Empires & Puzzles: Alliance War strategies

Basic information on alliance war can be found here
If you are unsure about the specifics of alliance war, please do read the information from Empires and puzzles wiki on alliance war.
Hero analysis specific for Alliance war here.

Alliance war Strategy Part 1: Defensive strategies

Tank Color Coordination

Many top alliances choose to coordinate the color of their tanks. The reasoning for shared tank color is to counter a common raid/war offensive strategy of doubling up attackers of the strong color against an opposing tank (e.g. bringing 2 blue heroes to fight Ares, 2 purple heroes to fight Guinevere, etc.) Should opponents attempt to double these colors, they will quickly run out of them in the first few rounds. This leaves the second round with no heroes of the strong color and the tanks will be more difficult to beat.

Fully coordinated defense team colors

Some alliances fix a Dark / Fire / Green / Blue / Holy formation.

There are both drawbacks and benefits to this strategy.

The beneficial part about this strategy is that it often forces your attackers to quickly use up a series of heroes for their attack.

The drawback is that not everyone has the optimal hero for the right positions. As an example, some team members might be forced to put heroes like Guinevere or Kunchen into the Flank, or Wing positions where they are unable to excel.

Choosing the optimum defensive strategies.

The key consideration behind choosing a defensive strategy for alliance war is simply two things.

1. Viable heroes that your teammates have.
2. Current Meta Defense/Offense Meta.

Alliance War Meta

Metas are always changing. 2020 has brought out many new heroes for all us to play with. There are new heroes in Seasonal events, season 3 Valhalla, Hero costumes for us to test and experiment with.

Ultimately, it boils down to the depth of heroes in the strong & weak elements.

The meta for the period of April 2020 to June 2020, will see a domination of Nature & Dark tanks.

• The general offensive power of holy and fire are slightly weaker.
• Ice has a few viable tanks, but the tanks are strictly weaker than Nature & Dark tanks
• Holy will not see a resurgence in popularity as the tank of choice. There are too many dark heroes that work very well in the offense.

Alliance war Strategy Part 2: Attacking strategies

Attack in waves

The key to winning wars is to have the highest average score/hit (assuming all hits are utilised). In order to do so, your objective would therefore to be able to have as many one flag kills as possible. In top alliances, one flag kills are easily obtainable as they have a deep bench of fully leveled 5 star heroes that can take down opponents easily.

But what if you don’t have such a deep roster?

Here’s a war strategy that you can utilize:

“Farming” the weakest opposing teams as many times as possible, while minimizing the number of times that you have to take on strong opponent teams.

At start of war (0-2hrs) target the 5-10 weakest opponents,
After first wave of respawn (8-10hrs) take the same teams down again.
After second wave of respawn (16-18hrs) take down the same weak teams again.
After killing all weak enemies, proceed to target all other enemies, as you will no longer be able to farm the weak teams again, until you reset the board (by killing all opponent teams).

The benefits of doing this is to minimize attempts to take down strong teams, which will most likely take up multiple flags.

We can create different scenarios to see how this strategy plays out.
The following assumptions are made:
30 member alliance with all flags fully utilised (180flags)
Tough team takes an average of 1.8 flags to take down.
Weak teams takes 1 flag to take down
Each take down is worth 53 points.

We can compare 2 strategies.
1. All out attack to reset as many times as possible.
2. Farming weak teams.

In scenario 1,
To fully kill all 30 players would require 10 flags + (1.8*20opponents = 36 flags) = 46 flags.
That would give you 3 full resets for 1590 points + 42 flags remaining.
Assuming you take the 10 weakest team out for 10 flags for 530 points
and another 23.3 teams (42flags/1.8flags). That would give you
Total score = 1590*3 + 530+1237 = 6537 total score
Average score would be 36.32 per flag

In scenario 2, where we attack in waves
First wave – 10 flags – 530 points
Second wave – 10 flags – 530 Points
First reset – 46 flag for 30*53 = 1590 points
Second reset – 46 flag for 1590 points
Third reset – 46 flag for 1590 points
Final Board – 22 flags remaining, points = (53*10 + 53*12/1.8) = 883 points
Total flags = 180
Total points = 530+530+1590+1590+1590+883= 6713 total score

As you can see, farming the weakest team strategy edges out other strategies by a slight margin, how big the margin is doesn’t really matter. A win is a win.

Dedicated Clean up teams

Another way to maximize points per hit is to have your players dedicated “clean up hits”. Clean up hits are secondary attacks after primary attacks which have failed to SSK (Single Shot Kill) the defending team.

The idea here is to force players without many strong heroes to reserve their weaker heroes to do clean up.

As an example, player A has 10 Fully leveled legendary heroes, 10 Fully leveled Epic heroes and the rest are partially leveled heroes of different rarity.

It would be safe to assume that he will be able to take on 2 to 4 SSK and will fail to SSK the remaining 2 attacks. In this case, Player A last 2 hits will be dedicated to do clean ups, instead of targeting fresh opponent teams.

The reason for this is that attacking with an extremely weak team often yields subpar results. It is highly likely that they will not be able to even bring the enemy Tank down. (yielding a 5-15 points on attack).

Alliance war: Individual Strategies

Alliance War: Setting up a defense team

Firstly, a few rules to follow

1. Follow instructions from your allies (Attack timings, defense color coordination etc)
2. Highest total team power is not the strongest defense team
3. Most effective defense varies because of the constant rotation between, Arrow attack, Field Aid and attack boost.

Setting up your defense team

1. Choose your tank.
2. Consider the overall strategy of your defense team based on the support that you will receive.

Alliance war: Defending in Field Aid

Heroes that restrict healing affect field aid.

You will want a difficult to break Tank + Flank combo, with snipers or damage dealers on your wings. This will create a “war of attrition” whereby you slowly whittle down your foes and hope that your snipers in your wings manage to take out their heroes one by one.

Alliance war: Defending in Arrow Barrage

Each activation of the arrow barrage deals damage equal to 25% of their current health to the attacking team. It is very tough to out heal arrow barrage with only 1 healing hero.

Therefore, it is expected that your attackers will run out of healers quickly and will not bring enough healers to the fight. You will want to capitalize on such effects.

Have a tank + Flank combination that is difficult to kill, and let the arrow barrage slowly whittle them down to the point where snipers on your wings can easily take them down one by one.

Additionally, another thing that can be considered is that your opponents will bring 2 healers to the fight, and will not have enough firepower to take you down.

Alliance war: Defending in Attack Boost

Attack boost cannot be dispelled, and can be stacked with any attack boost with your own heroes.

Capitalize on this effect by having fast heroes that deal AOE damage, or strong snipers that can Single Shot kill enemy heroes.

Read more about setting up your teams for raid defense here.

Alliance War: Taking your attacks

1. Consider the enemy support
2. Consider the enemy defensive strategy.
3. Always go in strong. (at least a 110% chance of a win). Never cut corners, or try to save heroes for the next flag. The reason for this is that there will always be clean ups. If you do not have enough heroes to go for a guaranteed kill, wait for a mistake to be made and go for a clean up.
   
   It is the most point efficient and will really go a long way.

Read more about setting up your teams for offensive raids here.

That’s all for alliance war!

Good luck & have fun. May Athena/God of war bless you in your upcoming battles.

Share all these tips and tricks with the rest of your alliance. Alliance war is won as a team, not as individuals.

Thank you for reading through all the way here.

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