This is more or less a copy and paste from:
http://zarienstactics.blogspot.com/Give credit where credit is due!
Warring, The Sauron Way First and foremost: this information is not for everyone. I've written this post to give our trusted attackers and defenders the upper hand. A big percentage of us play the game for war, and war alone, and it is our warmongers that make it a better place to live for the rest of Sauron. For that reason I want us to be the best at what we love to do.
I'll go into great detail in this post, but try to be as concise as I can. I plan to outline the mechanics of attacking and defending, the why's and how's of what to do to take down your opponent or stop them from taking you down. But before that, I'll go through the way that Evony battle mechanics work. It is understanding the way troops fight that is the key to everything else.
Battle Mechanics: The 2 major things that effect the outcome of a battle are range and speed. These are different for each type of troop, and can work for you or against you. A fantastic article detailing range can be found here:
http://theevonywiki.com/Range There are alot of theories there, but the idea of range and its effects gives alot of insight.
Unfortunately it would seem Evony has blocked another site that combined range and speed and showed what happened during a fight round by round. While it was usually wrong, just as the exercise is almost always wrong, it still gave a clear representation of range and speed in an easy to follow way.
I'll explain some of the rules that battles follow:
1. A battle starts at the most ranged unit's range plus 200 yards (this is the general consensus, its either this or without the added 200 yards). Usually this is the range of traps and abatis which are set at 5,000 yards from the city, or defensive trebs which have a 5,000 yard range.
2. The troop with the highest movement speed present gets the first move. This is typically scouts, and is effected by researches like compass and HBR.
3. Each round, troops will target the type of troops with the highest cumulative attack. For example: If you send 10,000 cavs at a valley that has equal numbers of all troops present - say 10k of each warriors, pikemen, swordsman, and archers, your cavalry will target the pikemen first, since they have a total attack of 150x10,000. After the first round, even if there are some pikemen still left, the cavalry will attack the archers since they are the next highest attack.
4. Ranged units will target other ranged units first, always, provided they are in range. This applies to archers, ballistae, archer towers, and catapults. An odd thing about this rule is that it seems attacking archers will target archer towers first, even if there are only a few towers and 200k defending archers. They seem to bypass rule 3. I'm unsure if balls and pults will do the same.
5. All troops of a layer will stop and fight the opposing troops in a layer, no matter the size. For example, if 30,000 defending pikemen rushing out of a city encounter 10 phracts, they will all stop to fight, expending one movement round and allowing your archers to mow them down. The exception to this rule: mechanics such as balls, pults, trans, and rams. They will continue to move forward while attacking regardless of layers. Archers will stop and shoot until all troops in their range are dead before moving forward.
Attacking A question that I get alot is: How would you take this out? My first response is usually: How much do you have and how much are you willing to spend? There are other factors as well, such as: is the person online? How far away are you? How many waves can you send at a time?
Before we get into all of those, I'll tell you what my strategy would be. I would send series of cleaner waves - small archer rainbows that will clear away his rainbow and make my cav/phract hit take less losses. Since he has both traps and abatis there, archer waves will do fairly well with his rainbow. I send in 10-20k archers (depending on the size of layer needing to be killed) with 100 of each, warr, sword, pike, scout, cav, and phract. The reason I don't send just one of each is I believe the single layer dies when it hits a trap or abatis, rendering it ineffective in stopping the defending layers (untested, but I know the 100 of each does well). I'll send wave after wave of these until all the layers are gone and only archers, transporters, balls, rams, pults and towers remain. Each cleaner wave will normally only hit one layer at a time, and bigger isn't always better. A 99k wave will still only kill one (maybe 2) layer before it dies, when faced with many more than its own number in defending archers.
After the rainbow is dead, next comes the wall cleaners. Small waves of cavs and scouts, 100-200 of each, and lessening as the traps and abatis drop into the 20's. The reason for sending in multiple waves? The machinery tech. This is most noticeable when capping an npc, you killed more in the second attack than what "should" have been left after the first attack. Npc's have machinery too. At lvl 10, machinery makes the repairable rate of traps, abatis, defensive trebs, and rolling logs 30% (3% is the base, increased by 100% for each lvl of research). What that means is - you killed 100 traps on that attack, 30 of them will instantly respawn when the attack is over, in your way again on the next attack.
Once the traps, abatis, logs and trebs are gone... BOOM. Alternatively you can skip the archer waves, go straight for the cav/scout cleaners, get the wall defenses gone and then hit it 3 or 4 cav/scout/phract waves in a row. But make sure you continue to send cleaners timed just before the big hit. If even one trap or abatis is there, the fight will start at 5k yards and the whole wave will die.
Defending Basically everything that we've covered here in reverse. Here are some easy ways to make you a great defender that we may or may not have went over.
Get your ponies out - They'll mess with the incoming rainbow and make you loose more than you should, even in small numbers. Greater numbers will do nothing more than die as the rush out of the city. Big losses for not much gain.
Make traps - Even one will stop an entire wave in its tracks. Whether archer or cav, they will march towards your city and kill almost nothing.
Fix your rainbow - One of each layer is enough to stop an entire archer wave, as long as you have traps. A 99k rainbowed archer wave will stop to fight one pikeman and get torn to bits.
Send scouts away - Make yourself a target, hide your scouts in a valley or send them to another city until you need them. Scouts are quick and cheap to make, and lots of people keep them in stock. I only keep scouts in a defending city if I need to hide that there aren't many troops in it, or I need a break.
Make it look good - Pile a bunch of resources in the city to make it look like a target worth hitting. They will, and you can laugh.
Take the hit -
Close the gates on a scout bomb, or any hit that will take you out if you're unpreparred. They won't get much, and even ATs, while they take a long time to build, aren't worth loosing your whole army over. If you have alot of ATs, scouts will get splattered without doing much damage to them.
Tips and Tricks Here are some things that I have picked up along the way that don't directly help in a fight, but are a great deal of use.
1. Catch them offline if you can, and when you notice that they are, give them the works. No city can be taken while a person is online (at least not if they don't want you to). It only takes gold equal to the maximum population to pray. Easy to do if you have another city to send from by scout.
2. Get closer. Cap a low lvl npc right beside your target city to send clearing or loyalty dropping waves from. The reduced distance can save you tons of time in prepping for the major strike, cleaning out the city, and getting to that dreaded under 15>
3. The last 15 loyalty is the most grueling. Here's how it works: When an attack drops a city's loyalty below 15, every attack from then on won't do a thing to the loyalty itself. Instead, each attack will add one to the public grievance. You need as many attacks as what the loyalty was on the attack that made it go below 15 to get the grievance to 100. (For instance, if an attack says -4 loyalty, +4 public grievance, the loyalty of this city is 13, you need 13 more attacks to get the grievance to 100.) Once below 15, the loyalty will drop one point every 6 minutes (based on public grievance, get it to 100), regardless of how many times you attack it.
4. A lvl 10 npc has all the comforts of home - 10 rally spot, walls, feasting hall, beacon tower, academy. But how about capping one at 200 miles away? Time waves from multiple cities to hit within 1-2 minutes of the first attack. The npc starts with 91 loyalty, 10k cav waves will drop it an average of 4, 10k archer waves an average of 2. I send an archer spearhead, a 100k cav spearhead, and then 26 10k cav waves to hit right after. A little bit of lag and poof new attack city. You can also send attacks from multiple accounts, just be careful of which account gets the hit that takes the city to zero loyalty. You can pack the waves close to the first wave of the helper account, then finish with attacks from the account you want. Also, the arrival time on the bottom is the time on your computer. If sent from a different computer it will be different, the attacks will land anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes different than what you had intended.
