1 -- Avoid Getting Farmed Spend your money often, because if you hoard too much, this makes you a prime target for potential attackers, and then you will lose most of that money, if you're unable to properly defend.
2 -- More Soldiers, More Money The more soldiers you have in your army determines how much money you make every 30 minutes. This means you should try to raise your number of units produced every 30 minutes, so you'll have a bigger army, which means more money.
3 -- Spy Before Attacking Spying is useful when you want to know how successful your attack will be. You can send spies to your enemy's base to determine different statistics on that enemy, and then base your decision on that. Be careful of high-sentry players though, because they will be able to catch and execute your spies.
4 -- Buy Bigger Weapons Try to save money to buy bigger weapons, instead of just buying lots of little ones. This will save you lots of money. For example, you can get 100 defense by buying 10 Leather Helmets for 25,000, but you can get the same amount of defense by buying one Scale Mail for 12,500, which would cost half as much. Be careful though, because if you save too much up, you might get "farmed" by a stronger player.
5 -- Repair Is Cheaper With Bigger Weapons Repair cost is lower for the more expensive items. This is another reason why you want to save for the best weapon instead of the lower grade ones.
6 -- Use 15 Turns More often than not, you get the most money from full 15-turns attack.
7 -- Attack Bigger Armies More often than not, you get less money if your attacking army size (attack specialists + untrained soldiers + trained attack mercenaries + untrained mercenaries) is larger than the defending army size (defense specialists + untrained soldiers + trained attack mercenaries + untrained mercenaries).
8 -- Attackers Suffer Attacking armies tend to suffer more casualties than defending armies.
9 -- Goals Set Goals, Are you playing this for you team to reach the spot, are trying to move up rank quickly in the short term, or quickly in the long term? Do you want to keep your rank for a long time or reach it quickly.
10 -- Strategies From the Goals devise strategies: Do you want to work alone? Do you want to work as a team? Do you want to keep allies for a long time or use them as convenient? Choose your enemies: Attack those with a lot of money? Pick on weaker players? Weakon Stronger Players? Attack those on an alliance? Attack those not on an alliance? Use your attack turns regularly? Save your attack turns?
11 -- Banking The point is the way the game is now there are many ways to play. You can raise your unit production early (look under training) so you get a lot of money each turn. You can keep your unit production in the zero to 2 range so you can keep your army small by training spies and sentries and build up attack turns. You can try to save money by building up your defenses, keep your army small or spending it as much as possible. If you spend it on weapons and armor the weapons and armor can get damaged. If you spend it on spytools you will get less money back if you want to sell it so you can by weapons and armor later.
12 -- Risk You can minimize your risk by not buying a lot of weapons or if you buy weapons buy weapons and armor buy the more expensive ones. Expensive weapons and armor are much harder to sabortage. Instead spend your money on upgrades (unit production, siege technology and fortifications) and spy tools.
13 -- Training You can train attack soldiers, defense soldiers spies and mercenaries. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to train much more of any of these then you have weapons for them. However, you may want to train extra spies and sentries if you want to keep your army small. To check this look at your attack and defense bonus before and after training and attack soldier. For instance say you train an attack soldier and you don’t have weapons for him/her. You will notice that the amount you gain in attack bonus is less then the amount you lose in defense bonus. Thus it is a waste of money, and the only reason to do so would be to keep your rank artificially low so less people will attack you and so you can gain more money on attacks. If you want trained soldiers by trained mercenaries instead.
14 -- Sabotaging Sabotaging is the key to the middle game. Early on you want weapons so that you can take money but you may reach a point where you cannot beat the defenses of the people higher up people. If you have the right mix of covert skills, spy tools and number of spies you can catch them off guard. The best time to Sabotage is in the evening because people tend in the evening to build up there defense in the hops of protecting there money while they sleep and to be able to sell them in the morning if needed to get there next upgrade.
To sabotage effectively you need high covert skills and 5-7 and a good number of spies tools 10-20 preferably stealth horses but I have a mix. With a spy bonus of 50 000 you can sabotage weapons and armor in the strength range 750-1000, with a spy bonus of 40 000 you can sabotage weapons in the range of 450-750. It does depend a little on the sentry bonus of the other player. NilsC suggested you should have a sentry bonus of at least 2x the other player. Kiral gave a formula
QUOTE
X*Y < (A*B*10*(2^C)*D) X = Strength of weapons you want to sabotage Y = Number of weapons you want to sabotage A = Number of armed spies sent B = Power of Spy Tool C = Covert Skill level D = Race Bonus .. race bonus is around 1 to 1.22 i think.. not too sure on the bonus it depends what you pick i think...
From the formula you can clearly see that if you don’t have spy tools for your spies then they aren’t going to be very useful. Thus never send more spies then you have spy tools because if your caught then the number of spies that get caught will depend on the number you send. I typically send between 10-20 spies. Thus that way I never lose more then 6-12 spies.
15 -- The End Game Once the Game progress far enough players will make enough money to be able to buy a two handed sword every 30 minutes. At this point it will be difficulty to keep your spy bonus double other players covert bonus because there will be know more upgrades and once the unit production is maxed out the money increases linearly while it becomes exponentially harder to double a bonus. At this point in the game the key is to have lots of soldiers. You can protect your soldiers by buying mercenaries. You can keep your army as small as possible buy training as many soldiers to spies as you can. Remember with covert of 10 spies and solders give the same amount of money every 30 minutes. If you make a lot more money then everyone else and NilsC puts restrictions on the army size that can bet attacked consider moving your self out of attacking range buy buying a lot of mercenaries. This will make it extremely difficult for new players to touch you whether they team up or not.
16 -- Don't Overproduce Each soldier/spy/sentry can only hold one weapon/tool, additional weapons/tools will not be counted...Don't overproduce weapons without the people to hold them.
17 -- Reset & Start Over There is a link on your Base section that allows you to perform a Reset to your current army. This allows you to start from scratch, and to choose another race if you want. Now, why do you even want to reset, some might ask? There may be a few reason:
A) The race you choose does not suits you. Realized you prefer the bonus of another race? You'll have to reset.
You have upgraded something and this has affected your strategy. For example, you planned to be an attacking army, only you spent a lot on unit production, making your army size too large. Since unit production upgrade is one of those thing you can get rid or lower down, you'll have to reset.C) Getting a fresh start. If this is your first time playing AS, chances are you may have made some mistakes from time to time. Heck, even veterans make mistakes as things didn't quite go as planned. What do you do then? If you totally do not like the way things are with your current army, just reset.
Of course, think hard before reseting, since you'll not be able to undo it later.
18 -- DO NOT CHEAT! Yes, AS is buggy. Yes, sometimes certain formula is unfair. And yes, it's only a game. However, many members came to trap17's Army System because it is fun, and are generally nice to each other. Some members have being around for quite some time, and invested a lot of time into the game.
So, imagine how some of us feel when a new member came out of nowhere and start cheating so much that the Army System has to be restarted, over and over again. It ruins the game. Period. If you want to cheat, please go and set up your own Army System, invite people to join your Army System, and cheat all you want in your own Army System.
Okay, I know there's bunch more, but my head is starting to really hurt, and I need a break from the computer. Feel free to post more guys.
*Try to post them in the same format as well, so it's easier to add in.
