Age of Origins Fighting Tactics

Strategy

Try to attack when you greatly outnumber the enemy using 1111 stagger formation as this will cause the least amount of losses if done correctly. For advanced targets who are far, bus or keep your fleets together and attack at the same time to avoid bubble traps. Use share in loss formation. When attacking small targets who are alone, try to use a staggered attack to minimize losses. When attacking big targets or in a hive, use a hard hit formation to sacrifice front line troops and save your back line. When attacking alone, you need to scout the enemy and make your hard hit fleet depending on their troops.

Stagger attack: strongest to weakest. Strongest person goes 5-7 seconds early to set up the battle. Each person after the first arrives 1-3s later (very important) so you replenish the front and middle line troops without having the enemy focus on your back line. If done correctly you will lose very little. Do not make the train too long or the battle will end and the weakest members will start a new fight. Watch your fleet and speed in if this happens. If you have a lot of people, reduce the split time or have most of the people go with the leader and then a few can stagger to replenish. Small mistakes mean large losses so please be precise and pay attention! Always watch your fleet and prepare to speed or recall.

Types and Counters

TA - basic team attack (including rally)

TD -basic team defense

STA -staggered team attack

ATA -advanced team attack

SATA -staggered advanced team attack

BT -Bubble Trap

A 1111 should always be used with a stagger attack.

A hard hit formation should be used with any non-stagger attack (rally included)

Your 4 team attacks should be 1111 STA, 1111 SATA, hard hit TA, hard hit ATA. 

Now you can use the common terms: TA, ATA, STA, SATA

Defeat a TA/ATA using a TD

Defeat an STA/SATA using a BT with TD arriving after last attacker

Counter speed attacks by building a large hive wall and using speed to defend

Getting Attacked

Sometimes people will attack you (those fools!) and you should make them regret it!

A couple of things to consider: Can you win? How many troops will you lose? Do you have reinforcements?

Your basic reaction should be shielding but you can consider fighting if you can hurt them.

If you are being speed attacked by a dozen cities, I’d just shield and maybe catch the last couple with a bubble trap if you think you can win.

If you are being attacked 1v1 and you think the enemy will kill some of your fleet, then you can send some of your lower tier troops away and keep hospital capacity in base (try to switch to medici, kingsley, bravestar and rockbell). You will still lose the battle but you won’t lose and troops and hopefully they will.

If you are in the hive and the enemy is attacking you in great numbers, you can try to get reinforcements and win the battle (or reduce losses, use the previous method of removing low tier troops). You can combine this with a bubble trap.a

If you don’t think you can win the defense without heavy losses, then it is better to shield.

If you are in frenzy, you can quickly rally all troops (or send doomsday) and let them hit an empty city.

Planning attacks

If you are on the map and click an enemy city you can share their location by hitting the symbol to the right of the coordinates. I will refer to this as a 'ping'. We ping enemy cities when we want to start an attack. During battle do not ping cities, only share scout reports or enter the city coordinates manually like "598:598" and then ask for a scout.

Try to scout and attack immediately. Do not send out too many scout fleets because you will wake the enemy and give them time to bubble or let them reinforce. Especially in a hive.

TA

After a scout is posted, the war general will ping the city and ask for times. You will set up your attack on the selected city with the correct formation but do NOT send. Remember the time of your fleet "6:07" and post in chat without symbols "607". After a minute, the person with the biggest number will be chosen as turtle and they will lead the attack. 

Say "go5" BEFORE starting your attack. This means you are going to attack in 5 seconds. Everyone else watches the battle screen. Make sure you attack according to the turtle time because mistakes happen and you do not want to follow the fool who goes early.

Turtle Method

Since waiting on everyone to post times and choosing a slowest person can take a stressful amount of time, you may want to use the turtle method. You can do a single TA (or look at the map and determine based on your team city locations and the enemy city locations) to figure out who will be your slowest person. Choose them to be the turtle. This makes attacks go faster as the general can ping a city and the turtle can attack as soon as their army returns. No need to post times between attacks. During the return trip from one attack you can scout, heal, and ping the next city for attack. Be quick.

ATA

If you can't pick a constant turtle, or everyone is very close, you may choose to fight off the present clock, the daily countdown timer in the top right of the screen which reads something like "16:05:30." This is also useful when you have a large number of players and need to keep chat clear for defense (think Chaos Land or global conquest). This is known as ATA. . This method requires everyone to be extra careful and quick at math but it is the best because you can easily set up your fake and stagger attacks. Practice is needed. You can get quite organized and creative.

Example ATA attack:

16:00:00

Example SATA attack:

16:00:00

PersonA 0, personB +5, Biff +7, personC +9, personD +11

Advanced teleport SATA attack with fakes:

16:02:30 teleport

16:00:00 3 attacks

598:598 fake

600:598 real

598:600 fake

Person 0, person +5, Biff +7, person +9, person +11

Save 2 fleets for defense

So if I teleport and find my attack time to be 55 seconds then I would need to add 7 and make my fleet leave when the present clock says 16:01:02. It is quickest to not use the alliance battle screen. Click the city and choose attack, click fleet, click go. Takes about 2 seconds

Age of Origins Advanced Tactics

Hiding Troops

While you are attacking with your main fleet, you cannot shield and your city will be vulnerable to counter-attacks. There are a couple of options to minimize losses or prevent any troops from being destroyed. If you have fewer troops than 5 times your fleet size, you can send your main attack and then effectively hide the remaining troops by setting them into a rally. Choose a dead city (c5 commander12345 account) or a nearby farm and set a fleet into a 30 minute rally. This removes the troops from defending your city. If you remove all of your troops (and don’t have zombies defending the city) then the enemy will only be able to take your resources and refugees. It is better to give these than let your troops be killed. You can keep some troops in the city to defend, but remember you have an attack out so beware of having your hospital fill and then troops being killed by surplus.

When you get to the later levels (c28 or c30? Someone help), the doomsday challenge will appear on the ruins. SAVE THIS. This is your get out of jail free card if you have many troops. You can send all troops (like tyrant of doom) to the doomsday challenge. You can send your entire fleet to the ruins and then recall to dodge incoming attacks. The enemy might get wise to this and try to catch your fleet on return, so use this time to bubble or have reinforcements coming (or be really really fast and resend the fleet)

Bubble trapping

A bubble trap is how you defeat an incoming stagger attack. If the enemy is sending multiple fleets but has bad timing, then you can bubble before the attack and have the first fleets bounce off the bubble. When you are sure you can win, send a scout to a nearby city to cancel your bubble and the last of the enemy fleets will engage in battle. You can zero an attacking fleet this way while not losing any troops. 

I had an alliance try this on my TA in another world where I am strong but I attacked last and ended up killing him in a 1v1 so don't bubble trap the wrong person! Make sure you will win the battle before removing the shield.

Self-replenishing timed defense

This is an advanced tactic and hard to perform successfully but is quite amazing if you can do it. Just like the stagger attack, the goal is to replenish the front and middle line during the attack to save your back line troops. When you see an attack coming you will quickly send out five fleets of fleet type number 6 as written above to reinforce neighboring cities. You will recall these troops to arrive after the battle starts, you may need to speed them. 

Depending on your city troops, try to have the first fleet arrive about 10 seconds after the start of the battle and then a couple seconds between the rest of the fleets. If you don't have many troops, this might be less than 10 seconds. If you have 10k shredder it will take longer for them to die. Testing is needed. If you are really prepared, you can also only keep a 1111 front/mid line in your city and send out 4 fleets of #6 and then send out your last fleet with all of your front/mid line troops. Then you can replenish 5 times and the last time will have all of your meat shield in it. This takes more preparation but makes it so you don’t have to guess on when to bring your fleets back. Just bring them back 6/8/10/12/14 seconds after the battle starts.

Extra

There is much uncertainty in several of these tactics, how do you figure out what you need to do? Attack level 3/4/5/6 commander accounts, have your farms attack you with level 1/2/5 troops, and practice during battle frenzy when there are no losses. Make your mistakes, test, learn, adapt.

SOS is the first important fighting skill at commander level 37. It allows you to attack once by yourself and have all of your killed units be converted to wounded instead. If your hospital fills, the extra wounded troops will die. You can help this by sending out your fleet with Morgan and then switching to Bravestar. It does not matter how many enemies reinforce but If an ally joins your attack, the SOS will be canceled. The goal of SOS is to find a 50/50 fight. If you are strong, then you want to fight multiple people. You will kill many and you will have a day of healing, then you can repeat. Some people like to use SOS as soon as it is available, which will save any gathering troops that try to get tile attacked or save you from forgetting to use it. The best way to use SOS is during the battle. If the battle starts and you realize the enemy withdrew most of their troops then you can kill the remainder, take a small loss, and save the SOS for another attack. Sometimes you will start an attack that seems easy and then many will reinforce, so pay attention and be ready to use it!

The next ability is Slaughter at commander level 45, which works the same way as SOS. You can and should stack them! Slaughter kills 10% of the wounded troops after the battle.

During alliance battles (KE, void, chasoland..) you will have many people online and fighting together and it's best to pick a single commander to lead the battle. Nobody else talks in the alliance chat unless told. Create an alliance chat so that members can still freely talk and not interrupt the commander. 

I also recommend making another chat so that people can post possible target locations. Again, you do not want to wake up the entire hive, so you should have a single person (whoever has the highest recon center) doing the scouts and posting them in the main alliance chat for the commander to review. The only thing that should be posted in the alliance chat is the coordinates of an incoming attack and THEN SPECIFY if the attack is real or fake! The less clutter in chat, the better the team can coordinate together.

During events which give points for kills, defending gives less than attacking. Unless your defense will beat the enemy by the point margin (2x for KE, 3x for VOID), it is better to not defend. You might win the battle but the enemy will still get more points. This is especially true if the enemy is using an SOS attack.

 Unfortunately the best way to prevent the enemy from taking points on a member who is unshielded or inactive is to kick them and attack them before the enemy does. For me, this is the hardest thing to do in the game, but is a great strategy for minimizing enemy points.

A lot of people will ask about mid range attack versus long range attack so let me clear this up. Mid range attack is for super spenders because it technically counters long range attack fleets but we focus on long range attack because it takes advantage of a broken battle system to minimize troop losses. Before the c38 upgrade about a year ago, the top troops were mid range so very end game players would have better stats sending mid range troops. Now that t12 troops have been released, the mid range power will eventually fall off (still good for the first year or so). During your chaosland/frenzy/duel/global/void wars early on, you will find massive mid range players who seem to destroy you. Mid range works well in battle with no troop loss but those players are spending a lot on heals. If you can spend a LOT and focus on melee expert, mid range expert, and mid range attack then you can quickly get to power spikes like c30 t10 rockets + c26 t9 tank or even better: c33 t11 gunner, c35 t11 storm troopers with c34 t11 tank. If you try to build this on a regular non-spending account, you will not be able to take advantage of STA and you will take more troop losses.

Fleet Speed Charts

Attack Chart

Refer to the excel chart below where I have many dead city scouts posted. Put your City or Hive location where it says “900, 900” and then put this formula into excel for distance

=SQRT(($L$2-L4)^2+($M$2-M4)^2) where L2 is 900 X and M2 is 900 Y

Fleet time can also be determined if you’re a little clever.

Copy the formula down and you can change your starting location and sort by distances.

This was my scout/attack sheet for 439 when I was clearing the world for void. I scouted from my hive but this would take too long to burn from the hive. You can use this to pick your teleport spots. Test some coordinates into the formula and see which set gives you the closest enemies.