Critical Timing (advanced topic)

Subject: Critical Timing (advanced topic) Fri Dec 04, 2009 1:53 pm

This game is all about critical split second timing when it comes to attacks and defense. Being able to time a garrison an ally moments before the enemy spearhead attack, will give you an opportunity to destroy enemy armies with little to no cost to yourself. Conversely attacking with multiple waves and split seconds apart will help to minimize the chances of a defenders success.

Offense:

Defenders have the advantage and waiting for a target to go offline is not always an option. Circumventing that advantage can be difficult but not impossible. Squeezing many attacks into a very short period of time will eliminate the defender's ability to react to each wave and in particular resurrect his troops between attacks. We will be focusing on this tactic in this article. On a side it should mentioned that feints and attacking multiple targets at once are great strategic ways to strengthen your attacks. However we will not be covering those strategies here.

I don't want to go into exact composition of our attack waves. The article on terminology goes over some of the composition of attacks but mostly what you attack with will be dependent on what units you have disposable at the time.

Planning an attack is important. Usually the difference between a mediocre player and a strong player is how well they have planned their attacks. Lay out all your different waves in some text document or paper if you prefer that.

Example:
Peon Strike (hero3)
200 warriors
1 scout/pike/sword/archer/cavalry/catapharct

Blind (hero2)
100k scouts

Pre-Impact Scout (hero4)
1000 scouts

Spearhead (hero1)
90k archers
5000 pike/sword

Then I lay out the arrival times (impact time) of my attack waves in my document.

Example:
14:30:00 Blind
14:30:10 Pre-Impact Scout
14:30:28 Peon Strikes x6
14:30:30 Spearhead Strike
14:30:32 Transports

Once you know all the times your strikes have to land it's easy to launch your attacks without messing anything up and having to recall and launch again. It's also easy to coordinate with others* if you want a Spider to do the Blind, or others to help with the Peon Strikes.

Now you may be wondering how in the world do I get all of my peon strikes to land at exactly the same time? While this may not be a critical issue for peon strikes it is for layer striping (again a topic for another article). It's actually fairly simple. Set a camp timer for 6 min and then press the “ok” button as soon as the arrival time is correct. Then decrease the camp timer to 5 min and wait for the arrival time to equal the correct time again. Using this method you can have every attack land at the same second if you wanted. Granted we wouldn't want that because our spearhead might arrive before the peon strikes.

Notice how there is only 20 seconds between my Pre-Impact Scout and my Alpha Strike. This is critical. The smaller you can make this the more likely you are to see any last minuet reinforcements they are sending to the city. However you make this too small you might see the reinforcements but not be able to recall your army in time due to lag.

Defense:

It's important to not reinforce a city that has an attack incoming until the very last moment. You want him to expect to hit a very small force in the city and then actually hit a very large one and lose the battle horribly. This is your best opportunity to destroy his forces with the largest attrition possible. If he sees that you were reinforced with enough units to wipe him out he'll recall at the last moment and you'll miss this opportunity.

When you are under attack it is best to quickly state all the information quickly in your alliance chat. Relevant information first is crucial. When stating you're under attack this is how the information should be presented:

MY CITY (123,456) IS UNDER ATTACK.*
Spearhead Impact @ 17:50:53, (about 33 min from now)
Spearhead has 80k archers, 10k swordsmen + 1 pike, 1 scout, 1 warrior, 1 worker, 1 cav.
Attacker's City Cords are 234,456

*only one line needs to be capitalized thank you! Just enough to catch people's attention.

Because everyone is in different time zones your time might not line up with theirs in terms of hours. It's easy though to extrapolate what time it would be local time if you know the approximate time from now.

Example:
If your local time is 15:18:27 and you read the previous example in chat you would know that the Alpha Impact time is around 15:51:27 because that is about 33 min from now. However since we also know the exact arrival time (17:50:53) we can quickly deduct it would be 15:50:53 exactly in our own local time.

With this information you should be able to reinforce your ally just after the attacker does his pre-impact scout but before his spearhead. Thus the attacker won't be able to react to your arriving troops and you will decimate him.*

*Server Time and Local Time

The first thing you need to know is that the “server time” clock you see on the top right of your evony screen is not actually synchronized with the server. It is calculated off your local computer clock. So if your computer clock is 5 min fast then the “server time” will be 5 min fast also. Thus, if you are coordinating attacks with other players your local computer clocks should be synchronized. (the only other option is to try to use statements like “I need a blind in exactly 15 min 23 seconds” and hope that they do the math right and the lag between saying that and them receiving the message won't result in a huge discrepancy)

Luckily it's extremely easy to synchronize your computer clocks. There's a very small application you can download from www.download.com that will synchronize your clock for you (when you ask it too). The link is here: Free Desktop Clock

I have synchronized my clock with the “chime.utoronto.ca” server and suggest you do also.

Do take note that download.com checks all programs for malware, viruses, trojans and is trustworthy.