GWG IS THE BEST

Offense:

Its said, Offense is the best defense. And its definitely true in this game as well. The advantage of first offense rather than waiting for the Foe to move on you is:

• Element of surprise: You can catch them by surprise, all their troops might be out gathering, their surplus small armies may be sitting ducks in their castles. You can kill them quickly before they notice a war and login to the game to respond to the situation. Discuss in your alliance and distribute targets among the members and start attack simultaneously. You might want to divide the members among rally leaders and take out the strongest players first simultaneously. This ensures that those powerful players don’t  get to reinforce others because they would be scared to defend their own castles against rally.
• Take advantage of timezone:  It pays to observe your enemy well. Usually Alliances are country/language specific. Therefore you can find a window during which major number of players in the enemy alliance are offline. That’s the best time to eliminate them.
• You make the plans: The biggest difference between offense and defense if that in offense you take the actions and enemy does the reaction. Therefore you can control what choices what they have. In defense you don’t get to make that decision unless you change the situation from  defense to offense  by making retaliation rallies. We will cover that in later section.

 

OK, now we know what’s our advantage on preemptive attacks. Now lets see what to consider and how to do it.

• Scouting early is bad idea: Don’t scout too early before attacks.. If you do that your enemy is going to become alert and will make themselves ready for defending. Don’t give them that opportunity. we will scout when the time is right.
• Study your enemy early: Go to alliance description and in member section to check the powers and corresponding castle levels and prepare an excel sheet. You can easily calculate how much troop they are LIKELY to have without scouting. This comes very handy when enemy uses anti scouts. For example if enemy castle level is 19 and power is 600k, You can readily deduct 150k from that as building power, 50k as lord power and 25k as science power. Remaining 375k is troop power. These are approximations. You dont need exact values. Now when you know his castle level and troop power you can calculate that he can have at most 375K/4.9= 76.5K of lvl7 troops or equivalent lower lvl troops. Now, you don’t need to know how much individual lower lvl troops he has. you should just take the highest lvl troops, calculate their total HP and  total defense (Taking the Infantry troop values). Prepare this excel sheet for all key alliance members of enemy alliance. You get an Idea how much troop you have to kill.
• Consider Their castle level and corresponding Embassy levels for maximum possible reinforcements. Your rally should be big enough to take care of the total possible troops and this is pretty obvious. But if you move parallely reinforcement possibility reduces drastically, your enemy will be confused about what to do and make mistakes.
• Distribute targets among rally leaders: Depending on Hall of War level distribute the targets among your Rally leaders. They should destroy the key players simultaneously. The rallies should be 5 mins time so make sure you divide the members among rally leaders such that individual members can join rallies within 5 mins. Any members who are far should be assigned to closest rally leader. Once rallying time over and march starts anyone who has got speed ups must use it. This strategy will ensure that enemy gets minimum time to react. Rallies should be as big as possible for minimal losses.
• Scout now: Once target is distributed and rallying started scout only those targets immediately. Scouts should return within that 5 mins. If target is too far you can calculate when the scout will produce the report and your match should start immediately after that. You can calculate that scouting time early to prepare! Dont scout any members who aren’t targets for this rally. This can make other people alert. Covert start is key to minimize losses.
• Rally Start: Once scouting is done and rally march starts keep scouting the targets frequently and keep an eye on the alliance activity for possible reinforcements. Don’t recall unless you find huge reinforcements. Yes you will have losses. But they will too. Key players usually have more troops than double of their hospitals. They WILL die. So will reinforcements. If rally is big enough their losses will be more than yours. One attack may not kill all their troops and some troops may show “Survived”. A second rally on the same target will be required.
• Scaring off the reinforcements: If you see enemy alliance members are reinforcing your target you should declare a fake rally on them and ask your alliance members to do same but no one should join those rallies. They are just to scare the reinforcers and keep their screen flashing red. When people are scared they forget loyalty or friendship.. lol.. These fake rallies should be 10/15 mins and should be disbanded before march starts.
• Once you take out key players:  Once key players are gone enemy alliance members will panic and will try averting maneuver to minimize troop losses. That’s the time to start plundering.
• Keep eye on key Players: Key players are often coiners. This means after getting attacked they may heal very quickly. Make sure you keep an eye on him and repeat rally him several times if you see his power grow back. If he does, his power is likely to grow little by little attack him again and again and don’t let him heal his full troop. This will make sure you will lose less troops in those attacks.

 

Defense:

Defense is two types. a) Avert and B)Fight back.

a) Avert :

If you are confident or scared that you wont be able to fight back given your status (not many members online or you just had a war and don’t have enough troops or the enemy is disproportionately stronger ) easiest way to avert is use shield. This situation can hurt your ego seriously and reduce morale of the members seriously. However if you wish to frustrate the enemy and keep member morale high there are more ways to do it without losing much troops.

• Safety Rallies: Make one hour rallies on your enemy and ask the online members to join those rallies. Any troops that has been entered into rallies can’t be attacked by incoming attacks. This will keep your troops safe for an hour. Every member can create 3 such rallies to protect all of their troops. This will also frustrate your enemy because their screen will keep flashing red.
• Use your traps: Even if your safety rallies are up your resources are still up for grab by your enemies for free. You can kill a lot of your enemy’es troops by using your traps by this. Keep just one infantry troop in your castle to trigger the traps. It will get killed by incoming attack and you can revive it again in a few seconds. This will make sure your enemies can’t plunder your resources with zero losses. If you have 30k traps you can easily kill 500 soldiers per defense, more if you have high lvl turrets(turret lvl 16 can kill 150 soldiers easily). Your enemy will soon realize the costs and leave your castle alone, saving your resources. Traps don’t trigger if you don’t have troops (that 1 infantry) in the castle but turrets still kill.
• If you need to go offline: In case you can’t stay online to frustrate your enemy, you can send your troops to either alliance farm or to ruins for safe keeping. Don’t send them to fort as its still attachable by enemy.
• Helping fellow members: Even if you are shielded you can reinforce other members to kill enemy troops. But only do so if your fellow member has considerable lvl of embassy. No use of having 30K reinforcements against 100K+ rallies/attacks. You unfortunately need to let that member get plundered. Keeping your troops alive is more important than costly and ineffective try to defend.

 

b) Fighting back

Fighting back can often changes the course of a fight. Your strong enemy may have taken you for a coward and too weak. But remember, even a weak player can frustrate and make a strong enemy taken aback if he plays right. Follow these tricks.

• Do the unexpected: If the biggest and strongest players of another enemy alliance has ported to your base to attack you, you have the choice to stay and defend or kill their weak member by porting to their base instead. Your enemy will either ignore his alliance members and try to plunder your member, where your members can try the tricks of averting mentioned above while you plunder their members. At some point those strong guys will have to move back to their base to try to protect their members and you will not have to request/beg/diplomacy to those guys for sparing your alliance. Remember a treaty is effective when both side has something to bargain with. Every Advance teleport costs 2000 gold. Your opponent will not spend so much gold to keep doing this back and forth.
• Reinforce where effective: Reinforce the member who are really worth trying to save. Members who have small embassy aren’t serious about war and it will not be at all effective trying to save them. They better shield up or get burnt. Its harsh but sensible. Strong players should not become weak by trying to save each of them. Your alliance then will become a farm for others. A lvl19 guy has 184K embassy space so he can even kill a large rally if properly reinforced. That is where you should reinforce. Also you can reinforce against individual attacks when the defender has some troops and embassy has enough space. That way you can kill lots and lots of enemy troops if a single/couple of strong guy has ported to your base!
• Make sure your territory is tight: don’t leave empty spaces in your territory for people to port into. The alliance turrets can only kill if the enemy is entering the territory from outside and stays inactive if somebody ports inside the territory.
• Wear your bonuses: Make sure you have attack and defense bonuses when fighting back.
• Retaliation rally: Retaliation rally is a great way to scare off random visitors into your base. Even if the porting guy has 3 lvl higher castle you guys can take it out with big rally. Unless that guy has 6-9 lvl higher castle this can be done. This depends case to case basis. Even if you don’t want to attack its best to at least declare  5-10 min rallies on him and disband repetitively. That will force him to keep the troops home and not attack your members in fear of losing in case the rally comes up and he doesn’t have troops at home.

 

Hiding troops

Hiding troops are vital if you are constantly being hunted by some strong adversary or a rogue alliance..

You can still grow without losing troops even if you get hunted and hit again and again everyday. There are some ways through you can send your troops away before attack so that they don’t get killed (or wounded).

1. Send them to alliance super mine to gather.. They wont be able to attack your mine.
2. Send them to Ruins for 8 hours.
3. Send them to a distant resource plot a thousand KM away through black earth zone.. The march and gethering time will shield them from attacks.. But make sure the enemy isn’t desperate enough to follow/port near your plot.
4. Send your troops as reinforcement to some other alliance member who is shielded
5. Make long time rallies (1 hour) and enter troops in there.. Troops in rallies cant be attacked by enemies
6. Camp your troops somewhere far and safe.. preferably lvl1 res zone. You should do that quick so that the attacker doesn’t track your troop movement..