Topian Early Ranking

From this UBB post Early Ranking - the topian way of life by Liandran

There has been recently some talking about early ranking and about the fact that there are only so few mages trying their skills in that. It is hard and it takes skill, so many decide not to take the challenge and instead take the safe route of gelding at the start and see how things are going. I started to think that maybe with sharing the knowledge I have about it would help more people to try it. So I decided to start this thread with that in mind. I might be a bit slow to write it, so I’ll keep adding more stuff here and make a “strategy-book” out of it later. I’ll also try to answer all questions that I can about this subject. Also I suggest that everyone keeps in mind that these are just my opinions, but I’ll try to give some thought on telling why I think like I think.

Difference between early ranking and rushing

Basic difference of rushing and early ranking in my wordings is that rushing is done without full research first (except blue, which I’ll go to later). When someone rushes he will try to reach the top quickly and stay there and try to research at the same time. So using lots of barrack troops and buyable troops and own color troops. Basically he tries to get to top before anyone else and stay there and research with mass guilds. Early ranker will research first and only after that try to reach the top and stay there. Rushing is very very hard and if you fail you will lose a huge amount of turns as you have to research with low land after wasting a huge amount of turns on reaching the top first (normally hardly anyone manages this fully). With both of these strategies you can do a quick 120-200 turn initial gelding, but it would make rushing even harder. Some early rankers do geld for that 120-200 turns before they go to research and make sure that they have enough geld (especially after some item sells) to research without towns and farms to have more guilds to research with and catch that ~100 turn loss that they just did (~100 because some of the turns used you would have used anyways [explore/some buildings]).

How to research quickly

Let’s forget that initial gelding for this. Those who geld for some turns can adapt it themselves. Basically there are 2 ways to do this and 2 ways to gather that land you need. To get enough land for your needs you can either explore or attack for land. I still suggest that your first land gain you do by exploring. After this the choice is yours. Explore is more guaranteed, attacking can be more profitable, but also has more risks. Idea about attacking for land is to have low net power yourself and hit mages without troops. Basically some 10k+ Frogs, Squirrels, Militia, etc and could use some buffer troop at the top. Or go with some stronger troops and try to find weak troops for easy land. To see if someone has low/no troops is to look at their NP and take 1 mil for every 1000 land and 20k from every fort and see what is left (later on SL will also influence it also, 1000 NP / 1 SL). If there is not much NP left then it might be an armyless mage or only have initial troops and be an easy target. This is pretty simple but has risks of giving you more attention and losing too many attacks on poor judgment. So I won’t start talking about this too much, you’ll have to learn to do this well by yourself so you’ll get the touch of it. Other way to gain land is simple, just explore it.

So I said that there are basically 2 ways to research quickly. One is to have ~1650 land and research without troops and other is to play defense and have some 2k+ land. Having 1650 land is profitable because when you lose a full siege against someone who wants your lands you’ll lose 165 land and it takes you well under 1500 land and without troops you will get Council Protection and can be safe. You just have to maximize your guilds to be quick. You’ll need some 1100+ guilds (preferably a lot more) and a very low amount of farms/towns. After losing 1-2 battles you should be able to play without any towns and farms. You will be losing lots of geld all the time anyway so your main income will be sold items (be ready to sell anything you need and so that you can run full turns the moment you leave protection, even MCs if needed). You also need enough forts not to die. Keeping 8 forts would be totally safe for example (and keep a safe margin still). And only research, do nothing else. Problem is that you need to cast Concentration (if you use it, blue should at least) again after protection as it gets dispelled every time you go under 1500 land.

Defending is the more profitable way, but of course has more risks like most of the things that give a better profit in this game. This is a lot dependable on the color you play. For example white can use AAs for defense, blue can use Djinnis and green can go with Griffons. Also it’s better to remember that even one Soul Speaker will deal fatigue (and more will give you more losses that can make you lose the battle) and keeping a cheap spell like BF or Fog Cloud or EA or Lovesick or FoH on defense with 100% or 75% will help you keep your land. Cheap item like Drums of War or Ointment of Healing or etc will help a bit too. Losing land is bad, but it’s not like you couldn’t survive with losing once or even twice, it’ll just take some speed from you. I suggest using at least 1500 guilds, some go even with over 1700 guilds at the end or even more. Some 150-200 nodes are enough to keep a decent defense and use Concentration. Cast Concentration every ~75 SL for blue starting with some 100 SL, white can start with ~200 SL and cast it again once before researching ultimate spells.

Best way is to research spells that give SL the quickest first (more SL is better Concentration) and probably ultimates as the last spells.

Black and red have a bit harder time as they need to research all spells and are the slowest to research (red being the last one), not counting blues that research all. Also they don’t have a defense that would be almost proof from attacks. Early whites will eat blacks and early blues will eat reds and etc. Demon Knights with a good defense spell can deal against early whites and could also last against other attacks. Choices for reds are quite poor too. Early blues love to hit reds with Mental Thrash which is pain to most red troops. Even 1 Red Dragon would be quite perfect, it’s just hard to get that so better for most to forget (I’d probably use Council Protection tactic for red at least myself).

It’s also an important thing to get few farms and towns before you are ending your research to get pop increasing quickly and not start form scratch. Also I'd like to point out that gods are not that good during research, mostly just slow down on average.

Blue also has the choice to not research red/green complex spells or just leave 15 of them unresearched. Blue that decides to do either one of these will be the fastest out of research counting all colors (thanks to Concentration). Trick is to get gods Concentration later in the reset to get them researched quickly (could be 1 week, could be 2 months), first choice would need 2 of them. Point is that blue can easily survive with reduced SL (some ~15% reduction in spell strength) and kick well with that early lead. Opposite complex spells take half the time of blue research so the trick is there.

Initial run and preparations

Got to stop for a moment, and will continue later from here. I’ll be glad to answer any questions that arise (that I’m able to). I will later compile all to one guide. New reset in guild server just started so I wanted to be quick to start this to maybe get some people practicing already . More challenge = more fun.