Incomplete: weaver's complete guide to green rushing
The first half of a guide I started writing before dropping out of TR a couple of months ago. As a warning - I'm not sure if much has changed in game and will probably need to start playing again in order to relearn the stuff to complete the guide. Until that point however, I hope people find this of some use.
any grammar/typos/layout things will be corrected in time
weaver
04:17, 31 October 2006 (CET)
During my recent attempt at rush researching I got a number of archmails asking for some pointers. As such I thought I’d write up a bit of a guide and hopefully will be able to just copy-paste this URL rather then writing it out again. :)
Basic Overview
Rush researching is a method of research were the mage attempts to gain a speed advantage by researching on more land (and hence with more guilds). The punch line is: if it causes research to take longer it’s not worth the worry. I have seen a lot of good rushers hold on for the first part of the set but not get research done in time.
On blitz it’s a reasonable guesstimate that most good whites will finish research with around 1000-1200 turns used. Add on 100 turns to convert their land and 200 to climb to 3K. If you’re still researching when they do their first run from 3K you’re in trouble. Thus, your goal is to be finished research and running a stack which can fend off most aggressors within 1550 turns used.
Generalities out of the way, how does green stack up against the other colours?
Red: Two main advantages. Fire Giant they have one of the few barrack units able of beating faerie dragon early on. An early cast Battle Chant will help boost your gold income. On the downside, your units are gold heavy hence hard to upkeep and your complexes get completely owned by mental thrash. While there was a bit of a fuss made when FG got boosted red isn’t really a rushing colour in my opinion. You can start off strong for the first 3-500 turns but you really get outmatched from that point on. It’s better suited to spending the first bit of the reset ruining other researchers’ rushes.
White: In whites arsenal are the following tools, decent barrack units (particularly KT + missile shield), Gate, generally hard to take land from, Holy word and SoL vs barrier less Nethers. On the downside they are gold upkeep heavy and perhaps lack a general offensive ‘oomph’. A lot of whites who rush will go to 2.5-3K land then turtle on mono AA.
Black: Black is possibly one of the strongest colours for rushing in terms of units. Research a bit before climbing and you can own most FD greens and djinni/aa turtle blues/white with imp/wraith/fatigue. With wraith, HD, vamp, rax etc units you can kick the tripe out of most rushers armies. Spells like BS and BR allow amazing land allocation and turn efficiency. Having population upkeep makes the resources easier to manage. On the downside, a lot of low int units makes you vulnerable to blue slow. You also have a pretty long research time and if you don’t make it you can almost guaranty the white researchers will pwn you.
Blue: Blue has two major strengths in my eyes. Firstly, they are the only colour who has complex units useful for rushing – they aren’t SL dependent, they aren’t easily nullified by spells and they can soak/damage. The second advantage they have a lot of spells that aren’t gimped by low SL – slow, paralyse, invisibility, flight, LS, FoH etc. Finally they have the shortest research time if they don’t get opposite colour complexes. On the downside they have crappy barrack units and need to research before effective so their climb is at a much slower rate.
Green: Green has a good mix of barrack units to fill a variety of roles (attack, fatigue, NP, soak) which allows them to dominate early. They can use NF+WS for land/turn efficiency. When your treant do come ‘online’ there’s nothing around that can really hurt them. Nymphs are great damage dealers. On the downside your complexes are heavily SL dependant so there is a ‘window’ of weakness you want to bypass ASAP.
How your rush is going to work
This is basically what you expect to happen.
- Turns 0-120 people set up.
- Turns 120-320 you’ll get a decent group of greens ands whites going up and maybe some blacks/reds. Of these people maybe five to ten will reach 3Kish (perhaps 2.8K or so). The blues will probably be researching but there tends to be a number who sit around the 2.2K-2.4K land mark. The number 1 person will probably have 4.5-6 mill NP and this power ‘cut off’ will probably creep up 1 mill NP every day.
- During turns 320-520 most of the near 3K people will make a couple of hits to get to 3K and proceed to start setting up guilds – around 1K or so. A lot of whites will tend to drop and sit at 2.5K-3K on mono AA. The blues will probably creep into the 2.6K-2.8K range.
- Turns 520-1220 will see most good rushers hit 3.5K land and pretty well stay their (assuming no land loss). Once people pass the 3K land mark they’ll normally only grow 80-200 acres per day. A lot of the green/white rushers will drop down to pure flying with heavy guilds. Reds are all normally beaten away at this point. The top ten mostly comprises of blues, the odd black or two and random geld newbies sitting at 10 mill NP with 2K land purely on market junk
- Turns 1220-1420 you’re going to start see movement from the white researchers – particularly if any got away with research with 2K guild on 2.5K land.
- Turns 1420-1620 expect to see whites and perhaps some greens break 3K land.
So, how are you going to pull this off? Basically you want to use your early dominance to get real big real fast. And when I mean real big I mean big enough to research and set up a stack which will defend against the blues when they get up into range to hit you. Keep in mind you probably won’t be gaining amazingly much land after your first run.
Assuming you do get a decent amount of land and manage to hold it you then need to set up some sort of turtle stack and start researching like crazy. Even more so then other colours because you aren’t safe when you get your complexes – you also need a boosted SL to use them well.
Finally, you’re going to want to start solidifying your stack to prevent you from losing land and having your rush destroyed.
Easy enough in theory you say – but how are we going to do that?
Before your first 120 turns
I’d strongly suggest getting in a group of people rushing if you can. Allies are good to have if for nothing more then extra fatigue. Getting in a guild of people will allow you to share BRs and have more protection (ie, less pressure to stack well, ie, faster research). It also makes it a lot more fun. So either poke people in your guild to get a couple interested, knock around at various guilds and ask if anyone is sending up a group or create your own guild if only for the start of the reset.
I’ll also mention now something I was going to put into misc. It’s pretty bloody useful to have a rough plan of how you’re going to spend your next 200 turns before you actually spend them. Knowing your land set up is a fair chunk of that. A tool I use all the time but which is particularly useful for research is a little XL program I wrote. You can find it at http://www.gmail.com/ username: weaver.files password: goapgoap and it’s in the attachment of the message called “Mage/Army Manager 1.0”. You can also use Excel to do fun things like calculate an entire rank list of army powers and arrange them from smallest to largest.
Finally, if you’re getting units on a turn by turn basis (eg, rax, nf, blood ritual etc) and you want to end up with as many resources as you started with you can do the following. Figure out how many turns you’ll be using per cycle (200 say) and then figure out what the upkeep will be at the end of your cycle (say 10 trees per turn * 1.8 mana per tree * 200 turns = 3600 mana upkeep at turn 200). Then basically build enough nodes to support half that upkeep (180 nodes = 1.8K mana income). You’ll start off with a positive income and build up a store of mana, half way through have your net income hit zero and then have it go negative and start eating up your stored mana. You can do a similar thing with gold eaters but remember rax stuff will take up pop space and reduce your geld income (as a result I tend to assume my population = (pop – unit space) for the entire cycle). Keep a bloody close eye on your resources at the end of your run though. I mana crashed all my army with 0 turns remaining once because I forgot this. Don’t try this with population upkeep. :)
Your first 120 turns
How you spend your first 120 turns will depend to a degree on when you are planning to rush. You have two basic choices – before 120 used and 200 saved or after.
Climbing before 200 saved. The major advantages are you’re less likely to get onlined during your climb, the market stuff is cheaper and you can take advantage of any noobs/fast gelders who have left P early. Further, you will have an opportunity to online other rushers as they start climbing but are still fat. On the downside you run the risk of powering up too early and missing on easy land or not powering up enough and getting nailed from below for being too fat.
Climbing after 200 saved. Firstly, doing so might enable you to rush at a more reasonable time of day. Real life aside it will also give you a chance to do a bit of research (for say natures cure with 150 guild – suicide and reincarnate until it’s your first average. Don’t have numbers on me for how much SL 6 brings back so may not be worth it. Or nymph, which kick butt =)). You also have a chance to milk for D status by using maybe 130 turns and climbing to 1.5-1.8K land on mono militia. On blitz D is godly – you can get in two and a bit runs and will not have to worry about defence (barring counters) in between them. You do however run the risk of there being few targets with harder to beat armies.
Whichever method you chose there’s a couple of things you’ll want to keep in mind.
Firstly, efficient building/land set up.
1) The more workshops you have the more buildings you can build per turn. Build your workshops up one turns worth at a time.
2) It takes one turn not two to build half a turn of building A and half a turn of building B. Make sure you always using a full turn by cramming in as many farms as possible. Whenever you can build 0.5 or more of a workshop you can build a farm. Eg, 16.63 workshops per turn --> 16 workshop and 1 farm.
3) Only explore for just enough land to build your turns worth of buildings (one turn at a time). Doing so keeps your land smaller for longer and hence your town% and hence geld income higher.
4) I’d normally build to 374 workshop during my first 120 turns. Workshop and farm are turn cheap to build a lot of so you’ll end up spending a lot of turns exploring. Nodes and towns are turn costly so you’ll spend less turns exploring. Exploring for land is very inefficient and you want to spend as few turns doing so as possible. 20 turns of node/town will be much more helpful then 300 acres (which will cost 3-6 hits, 6-12 turns vs 20…). Barracks are similarly cheap.
5) You want to end up with 374 workshop, enough farms to keep current population < 90% of possible population, around 100-200 barracks. If you are researching - ~150 guild, if not ~250 town. Nodes are nice but you don’t need heaps, just enough to keep your mana income positive.
Next you need to have figured out what army you want. Militia are cheap, come in large numbers and have a low NP. They are good for bottom feeding vs no army people. I have also heard of people making good use of cavalry, archer and elven archer. For a little more kick you could consider getting a small top stack of elven magician, faerie dragon or druid. What ever you end up using keep in mind you want around 15K units at all times to take full land. It can also be a good idea to run 1 archer, druid, EM, EA, dryad for fatigue.
- Disbanding
- Efficient building
- Maxing po
- Research
- What to build
- What army to log off with
Your First Run
- Calculate no army
- What colours
- Building as you hit/destroying fort+guild
- Exploring
- Powering up – (FD, SM, market)
Day 2
- Grabbing
- Setting up land
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Subsequent Days
- 1.4mill guildturns
- What to research
- Winning land
- Stacks
Misc Tips and Tricks
