Spending turns on oversummoning servers

A "run" is when you spend your fully accumulated turns, ideally you should only do a run every 180(or close to 180) turns, in other words once every 36 hours. This is for maximum efficiency as most of the turns are spent MP charging/resummoning units.

The basic concept of a run is as follows :

Pre run phase

• Before you do anything else, vote for the game(link at top of page) to try and get luck favor(+5% summon rates, NOT guaranteed to get even if you vote all 3 times), and you may wish to get god favor as well(sun for battle success, magic for MP income if you are low on mana). Alternatively you may wish to try and get favor at the end of a run, some of the enchantments that the gods can cast on you are more useful at the end(e.g. Mind Bar), although the chance of them casting an enchantment at all(and of the type you want) is random.

• With full troops, look for good targets(with low power to land ratios). You may need to disband some of your troops to drop down low enough to hit the best targets, and should check out the FULL ranking list(not just the 80-125% range) to see which are good targets to hit. Depending on your color, you may wish to choose not to attack some colors(e.g. whites attacking greens should be avoided).

• You have two choices, you can either seige or do a regular attack. Seiges should be reserved for when you are relatively confident of winning or when you are running an all flying stack. To gain max land, you need 5 surviving troops per target's acre in a seige, half for a regular attack. This also applies to the amount of gold you get from battle chant(Red mages only). Most people use seiges at sub 3k land(for maximum gains).

• Your aim is to gain more land than you will lose in the next 36 hours. This is largely dependant on your stacking which will determine how well you can block the attacks. After losing 30% of your TOTAL Net Power, you will enter "damaged" status and be unable to be attacked(except via counters), damaged status only lasts 24 hours and is of limited value on Arch(as runs are every 36, not 24 hours).
  • To calculate when damaged status will end, let us assume you first get attacked at Jan 1 1200hrs. You get attacked again at 1400hrs and at 1600hrs before going into D status. Your 24 hour timer starts at Jan 1 1200hrs, and ends at Jan 2 1200hrs.

During your run

• After gaining sufficient land via attacks, you will probably wish to disband some of your troops in order to gain a positive gold/MP income. I find that disbanding sufficient units to have a MP income of approx 0(plus or minus a few) works well, and generally involves disbanding a gold/MP upkeep intensive stack completely(most likely, your top stack).
  • You should consider your summon rates and disband a stack that is the easiest to resummon but also has high upkeep. E.G. 5k chimeras cost a lot of gold/mana per turn, but it only takes a fully researched red player about 5 casts(20 turns) and 160k mana to resummon them all. This is better than disbanding 1.5k efreeti which takes about the same turns/mana to resummon, but has less upkeep.
  • Approximate summon rates can be found on the wiki(do a search for RedASR/GreenASR/etc, be warned, off color summon rates are usually inaccurate).
  • Another method is to "pillage disband", just trying to pillage people. If you suceed, you get gold and an item...if you fail, you lose troops that would have been disbanded anyway. This is also a good way to counter people who have attacked you, and you have a valid counter for them, but they are too high ranked for you to do anything, you dont stand to lose anything(if you fail, they cant counter you back). Warning : If you suceed, you will give them a counter!
  • If you need to disband undisbandable units(blacks mostly), you can send them off on sucide runs and specify it is a disband attack, hopefully you wont get countered. Make sure your hero doesnt get killed while doing this.

• This is where you are most vulnerable during a run, as your army and stacking is in shambles. Dont take your time here, you can get attacked, especially if the people you hit were online and looking for a chance to counter you. You may wish to destroy excess workshops/barracks or keep them if you expect to lose land in the next 36 hours. With 299 workshops, building 7 towns/18 farms is a rough guide of keeping the food/max pop ratio equal. You can click the + sign next to a input box to see how many of that building you can build in one turn(e.g. if you want to build 5 nodes and see how many other guilds you can build in the same turn, you can click + next to guilds and the game will auto calculate for you, but this feature is only available to supporting guilds).

• After building everything, bid on whatever you want on the market and MP charge, making sure not to get more mana than you can hold. As a rough guide, you may wish to keep 40 turns or so left after MP charging in order to oversummon. Ideally, you dont want to end your run with less than 300k mana, if you have time to check on the game throughout the day and wish to resummon units lost on defence, i suggest at least 500k mana.
  • To calculate how much mana you will get per turn spent on MP charging, take a look at your status report and your total MP income per turn. Then take that and add your final MP income(after upkeep reduction). E.G. I have 10k MP income, and a total upkeep of 5k, giving me a positive income of 5k per turn. 10k+5k=15k MP income per turn MP charging. On the other hand, if i have 10k MP income and a total upkeep of 15k, giving me -5k income per turn, i will instead only gain 5k per MP charge.

Ending your run

• After MP charging, its time to oversummon, basically summon up enough units to go into negative MP income. The bare minimum power to land ratio is 3,000 NP : 1 land. But if you can, try to get at least 3,500 NP : 1 land, in order to discourage attacks. While some players may not attack appa students, there are also some that will attack you purely because you are an appa student, as you probably are not familiar with the game. A high NP:land ratio will make you look less attractive to attack. Depending on color and whether you are running mono defence stacks(Archangels/Djinni mainly), you may be able to get away with less.
  • Make sure to summon sufficient fodder(bare minimum, 10 troops per acre) to block pillages, especially as the people you have hit probably cannot counter you in a direct attack(as you are higher ranked) but stand a chance to counter via a pillage. Summon lowest upkeep units first before summoning expensive ones(fodder first). After oversummoning and ending your run, try not to spend turns as you will lose mana/gold rapidly due to upkeep costs.

Final notes : After doing a few runs, you will get the hang of it, you will be more familiar with how many turns you will need to oversummon, how much you should be oversummoning, so on so forth. If you have any questions, please go to #appa on irc.galaxynet.org.