dc804e5a.png

9d7e2be1ea8c2c5883fe0c5c395426ed.png
 

DeletedUser5160

Guest
What site are you using for that?

It’s not a public website. Was initially a VP/bash/point tracker for en35. I asked to the maker of that to repurpose but also improve upon the original source code. He went out of his way and added new functions so it’s the same or better than tw2 tools in functionality. Right now only scrapes en44 otherwise the amount of data that needed to be scraped would be much higher. So now I see all the changes in stats every 12 hours
 

DeletedUser4967

Guest
What's up with PEAK nobling barbs, any comments on that? :D
 

DeletedUser5160

Guest
Ok here's another update. Firstly, this one might be a bit brief given my week and last week was spent mostly doing data work and excel modelling so I might be a bit tired of numbers for the time being. Secondly, this will not be a Top 5; it will mostly be about FG. I might write a follow up post about Peak/IDP in depth later (and talk about all the top 10 members, etc.). Anyhow, here's a map. You guys can read a map - I'm not gonna comment too much here.

map.png

So let's start with the kinda obvious stuff. F.G went from beating everyone to beating everyone. If you're not in F.G, life is kinda grim. It's like living but knowing you have an expiration date. Those still hanging on in Peak, mad respects.

Sitting at rank 1 with solid stats across the board with the highest points per member (96k) is F.G. Before we talk about how good they are, maybe first about how they got there. Last time I wrote this they were solidly first place, fighting against a coalition of tribes. Now, the big change is that they merged with -X- which in itself was a very active tribe, with active heavily offensive players. The merge basically makes it extremely difficult for any opposition to effectively oppose F.G, as they are able to cut across both Peak and IDP. With this move, F.G was able to grab most of the good players on this server (stat-wise, atleast).

Their gains in the last two weeks can be seen here.
91a7b2c04daf03481ce4c12c2ba14560.png
Their success is expected given the cards that they have, and at the very least, diplomatically outmaneuvered the other tribes on this world by getting a merge with -X-. So it is no surprise to see them being the tribe with most amount of conquest daily:
58770fcab53cfe1dbfe6fd4c6703f513.png

Now I think that's enough of saying good about F.G (and the praise should be deserved). Now I'm gonna go off on a tangent and interject some personal opinion:

I think the merge was honestly kind of cancer and unhealthy for the world. Like, this is tribal wars. What happened is basically a merge to win and looks more like an attempt to speedrun a world (if that even could be a thing). Sure, if F.G was losing badly vs the combined Peak/GOB/IDP force then sure - go ahead and merge. But FG was not losing - they were already clearly ahead. I am not going to put any particular blame on which tribe is more responsible. Both are probably equally guilty of being unsure they can win the world with the players they have. Is this a good decision, strategically, to ensure the highest probability of winning? Most certainly. I can definitely emphasize with whoever was making the decision. However, from a more competitive standpoint, it's a lazy decision. Worlds are meant to be won through war. By no mean does the odds have to be equal - that's not my point. The thing is, F.G already had an obvious advantage which (pre-merge), they:

1) Were Winning
2) Had better quality of players (overall)
3) Better communication & coordination

Those 3 advantages will almost certainly lead to a victory given enough time. The merge with -X- basically stupidly stacked the odds against everyone else. You can't talk about bash when bash is two things:

1) How effective you are at using troops
2) How much troops the opponent have

I think the second point is often lost to people. You don't get ridiculously high bash from killing people with either no troops or not rebuilding their troops. You get high bash from constantly wiping out large stacks and concentrated defense efforts; which suggest that the enemies are active and resisting. Those make for fun worlds where opponents can actually respect each other. Lopsided world wins are rarely exciting. Sure, they can be fun for the winners. I know some people like that style, completely stomping on noobs who at most spend maybe less than a hour a day on the game. Personally, I don't enjoy one sided worlds. There is no fun attacking people who don't even log in to their villas or make an effort to defend. It's basically just attacking barbs with longer train times. The bash on this world is quite extraordinarily low. I would expect people with 35+ villas to be on the order of 4-5 mil obash/combined bash alone. That is not even remotely the case.
@blitzkrieg? Of course Peak is going to noble barb nonstop and turtle down. Its the best and easiest course of action to take when F.G has a ridiculously overwhelming advantage by merging to win.

A win is a win I guess. But winning because you recruited out all the potential competition (except Peak) and only have to beat a single tribe and a bunch of unorganized, noob tribes is nothing to be proud of.
 
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DeletedUser4967

Guest
I see you want to make it as dramatic as possible. I just want to clear things up a little.

Real X was F.G.'s academy before Real X became famous. I myself came from Real X to F.G. long time ago when Peak was ranked #1.

The merge was agreed before the war began and it wasn't a spontaneous decision, good players tend to group together.

Thanks for all the praise to F.G. we deserve it! :p
 

DeletedUser2369

Guest
@blitzkrieg? Of course Peak is going to noble barb nonstop and turtle down. Its the best and easiest course of action to take when F.G has a ridiculously overwhelming advantage by merging to win.
I admit i skipped over most of the post, but i want to respond to this common mistake.
When you are outnumbered, barb munching is the worst course of action, and not nessacarily the easiest.
When you barb munch, what is the purpose? I have heard a few reasons:
1. taking barbs means the enemy have to take 4 villages to keep up with you trying to reach the 80%
- not totally accurate. when you take a barb they need to take 4 barbs to keep up with you, alternatively they could take 0.8 villages off of you. Where as if you take a village off of the enemy, they need to take 8 barbs to keep up, or 1 village off of you, therefore it is best to find unskilled or inactive enemy and take their villages instead.
2. you have more villages to compete with (e.g you suddenly have 6 villages to fight back with, instead of 3)
- Not immediately. Eventually yes, but initially the village is not a fully functioning village, you have to spend time and resource building it up to a point where it can be self-sufficient (at least 2 weeks in most cases), in which time you have to defend and protect it with the original villages, so in the example above, you are protecting 6 villages with 3 villages worth of troops and production, this increases as time goes by, but only untill you are attacked. Alternatively taking an enemy village only costs you offense, so you still have the same amount of defense to protect the new villages, but the new villages are usually much better built and can be more usefull from day 1.
3. fortressing a province - i.e taking all villages in a province, barb or not, so that the enemy cant chapel flash in.
- This is the closest to being a good course of action that I have heard. However it is not foolproof. Similar to my response in #2 you have 2 weeks wherein this is making the game harder for you, if you manage to keep the fortress for 2 weeks and all villages are at full production capacity, it becomes better. however, it is not possible to produce from a fortress province (say 40 villages for purpose of example) enough troops to compete with an enemies equivelant number of villages (say 40) due to lack of farming. If you recruit a foot-defense (spears, swords and archers) it takes you something like 2.5 weeks to build a full village of defense (i forget the exact time, but the point stands), in which time the attacker could have built 1.5 nukes from each village. The only way to keep up is to build HC, which is weaker in a full village worth of troops, but builds so much faster. i.e. foot-soldier defense builds at say 10 def strength per minute (numbers not right, but if you check, the ratio is close), while an HC builds at 15 def strength per minute, and a cav nuke builds at 16 off strength per minute. The problem with an HC defense is that a village does not produce enough iron to keep them recruiting, you need to either farm, or send iron from other villages, I tested it, and it takes about 3 or 4 villages building MA and sending excess iron to a village building HC for the HC to be kept in recruitment full-time without farming.

On top of these three "reasons" for barb-munching I have some for not barb-munching
1. every barb you take weakens your per-village army strength, while their per-village army strength remains the same, making it easier for them to kill you. At least taking enemy villages kills some of their troops, and reduces their production capacity.
2. when you take a barb, you immediately have an "at-risk" village, where if the enemy have 1 spare noble nearby they could send it and take it over.
3. If you get into a fight over barbs (i.e. you take a barb, they take it back, you take it back and so-on) unless you are the stronger player, the enemy can keep replacing nobles faster than you, and every time they take, and keep, a former barb from you, they get closer to the victory condition, not further.

The only time when barb-munching could be truely considered a wise course of action in my opinion, is on a VP world, where you are making a push to get as many VPs as possible as fast as possible, as it doesnt matter if you lose the village afterwards, you just take another barb which gets you the same VP, and doesnt let them get any closer, and they have to mint more coins to get more noble slots to keep up with you. I still dont think its the best solution, but it is a viable solution, which is why i refuse to play VP worlds.
 

DeletedUser5160

Guest
I admit i skipped over most of the post, but i want to respond to this common mistake.
When you are outnumbered, barb munching is the worst course of action, and not nessacarily the easiest.
When you barb munch, what is the purpose? I have heard a few reasons:
1. taking barbs means the enemy have to take 4 villages to keep up with you trying to reach the 80%
- not totally accurate. when you take a barb they need to take 4 barbs to keep up with you, alternatively they could take 0.8 villages off of you. Where as if you take a village off of the enemy, they need to take 8 barbs to keep up, or 1 village off of you, therefore it is best to find unskilled or inactive enemy and take their villages instead.
2. you have more villages to compete with (e.g you suddenly have 6 villages to fight back with, instead of 3)
- Not immediately. Eventually yes, but initially the village is not a fully functioning village, you have to spend time and resource building it up to a point where it can be self-sufficient (at least 2 weeks in most cases), in which time you have to defend and protect it with the original villages, so in the example above, you are protecting 6 villages with 3 villages worth of troops and production, this increases as time goes by, but only untill you are attacked. Alternatively taking an enemy village only costs you offense, so you still have the same amount of defense to protect the new villages, but the new villages are usually much better built and can be more usefull from day 1.
3. fortressing a province - i.e taking all villages in a province, barb or not, so that the enemy cant chapel flash in.
- This is the closest to being a good course of action that I have heard. However it is not foolproof. Similar to my response in #2 you have 2 weeks wherein this is making the game harder for you, if you manage to keep the fortress for 2 weeks and all villages are at full production capacity, it becomes better. however, it is not possible to produce from a fortress province (say 40 villages for purpose of example) enough troops to compete with an enemies equivelant number of villages (say 40) due to lack of farming. If you recruit a foot-defense (spears, swords and archers) it takes you something like 2.5 weeks to build a full village of defense (i forget the exact time, but the point stands), in which time the attacker could have built 1.5 nukes from each village. The only way to keep up is to build HC, which is weaker in a full village worth of troops, but builds so much faster. i.e. foot-soldier defense builds at say 10 def strength per minute (numbers not right, but if you check, the ratio is close), while an HC builds at 15 def strength per minute, and a cav nuke builds at 16 off strength per minute. The problem with an HC defense is that a village does not produce enough iron to keep them recruiting, you need to either farm, or send iron from other villages, I tested it, and it takes about 3 or 4 villages building MA and sending excess iron to a village building HC for the HC to be kept in recruitment full-time without farming.

On top of these three "reasons" for barb-munching I have some for not barb-munching
1. every barb you take weakens your per-village army strength, while their per-village army strength remains the same, making it easier for them to kill you. At least taking enemy villages kills some of their troops, and reduces their production capacity.
2. when you take a barb, you immediately have an "at-risk" village, where if the enemy have 1 spare noble nearby they could send it and take it over.
3. If you get into a fight over barbs (i.e. you take a barb, they take it back, you take it back and so-on) unless you are the stronger player, the enemy can keep replacing nobles faster than you, and every time they take, and keep, a former barb from you, they get closer to the victory condition, not further.

I kind of made the statement without much considerations but I still think it can be a good thing if done right. You have a lot of good points - to be honest I haven't thought too much about yhid common issue (even though I've complained plenty since its usually my opponents that are doing the 'barb munching'). You have a lot of good points; I wanna clarify on my reasoning a bit.

1. On this point I agree, though I don't think its 4 barbs - that number seems a little too high. I saw some of the math before but kind of forgot about it. But the point in general still holds true. If taking barbs is the goal to delay a world getting to 80% - its pointless. Just slows down everything.

2. Yes most of the benefits are not realized immediately. I rashly generalized - its only really useful if you take barbs in safe back line provinces and use it for a purely troop recruiting perspective. In time it will develop to be a useful village but its also a net gain in terms of recruitable troops per hour. That benefit is realized immediately. It might be only swords or spears, but it is something. With relocation that can be moved to a more frontline village where the defense can be distributed more efficiently. There is not much incentive for an attacking to noble a random barb you took for troop recruiting purposes - you don't really need to protect it if its got nothing valuable. However, this does cost a noble/conquest slot - so again, its only really useful IF you genuinely haven't got better options to noble. Further, you say that taking an enemy villa cost offense, which is true. But what if you are unable to nuke efficiently? If all you had was 3 nuke vs a minimum 30k/30k/30k stack, what can you do? It would be heavily efficient to throw around those offense because the rebuild times are deeply lopsided. Of course new villas are better on day 1, but sometimes you can't really get them. The reality is if that someone is attacking you with 1) a significant villa advantage 2) they are better than you, you will be unable to really get villas off them unless they make mistakes or you get tribe assistance - and that's not easy relative to taking safe barbs in the back line and developing them. My comment does not mean to take barbs wherever and whenever. What I should have said is that they should be taken given enough time to make them useful/use of them. I place a large emphasize on villa location and strategic nobling (rather than what is being nobled). Its essential to have a fast pipeline for relocation so that frontline villas are always full 30 farm, being useful offensively or defensively.

3. Again, a very common thing to do and I agree mostly. Fortressing/locking up a province is something I generally encourage on key frontline provinces. The two points I wanna get at is this - yes, it is true that hypothetically removing barbs limits your farming potential and so on and someone without such constraints have better resource generation. But practically, I've found once you hit above 100+, 200+ villa counts, the amount of people with time to farm all those villas and farm them efficiently exponentially dwindles. Those are very rare cases in practice. It is weaker IF the enemies equivalent is able to farm what you are unable to farm but that is a big IF. Secondly, I hear you on the point about builds per unit time. Yes the math checks out and you are correct with the faster offense to defense build times. HC is for sure the way to go and you won't have that if you noble a random barb. However, in practice, I don't think build times are that relevant. Firstly, with relocation, there is no build you have to follow in any villa - you can mix and match always. Beyond that, I just don't think it matters. Because you have a choice in what to attack and what to defend. If a given trade is a 1:1 loss and you are defense, just don't take the trade [if you can, i.e. sniping, etc.]. Build times are important if you assume the vast majority of attacks/defense are equal trades. But they rarely are equal. Sometimes you catch nukes off guard and undefended, sometimes you noble a villa with all its defense out and they die. All sort of things can happen. What's more important is minimizing the chances of those events happening (i.e, increase your average speed of response). What I mean by that is ensuring your villas are distributed as such that they are not isolated and you are able to support the villas in a reasonable time frame relative to your opponent's closest noble train. That's the reason pure HC is just better - not because of the build times but because there are many situations where they just can be of use (as oppose to standard s/s/a), even though their pure defense efficiency is less. It doesn't matter if you have a full s/s/a def stack if it can't reach something getting trained in 2 hours but you might have 500 HC that can (and even if this 500 HC can't kill a nuke, it can still snipe a train). I do concede that its hard to get barbs to barracks 21 for HC - they are usually more useful for pumping out useful offense rather than defense.

On some of the other points you have ["reasons for not barb munching"]
1. I can see situations where per village army strength that matter - but I think it only matters on the frontline villas. Taking barbs in the back-line will lower this figure but can improve your front line per village army strength (where frankly, most people concentrate their attacks on). I know hitting back-lines and such is a thing but like its pretty rare to see it successfully executed. Secondly, the point about taking enemies villa is true but begins with the assumption you are able to trade efficiently and take their villas. I'm not sure Peak in particular can given how they are outnumbered.
2. I agree mostly. I didn't really think of this because in my mind I'd only imagine people taking barbs in back-line provinces where this kind of "at-risk" problem won't happen. Hence, I didn't really consider this to be a argument against it.
3. Again, the point is true but you shouldn't be taking barbs where this sort of situation can happen.

My statement makes a lot of assumption which I didn't say. Mainly is that you can't just take any random barbs and have it be a net benefits. Location matters, a lot, as it dictates the sort of response your enemies can do (and whether are able to get advantages because of it).
I'm also haven't considered this as extensively as I did. I've not really been in this sort of situations. My perspectives are mainly from someone who is never in these sort of defensive positions - I am always the one that outnumbers my opponents. I will do stuff like take 10 barbs in a province next door and rush 30 farm on them and acad so I can run ops with multiple, <4 hour trains - so that probably bias my views a bit.

Your point do stands though. The fact I typed out all this basically prove its probably not the easiest thing to do lol
 
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DeletedUser4818

Guest
Like Blitz says the merge were set to happen a lot earlier and it did start but had to be aborted due to some unpredicted situations accuring.
Secondly all tribes will eventually fall off in active players, and playing a tribe with 60 players vs 250 is one thing but on top of that youhad the real x and also house of targaryen (which obviously is alt accounts) rising up. Now F.G might have been winning vs the 250 coalition but they wouldn't have won if the real x and house of targaryen had joined the fight against F.G. I mean some areas are still won by peak and they have benn turtling up in the rim with barbs (kappas in the south and porty, duke cornwall in the northwest). Just the amount of nobles freed up for barb munching is huge and with another 2 two good tribes in the war would have swung it heavily in favor of everyone else which you obivously are very well aware of.
 

DeletedUser5173

Guest
Well not to mention PEAK went after "The Real X" right after world first protection dropped and we were rimmed out on SE so how can you not to expect that we wont fight back against them, also PEAK members started nobleing barbarian villages way before merge was done and they were barb munching in my provinces so that made me a bit angry and ofcourse I wanted to get rid of them.
Barb munching shouldn't be allowed at all in my opinion (only for setting up capel or church)... ;)
 

DeletedUser2369

Guest
1. On this point I agree, though I don't think its 4 barbs - that number seems a little too high. I saw some of the math before but kind of forgot about it. But the point in general still holds true. If taking barbs is the goal to delay a world getting to 80% - its pointless. Just slows down everything.
for barbs it is kind of accurate, to reach a 80% advantage in villages, you have to own 4 villages for every 1 village other top 10 tribes have. This means that every barb other top10 tribes take, adds 1 village to the total villages in the top10, which increases the villages the top tribe needs by 0.8 villages, however, when they take a barb, it also adds 1 village to the total villages, so increases their villages by 1, but also increases their required villages by 0.8, so each barb gets them 0.2 villages closer to the target, so you need 4 barbs to make up for the 0.8 villages increase to the required number due to other tribes taking a barb. Thats a very convoluted way of describing the math, so let me know if you want me to put up some examples to prove my point.
On the other hand taking another top10 tribes village increases their village count by 1, but does not increase the required villages number, so they are better off taking those instead of barbs. thus why the claim of their needing to take 4 villages to make up for other tribes taking 1 barb is completely false.

]
2. Yes most of the benefits are not realized immediately. I rashly generalized - its only really useful if you take barbs in safe back line provinces and use it for a purely troop recruiting perspective. In time it will develop to be a useful village but its also a net gain in terms of recruitable troops per hour. That benefit is realized immediately. It might be only swords or spears, but it is something. With relocation that can be moved to a more frontline village where the defense can be distributed more efficiently. There is not much incentive for an attacking to noble a random barb you took for troop recruiting purposes - you don't really need to protect it if its got nothing valuable. However, this does cost a noble/conquest slot - so again, its only really useful IF you genuinely haven't got better options to noble. Further, you say that taking an enemy villa cost offense, which is true. But what if you are unable to nuke efficiently? If all you had was 3 nuke vs a minimum 30k/30k/30k stack, what can you do? It would be heavily efficient to throw around those offense because the rebuild times are deeply lopsided. Of course new villas are better on day 1, but sometimes you can't really get them. The reality is if that someone is attacking you with 1) a significant villa advantage 2) they are better than you, you will be unable to really get villas off them unless they make mistakes or you get tribe assistance - and that's not easy relative to taking safe barbs in the back line and developing them. My comment does not mean to take barbs wherever and whenever. What I should have said is that they should be taken given enough time to make them useful/use of them. I place a large emphasize on villa location and strategic nobling (rather than what is being nobled). Its essential to have a fast pipeline for relocation so that frontline villas are always full 30 farm, being useful offensively or defensively.
Alot there. First, taking barbs in safe zones, I agree, but when tribes start trying to barb-munch, there are usually very few safe zones, and by the time the villages are built up, the lines have moved, and often what was once safe is no longer safe before its at peak capacity.
Second, net gain in recruitment, yes this may be realised immediately, however the barracks are often low level, so recruiting slower than taking another village, and they can only recruit the slowest units to recruit, so you have to invest resources into upgrading the barracks. Compared to taking a player village, its a net loss. Its a gain compared to what you had, but a loss compared to what you could have. Now there are situations where thats not nessacarily true, and while I am the kind of guy who strongly advises against taking barbs, I also recognise that sometimes doing so is the best option. However a tribe policy of taking barbs is never the best option, taking barbs should be the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.
Third, nuking a 30k/30k/30k stack, what can I do? easy, attack one of the 4 villages left empty by supplying that stack. Again, not always practical, but if your enemy has the defense to stack every village in range with that much troops, then your tribemates should be able to move, if all villages in range of your entire tribe have that much troops, then either the enemy have simply overwhelmed you, and there are nobody else hitting them elsewhere, in which case a long jump is my reccomendation, or the enemy have little to no offense, so you can lose all your nukes, and have time to rebuild, defense does not take villages, so your not overly threatened, and you have the upper hand.

3. Again, a very common thing to do and I agree mostly. Fortressing/locking up a province is something I generally encourage on key frontline provinces. The two points I wanna get at is this - yes, it is true that hypothetically removing barbs limits your farming potential and so on and someone without such constraints have better resource generation. But practically, I've found once you hit above 100+, 200+ villa counts, the amount of people with time to farm all those villas and farm them efficiently exponentially dwindles. Those are very rare cases in practice. It is weaker IF the enemies equivalent is able to farm what you are unable to farm but that is a big IF. Secondly, I hear you on the point about builds per unit time. Yes the math checks out and you are correct with the faster offense to defense build times. HC is for sure the way to go and you won't have that if you noble a random barb. However, in practice, I don't think build times are that relevant. Firstly, with relocation, there is no build you have to follow in any villa - you can mix and match always. Beyond that, I just don't think it matters. Because you have a choice in what to attack and what to defend. If a given trade is a 1:1 loss and you are defense, just don't take the trade [if you can, i.e. sniping, etc.]. Build times are important if you assume the vast majority of attacks/defense are equal trades. But they rarely are equal. Sometimes you catch nukes off guard and undefended, sometimes you noble a villa with all its defense out and they die. All sort of things can happen. What's more important is minimizing the chances of those events happening (i.e, increase your average speed of response). What I mean by that is ensuring your villas are distributed as such that they are not isolated and you are able to support the villas in a reasonable time frame relative to your opponent's closest noble train. That's the reason pure HC is just better - not because of the build times but because there are many situations where they just can be of use (as oppose to standard s/s/a), even though their pure defense efficiency is less. It doesn't matter if you have a full s/s/a def stack if it can't reach something getting trained in 2 hours but you might have 500 HC that can (and even if this 500 HC can't kill a nuke, it can still snipe a train). I do concede that its hard to get barbs to barracks 21 for HC - they are usually more useful for pumping out useful offense rather than defense.
again, alot there,
First, having 100+ villages people dont farm, I agree, but if you have that many villages, you really shouldnt be in a position where you need to fortress a province. players fortressing a province usually start with 20-30 when they start, and end up with 60-70 tops when they finish, most of which are in that province. If you are meaning that the enemy dont farm, then again it is true, but when they outnumber you in villages they can afford not to, you cant.
Second, build times are irrelevant. False, totally and completely false. You are outnumbered (only reason to fortress as mentioned earlier), you need to produce enough troops so that your losses are comparable to your enemies in total production timenot in total numbers. a 1:1 loss ratio, when you are building say HC out of 5 villages, while the enemy is building say MA out of 10 villages, you cant keep up.they can just keep hitting. Third, Dodging and Sniping, gives you more time, but eventually the enemy starts sending a nuke with each noble, you cant dodge or snipe that, so that who reason is out the window as far as I am concerned, sure you can start prenobling, but then they just send larger gaps between nukes, and all these tactics are high level, most players that get encouraged to barb-munch or fortress simply dont have the skill to pull that off for very long, if at all.
Fourth, barbs more useful for offense than defense, agree, but if you are pushing offense that much, and arent desperate for defense, then you shouldnt need to be fortressing, you can much easier move into the next province through a barb for faith, then your fortress is a liability not an asset, it completely undermines the whole point of setting up a fortress province.

1. I can see situations where per village army strength that matter - but I think it only matters on the frontline villas. Taking barbs in the back-line will lower this figure but can improve your front line per village army strength (where frankly, most people concentrate their attacks on). I know hitting back-lines and such is a thing but like its pretty rare to see it successfully executed. Secondly, the point about taking enemies villa is true but begins with the assumption you are able to trade efficiently and take their villas. I'm not sure Peak in particular can given how they are outnumbered.
2. I agree mostly. I didn't really think of this because in my mind I'd only imagine people taking barbs in back-line provinces where this kind of "at-risk" problem won't happen. Hence, I didn't really consider this to be a argument against it.
3. Again, the point is true but you shouldn't be taking barbs where this sort of situation can happen.

My statement makes a lot of assumption which I didn't say. Mainly is that you can't just take any random barbs and have it be a net benefits. Location matters, a lot, as it dictates the sort of response your enemies can do (and whether are able to get advantages because of it).
I'm also haven't considered this as extensively as I did. I've not really been in this sort of situations. My perspectives are mainly from someone who is never in these sort of defensive positions - I am always the one that outnumbers my opponents. I will do stuff like take 10 barbs in a province next door and rush 30 farm on them and acad so I can run ops with multiple, <4 hour trains - so that probably bias my views a bit.

Your point do stands though. The fact I typed out all this basically prove its probably not the easiest thing to do lol
for all three points, see my first point to the first quote in this message.
1. additionally, being outnumbered does not mean you cant trade efficiently, only that its more work. I was in this position in en 37/8 (i forget which), but much later, I was in a minor tribe, rank 3 or 4, when the top tribe had almost reached victory conditions. I put a lot of effort into timed assaults, and was taking entire provinces with the loss of 3-4 nukes. Its not quick, it takes alot of time and effort to set up, but it is rather easy, especially if you can find a weak link around you, not all players in the winning tribe are higly skilled, and if they merged-to-win, then usually very few are skilled, so there is usually someone around you that will give you villages for good trades if you are willing to put the work in.

This whole discussion is on the wisdom of a losing tribe barb-munching. Your arguements are great, however for the most part they dont apply to a losing tribe. They mostly can be used for tribes at a stalemate, but not in the situations where tribes adopt policies of barb-munching.
Again, there are definately times where taking a barb or ten is a wise course of action, and sometimes (though rare) it is wise for a losing player to take barbs. It is possible that there is even a time when it is wise for a losing tribe to take lots of barbs, however if there is, the number of times where it is unwise far outnumbers it. Therfore I pulled you up on the comment that "Its the best and easiest course of action to take when F.G has a ridiculously overwhelming advantage by merging to win" - it is almost always not the best, and while it is easy, it's easy in the same sense that it is easy to lose the game.
 
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