Time for some REAL strategy - The White Guide <LONG>

[Distinius]

OK.   I\'m disappointed by the tiny number of white mages in the top 100.  So here\'s something to help them out.   This is from a post in the original AM bulletin boards, and is aimed at new or relatively new White mages.



It was written by a dashing and very smart gentleman named sirhatter.



Please keep in mind that it was written for the apprentice server in the original AM - 120 max turns, no ultimate units, and all the spells working.  I\'m too lazy and ignorant to adapt it for this server.  If someone wants to make notes in addendum posts, please feel free.   Nonetheless - this stuff is pure gold - even for non-white players.



I encourage others to reprint Guides for other colors.



best,



D.



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sirhatter\'s Ultimate White Apprentice Guide

This is copyrighted by me. Feel free to use freely, so long as credit is given to the author and use of this document is not for profit in anyway.



This is version 1.2 Anything i had been wrong about in the earlier version (there were a few errors, only one of major substance) was corrected. Most notably the accuracy calculations are fixed, and part 5 is now in here, so this document is in its entirety. Hopefully you or your friends find it useful.



So, as I forever leave terra as a white. I come to offer a few thoughts that hopefully you all can use, and to dispel a few myths that are running around here. This will take some time to read, but it is worth it if you are not in the top ranks, and are not doing as well as you'd like.



I didn\'t come to white totally as a new player. I had fooled around with it before for part of a reset to test the effects of love and peace and a few other spells (largely bless and a few others)

I also had been able to get some white strategy off of my mentor Bale, who is truly an awesome player, and could hall with nearly any color, any server, and any time. (And he\'s almost as cocky as me )

The first myth I want to dispel, is that white cant play offense, and is purely a defensive color only. To some degree, this is true, and perhaps for a new player, he will find defense easier than offense. However, just as the best defense is an unbeatable offense, I think the reverse has some truth to it too. BECAUSE of its defensive capabilities, white is a superior color to play with for offense, ESPECIALLY on apprentice.



I, however, have always been of the opinion that unless you want to get really good, you need a Kick butt offense before anything else. You don't learn great defense by playing in the 2500 range all reset. You don't learn good turn management, and you won't hall if you can't gain acres rapidly.

That being said, this will teach you how to reach that level, and hopefully, as you learn, and read from others, your defense will develop too.



One last word of advice: This is what worked for me. Don't necessarily be a copycat. There are dozens of mages who tried to copycat Orpheus, and to this day I can think of only one mage who does an ok job of being Orpheus aside from Orpheus. To some degree you need to find what works for you and stick with it. If you are failing at what you're doing, change it. This is what I was finding to work for me, and it isn't \"THE\" way to play archmage per se. It is my way, and it was effective for me. I do think it will be effective for a lot of players though. While a pure whatever strategy sounds simple, in reality it isn't, and requires perfect resource management to pull off well.



At the same time, I think this can work well for many players.

My strategy has some turn management difficulties, but after that it is relatively easy, versatile and forgiving, making it suit even a newbie well I would hope. It doesn't rely on precise mana management, or heavy deficits on mana or gold. It doesn't rely on a specific and exact stack arrangement, and thus if you screw up and lose most of your top stack you are still ok. It allows the user to hit a wide range of colors, and defense is easy, because your defensive stacking relies on pricey assignments and not stacks, so you can transition into offense more easily. Overall I hope many whites will improve their game with this guide.

Good luck to you in your attempts to restore white to its rightful place on this server.

Right now, there are a sad lack of whites high up, because it is supposedly a weak color. This is also untrue. Let us begin

and assume you have about 2000 acres, and are not set up for any type of offensive strategy.

The first thing you will want to do is reallocate your land. I play with 35-40% nodes, 2.5% bars (yes that is full). 10 forts or fewer (sometimes too few =P), at LEAST 10% barracks, a few guilds to hopefully make an item or two, and then a farm-town ratio of around 2.2-1.

This would leave you about... let's say:

800 nodes

50 bars

10 forts

220 barracks

20 guilds

660 farms

260 towns

Once you are done, try to rearrange your kingdom into something kind of close to those ratios. Balance your geld and mana appropriately. ALWAYS keep on concentration and protection from evil. Higher up weather summoning is very good, and so is mind bar past 5k land.

Set up an army however you like. Try to keep at least 30k troops or more though. Log off until you're at least at 110 turns. Anything less you're playing with fire, and will slow down your climb considerably. Always being able to play in around 120 turns and not wasting turns is the first step to dominating this game. If you don't know that by now, learn it. If you still don't understand that concept, then you'll never be good.

Now you are logged back in. maybe taken a hit or 3. First thing to do is check your status report. Hopefully you have some mana to play with, and some troops to attack with. if you are attacking, now is a good time to decide what color you will want to primarily hit... for now lets say you will hit everything that moves (which low down is fine). Start recruiting either high priests or paladins. Recruit about 30 turns worth. They come kind of slowly, but that's fine.

LOW DOWN STRATEGY... Your first true run:

Start attacking. find a ranklister (yes I know that's supposedly against the Decalogue), or do random arena archmages of 2-3 letter strings or if you want to take turns and gradually open rank windows that's fine. Do whatever it takes. I\'ve used all 3 tactics, and if you're lazy the best way to go is to make/find a ranklister. The other two work just as well though. Get a list, and hit the following:

Whites (only if you know they are troop less or over 3.5% forts)

Greens (only if you know their stackings or they are over 3% forts or troop less or REALLY FAT)

Fat Blues

Moderate-fat blacks, and the occasional thin one with hi forts

Middle of the road reds.

In all cases, a person with over 2% forts is really stupid, and asking to be hit, unless they are in geddon. Aside from the massive geld upkeep, forts are 20k np. 50 forts is a million net power. Power is good right? WRONG!

Here\'s a question. Would you rather defend a country with: 1050 archangels and 10 forts, Or 500 archangels and 30 forts?

Both carry the same amount of net power more or less, but in your first case, you have considerably more archangels, and no fort bonus, where in the 2nd case, you probably get a 30% hp bonus or something crappy, and can only deal out half the damage and only have to lose half as many aa to lose the battle.

Mages with over 2% forts are... in a word, FOOD! (Btw it pains me to say I was allied with TKA. they had more of these dummies than anyone I saw, and I couldn't touch any of them ={ )

Once you understand this power calculation, given that you are about 2k land, you can see that mages with over 30 forts and your land or higher, probably have almost no troops, or may in fact have none if they have lots of heroes/geld. These should be your primary targets, regardless of color. Some quick math dictates each acre is 1k power, and each fort is 20k power. Assume a million power for geld bars and stuff like that. If you see mages that are at 2800 land, 25 forts, and under 4.3 mil power, they almost surely are troop less. Doing this math quickly will give you winners in battle every time.

So start hitting. You have 119 turns to play with.

YOU MUST KNOW EFFICIENCY. If nothing else, learn what efficiency is, and how it applies to archmage. For me, this means attacking at the START of my turns. In fact, I think for most mages it means this. The 3 biggest complaints I hear about this are:



1) If I hit a lot of mages ill give out a lot of counters...

2) I'm not ready to hit a lot of mages right away... my kingdom isn\'t set up for this!

3) I\'m always exploring and don't have a lot of power till the end.



In reply to each

1) No you won't, not unless you are smart or targeted for a bbq by a guild far stronger than any I've seen here. Not if you power up well at the end anyway.

2) Your stacks don't mean that much. If you have troops and 20k mana, you can make attacks! You didn't deliberately cast bad units the last time u spent your turns did you?

3) To quote the snl guy who plays Alex trebek, are you English or are you retarded? (With apologies to absolution) Seriously, exploring is a major mistake. Land comes so easily down here, with such little risk to your troops, even if you're HORRIBLE and can only win 25% of the time, winning 100 acres every 8 turns (4 hits) beats exploring for 8 turns at 7 acres a pop. Do not explore... You are throwing away turns if you explore past 1500 acres after research.

Your first few sieges this low will be really really easy wins. Here is a good place to burn your staffs of illusions. Spells? Bless/sleep/phantasm magic/blaze. They all work this low. If you are at 2k land, it doesn't hurt even to start your run at 5mil power or less. Then you are hitting mages at under 4 mil power. These are, without a doubt, the poor sisters of archmage. They are truly the newbies, and the people that are learning the game, or inactive, or just playing for fun/gelding. If they are in war, kick them while they are down. At least their enemies aren't getting the land. Win your first four or 5 sieges... This shouldn't be hard. You may get unlucky once, it is ok. Keep going and you will soon be at 2500 land and around 5 mil power, hitting targets at 80% of you.

Now you will have to start halfway playing. Your stack still shouldn't matter too much. If you have those kickass barrack units, and some good gate stuff or spirit warriors, you are fine. Even lowly knights are better than most of the junk people run. At the end of this document I've put in an appendix on offensive capabilities of all units.

As you go, you will gain forts. Every time you hit 20 forts, drop 10. This will drop you 200k in power, so you can hit targets lower, and weaker. Especially if you aren't experienced up top, you aren't going to dominate in this game by taking on jez and Orpheus and iuz and winning. You are going to only do well by dropping down to hit the weaklings.

At this point, I like to primarily prey on blacks. A veteran black is an even match for a veteran white, but a neophyte black will lose even to a neophyte white, and a neophyte black will die horribly to a skilled white.



First, you need to understand that almost no native black units have good resistance to holy attack. And guess what, white has lots of units with holy attack! Furthermore, units like liches and vamps, don't really dent white units too well. The natural advantage is almost always to white... the math ill explain later if you\'re not familiar with it. For now you only intuitively need to know that white has natural advantages over black that can easily be exploited. Lastly, most demon units that are black have a hidden weakness to holy attack. This was confirmed by the great DaveMcW (a god of archmage, has 39k land on Japan server as a blue!). Thus demon knights even die to holy attack in spite of their so called 400% resistance, long live the hidden weakness!

White has an awesome set of weapons against black. Most low blacks don't run shroud or bars (or only 1 or not at a high spell level or something else stupid!). For this reason, the spell holy word has like a 60% chance of getting thru. If it does, you win the battle.

Holy word will kill about (with some considerable degree of variation)

35 vamps

35 liches

200 wraith

150 hd

500 ghoul

1k zombie

1k skeletons

750 shadows

The beautiful thing is, the more black stacks they have, the better off you are. None of these units resists holy word at all (except hd some small fraction of the time), and you can do about 50k in net power damage to each stack. Stupid blacks stack lots of these things, and you will pretty much win the battle on this spell alone low down a good fraction of the time. This is truly wonderful. Blues will also run 1-2 of these stacks often.

The spell costs 10k, which is kind of pricey, but hey, it's cheaper than a magic compass =P.

Start whacking every black you can find that doesn't have a good guild next to their name. Presumably good guilds will know to run shroud and barriers. Even the good guild blacks will do in a pinch. Keep your item assignment defensively oriented. You don't want to lose too many troops. The only people you may lose to are pure ghoulers. They are not a good match up for white (but oh they are for blue/green =P)

Keep whacking people over and over. This is sooo easy. If you do dip below about 14k troops, spend a few turns building. If you need to waste 2-3 turns, build farms, if you need to waste 10 turns, build lots of towns/nodes and a barrier or two. Meanwhile your barracks are giving you more troops each and every turn. I've taken land off of people with high priests top in this circumstance. If your net power also dips to less than 1.7 * your land, you also need to run this tactic, and possibly summon some stuff. This means if you're at 3k land and under 5.1 mil power, you are probably too fat. You could drop that ratio lower, but unless you're an expert or incredibly courageous (read: stupid and greedy like me), 1.7 is a pretty safe ratio.

At this point I sort of assume you have made it to 2800 land, won 9 out of 11 or 12 sieges and maybe burned a few turns building. If you can't get here, please find me in IRC (often I'm in #gotr), or ICQ me 15173465 and I will see what I can do for you to fix whatever you're doing wrong (and it is something drastic or else u are just uniquely unlucky)

If you recruited hp at this point, recruit either a few more or switch to kt now. If you recruited paladins, switch to hp now, just 20-30 turns worth.

You are probably at around 90-100 turns left. You will want to make 5-10 more attacks on this first run before you are done, but by now you are kind of fat, and will find it harder to win battles. If you have confidence in your defense, keep using holy word, and hope to win on that. If you want to switch to just the fattest targets you can find, that is good well. At this point though you may find yourself losing some battles because of not dealing enough damage, or getting out hit. Its better though to go for 7 more hits and only win 3 than to go for 0 more hits and win 0. 300 land is always good in my mind.

You will, however, need to eventually stop all of this fun, and picking off lowbies. If you have more than 500 land to build on at 80 turns, or really any land to build on at 70 turns or less. It's best to stop. That is cutting it razor thin as well. You could stop 5-10 turns earlier and play safer, but I have never been about playing it safe unless I am on top. There are a few times, if you somehow run into a mage who has 2 allies in the top 5 such that you will lose your whole army almost and have to stop real early, but again this doesn't happen often.

Build quickly. If you can't get the bars up right away, get them up on your next run and attack less. They won't be full if you were really successful, but try to build at least 5 every day. If you intend to build more workshops (I virtually never build workshops only take what people give me thru sieges). Build nodes first, and then farms and towns, then barracks and whatnot, and try to build to take advantage of the decimal places in turn building. (I.e. better to spend just under 2 turns then just over 2 turns which is rounded to 3 turns) This way you're enjoying the benefit of the extra mana for a few extra turns, and extra geld, and not paying the upkeep until the end (I even charge before building bars for this reason).

As you're building, as SOON as you run out of whatever you recruited, you will have 40-70 turns left. Recruit 75 turns worth of kt or more. Knight Templars come pretty quickly, they are moderately priced, and are a very capable unit that has some weaknesses but overall is nice to use for defense. The stuff you recruit early will get killed as you recruit it.... Thus you will have less of it, and more of the kt

The theory behind this order of recruiting is that knight templars are going to be your most highly stacked unit. But your cheapest on the geld as well. It's better to have more of these and less of the other two barrack units than the other way around. Thus recruit the kt at the end, as I stated above rather repetitively.

You are now done building, and only have 55 turns left, and sirhatter, you have left me with 3200 land and only 5 mil power! I can never forgive you, you son of a *****! I made 1200 land today (if I was good/lucky id make 1800), but will lose 2200 tonight!!! Heh sorry. But if you follow me for 55 more turns, I promise you can get out of this, honestly, I do =P

You will need to disband your angels and knights, dropping you even lower in power. Save 1 angel and 1 knight. Mana charge now. You will want to get between 2.5 and 3.5 times your land power. So if lets say in theory you run from 2000 land to 3200, you will want to be between 8 mil and 11 mil power. I tended to play on the low end of this #, but you can play it how you like. Save any forts you gained from your last sieges. You should have between 10-20 if you're not stupid/greedy.

You will need to have this number in your mind, and know how to hit it. So let's do some math. Let's say you want to hit 8 mil power, and you have 5.5 now.

You have 50 turns. You need 3 million power, that much is obvious. Let's say you have enough barracks for 150 kt a turn (I don't have handy how many kt you make per barrack sorry). That will yield you just under 10k in net power a turn. Meaning over 55 turns you will make about half a million in net power. You have 2 million in power then you need to summon. You will need to bear in mind 2 things. Your mana, and your turns. The rest is easy. Gate, will, on average, give you about 150k in np. The other spells, can all be calculated, but the other biggie for me was spirit warriors, which gave me 62.5k in power per turn, or 250k over 4 turns on average.

So, you could just go with 12-15 castings of gate (a fetish of mine is to cast gate\'s in 3\'s, I don't think it means much though), or to cast 32 turns worth of spirit warriors, or some combination in between. For me here id run probably 9 gates and 2 spirit warrior castings and maybe one fodder cast. Meaning I could charge for 36 out of 55 turns. I then would visit the black market and buy any webs I saw, or cheap items. Then id summon as mentioned. You are done, and safely at 8 milpower.

Whites big 4 units are:

AA, Uni, Spirit warrior, Knight Templar...

All 4 are good units. The reason you disband angels and knights before mp charging is to make sure AA and uni stay ahead of knights and regular angels. Still this doesn't always happen. Higher up, you will have time to goof around, and cast unis and aa first to make sure you get what you want. once in a while you will roll snake eyes though, and that is just unavoidable.

The order of casting is critical.... ALWAYS CAST: Off color stuff first (one casting of dryads for defense to fatigue, ditto for soul speakers, if you choose to run this strategy), opening items (I often ran 1 coffin at the bottom, grew it to 80 vamps =P), do all the really cheap stuff and off color stuff early. you get fewer off color stuff, and this will help your mana/geld management.

Once you do that, summon your spirit warriors if you are using them (I *highly* recommend them). even if its just one cast. Then cast gate however many times you need.

Part of the key is to move thru your last 70 turns damn quick. You are woefully under summoned. 2-3 times this reset I got hit while madly under summoned. only once I blocked. it's not healthy to stay there for long.

BUT... if you are afraid of counters, remember you were hitting chumps and knuckleheads at 4 mil power for the most part. You are now at 8 mil power. if they hit you, they won't win. If they even do any damage at all, rebound counter if they have gay rules, after all free land is free land =P

As for defense, and assignments, you will need to read my defense post. Let us hope you haven't lost too much land and are ready to go at it again the next day...

The next part of this post is coming in a little bit. This is pretty long already. But I'm trying to make this detailed and compact at the same time, not an easy task =P





Chapter 2: The Second Run



we can now assume you can start a day logging on at 3k turns or more... and perhaps even over the explore limit. feeding on newbies is no longer an option. well, there is good news. feeding on mediocre players who aren't quite new is almost as easy!



You will start your cycle again. Unlike last time though, where the natural defensive capabilities of white were more than enough to let you support 15 attacks without losing too much power, you will have to be a smidge more careful...

start attacking with 119 turns (mp charge for 1 turn, this will ensure that all hero abilities are in place (and any offensive spells as well)

Target selection will kind of remain the same. I still favor blacks and holy word here, but blues become a bit more desirable, as do reds... When hitting reds I use scroll of protection of fire often times... and use sleep. Sleep lowers resistances of one enemy stack, much like a candle would. IT rocks for nailing hydra and chims and salamanders.

I usually try to keep either item or spell defensively oriented when hitting reds.

Some good items to consider in this low-mid range of 6-8 mil.

Powder Keg: Lowers one enemy's primary ap by 10%

Javelin of Lightning bolt: Lightning damage + lowers counter attacks by 25% of one enemy stack. I have confirmed these, thanks to ravashack for giving me this info.

Cosmetics: Adds beauty to all human units, which effectively makes them 11% harder to kill.

Missile Shield: I am THE KING of missile shields! This is seriously my all time favorite cheap item... And it is my all time favorite anti-blue item, cheap or otherwise. Missile shield halves all ranged damage effectively. Blues have... mind rippers, ranged; all their ultimate units (other servers) are... ranged! They also like to run a lot of... liches... range, psychic wisps/soul speakers/nymphs for their monkey brains... ranged! Blues have a ton of ranged units, and I've seen stacks with nothing but ranged stuff. And missile shield nerfs them all...

Combine this with some resistance and the natural large shield of knight templars; you yield this... totally kena!

Mind Ripper attacked sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar.

Mind Ripper\'s attack failed.

)\'s Mind Ripper was too distant, sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar was unable to counter strike.

\'s Mind Ripper attacked sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar.

Mind Ripper\'s attack failed.

sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar attacked \'s Mind Ripper.

sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar units slew \'s 6 Mind Ripper units.

sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar attacked \'s Mind Ripper.

sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar units slew \'s 14 Mind Ripper units.

)\'s Mind Ripper struck back sirhatter (#591)\'s Knight Templar .

Mind Ripper\'s counter strike failed.



That shows just how powerful the missile shield is. That opponent had mind rippers as a top stack, and my top stack stayed 100% intact. Even without the large shield ability, a missile shield is still a kickass item. That was always my biggest secret, and one thing bale and I shared in common. We don't use expensive items on offense, too much money. There are too many super cheap items that are incredible. I always jumped on the missile shields en masse...

Also good and kind of cheap:

Flasks of holy water (anti black and will be more likely to slip thru)

Potion of valor: I use this more high up, but it ROCKS on offense and defense. if 40% of your army is human or more (and mine usually was), you have just boosted those humans by 25% across the board!

Vial of venom: Kind of pricey, but good for knocking off blues...

Bubble wine: Good for hitting blacks... When you know you are going to deal enough damage and only worried about not losing too much, the extra 25% hp is nice

Ointment of healing... ROCKS! gives some nice poison resistance. I use this a lot against reds with hydra/wyvern suspected...

I think that's about it. ill edit this and put in more as I think of them... but never use expensive items until you are about to break 7k on offense. not worth it.

Always know what your spell and item do... Some good combinations

Anti red: SoL (Sword of Light)/scroll, sleep/scroll. sleep/ointment, potion/blinding flash, potion/plat hand of healing....

anti blue: missile shield/SoL (oh how I love thee), missile shield/holy word, missile shield/anything, potion/sol (for mad killer werebears, knights and knight templars), and some other setups I'm forgetting...

Black: flasks of water/holy word (good for hitting mages in the 5-8 mil range), holy word/cheap item/ carpet SoL if I was absolutely desperate to beat a major enemy, or call candle as mentioned earlier.

green... web of the spider woman/ powder keg, web/brooch, web/sleep (to nail drakes)... a few others

white *gulp*: first let me say my success rate anti white sucked, I prolly lost 8 of my last 9 against even the fat ones... what was best though was call/vial, and a prayer.

Again start hitting mages hard and often. You probably should start regular attacking blues/reds now... The enhanced accuracy for your unis/sw\'s is well worth it. If your troops dip below 15k, mp charge, build, do SOMETHING. If your mana is low, charge for a turn or two, attack, charge etc.

You shouldn't finish attack runs until you either have a hugely positive mp/geld income, or you've been SO good, that after 30 attacks you are at 60 turns and need to build. The latter will not happen. Somewhere you will lose a ton of troops in a win or loss, then you will get fat, and lose more and more each battle. That's fine. My euphemism for lots and lots of attacks is known as Darwinian disbanding. Only your tough troops survive. The angels and knights from gate die quicker than your sturdy aa usually.

Now you understand why you need to take turns in big chunks. Taking them 70 at a time is worthless. I need 60 to rebuild my kingdom. So attacking for 6 turns, building for 2 and shopping for 2 won't cut it. Not efficient. Better to attack for 30-40, you'll have to disband most of the stuff anyways at the end so why not kill it?

The more land you can take everyday, the more quickly you stay ahead of the pack and leave yourself only hittable by the top. Thus always think offense as a white. Your defense is so good you can get away with being fat. Your defense is so good you can make 20 attacks a day, and keep half your aa if you get lucky. It's just nice like that.



Chapter 3: To break through



Ok, if you have followed everything I have said so far, and your defense has held up with some degree of success, you are easily in the top 5% of all archmage players in apprentice. Unfortunately, if your goal is to finish in the hall of fame, you need to be in the top 10th of 1% of all archmage players roughly speaking. There are roughly 7000 mages on apprentice, and only 10 hall. So being able to consistently hold a rank of 350 or better won't cut it.

By now one of these days you will log on, with 120 turns, 100k mana or more, and over 4000 land with upwards of 10 million power or so. You are now on the threshold of breaking through and being a threat to finish highly, but you can't quite cut it there. If this describes you, I may have some ideas and things you haven't thought of yet. Remember, especially at this level land, white and green, more than any other color, can continue to stay aggressive and think offense first. Though it doesn't matter that much what your stack is, it does matter that you know what it is, and pick targets accordingly. You have reached the stage where wins do not come easily, and you will have to win through a bit of quality now as well, in addition to your usual dose of a large quantity of sieges/regulars. You already know HOW to take your turns now when in an attack mode... It's a matter now of making sure that use is rewarded with land on your attacks, and a well spent army that can be built up again quickly on defense.

We are going to discuss 3 key things the rest of the way. Unit match-ups (which everyone has a theory on), resource use, and target selection. The third topic, is most critical in my mind, and will in the end separate the best players from merely the very good players.

At this point it is not easy to play your 120 turns in less than 45 minutes. I may have 6 windows open merely to play one server. I kept a rank list (and thus some would say cheated, but the devs have all but allowed it by now.). In addition, I kept an arena archmage window open to confirm my rank list findings and make sure I wasn't hitting allies. I kept an IRC window open always to ask people what they knew, and to shoot the breeze. I also kept my playing window open obviously, and a guild homepage window, and lastly sometimes I would keep a chron-terra window separately open in addition to my own library of battle reports in a separate folder with easy access.

SIX windows you say for one stupid game! Yes. You understand the use of a rank list and separate arena archmage window, but why keep that other junk.

First, IRC is a good resource. It is a good place to trade information and a good place to coordinate your guild. Use it, even if it is dorky. It is safe to say that for the apprentice server, #Gotr in galaxynet is the premier place to chat, usually having about 20 mages in there at any one time.

More importantly, you need to start using chron terra. I didn't do it nearly enough in apprentice, and it cost me my life. I think had I been more diligent, the last few days before I was supposed to hit 7k, I wouldn't have languished in the mid 6k's unable to win a battle for the life of me. Had I used it more, I would have reached 7k, and been safely running some purely defensive stack and safe from everyone. I learned to use this from Lazzarus, a tarakian, and a mage who has more hall of fames than anyone will know (its hard to get him to admit which mage he is playing, since he is going for/already has hall in almost every color I think. Last reset he finished #1 on s2 as some blue mage) He taught me 2 resets ago the importance of using this window, and it made me a smarter player. The chron terra window is critical to target selection. Confused? Let me first put something simpler to you.

You as an attacker need to sort of guess what the defender is running. They can sort of guess what they are going to have attack them, and they stack against it. You need to do the same, but do better....

If you see a white at 4k land and 7 mil power with 41 forts. You not only know that they are almost surely pure archangel, but with 41 forts, 4 mil power, and roughly 500k power in miscellaneous stuff, such as 1k for each spell level, in addition some number of bars, in addition to items geld. So you can estimate that they have 4mil power in land alone, an additional 820k power in forts, and 500k additional power. This leaves them with an extra 1.68 mil power out of 7 mil power that consists of their army. You almost surely know (80% sure) that this is going to be pure archangel (or else they just got raped simply or are mid attack run). Since archangels have a power rank of 750 (memorize the power rank of important units if you are going to continue playing this game after it switches to pay to play), you know they have 1.68 mil power worth of them, or are running 2200 archangel. As an attacker of any color, you have to ask yourself if you have a pretty good chance bring down 220, after resurrection and their spell. If the answer is no, move on to a better target. IF the answer is yes, you hit.

So if you are logging on at that hypothetical 10 mil power window, you might see a variety of mages... You have just started, and you are psyched to take it to the house today and break 5k. First thing you should do, is the one turn mana charge. Now you are at 119 turns.

You will see fat whites and anorexic whites (neither I particularly recommend unless if they have a retarded number of forts). You have really thin and over summoned greens, and you have fat greens. The fat greens, especially right around 3500 land, are almost always pure tree, or 95% tree or more. They explore for their land... and move very slowly. The thin greens could just have been whacked hard, or they could not understand the game, not understand plant growth or even how to research, and power up entirely on faerie dragons (ironically dangerous to white) and druids and militia... HERE is where you check the chron terra. Keep that window open separate, and tag in the white at 2100 land and 8 mil power. You KNOW he can't support trees on that kind of land. Has he been hit a lot or making a lot of hits, or has he not done anything in the last 24 hours. If the answer is on the side of the latter, you know this knucklehead has explored for his land, and summoned dryads and recruited barrack units. HIT HIM! But, do a reg. In spite of the crappiness of his troops, he has so many (more army power than you), that you may not do enough damage otherwise. Set your item and spell to the most destructive thing you can (if you have lots of melee troops go sword of light here). Set the item to something that will enhance your damage dealing capabilities. If you didn't check the chron terra, you wouldn't know if this guy was a crafty veteran, or a raw newbie. The veterans don't explore for their land. The newbies do.

Really any target under about 2250 land and over 7 mil power with an inactive chronterra (or one spaced out over 7 hours or more meaning the mage is defending not attacking), means that they are usually newbies. These are your easiest targets to hit. Take them. You will only gain 45-50 land, and lose some number of troops, but it is very high percentage. Your second high percentage, and I've already mentioned it, is the people with over 2% forts, regardless of color. The HP bonus gained from 2% forts is insignificant compared to the extra amount of fake power it gives you. These are also good targets

Of course, juicy targets like these aren't so easy to find. The chron terra will continue to remain useful....

Here is a guide to picking targets and figuring out stackings..... I'm assuming a level of forts around 1% for fat mages, and .5% for nonfat mages for all targets. This is before you think to use the chron terra.

Mind you, there will be exceptions to these rules, but this is generally going to be pretty safe for you. I have listed the colors in order of mages that generally need the least army on up. I.e. a fat white is fatter than a fat black, and about the same size as a moderate black.

Fat whites: Pure flyer, very fat whites are probably pure aa.

Fat greens: Tree dominated.

Fat blues: Mostly using complex units, but it gets tricky

Fat reds: Pure efreeti, or they have been hit hard

Fat blacks: Unknown, could be heavy demon knight, or anything really.

Moderate whites: Flyer dominated... Maybe 1 ground stack

Moderate greens: Tree top (50% or so), diverse stacking after that

Moderate blues: Anyone's guess... Often heavy ripper though...

Moderate reds: Anyone's guess...

Moderate blacks: Anyone's guess...

Thin Whites: lots of ground troops (greens take note these are easier targets than fatties)

Thin greens: Can't support too many trees or gryphs. Lots of fodder, watch for animals

Thin blues: Running lots of crap somewhere....

Thin reds: Really thin ones like to run lizzies... The rest will have fodder lower

Thin blacks: Other servers its zombies... Here it's a mix of pop eaters and red troops



This is your first guide to picking a target. White has some obvious strengths and weaknesses. To summarize:

Strengths: Very nice attack type in general (holy), Melee troops can easily be modified... Many troops can benefit from attack enhancing items/spells... good solid defenders.

Weaknesses: LOW attack power in general for their power rank. Vulnerability to some types of attacks. Generally not of a quick speed to attack... Fatigue easily.

What does this mean for you? Well two things. First, While your better troops will still kick militia square in the pants, your low attack power means that you won't attack some fodder quite as well as it should. For example, knights are generally considered poorer attackers than knight templars. However, since militia have 0% resistance against anything, the knights, with a higher attack power ratio for its power rank, will deal MORE damage than unicorns if the knight templars! (assuming you have 100k worth of knights and 100k np worth of unis)

You need to find units that are weak to what you do well. You want to hit units that are weak to holy, and want units with low hp/low resistances in general.

The obvious place to look is black. Even the demon knight doesn't truly have good holy resistance. Archangels, angels, spirit warriors and the like will win almost all of their matchups against their nether enemies. Yet... you are now at the level where there aren't many bad blacks around, even at 80% of your power. You need to pick a black you can beat. How do you do that?

CHECK THE CHRONICLE TERRA!

White has an intimate fear of hitting pure ghoulers. The one hero I held all reset as a white (lasted me 3 days) died when I hit a red ghouler with flight. I could have saved that life easily had I checked the chron terra. By checking the chron terra, you will now know exactly what type of enemy you are facing. If the chron terra is idle over his last 48 hours, or only with attacks spaced out over a long time, he is probably playing defensively, making 1 attack a day or so. However, more than likely, there will be a long string of attacks one 5 minutes after another. This is when this mage is playing offense (or being barbequeued by an enemy guild once in a while, in which case you'll get the "so and so has taken a crapload of damage, try again in 24 hours")

The key to checking his run, is to find out what type of food he eats. If in that run, you see whites and blues galore... Look out! This guy is some evil person either ghouling it or wraithing it. If you want to feel adventurous, and take a chance hitting him, go ahead. It's your call. I recommend either call hurricane (to at least ground those ghouls), or some sort of slowing device. I tend to stay away from these mages (at least I do if I'm not lazy and actually check the chron terra). By keeping a separate chron terra window, you can write down the #'s, then enter them on your arena archmage quickly, by entering and hitting back to check color, and move more quickly, keeping you vulnerable for a much shorter time.

A black hitting whites is obviously not an ideal target. A black hitting reds however, is more often than not stacked full of liches, vamps, and mind rippers... Yummy! These are talented blacks, that know how to play offense, but they have left themselves vulnerable to you. Punish their weakness by taking 380 acres of their hard earned land. Go on a full out siege here.

A green doesn't really need his chron terra checked too closely. Only hit if you are stacked anti green. How do you stack anti green? First, web of the spider woman/brooch or some defensive item is a must. Then stack with aa top (these are weaklings when it comes to killing fodder, so you might as well have them hit trees), then kt/uni/sw (whatever it is pray item or spell gets thru or you're screwed anyway), and then below pack a vicious punch with high priests and knights. Knights, as mentioned, have a high attack power/power rank ratio. They aren't horrible offensive units, and will often win matchups versus dryads and nymphs. More importantly though, you NEED to stack evenly. The aa's will be top, but won't be the bulk of your army.

Something like:

15% aa

21% kt

20% sw

19% uni

15% hp

10% other...

is ideal...

Archangels are top, but where you will really beat this mage, if you do beat him, is by killing 3 or 4 of his bottom stacks. If he is mono tree, you can almost forget it. If he has tree/bear/nymph/dryad/elven archer, you are in business. The unicorns and spirit warriors will lead you to victory here. You will only kill 20 trees, and may lose a lot of knight templars for your troubles, but you will win the battle. It will be close though, and you will need to do a regular so you don't get hit with the accuracy penalty.

Picking Whites for whacking is nearly never recommended... never never never... Can I get this thru any more clearly?

Picking reds... an intriguing option... Dangerous, and intriguing. Check their chron terra. If they are massively hitting whites, stay away, Either pure ghouls, lots of wyverns, you really don't know. If, however, they are hitting greens, you are in business. They then have fire units. Fire units suck defensively, except for the efreeti, which can also lose. Fat reds are often pure efreeti. Think carefully about how you will do enough damage. Take a chance on sleep breaking their resistances, and you should win. (efreeti have solid resistances for the most part, and you don't have access to flame blade)

Chims/sals/hell hounds, as nice as they may be on offense, kind of suck on defense. Your units will get hurt. You will need to regular, and you still may lose more power. You will need to set your item here possibly to ointment of healing (red has lots of access to poisonous units). Risk = reward sometimes. You will drop once in a while 1k chims, which isn't a lot, but it's more than enough to win. Here is another worthwhile place to check the chron terra to see target selection. (and no red high up explores, since their defensive capabilities are so weak they'd get hammered)

Your last color to check up on is blue.... This is THE BEST color to chron terra, and it makes ALL the difference in the world. I didn't do this nearly enough, and again it cost me...

If a blue is hitting whites he is running... Wraith/ghoul/mr... look out!

If a blue is hitting mostly greens... he is lich top... almost every time. Nothing else blocks treants. If you have a holy unit top, this is a win ¾.

If a blue is hitting other blues... Spin a wheel, print out all of the units, and throw darts. God knows what he's stacking.

If a blue is hitting blacks, he is running gate units heavy, with mr and maybe a few liches/fodder. This will be a tough win, but is worth a try.

If a blue is hitting reds, he is lich/mr/night of living dead stuff usually.... SOOOOOO EASY!!!!

If a blue is defensively oriented... Think all-flier (aa/djinni) or a balanced stacking.

If he is hitting a mix of colors, look at the mix and sort of combine what I put up here. For example a blue can hit reds and greens at the same time kind of easily if he keeps lich top. He can hit blacks and blues easily if he's mind ripper 2nd.

The chronicle of terra gives you so much information about your target, just by looking at the people he hit. Make sure to only look at all of the attacks in a row. The attacks 7 hours spaced apart are his defensive battles, and not attacks. Combined with the guide I put up earlier, you have a great idea of what you're going to run into. Guilds often share information about enemy mages or just even random mages (kindred does and others). If you're worried about the legality or ethicality... tough! Nothing will be done about it, and I think it's legal to share information about enemies in guild servers (though not unguilded servers). Since enemy can be broadly defined, lots of good guilds have this information readily available. Check your guild to see if you have some sort of library. If not, or if there haven't been attacks on that mage recently, this guide I put up here will tell you what the mage is stacking, without knowing what he is stacking. Even those guild lists, are not totally trustworthy. While some mages will stack the same thing every time (either because they are damn good with it or because it's the only thing they know), there are others that will have stacks rearranged either through battle or design. You need to be able to pick targets and plan your battle ahead quickly in your mind without such crutches. This game gives you exactly what you put in. Its not like everquest where playing 24-7 is all you really need along with a few brains and some friends. Yet the game as you get better takes more and more time, and something like checking chron terras isn't necessarily fun (and why when I'm lazy I don't do it), but it makes a big difference. I hear mages ***** about how "Unlucky" they are all the time. That's bull**** 9 times out of 10. That mage doesn't know how to pick targets, and he wants a shoulder to cry on is what he's really saying. At the highest level, the calculations the very best mages go thru mentally are absurd... I won't even discuss them here because it isn't relevant to anyone, and few would believe it. Yet it is how mages win 33 out of 35 times in a days attacks on other servers. You want to make as many attacks as possible, but you also want to win as many as possible, for obvious reasons. The best way I can think of, is by picking opponents that are suited to you and your stacks. Now that you know what opponents are stacking, as we approach the end of this offensive treatise, I will next discuss matchups between units in a relatively simplistic, but effective manner, that makes the game easy, and doesn't depend on the wisdom (or foolhardiness) of the random mage that posts here with advice.

We were all newbies once. That can't be controlled. We can control what kind of veteran we are though. And the idea is to turn into a skilled veteran rather than an unskilled one. Good luck to you in your maging.





Chapter 4: Locking in on the top:





All of these sections contain information pertinent to other colors. This section, however, is truly the most useful for other colors. It was also the most difficult section to write clearly, for the nature of the topic leads to the risk of the post becoming arcane, mathematical, and boring.

Something very few mages understand is how battle really works. Sure they know more attack power is better, and understand a higher initiative is better, and that you want units with big resistances and whatnot, but they don't understand the mechanics of battle. They look at the #1 mage who stacks swanmays on geddon (as greens occasionally do) and then they go out and stack swanmays and wonder why they lose. Or they see some huge white (ander comes to mind) have vamps/wraiths high in their stacking and go out and try casting wraiths at 120k mana a pop.

Hopefully the first part of all of this has taught you a few key concepts:

1) Play efficiently. Turns are one of your most valuable resources, so don't dicker around trying to amass crazy amounts of stuff.

2) Attack often, and pick easy targets. This was all discussed above.

3) Match up units well, while staying efficient. This is best done through picking targets well.

The first part of all of this dealt almost exclusively with efficiency and pointing out pitfalls that other mages make and that you can prey on.

I sort of have alluded to how to make these matchups favorable, but only purely on a qualitative level. One could argue that archangels aren't really defensive powerhouses, or that high priests actually suck on offense. This section is intended not so much to impose my view of what units are good and what suck, but rather to give YOU the tools to allow you to make those assessments on your own.

I am a firm believer in finding your own way of playing. There are some definite concepts that you must understand if you want to be good, but there is still some degree of variation even after you play by these concepts, and you have to find one that works for you, and that you are happy. With very few exceptions, you don't play exactly like the person who taught you (I know of one hilarious case where the mage made hall of fame following a turn by turn script emailed daily to said mage... nevertheless that immortal is a quality mage in his own right).

To understand how units kill each other, you need to follow this formula...



#of dead enemies =

# of attackers * attack power * accuracy * (1-def resistance)

---------------------------------------------

hit points of defender



So, if 3000 angels hit lets say some number of wraiths... we can anticipate with some degree of authority how much they will kill.

You have 3000 angels * an attack power of 800. Wraiths have 0 holy resistance, so 1-0 is 1. That number stays constant. For now we will assume an accuracy of 25%. Thus the amount of hit points killed is = to 3000 * 800 * .25 * 1 or... 600000 hit points of damage. Wraiths have 1000 hit points, so your angels would kill 600 wraiths. There is an obvious fault in the formula. If you wipe the stack, you cannot use the formula. Otherwise it stands.

This is the battle system. Seems simple eh? Well, to me, the hit points, # of attackers, attack power and hit points of defender are pretty easy to solve. They give you that on the battle report. All that is left to calculate is accuracy and resistances. Well, this is where the game gets really damned confusing, and I am left with the unenviable task of trying to make it easy to explain, when I myself still run into issues with accuracy.

To start, accuracy is really the key to understanding the battle system. Once you pick that up, the whole game is just math. Unfortunately, accuracy is truly a ***** to get a hold on. An analogy would be in basketball. Over my inglorious career, I am about a 35% 3-point shooter. However, that doesn't mean in my next game, wherever it may be, that if I take 20 3-pointers I will hit 7 of them. Rather, my accuracy is random. Sometimes I am cold and will make 10%. Other times I couldn't miss blindfolded, and will hit half my 3's or more.

Most of your units act the same way. With magic being the common exception, your units will have a wide range of variance, even before taking into account any number of battle related items. To prove this, make an account, and get a few buddies to make one too on some other server. Make them spend 121 turns exploring. Play a color that has quick access to flyers (not red). I would recommend faerie dragons. Hit your friends. They will have the crappy 1k militia and so on setup... You presumably should kick their ass with 3k faerie dragons up top. However, that's not the point. The point is to look at what their archers do. Each friend of yours will have 300 archers. Sometimes they will bring down 15 faerie dragons, sometimes 25, sometimes in the middle or outside that range. The point is, resistances or no... fatigued or not, most units won't keep the same accuracy.

This makes understanding battles difficult, but also fulfilling. An OUTSTANDING site, and one I frequent is www.taka.nl/am. Go to the advanced battle analyzer. It will calculate all applicable accuracies for you, assuming 0% resistance, because, simply put, you don't want to waste your time on that. I recommend saving a few of your cooler battle reports in html and visiting here later.

As I said, the math of the game is easy, except for resistances and accuracies. Accuracy, if it wasn't already random enough, becomes even more random when you throw in the following factors:

Siege penalty (applicable to sieges)

Siege ability (given also to flyers it negates said penalty)

Charm, Beauty, Fear, Swift (lowers enemy accuracy)

Marksmanship (enhances your own accuracy)

Clumsiness (lowers your own accuracy)

Fatigue! (this is big... I still don't have this one figured out 100%)

Endurance (partially negates fatigue)

Attack type (some types are more accurate then others)

Items/spells (satchel/fog cloud/blinding flash/fear/lovesick you name it)

Unintended consequences: (battle chant increases fatigue rumor has it)

As a result, when you're in a battle, you can't predict the accuracy of your troops with any degree of accuracy (whoops lets use the word certainty here to reduce confusion =P)

Every time your troops get hit, your accuracy lowers, every time they make a hit, it lowers and on and on. Leave it to taka to help you solve these mysteries. The grandmasters of archmage understand this better than I do, so I won't go in much further. I will say this though. Be careful with the encyclopedia and what you're told. When a unit has charm enemy accuracy is lowered by 50%. What this means is NOT that an attacking unit hitting dryads all of the sudden go from 30% (a good base rate for many troops) to -20%! Instead, it means the attacker goes from 30% to 15%. However, a satchel of mist, lowering accuracy by 5% DOES in fact mean that a unit goes from 30 to 25 I believe (but cannot prove since I cant find a battle report where a defender uses just that without a fog cloud as well, making my calculations useless).

If you are quitting in 3 weeks, don't bother it's not worth it. If you intend to get better at this game, I recommend you research this until you find a level that YOU are comfortable at.

Now, to the second confusing aspect... remember our formula:

# of dead enemies =

# of attackers * attack power * accuracy * (1-def resistance)

---------------------------------------------

hit points of defender

All we have left now to explain are resistances... And you say, sirhatter, resistances are easy to calculate the encyclopedia gives them to us!

I say, yes and no. It's easy when your attack type is pure (say melee), and the defender has 80% resistance to melee. Then the formula is easy. Plug in 1-.8, and you will see that a unit with 80% resistance is 5 times hardier than a unit with 0% resistance to melee. For this reason each percentage point of resistance is more useful than the one before it. 99% is literally twice as good as 98%, but 100% is infinitely better than 99% resistance. Tangentially, you could argue that anything under 50% is near worthless, and wont do much good, especially to a unit with fewer than 10 hit points for its power rank (i.e. 80 power rank and under 800 hp).

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the developers kept a few things secret from us. A pure attack type is good, but what about a blended attack type? i.e.: what happens when you use sword of light to make melee melee-holy, or your attack is blended to begin with (note the astral magician's magic-holy attack). Most attack types are blended. Breath-magic, breath-fire, ranged missile, and on and on. Enchantresses make melee units melee-holy. The encyclopedia doesn't list resistances for these... The effects of spells are often cryptic. Does vial of venom just affect melee units or units with other attack types?

Furthermore, to REALLY compound things, you get spells and items to fux0r your precious calculations. Oil flasks, candles of sleeping, stun, brooch of protection, rust armor, vial of venom. The result is when someone asks about these items, some uninformed jackass who heard about the item 3rd hand from his cousin and has never broken 4k authoritatively states what the item does, and thus bad information gets passed on.

As for exact calculations of items, if I wasn't so likely to retire at the end of this reset I'd say its more than 50-50 I walk away from the game forever.... 100% if all goes as I plan in s1, I'd do myself the calculations for these items. (editor's note: I ****ed up my very high hall chances in s1, finishing 13th thanks to my overly conservative play, and stand before you this reset) Instead, I leave you with what I did find, or at least I think I found. Even this though isn't certain, but it was tested reasonably well. The developers said that blended resistances were NOT averaged... I asked them this. They wouldn't, however reveal to me the formula. So I started putzing around, and came up with a usually workable model for blended resistances among two attack types.

Unfortunately what the developers didn't tell me that Dave did is that they ARE averaged. There are hidden weaknesses that you will never see though (the most famous being most black units have a hidden weakness to holy attacks that was recently unhidden)

This also explains the effort for demon knights to have the faulty "400%" holy resistance. At first 100% wasn't cutting it when holy ranged or melee holy was tagging these freaks. The 400% represents an effort to make all blended attack types still have full resistance. Alas the developers still screwed up.

Add in factors like weakness to attack types, and scales, and you can see our basic formula is confusing.

We now know how battle works, and who to exploit. All that's left is actually finding a way to exploit our enemies. I will now discuss how to determine the usefulness of individual units on paper.

You have all seen the encyclopedia. That will give you all of the \'paper\' information you need. I want you though to not think in terms of how the encyclopedia puts out information, but rather on a scaled basis.

i.e.: you cannot compare treants against knight templar just by looking at attack powers and hit points. Mind rippers have 12k ap, and kt\'s 550. 500 mind rippers would be able to demolish 500 knight templar.

However, obviously, you don't compare attacking abilities that way... So here is a better way.

instead of attack power, use attack scale.

For me this is actually two numbers. The 2nd number is the primary attack/power rank, and the first # is the primary attack plus extra attack/power rank... An example would be unicorns.

they have a power rank of 375, a primary attack power of 2000, and extra attack power of 1000.

This means their attack scale is 8/5.333. The attack scale to me is the single biggest measure of offensive competence.

Why does the 2nd number matter?

Well. The 2nd number (primary power) is the number that can be wildly influenced. The secondary attack power cannot be valor boosted, plant growthed, paralyzed, battle chanted/lusted, or animal enlarged or have much happen to it really (its imitative, however, CAN easily be changed.) I haven't tested this entirely, but I'm sure that it can't be paralyzed, or valor boosted as the following will attest to. (mods please don't pull this down the opponent is a now dead arma caster on s1)



This is my bottom stack in a battle. It had all but 1 of my valor heroes feeding this guy some steroids

Spirit Warrior 991 8323 1656 2288

sirhatter (#354)\'s Spirit Warrior attacked *** (#1087)\'s Treant.

sirhatter (#354)\'s Spirit Warrior units slew *** (#1087)\'s 110 Treant units.

Erin Herfel Shepherdess\'s attack failed.

***** (#1087)\'s Treant struck back sirhatter (#354)\'s Spirit Warrior .

***** (#1087)\'s Treant units slew sirhatter (#354)\'s 6 Spirit Warrior units.

Malein Scully Shieldmaiden\'s attack failed.

sirhatter (#354)\'s Spirit Warrior attacked ***** (#1087)\'s Treant.

sirhatter (#354)\'s Spirit Warrior units slew ***** (#1087)\'s 30 Treant units.

note that spirit warriors have an attack scale of 11/6.

The secondary attack normally would be almost as big as the primary attack, but since I valor boosted those spirit warriors rather dramatically, this example clearly illustrates that the primary attack, at 8300 ap hit first and killed far more than the secondary attack. The only explanation is (since the secondary attack didn't kill the last of those treants) that the secondary attacks don't valor boost.



Thus if you have 7 valor heroes, all at level 18, that 1000 in extra power will still stay at 1000, even as that first number zooms from 2000 to about 9000.

In this way, the two numbers are distinct, and important higher up. For now the first number is most useful though for attack proficiency. For my purposes on my overall offensive scale I usually average the two.

Also, instead of hit points, I use a hit point scale. Here this becomes VERY MUCH a matter of personal preference, and it's easy to dispute what I'm saying here. I will try to provide you the math as best as I can. Thus a unit like the archangel will have 5000 hit points and a power rank of 750. It gets a hp scale # of 6.67, which is worse than the phalanx! Unfortunately for our lowly phalanx man, he doesn't have a wonderful array of resistances that the archangel has. With only major weaknesses to poison and paralyze, most of the aa's resistances are 75

[Distinius]

(the whole thing didn\'t paste for some reason - here\'s the rest:)

*******************



All in all, white doesn't suck offensively. You have targets, you have tools. You now just have to win. I mentioned in the last part on how to anticipate what an opponent has. Once you make your guess, you need to set your spell and item to win. You are now ranked high up, over 5k land, and in the big-time for apprentice. This will be a challenge.

Before I go on, I forgot to mention this (and I feel like crap about it.) SAVE your battle reports. After every battle page that fully loads, go to file and save as. Make a separate folder for each reset and server you play. Put the battle reports in there. Save them under your enemy's name. Optional is color (blu/bla/w/g/r works), and win/lose. This will let you see tendencies in your enemies, and just saving them will jog your mind as to what enemies run. Knowing that a fat black is all flyer 2/5 times for yourself is much more useful than me telling that to you. Again, learning things for you just helps more, its hands on, and if you're like me you're a hands on learner. Now we learn how to beat the top mages and what they might stack.

I'm now assuming you won't see many more guys with dryad top, since you are past that point in the rankings. I also assume u know by now how to beat them without my help

Problem 1: Mass ghoul black with flight/ash

Answer: First time around u lose... sorry. Second time if you saved the report you can see bars. If they have bars fuhgedabout it... Let a green try his hand or maybe a blue. If they have no bars, you can use a weak white paralyze... call hurricane will help here too. Be careful of your heroes! Do a reg and hope for the best.

Problem 2: All flyer black.

Answer: Call hurricane. Many blacks high up with this stack have mana issues. Black has no native geld eaters in its summonable troops, and thus has MAJOR issues with mana balances. They often sacrifice bars, especially if they are in a big guild and don't expect to hit much. Since I advocate a balanced stack of ground pounders flyers and ranged troops, you need to get these guys on the ground so your spirit warriors can whoop them good. DO NOT try to get cutesy and run holy word or carpet of flying/SoL. If there is one thing you know, it is that a high black IS smart enough to turn on shroud of darkness. They didn't get there by being stupid. Even if they can't afford bars, they will fork over 300 mana to avoid totally getting raped. Do a siege if you are willing to spend a candle as well. Else do a regular.

(in general, items are ALWAYS more likely to get thru than spells, especially blue and white spells that a white will cast. Many mages have access to mind bar which blocks spells (especially blue) but not items. Blacks reds and blues will also run shroud, stuffing your white spells. Lastly green will try to run sunray often, thus stopping your efforts of paralyzing a stack or whatnot. Items always have at least a 25% chance of working, as for spells, it could get very low %.) A reg or a siege will work.

Problem 3: Black diversely stacked with full bars.

Answer: On servers that have more talent than here, many blacks will run heavy stacks of efreeti/hydra/salamanders in an effort to save on mana. This lets them run more bars. Even more troubling is these units do well against holy stuff often times. The best of these mages will stay away from defensively challenged chimeras and mana costly wyverns (on that note chims are mana costly too). It's not super efficient, and is weak against other blacks, but it is also offensively dangerous (another topic). To beat this stack, you will need... BALANCE! A pure stacker or an aa/peg person will lose to these guys. You will want to run the big 4 white units... all in good numbers. Somewhere he is hiding the liches/vamps/wraiths. You have many options for spells/items. If you are blocked though, and you match up wrong (i.e. unicorn against lich and spirit warrior against hydra), you will scroll down to see the message about inflicting insufficient damage on the enemy. Shrug it off and save the report for next time that guy is at 80% of your range.

Problem 4: Hitting Red feeding Blue high up... or most any high blue.

The problem here isn't in what he stacks per se... You know you can beat it. It's in his assignment/bars. There was one blue in the top 50 (who deleted before I did) that always ran slow/web. Expensive as hell, and I swear his stacks were absolute white food, and I always came by (3 times I think) to see if he was out of webs or if somehow my troops would resist the slow, but they didn't. My army became lazier than Al Bundy on Homer Simpson's couch with a 12-pack, and I lost. You could get paralyzed, slowed or any number of bad things. Some of this is luck, and some is skill. Getting spells/items thru mind bar and bars is luck. Getting your angels paralyzed instead of your archangels is also good luck. (unis paralyzed isn't fatal either since they still get their 2nd attack). Sometimes though you will get bad luck. Your melee units will meet their black stuff, and your holy stuff with low attack power meets sprites. Nothing is worse than watching angels or archangels try to take on sucky sprites. So painful, because you know just about ANYTHING else would kill them badly. AA only somewhat murder them, and angels... *sigh... the price you pay for running sucky troops in my quest to not look fat and be efficient* Think destructive capabilities here. If you're low on mana, also think cheap spells items. Bless/sleep/web... It probably won't get thru anyway. On that note, scratch sleep from that list. NEVER try blue spells on high blues. Guaranteed not to work more than ¼. Stick with white/green.

Problem 5: Pure efreeti red with chain lightning.

Answer: (fodder dies). Go sleep/candle. Or sword of light/candle. You will have your fodder FRIED. You need to in turn kill a ton of efreeti to win. I run lots of fodder. I keep knights I get from gate (since I'm always too fat rather than too thin) and I run high priests often and sometimes paladins. These will all die. Good luck This was the defense xelco often ran except he kept extra stacks usually

Problem 6: Mass chim/Mass fire/melee red with flame blade/oil flasks or stun/oil

Answer: Oils are astonishingly cheap here. No red I saw ever ran this, but that's because reds here for the most part SUCK. To counter... think defense. Chims will die without your help in item/spell. Try a scroll for starters. If that isn't enough go with armor of light/plat hand of healing/anything. This will be a close battle at best.

Problem 7: Weirdo off the wall stack. Red with pure gryphs, blue with pure mr/carpet/call (since call doesn't hit rippers 3/4, they fly, everything else hits the ground). Answer here is to be careful. Save the stack. If you see the guy again, I think I've given you the tools to figure out how to beat him. My answers to problems here aren't the only answers. They are based on my application of what I know to how battle works. You have to kill 10% of the enemy to win, and lose a smaller percentage of your army than they do. Find that weirdo unit, find their weakness, and hammer it. Find a way to lower their resistance or enhance your accuracy/hit points for power ratio. Maybe you need to drop to 1 fort to amass that extra 200k in army power to win. All defenses can be beaten. Good luck to you, and the conclusion will be coming shortly. Cheers! (editors note: real life caught up with me for a bit. oh well)



Part 5: The end game, alternate stacking strategies, and Miscellaneous topics





So now youre doing quite well. Or maybe not... Here are a few final thoughts, alternate strategies and ideas to get you going. First, if you don't like the road to the top that I gave you, or cant get it to work, here are some other ones.

Alternate Strategy 1: The geld start. This is a very slow start, but potentially very powerful. Even though your geld income at the start of the game is quite limited, the prices for heroes and items is remarkably low. To make this strategy work, you need to get gelding right away and do some crude analysis. At 7k once you get there, you can make 300 million per 120 turns... or in other words it will take about 180 turns to buy you a decent hero. With a geld start, early on you can only make about 600k per turn, but if you can find good heroes for under 110 mil (which is 180 turns), its probably to your advantage to get heroes early. Eventually hero prices will zoom and you will need to research, and put up weather summoning and a good defense before you resume gelding.

I personally dislike the geld start for a few reasons. First, you have to come from behind. Second, it requires much more of a time commitment to play. Even if youre not buying off color complexes, the specific hero you want may not show up for 4-5 days, and then you might be sleeping or eating or who knows. Lastly, if youre buying heroes, it teaches bad habits in stacking and strategy, and also is fake net power for a little while that you don't want.

Once you get your heroes, typically there are two ways to play:

Way 1: Mono aa on defense, AA/peg on offense. With the whole boatload of heroes, you cant stack deep without killing off lots of heroes. That dragon knight who commanded 5k soul speakers is a prime candidate for death every battle. Thus mages will often run aa with some accuracy reducers/init reducers on defense. The good ones will play full bars in spite of the mana costs. Many mages though do not know how to manage their mana, and the first thing they sacrifice is their bars, and then they wonder why they got raped by a green who snuck in call + vial. Probably the ideal defense for mono aa would be lovesick/web. This should give you first strike against most opponents, and with your archangels now nearly doubled in attack power, they will indeed be a force. An amazon is a must, because it will not get resisted by your aa or peg, and it will enhance the pegs even more than normal with beastmaster. Your pegs will become good offensive units suddenly, tho still very weak on defense. The purpose of them is to only have enough alive at the end of each battle to take full land.

While a full bar mono aa defense seems impregnable, it has some major weaknesses. If you are caught online with all them pegs, you are doneski. Good guilds will track when you take turns, and nail you. The other disadvantage is you of course are relying on accuracy reducers to get thru like lovesick and bars. There is a slight chance someone with wraiths at well over 4k attack power (unlikely but possible on AP) get an ash thru, or someone set up just right to kill you does exactly that. The AA defense does not allow you to get too thin, and is of course not pillage proof, and has many limitations, but nonetheless, if played perfectly, it is a major force, and a major defensive powerhouse.

Way 2: The less tried, but to me more intruiging road. Id use mono sw or uni. On defense for unis try carpet/lovesick. For the sw try flight/item of your choice. You can afford 10k of these or so easily even at only 3k land. Do regulars to take max land, and though the valor boost isnt quite so nice (because both units have secondary attacks that wont get boosted), you can still wreck major havoc with 7k ap sw. The weakness here is that flight wont always hit the sw, and lovesick will occasionally be blocked by the unis. Also, you will catch yourself running double deficits in geld and mana, and you will have to closely watch your income.

Having 8 heros severely limits how many stacks you can run. You could of course run up to 3 or even 4 stacks, but people want to protect those hard to find heroes on apprentice, and thus will not be so aggressive.

Assuming you get to 6k, you need to do things a bit differently no matter what. Rely almost exclusively on regulars, unless you know your opponent either sucks or has a stack that is badly set up to defend you. Rely much less on easily killed fodder, perhaps eliminating some of these stacks altogether, and rely more on your money troops, spirit warriors, unis and archangels. Unify your strategy, and prepare to make only 5-6 attacks in a day, and perhaps even have them set up with a few enemies in mind... Think along the lines of "this sucker tried hitting me pure wraiths earlier. Hes been pure wraith all reset. Time to teach him a lesson... Decide if you want to go mass sw with call/candle or find a way to slow the wraiths so your aa and high priests can make a meal out of him. Even at 6k and 15 mil power, you'll often be reaching down to mages at 3.5k land and 12 mil power, who will often have armies bigger than you. You need to use better items, in hopes of hitting 7k. Once you hit 7k, you need to set up exclusively for defense. Either set up to send HUGE reinforcements, or set up to not send any at all. Full bars is still a must, because you'll have to rebuild them eventually anyway, and nothing sucks more than realizing theres a week till geddon and you need 200 barracks up, and you needed them yesterday. If you set up to send full reinforcements, I would recommend: 22% aa, 33% spirit warriors, 44% soul speakers. In this way, you send a very large amount of aa, and your soul speakers will make your incomes easy to handle. Your first stack is being sent, so hope it doesn't get cleared, but assuming you keep around 8 million in battle power, you will send about 2500 archangels, a very nice reward indeed for whoever is receiving your reinforcements. It all depends on your risk of being hit. In my situation 2 resets ago, I knew even if I was at 7k I was not going to be a safe man, so I would have monostacked aa and prayed. This reset once I hit 7k, I didn't stack to worry about myself, but more to help my allies who were climbing below me. If you're in a strong guild, you can stack crappier units, rely on your assignment, and geld more effectively. If you're a loner up top, stack as if you were going to get hit, and mp charge most of the time. In the long run you'll end up losing. While the hostile mages around you are gelding freely and buying all sorts of fancy heroes and compasses, you will need to spend most of your money on carpets/webs/whatever you use, and only afford a rare hero or two. Heroes are hard to come by in apprentice, and the mages with loads of money have the distinct advantage in buying these. You can still win the fight though. I think I've proven its rather easy to attack and defend as white without a reliance on heroes. Hopefully you've found this to be true for yourself. If you are struggling though, and need a little kickstart, there is always:

THE RUSH:

Here is another way to get to the top quickly. I suspect if they change the research mechanics on apprentice, this guide will be quickly semi-obsolete, but the rush will be more important. The reset I played white I rushed. It didn't pay off entirely, but it kept me in the top before the mass of kindreds came up against my lonely mage.

The key to rushing is a dual commitment to researching and taking the top at the same time. It will not make you popular, and as of right now is very difficult to pull off, but is highly rewarding.

Start your exploring as normal. Build your workshops, and build your first 45 guilds or so (to get items pumping). Instead of building lots of guilds though, build 150 barracks, and build about 300 nodes with some number of towns and farms. Don't build any forts, and build the 1 barrier for the 1% resistance.

By turn 100 you should be at full mana or at least 250k or so. Recruit immediately. My choice to rush was paladins. Paladins in my mind were superior to knight templars as a rushing unit because of the higher attack power and higher initative. If I had to do it all over again I'd probably put kt top because they are more efficient, and can block melee units better. You may even be able to get away with a balanced recruit strategy and throw in crusaders and high priests, which is what I did after the first run anyway.

By about turn 110, you need to start summoning stuff. Hopefully you did not disband your original barrack troops. Get a lot of soul speakers, and a few castings of pegasi too. You will have about 2k soul speakers, 1-2k pegs, and 20 turns worth of some barrack unit, and your original 2k of old fashioned barrack troops. This is about 7k troops, enough to take full land off of mages with sub 1400 acres. Stop at turn 120, and don't move your mage. Wait for the full 120 turns to come back.

When you are full turns, open up your rank window seperately. Here is one scenario where rank listers definitely will not cut it for you, not high up. Lots of mages will be moving at about this time, and the top changes rapidly. Perhaps use a ranklister or find a mage that is at 80% or so of your power and is actually out of protection. Drill him. Let me give you a tip, your army will be 4 times his size, and kt/paladins beat the crap out of militia. Trust me on this. You will win your first few battles quite easily. Keep pounding. You will rise in net power very rapidly. Every time you get to 10 forts, knock 5 off. Convert your buildings into barracks till you hit 300-400, and nodes till you hit 400 or so. You will win farms and towns on your own. Start building guilds too towards the end of this run, You want to be at around 500 guilds. Use healing as your offensive spell (given that a level 6 bless HAS to suck), and do not waste your items. As you get higher, you will see mages with semi real armies. Here is a guide as to what to hit and what not to hit.

Hit blacks. Paladins beat black stuff with their holy weaknesses, as do high priests. Soul speakers and archers low will fatigue any wraithies. Pegs will also do OK.

Hit reds. Reds have no good troops available to them to rush. Lizardmen? Ewww. Dwarven Death seekers??? EWWWW! They will have blaze, but that is not a big deal. You can cream reds, even if they have salamanders or hell hounds learned by some miracle.

Hit other whites. If your army is bigger, you will probably win. If you are relying on barracks and they are relying on peg/ss, you will also probably win.

DO NOT HIT ON YOUR FIRST RUN:

Greens. Greens may be easy food, if they have gorillas, which are poorer than almost any unit without enlargement. However, a good green rushing will run faerie dragons. Faerie dragons have initiative of 5. Faerie dragons mass easily, faerie dragons will eat your first stack for lunch, and the green may be able to cast web of the spider woman, slowing your kt to nothing if you are extra unlucky.

Blues: Blues do not have barracks much to rely on, but they have sprites. Sprites will also do very bad things to white units. Stay far away from rushing blues. You cant even really defend from these too well mid rush.

As you go higher and higher, rely on rank windows you previously opened for rankings. Around 1700 land you should stop destroying forts and actually start to build a basis so y ou don't die in your first day or two. Youll reach a point at about 60 turns, where you simply need to stop. Build the rest of your land. Get your guilds up. If you have a few turns research some things. Otherwise, you should put to use the 400k mana sitting around with 20-30 turns. In addition to an incredible number of barracks, you will want to cast stuff. If you have astral magicians or angels, you may or may not want to get them. My guess is astral mages are slightly more useful. The more efficient use of your mana though, is on pegs and soul speakers. Lots of em. Your oh so slightly enhanced spell level will get you considerably more per cast. Use this to full effect. Try to have soul speakers as your top ranged/flying unit, but do not have them first stacked. Ideally kt/paladins will be in front. Heres why.

You are likely to be food for a green rusher. Soul speakers eat fd, given the chance to do their damage. FD have 90% resistance to melee attack, so they will block pegs. If fd strike the soul speakers first tho, you wont have enough ss to make a run. So get soul speakers behind kt or paladins or something, and let them do their thing. Set your item to javelin of lightning bolt or powder keg. Blast away

Ditto for sprites. IF you can block a green rusher, you can stay in the top and never look back. The next set of 120 turns should be deidcated to grabbing more land and learning gate. Once you have gate, you are good to go for a long time. You have pretty much the top white troops available to you, and you can summon them quickly and research. Do not keep more than 1 bar while rushing. You can afford to have few nodes if you have no bars, and thus the extra space goes to guilds. As you get to the top 10 and stay there, pnap off the greens below you if you like. If they refuse, farm them and farm them aggressively. Their trees won't hurt your kt much (by now you should have kt over anything else), and your unis/astral mages can make a real meal of them. Balancing your research and grabbing and incomes will be tricky, but I will say this, use mana crystals when you get low, and make sure your geld income isnt too positive, or you've done something very wrong. My usual sequence of turns for me was to start off negative in geld and mana, and hit people until I was quite positive in both and quite fat. I then would research while letting my barracks replace my templars, and maybe at the very end mana charge for a few turns. Then with only a few turns left id gate myself until I didn't look like a good candidate to take counters on. Rushing early is rewarding for a white in its late stages because you already have your best troops available to you. A blue cannot rely on gate until his spell level is high. A black can mass wraith, but he cant summon that many a turn and you can block it with your ranged junk. A red cannot rush well often, and thus will stay low and wait to finish research, and greens will seldom splurge the 500 mana for plant growth and 1.8 mana for each tree and have low ap/hp trees so early in the game while trying to research. White though has gate, a good balance between mana and geld eaters, and thus can move quickly.

If the new apprentice gives you all of your own color spells to start, white wont be quite the dominant rusher (red can immediately run mass chim/efreeti, and green can play the mass tree right away), but it can still be a major force by gating its way to some quick easy successes.



End game strategies:

Anywhere between 3 weeks to a month till the end of the server, you have to make a decision, are you going to try to hall, or are you going to end someones hall chances. If you go for the latter, its pretty self evident what to do, burn your voodoo dolls and vortexes the day before on him, oversummon like hell on a troop that can wreck him, and whack away.

If you go for the former, you need to build up a big geld reserve. If you run a deficit that is as great as your mana income, it is not likely that you can go more than about 150-160 turns (assuming no charging), even at full mana, without wiping your supply clean. This also means no attacks and no use of spells on defense. Clearly oversummoning on mana units isn't the answer. Oversummoning on geld units is. Before you summon a million pegasi and expect to cruise to the hall, you have a few major concerns that you need to address (unless you have the chaos ward)

1) Chain lightning and gravity pull: If these get through, you are toasted. Bye bye pegs, bye bye crusaders, bye bye crappy troops. A single effective chain lightning can drop about 4 million np worth of troops from a 45 million net power mage in a single battle, assuming they are running a fair amount of fodder. Gravity pull can kill about half of your pegasi. This will be a major killer.

2) Assignments: You can either use no asssignment on low crappy mages, and a nice one on targets that have a good chance of hurting you (set to 50% on apprentice, perhaps 25% on servers where you can amass land well over the cap here), or you can set a crappy assignment to 'always', something like healing, or bless, or the like. You cannot, under any circumstances, rely on something like having 700k pegs, 700k crusaders, and using the spell sword of light/ash of invisiblity both set on 'always'.

3) Mages set up to screw you over. A good guild trying to bring you down will have you scouted. They may try to voodoo you to freeze you in arma, (which is why barriers are a must!), they may vortex you silly so you cannot make your last charge at the very end, and lastly, they will know your stack. If you are overstuffed on fodder, they will set a red on you with chain lightnings until a few crack through. If your 3rd stack is a crap unit but your 1st. 2nd and 4th stacks are strong, a green might come in with militia/gorilla/treant. Guess which stack is going to find your weak one? Correctumundo!

4) Nuisance moves. A mage will D&D you. You don't want to waste the turn and mana dispelling in such a critical situation, and you could easily knock it off, but that's a waste too, and its no guarantee to be knocked off. A mage will run wall of silence into your country ruining your assignment. A mage will bd you, which wont bother you much but will still annoy you. Mages will also try to pillage you heavily.... Keep many forts for geddon, at least 1%, perhaps more, much more. In addition to being lots of net power, it will block pillages and add hp to your troops. Since there are no attack caps, here's the ultimate situation where more np is good.

5) Be ready for the unexpected. Usually as a rule keep full bars for as long as you can, but if the situation is such that there are either no enemies even close to being alive, or if it is so chaotic such that any old mage can make the hall (ive seen both), dropping bars will be a must at the end, you will have to pray to not get hit as you frantically summon up stuff in 120 turns in your last 10 minutes, and pray your mana and geld don't burst. The situation is a judgement call, and making the wrong judgement will cost your mage a hall chance often times. Good luck, this is the end game.

Conclusions:

I hope you have learned from this guide. I made myself better by writing it and getting my thoughts on paper so to speak. You get out of this game what you put in. The more you put in, the more fun youll find, and the better the player you will be. I have one final word of advice, and one request. The word of advice is to keep trying to get better. Even now I learn new things every day. Today I learned something new about mindbar/barriers, and I consider myself a skilled veteran. If it ever gets to the point where you master something completely, it loses its fun usually, and loses its challenge. So keep pushing to make yourself better. Keep trying things. Don't be afraid to make a mage on another server and test something about accuracy you don't understand. Don't be afraid to admit you don't know something and ask politely of someone who is better than you. I was blessed by having both a curious mind (which made me pick up many things on my own), and being surrounded by spectacular players, a few of whom took me under their wings to become their apprentices. The very very best in all of archmage have helped make me the player I am, and I am grateful to them. So push yourself, and when in doubt, ask someone. Soon you will find yourself being asked questions instead of asking them.



The favor I have to ask to you all is be nice to newbies, well some of the newbies anyway. A polite mage who is new to your guild will quit if they suck for too long more than likely. If you become their teacher, and help them out, going out of your way sometimes and explaining things twice in an email or aol chat even, or walking them through something, they will be grateful, and count you among their friends. You don't play this game for too long without naturally making some enemies through war and battle if youre any good, but it's the friends that keep you coming back, and the friends that make this game worth your while. I have particuarly enjoyed my time this reset chatting with other mages, laughing at things, goofing off and going to other sites and just enjoying the people that play archmage in a non archmage setting. This game is a great community, regardless of whether youre on one side of battle or another. For the most part, you can find a guild full of people that you like to play with, and people at your level of commitment. But teaching, is where you can get the most reward out of the game, and good teachers keep the game strong, because god knows everyone starts out sucking at this game. I have my own laughable stories of my early follies. So teach a newbie, whether its in the UBB or your guild, and you will make a good friend, and keep the community strong.



Thank you all, and see you in battle.

sirhatter

sirhatter@hotmail.com                    

[Revenger]

Wow! Sorry Distinius, I don\'t have the courage to read all this                    

[Anonymous]

Well, I had to test my poor english, so I have read it.

Now my eyes hurt a lot, but I must say it was worth the time. It is probably the best guide I have read so far, with a lot of things interesting for another colours.

Sadly, right now many things are obsolete due to the state of this server, but still it can teach a pair of things to play here.                    

[Bard]

Be that as it may... My understanding still stands



White Mage = N00bie CoLoR



Its been in mari, and as ive seen it here, still the same.

(maybe its not the mages that have the problem, eh?...)



:ban:  :ban:  :ban:













HaTe the PLaYer... NoT the GaMe...                    

[Distinius]

In the old AM, white was a good color for newbies to learn on.   There were several easy and \"safe\" stacks that could be used (like AA/Dom) to keep from being easily pounded on by more experienced players.   It\'s a great defensive color.   But (very generally) it was not as good on offense as the other colors.



Here, I think that green is the newbie color.  So many of the essential white spells (Sword of Light, The Holy Light, Love and Peace, Holy Word, etc.) aren\'t working that it\'s actually a pretty difficult color to use effectively.   Until the spells get working, only good players can do reasonably well as white.   Green, on the other hand, is a bit overbalanced... just look at the number of greens in the top 100.  



But even in the old AM, it took a fair amount of skill to be able to stay in the top 100 as white.  Good players can stack to clobber whites - they need to especially watch out for red and green - and the best black players could take whites to town with clever multicolor stackings.



best,



D.



[edit]  and if white really is the color that most newbies use, then the white guide is especially needed to show them the basics of playing the game well, neh?