Ok, so a lot of people have posted beginner strategies and basic strategies for attacking over the years. The one thing I fail to see very much of is the more in depth, detailed, strategies for players who want to become very good at attacking. Now, you can sit back and be like

Nice one Hydro. Specifying what and how to use a anti-raid planet would be a usefull addition

Ok thanks Hoffman and Kollop for asking those questions. I will try to answer each one here for you.

1. What is/how do you use a anti-raid planet?

Ok, this is something that if EVERY player (besides attackers) does not have, they are setting themselves up for failure. An anti-raid planet is simply a planet where you station fleet (either figs or ground) on it and it is a direct share with preferably ALL your attackers. If you start getting raided you can presume the first 15-20 are fleet busters (if you read my above strategy) so you know that as soon as it hits those numbers and you see your ground has gotten low (100k-200k) then you pull out the fleet to protect the rest of your portals and watch as the enemy raid begins to fail. OR if you are offline your attackers can attack/take that planet which will force those troops back into the main fleet and protect your portals. You should always keep your attackers abreast of what planet it is and make sure the fleet on it is relative to what a raid is going to look like.

Attackers, if you know a player is going to have a raid planet and you have the extra fleet why not send an extra 10 fleets designed to destroy his anti-raid defenses? As soon as you fail one and realize that he has pulled his troops out you just start bashing that fleet with your "reserves". This is not a fool proof plan as it will be hard to know how much he is going to pull out. But it doesn't hurt you to try. If you succeed...you rape him. If you don't, then thats just the way things work out sometimes.

2. How do you calculate fleet needed for a raid?

When trying to run down fleet the idea is to get as close to maxing the enemy as you can with each attack. So if you know you have the fleet to do so, then just run the numbers needed. Keep in mind that you have 50% ATK race bonus and then your MIL % in research (as well as NO FEAR). That can be a significant amount power when crushing someone's ground.

You ask for numbers if i was trying to take someone from 200k to 5k. What I do is a little bit different from what I just said because personally I do not care about maxing them. All I want to do is keep my losses at half of theirs. The easiest way I have found to do that is by adding the %'s. I try to keep my military science as an extra bonus and will not use it. Therefore I would start by sending:

1 fleet of 300k (atk power 480k)
1 fleet of 275k (atk power 440k)
1 fleet of 250k (atk power 400k)
2 fleets of 200k (atk power 320k)
3 fleets of 175k (atk power of 280k)
3 fleets of 150k (atk power of 240k)
4 fleets of 100k (atk power of 160k)
1 fleet of the following sizes (90k, 80k, 70k, 60k, 50k, 45k, 40k, 35k, 30k, 25k)
5 fleets of 20k
5 fleets of 15k
5 fleets of 10k

Total = 3.35mil ground

You can be assured if you are able to send that, you will crush him for sure. You can get away with using less but it becomes risky sometimes with the drop off as you get to your lower fleets.

3. Op defenses needed to protect your portals and be difficult to infil, PI, IP?

This one can be tricky because so many people do not build enough defenses to stop bankers and attackers from opping them or they go overboard and build too much thinking it will stop that pax who has jumped 5 million wizards. The general thing you are told is 10-15% of your NW should be wizzies/agents. To be honest, I have stopped caring about whether people can PI or IP me. Who cares? The things I want to make difficult are infils, DU's, and CPFF's. Those are the things that make life hard for your enemies when they cannot get that information. To do this I would suggest having a 20-23% ratio of agents/wizzies and if your NW is a bit higher than you like, give up some ground to make sure you have it.

4. How do you stop ping pong at SOR when you try to make your core or keep a big fam away?

Well, there are a lot of ways you can do this. But in the end 3 options tend to be the most used...
A. NAP the family
B. Raid the enemy family and force them to give up that area or they get raided again. (please keep in mind that it can happen to you just as easy as you do to them)
C. Jump a wizzer or sabber and knock any portals they have in the "middle" ground. Whatever is in between the systems you want and their main core...take it out. If that doesn't keep them back, take out the ones in their core. Make them defend THEIR turf while you start portaling up yours.

5. Activity check and NW check before and during a war

Activity is one of those things that can be tricky to gauge. Knowing your enemy attackers time zones tends to be one of the ways you can make assumptions towards when they will be active. But to be honest, thinking that an attacker will be sleeping just because it is his nighttime proves to be a big mistake a lot of the time. What you need to do is get into chat and talk to people...find out what that person does for a living, if he goes to school, if he likes to party or play sports or whatever it is. Getting to know your enemy is one key to defeating them. So get personal with your enemies You can also send them msg's throughout different times of the day. When they msg you back gives you indicators of when they are online.

NW checks before and after are major players for calculating what sort of fleet someone is jumping. Do not worry so much about trying to calculate an attackers fleet by his NW jump...leave that to Infils. But for bankers/ressers it is extremely useful. Make a copy of each person's NW and get infils on them. You can immediately make an assumption of how much fleet they have off the infil and their NW and then if it goes up you will know by how much. Saves having to do infils later on if you want to raid. You should update their NW any time you see a significant change (200k nw on a player is significant) or every 6hrs.

If you have questions or stuff to ask...please do!

Or plan to hit all same tick....

Make sure to raze portal on anti raid planets!

Nice strat hydro. U really r bored in africa!

What is the ratio to max ground assuming no mil bonus and no fear? Because wouldn't maxing each time be more efficient cause you halve the enemy's ground each 4 times you max basically.

> The Riddler wrote:

> Yes maxing is ideal when you can actually do it. But in a lot of raids you will likely not have enough fleet to max someone every time you hit them and get their ground down enough so the next person can take over. For the most part the main attackers job is just to hit where he kills enough groun each time that he can drop the enemies fleets down to a certain number where the #2 guy takes over.

The #2 guy will start getting max kills somewhere around the 60k mark if this is done properly.

I am currently working on a chart that will show you what is needed for max kills at each particular # of ground units and calculating what is needed for someone with 50% atk bonus. With that I will be able to make adjustments and give the numbers of what is needed for an attack with NO bonus.

So please give me a lil time and I will have that up for everyone.

Yes I understand what you are saying but what if not maxing actually takes more droids? I don't know the specific numbers but say your opponent is a banker with 1 mil solds and you send lets say 2 mil droids. You kill 150k where as if you send say 1 mil droids, you only kill around 70k ground. Clearly, in this case then it would be better to max then send smaller fleets that killed less for the same number of droids. I guess I'm curious about whether there is an 'ideal' number to hit. If max'ing is actually more efficient per number of droids you send or rather, your method of just killing double what you lose.

Ok, so after some testing, ideally you want to send 2.5x what the enemy banker has to max him with each hit. If you have the ground for it maxing is the most ideal route to go as it will require less hits and obviously kill the most.

so if he has 10k ground, you send 25k to max kill him.

(the testing was done at a base 50%mil bonus) so keep that in mind you will have to send more than that if you dont have that mil bonus.

to make max damages I used to send 2 times more droids than defending soldiers, when they were 5/5, now they are 5/6 but it was not perfect calculation...2 times was easy to calculate it

well, when i used to attack it was 5/5, to make a raid I was sending for a 200k fleet defending 400k, then 340k, then 289k etc...each one was making max damages. now you may need more, since soldiers def went from 5 to 6, but it was not perfect calculation but only an easy way to make raids (2 for 1 then u remove 15%). Anyway that was for me, having each round same military bonus more or less for same nw. Now with new science planets my attackers tell me that they have incredible military bonuses compared to their nw. So the 2vs1 may still work...I can't say atm...