IntroductionThis strategy guide is based on Napoleonic and West Point military strategy. To be covered will be the basic tips for new RTS(Real Time Strategy) game players and general principles of military strategy. MegaGlest factions will also be covered.
Basic Tips for New RTS Players- Make workers early and constantly throughout the game. The earlier a worker begins gathering resources the more that worker is worth. Make a new worker for gathering resources or building stuff at least twice a minute.
- Make your gold and resources work for you. If you have excess resources they are not getting "interest" spend them on
buildings, workers, or combat units - Scout and explore, know when an enemy attack is coming, know the terrain, and know where resources are.
- Practice your order of build and base layout to make sure you get the most use out of each building and unit. Some buildings make great walls
- Only send your units(with the exception of units you are using as scouts) towards the enemy in groups. Units used for scouts are expendable workers and builders are not.
- In early game focus on a mix of cheap, light, and fast units for early raids. A raid is where you send units for the purpose of killing enemy workers and vulnerable economic buildings. Every worker unit that you manage to wipe out is lost time and gold for the enemy. Loosing workers early is a death sentence.
- Later in the game you may want to switch to using a single large main battle group with large numbers of high quality units.
Four General Principles of Military Strategy- Defeat the enemy in Detail. Concentrate the forces of your main battle group on a smaller number of enemy units. If your units kill them faster they take less damage and the enemy units can fire fewer attacks. Also make sure all of your units can support one another so that you do not become a victim of defeat in detail.
- Control the Center. The center of the map between both bases is the position of the most power. Controlling the center allows fastest access to areas on the map and allows greater map control. Any attack from the enemy has to go through the center if they want their attack to be a straight line. The fastest way between two points is a straight line. If we can control the middle ground and center we can attack and respond to enemy attacks quickly.
- Use the terrain. Bottle necks or choke points are great places to defend. If the enemy army has to thin out to go through a bottle neck or choke point we can defeat their units more easily and with fewer casualties.
- Maintain constant contact with the enemy. Always keep a scout and your main battle group close enough to the enemy to apply pressure and respond to enemy troop movements. If you see your enemy building defensive towers and you are right there you can attack and destroy the towers they are building. There is a great advantage to keeping constant contact with your enemy.
A few other points from the Art of War:
- An army that is everywhere strong is in reality everywhere weak. Sometimes you can go around the strongest part of their army and destroy their base or other unsupported units.
- Be flexible to respond to changes your enemy makes.
- If your army is weak: act in strength, if your army is strong: act as though you are weak. Deception can win wars.
- You do not need to actually destroy an area to apply pressure there. The threat of attack can be used to force your enemy to divert forces to that area.
- Do not hesitate to retreat if the military engagement will result in a loss, retreat and regroup with more forces for a response. Try to engage the enemy when your forces have the advantage
FactionsMagic is a great faction for early game mage and daemon rushes on small maps. Magic has a great ranged mage and arch mage unit. On larger maps and on team games the magic faction can fight very well with arch mages and evil dragons. Magic seems to struggle on middle sized maps, and during middle game.
Indians have a great ranged units, and somewhat useful melee units. I use them on small maps often. Fire archers are the most handy ranged unit of this faction but is fragile.
Egyptian: this faction seems like a slower version of Magic with a sphinx instead of a tower. Their spear men and spear throwers are decent early game units. The Egyptian snake unit is very effective for killing land and air units with great splash damage, however the snakes are very slow and fragile. This faction seems to do better on larger maps.
Persians are great for controlling larger maps with their cheap early game units and later game genies with their decent damage. Genies and Princesses will likely be the core of your army with melee to slow enemies and act as damage shields.
The Roman foot soldiers are some of the best in the game, if combined with magic or Indian ranged units in team play this faction is quite powerful. Roman soldiers can take and deal large amounts of damage.
Norse cudgel ladies and archers are good early game units, this faction is almost like a faster and cheaper version of the Tech faction with Thor units instead of Tech units. This faction early game is formidable and in later game its ballista units mixed with their swordsmen and Valkyries can be difficult to stop. In the right hands this faction is lethal, in the wrong hands it can be awkward and harder to play.
Tech is hard to use, builds up too slow imo(let me know in the comments if I am wrong and I will change this line )
SummaryControlling the map, building worker units early, moving from raids to main battle armies, and defeating your enemy bit by bit are all important strategies to consider when waging your war. Mastery of strategy can help, even if having a high number of actions per minute is difficult. Master the strategy and with practice a new player can become quite competitive quickly.
