Now, we will begin with the basics of basics; that is, declaring war!
Declaring war and preparing to attack
1. Check whether that nation is within range.
Yes, this may sound obvious but I must treat you like children else you will be overwhelmed by my superiority.
If you are trying to search for a nation right after update (from 1 AM EST to 2 AM), do the following:
http://www.cybernations.net/search.asp?sea...ing=All&search=Enter that URL with the name of the nation you're searching for at the end. If there's a space, use an underscore. For example, let's say I'm fighting Neues Prussia, so in order to find him, I would put
http://www.cybernations.net/search.asp?sea...h=neues_prussiainto my address bar.
2. Declare war.
More obviousness courtesy of n00b retardness. How many times have we seen n00bs see an enemy within range, get all giddy with the prospect of actually fighting someone, buys millions of soldiers and then checks back to realize their strengthened military boosted them out of range.
N00b happens.
3. Set your nation to DEFCON 1.
Your military will be most efficient in this setting.
4. Go to the Wars and Battles page, click on the drop down and select a 'ground atack'.
You will see a window that looks like this:
With that information you can see how many defending soldiers he has, and how many you have attacking. You can also see your enemy's technology level.
THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.
Tech is the number one deciding factor in battle outcome; if you have superior or equal tech, you have a fair chance of winning. If your tech is below that of your enemy's you will have a harder time of getting the battle odds in your favor. I will go into the intricacies of battle odds later on, else I run the risk of blowing up your brains too soon. For now, suffice to say that if you have battle odds 50% or higher, attack. Anything lower than that, and you should think twice before engaging unless you simply want to cause damage at the expense of your own troops, but where the *beep* is the efficiency in that? Of course, sometimes for the greater good of the alliance sacrifices must be made, but that's not what you are here for.
5. DO NOT ATTACK YET.
Yes, you heard that right, there are many things left to be done before you engage. Now you are at war, but still don't know about the intricacies pertaining warfare in CN. We will get back to the Battle page soon enough.
As you know, there are several ways in which you attack a nation as well as defend. We will be focusing our attention into attacking. First of all:
Nowadays a soldier's main function is to police a nation. That is, to prevent it from going into riots. They also strengthen your nation by a factor of 0.1 per soldier. So, for example, if you have 100 soldiers they add 10 STR to your nation. The best ratio of soldiers to citizen is 1 soldier per 5 citizens. Check your nation's population and do the math.
However, they still serve a function in battle, if anything because they are cheap, and cheaper still when you are set on DEFCON 1. In terms of military strength, each soldier represents a unit. In other words, 10 soldiers represent 10 military strength. This strength is independent from your nation STR, and is used only to determine battle odds.
Tanks:
Oh, them tanks, don't we all love them? The moment they hit the shelves there were like a thousand nations stacking tanks for the sake of it, not stopping to think that these toys, however "cool" and however strong, cost money to maintain. Why do I bother you all with economics? BECAUSE ECONOMICS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE GAME. You cannot escape them; you must understand them, and base your decisions not only on the glory of the alliance (which always comes first) but also on the economics of the situation.
So, if you are not at war, why buy 100 tanks? You will be crippling your economy by adding an unnecesary amount of dinero into your bills. At the most, I recommend buying 15 for defensive purposes. If you are at war, of course, it's an entirely different ballgame.
Tanks do not add (yet) strength to your nation. They do add military strength - and a heck of a lot of it - but it will depend on how you use them. Tanks have more power defensively than they do offensively, although the difference isn't staggering.
How strong are tanks, exactly? On offense, they are 15 times stronger than your average soldier. On defense, 17 times. There is an added military strength (MS) factor involved, which has to do with your amount of technology. We will discuss this when we get to battle odds.
Air Force:
Again, do not stock up on Bombers you can buy them when you need to attack. It is not worth the economice loss. However fighters are you ONLY defence against enemy bombers, so keeo some handy. When you are first able to purchase i would suggest about 4 fighters, with more as you grow. Fighter aircraft cannot destroy enemy infrastructure, tanks, or cruise missiles.
There are 18 different aircraft in the game consisting of fighters and bombers (9 of each type). When launched on bombing runs bomber aircraft have the ability to destroy up to 20 infrastructure, 20 tanks, and up to 5 cruise missiles per bombing run. Fighter aircraft help defend your bombers during bombing runs and can also be launched without bomber aircraft for dog fights with enemy fighters.
Cruise Missiles:
The Cruise Missile (CM) is primarily a tactical weapon. Whenever your enemy doesn't have enough defending troops to enable you to battle, use CMs to lower his infrastructure. And in the case your enemy has enough for you to attack, but you want to get rid of some of his tanks before engaging, pepper him with CMs. You can only attack twice per day with them, and only launch one per attack, but if your technology level is high enough you can decimate up to 8 levels of infrastructure. Doesn't look like much, but think about it; the more infrastructure a nation has, the more expensive it is. To some nations 8 levels of infra are the equivalent of $75000 in purchases, plus 70 citizens killed. The economic impact can be quite great.
Nuclear Weapons:
The goal of every trigger-happy nation in CN is to get their hands on these babies. Here are their effects, as explained by Admin himself:
QUOTE
Nuclear weapons completely reduce the number of defending soldiers for a defending nation to zero, cause great amounts of land and infrastructure losses (35% each), and also cause population happiness to plummet for a period of 5 days after a nuclear attack.
Nice, eh? But while their destructive power makes them very attractive, their impact on a nation's economics can be great. Nukes cost $200,000, $500 a day to maintain, they affect negatively your environment and take away your added income from uranium trades. If your goal is to have a richer nation, do not purchase nukes. If, on the other hand, your aim is to make the BoSS Nuclear Nations list and feel more powerful, get one.
War Slots:
Now before we continue, let's take a quick look at how war slots actually work, as there is a typical misconception regarding this that affects both n00bs and veterans.
War slots and how they work:
Since a lot of people are confused over this issue, I will try to spell out how this works.
1) A nation may only have 3 wars declared on it at any one time.
2) A nation may declare war on as many other nations as it feels like.
There I hope this clears things up, no? Still unsure, well here is an example:
Bobs Nation declares war on Nancy Nation and Jimbo's Nation
Bobs Nation still has 3 war slots open on it, so 3 more nations can declare war on him.
So even if a nation declares war on 3 nations, and is engaged in active battles with 3 nations, he can still have 3 more wars declared on him for a total of 6. A lot of people do not realize this, and think that declaring war on multiple nations will shield them from other attacks, this is not so, and will lead to a huge amount of nations stacked up against him.
A recent example of this was Thors Empire when he nuked my nation, he declared war on 3 other NPO nations that were below my rank, thinking that he was going to fill up his war slots, and thus avoid a nuclear retalliation. He sure was in for a surprise when 3 more NPO nations declared on him, and one of them having a nuke fixed him up good. With 7 NPO nations attacking him, his nation made ZI in a matter of days.
Tactics:
Military strength and basic strategy
There are two kinds of fighters in Cybernations: those who like to throw big hordes at the enemy, and those who go for a more efficient military campaign. Those that throw big hordes at the enemy (and there are many in the alliance who love that kind of strategy) do not care about the economic costs and are happy just to beat the enemy's butt big time. This strategy can easily achieve that, but your own casualties will be great. If you do not care about losing a lot to destroy a lot, then this is the way to go. No calculations, just go for the biggest deployment possible without going into anarchy.
However, there are those who prefer to attack with minimal casualties on his or her side, and the maximum number of casualties on the enemy's side. This is much more cost effective, and can damage your opponent just as much as going all out in him, with the added element of humiliation by numbers.
Humiliation by numbers is just the perfect description for this. I have been in battles where we have lost just one man to the enemy's one hundred and eighty, and I have seen even greater butt kickings than that in the battalion reports.
So, what's the catch, you say? What's the shortcut to achieve this? Yes, I know you lot like the easy way out. And me being the nice person that I am, will oblige: attack with between 15 and 50% of your enemy's defending forces. There, that's it. If you know what I am talking about, you need not read any further. If, on the other hand, you are somewhat new to this, then you might want to stick around and find out just exactly what the hell I mean.
The short version of my explanation is that, if your enemy has, say, 100 soldiers, you attack with between 15 to 50 soldiers. Sounds like an awful disadvantage, but the truth is that this is set up in such a way the attackers get a bonus for sending small numbers. You might see defeats using this tactic that, when you actually analyze what just happened, you realise you did in fact win, and win big time. Let's take this battle report as an example:
QUOTE
Attacking Nation: Pancakes (President Garfield)
Attacking Soldiers: 89
Attacking Tanks: 0
Attacking Technology: 72.44
Attacking Land Area: 85.274
Attacking DEFCON: 1
Attacking Money: $9.80
Battle Odds: 30% Chance of Victory
Defending Nation:Diminix (Anthony)
Defending Soldiers: 841
Defending Tanks: 0
Defending Technology: 60.83
Defending Infrastructure: 408.48
Defending Land Area: 233.472
Defending DEFCON: 1
Defending Money:$0.00
Battle Odds:70% Chance of Victory
Battle Outcome: Defeat
Pancakes Casualties: 35 soldiers 0 tanks
Diminix Casualties: 274 soldiers 0 tanks
Battle Details:Your soldiers fought bravely and killed many enemy soldiers but were forced to retreat and were ultimately defeated in battle. Your forces fought bravely but were decisively defeated in battle. In your defeat your forces were still able to capture 6.479 miles of land from Diminix. They also destroyed 16.339 infrastructure within Diminix. They also stole 3.042 technology from Diminix. The value of your equipment abandoned in the battle was $0.98. Your forces looted $0.00 from the nation of Diminix.
The battle was a "defeat" to Pancakes, yet who in their right mind would qualify that as a defeat? 89 soldiers (about 10% of the defending forces) took on 841 and killed 274 while losing 35. The battle was a defeat because the percentage of casualties was greater for Pancakes than it was for Diminix, yet a very small force managed to cause a hell of a lot of damage. Ultimately, this is your goal, whether you send in big numbers or a small group. Your enemy won't be happy just because it was a "victory".
Now, when tanks come into play things get a bit more complicated. You see, soldiers are units of MS (Military Strength): that is, 1 soldier is 1 MS. But 1 tank does not equal 1 MS. In fact, you even have to distinguish between attacking tanks and defending tanks. Attacking tanks are 15 MS; defending tanks are 17 MS. The bottom line is this: when you want to calculate how many ground troops you want to deploy, you add the defender's soldiers MS with their tanks MS, and then do the same with your own troops to see how many to deploy.
When it comes to attacking you have four Ground Attack Options options as shown below-
This is a fairly new development and here is how they should be used-
Aggressive- You will loose more troops but also kill more. Best type to pick if u are going on a 'kamakazee' mission where u aim to loose but kill more troops than your opponent, as explained before. Also best type if you have much higher battle odds than ur opponent, you want to make use of those numbers!
Cautious- means less casualties but also less kills. Use when you have lower battle odds, but not too low between 59% to maybe 30% chance of vitory.
Planned- Similar effect to Cautious. If you are not assured victory go for one of these. And you can win with less troops and give staggering defeats!
Standard- This should be used if you have good battle odds, but dont want to chuck everything at them. Basically your stronger than ur opponent, but want to mininmise casualties. Good if ur odds are good, but u are low level and cant afford to replace soldiers, or might fall into anarchy if you loose too many.
Now for some strategic tips:
1. ALWAYS attack on DEFCON 1 for the highest efficiency.
2. Declare war as close to update as you can, to catch him unawares.
If we are talking major wars, then the order to attack will come close to update anyway, though not to catch him by surprise, but to do the...
3. Quadruple attack combo.
If you can wait for the update (midnight EST, 5 AM GMT), do this: attack just a couple of minutes prior to update, and then right after update. This gives you four attacks in succession (you can have no more than two attacks per day), making your enemy's forces considerably weaker. Add to that four CM strikes in the same manner and your enemy might wake up to smoldering ruins and a dead nation.
Note: you cannot do the quadruple attack every night, it has to be spaced to work.
4. CMs are to ground troops what ladies are to a gentleman: they always go first.
When your enemy has tanks, it's always wiser to launch CMs at him first to take some of them out and make the job eaiser for your troops. Also, your CMs lower his infrastructure, thus lowering his defending bonuses. If you are waging war with more than one nation (not recommendable if you are the one declaring war to and fro, but whatever rocks your boat), you can launch two CM attacks per battlefront, meaning that even if you can't attack more than twice a day with ground troops, at least you can send gifts to all your enemies in the form of rockets.
Of course, each CM costs $4000, so using them on all your battlefronts will take quite a chunk out of your economy.
5. The Silent Bomb - when your enemy decides to sit it out and not build up his army to avert future ground attacks, always check the Battle page anyway.
Even if you can't attack him, doing this decimates his infrastructure by 20% per day, and you didn't even have to press the pretty button; all you have to do is go to the Battle page and stare at it for a couple of seconds. So if, for example, he has 100 infra and you do this, it goes down to 80 levels of infra; the next day if he's still stupid enough to refuse to rebuild, doing it lowers his levels to 64 (20% of 80 is 16), and so on and so forth. This was implemented so that cowards had no place to hide.
Efficient warfare: managing war costs
Apocalyptica: Wars are pretty expensive, not only for the amount of damage inflicted on your nation but by the settings we must use to attack better, such as the DEFCON level, which reduces happiness and, in turn, citizen productivity. Here's a few tips to try to make that toll less damaging to your pocket.
1. Attack on DEFCON 1, collect taxes on DEFCON 5.
You can only reset once per day the DEFCON level, but that doesn't mean that when you are at war DEFCON must stay at 1. If you are able to be awake when update comes, so much the better. If you are on DEFCON 1, then attack and wait until the last possible moment before update to reset to DEFCON 5 and collect your money, then when update comes collect again and reset to DEFCON 1.
If you are on DEFCON 5, then collect taxes and reset to DEFCON 1. Leave your nation on DEFCON 1 until the last possible moment of the next day, then reset and collect (that would be the example above). Try not to leave your nation on DEFCON 5 for long, since an attack by the enemy can come precisely when your troops are at their least efficient (DEFCON 5). That's why I advice to leave on DEFCON 1 for as long as possible before resetting, giving your enemy ample time to attack when you are at the ready; if he has already attacked you and you are waging war with just one nation, then you can make the reset earlier. If you are waging war against several, then wait until all of them have attacked.
2. Take down one enemy at a time.
Don't start declaring wars to and fro, remember that you can only attack twice per day and if you declare on three nations then one at the least will be spared... but you most certainly will not. The NPO has the most nations out of any alliance, and at all ranges, which is why we can gangbang others but hardly ever they can gangbang us. Unless given an explicit order by the Emperor or the Councils, wage one war at a time.
3. Be realistic.
If your enemy has an army much greater than yours (which requires that you buy many more soldiers and make your population unhappy), don't attack them, unless a major war is on and there are no other targets within range. Same goes for technology disadvantages.
Final word
Coordination within each battalion is essential. We all know you are eager to fight for the glory of the brotherhood, but don't let that eagerness affect war efficiency. Whenever you are going to engage an enemy, check first if another nation declared war on him, and when. If this is the case, do not declare just yet, but wait a couple of days so that when you declare you effectively extend his warring period by a couple of days. This way we won't let them go into hippymode and escape our wrath. Blades are most responsible for coordinating this, but if you give them a hand so much the better.
I left out discussing nuclear strategy because there is no such thing - you just launch the nuke and wreak havoc. However, this weapon should be considered strictly retaliatory (in response to another nuclear attack) and not an offensive tool. The international community does not take kindly to nukes, and with good reason.
