ENG off guide

General offense guide

Maintain your hammers. Keep those bad boys building, and switch them out as they get worn down.
The following is the ideal hammer building strategy for:

A minihammer:
2-5K infantry, 100-200 rams, 200 catas. Built far from capitals- oftentimes inside enemy clusters to harass them from within.

a general use hammer
build infantry 24/7 first, then cavalry as resources afford themselves. Maintain a 10-15% total wheat proportion of rams (1 ram for every 20-30 wheat of your hammer). Should be used often so it will not hit sizes larger than 50Kish usually. Should only need about 500 catas. Teutons should use maces for these.


a Cap-Smasher:
Build infantry and Cavalry 24/7 (possibly using GB/GS). Maintain a 15% wheat ram proportion. Maintain about 1500 catas. This hammer will be used to destroy the fields of well-defended capitals. Used less often for serious hits, and used for farming the rest of the time, these hammers can reach large sizes of up to 100K. Teutons will use axes for these.


Remember to always target the following priority targets, and make damned sure you destroy them: Granary, warehouse, wheat fields, rally point, market, main building. Destruction of residence in the first wave negates the necessity to include escort in followup same-second waves.

Except when you are attacking a capital-- then you should target only wheat fields for maximum impact.

Since you have his rally point destroyed in the initial attack, he will be unable to microrein, or otherwise determine fakes from reals in future attacks on that village.

So keep the pressure on, sending fakes every so often (forcing the enemy to waste troops reinforcing wheat fucked villages), scouting constantly (preferably at the same time as your fakes land so you can see if they are microreining), and sending your hammer+cats back to resource fuck and otherwise finish off their village. Alternately, if the player does not appear to be very skileld or a gold-abuser, enjoy your new farm .

Unless it is a 9-crop or 15-crop, it is best not to completely destroy villages, as it will tie up their CP on a useless village.

So long as you make sure that his wheat fields, granaries, and rally point are gone, your enemy will not be able to do all that much to resist you, provided that you send a fake wave or two randomly before your hammer arrives, their rally point will provide them with no useful information in regards to reinforcing.


So, an example of an effective attack sequence:

Cripple (as part of a mass attack that involved faking several villages)
cata Fake cripled village (while timing scouts to land shortly after the fakes land)
cata Fake crippled village
send random waves, with hammer and catwaves following up, targetting to ensure village is still crippled, and begin resource killing.
Fake several villages (send scouts to land a few seconds after fakes land)
Send random waves of various speeds, with hammer following to inflict further damage, decimating crippled village.
send fakes to several of his villages, with hamemr now hitting another support village, crippling it.

Rinse and repeat.

Keep in mind, that is only an example. Keep things mixed up, and you will find that your personal attacks cause great damage with little risk.


Now... a few pointers on attack coordination with allies.

Use your squadmates, both as cover, and to enhance total damage.

Never, ever target the same village as one of your allies, unless you are helping them chief and send an identical looking wave to every one of your collective fake targets (or distance from one of you to the enemy is a very short time).

Perhaps the simplest, effective cata attack plan:
find X many local allies near you wanting to attack.
Find X many enemies near you all.
Assign each player a fake village from each enemy player (except from their real target).
Pick a time.
Have everyone hit at that time.

with lets say 6 teamates, this results in 30 enemy villages being faked and 6 enemy villages being hit. Enough to give you a damned fine chance of making it through without running into defense.

two targetting methods are prevalent:
Have each player's real target be different players.
Have all players really hitting one player's villages (each a different village of that player), and faking the villages from the other selected players.

The second tactic is more devasting, but mix it up between these in order to keep your opponent guessing.