Getting Started
Getting Started
THINGS TO KNOW
- If you have questions post them in General Mail, click on 'Mail' on the left hand menu and then click on 'General Mail'
- Of course, choose a race (Minotaurs,Trolls,Ogres and Wood Elves are easy races to play; Vampires and Werewolves are hard to play and beginners should not try to attempt to play them if they don't know the game properly). A wonderful way to learn the game is to use the test server(On home page where you first log in, change Game server drop down to Test Server the same log in information is used for both).
- It is absolutely critical that you establish a basic economy. Without gold you cannot build or defend your land. Market Places and Coliseums provide more gold revenue. You start the game with 10k population and 30 pieces of a Market Place which is enough to cover all your starting population. First thing most players do is destroy your starting vaults, armories, and some also destroy starting outpost and guard towers to get more free land. Also you will want to sell or destroy your starting war machines. Second it's best to build 23 coliseums in your first turns that will give you enough coliseum pieces to cover your starting 10k pop. From there its a good idea to build the last free land you have into barracks so you can start to hire some more troops without losing them.
- Barracks - House your troops, can check build screen to see how many they hold, without enough housing for your troops they will leave your kingdom, these are very important.
- Searching for land will return diminished results as you gain more and more land, that's why attacking is better way to gain land later on(depending on race not until you reach between 1500-3000 land).
- Training Fields - train your troop % its good to have enough for your total fighters, rangers, archers, thieves and assassins( dont try to cover all your troops in beginning, and note mages/clerics you do not need training fields for them instead cathedrals train clerics and mage towers train mages).
- Vaults protect your gold - you can see how much is protected on your Building screen, under Economy part.
- Know the race you play - read up on it on Wiki, or ask questions in General Mail or Chat.
- Know the race you attack :)
- Have fun and if you have any questions, post in General Mail or ask in chat - but do ask!
- Remember, you can make new kingdoms in Test Server to practice - it is an ideal place to try out different strategies and test your races(you can create a lot of kingdoms in Test Server, you will want to make them in the universe of Sarah you can change your kingdom all around in that universe under setup kingdom option). Look through the help resources before asking a question in GM (SM chat can be a good place to ask questions sometimes. if no responds, type in /moo). If you do ask a question in GM don't expect an instant response. Except named few, people tend to be very friendly towards newcomers, so do not hesitate to ask questions. SM is a great game, and one worth learning.
First 200 turns
By Dogma
I'm gonna try to give you couple of pointers on what you should do when you start your kingdom. I will also give you some of the goals you should try to work towards. These goals are very simple and you will learn as the time goes by that you can actually achieve these goals very fast, using less turns than you might be doing now. The more advanced you will become the better you will become in maximizing your land usage.
START OF **For vampires and werewolves - read 'Things to know' section first before reading this section**
When you create a kingdom the first thing everyone will recommend is for you to wait till it has accumulated 200 turns (in order maximize your kingdom into best shape). You can move straight away with 150 turns, but it is general belief that you will not achieve as strong of a kingdom as if you have 200 turns.
Once your kingdom has been created and you have decided to move then you should know couple of things. The first thing you need to concentrate is getting your economy running because - no economy = no gold = no troops = no defense/attack power = no land.
ECONOMY
Economy of a kingdom consists of population, market places and coliseums the populations is using and finally farms that feed your population and troops.
When you start off you will have 100,000 gold. It might seem a lot of gold and you might be tempted to hire troops, but don't - all in good time.
First thing most players do is destroy your starting vaults, armories, and some also destroy starting outpost and guard towers to get more free land. Also you will want to sell or destroy your starting war machines. Then build 23 coliseums pieces which is enough to cover your starting population. To check how much population is covered by market places/coliseums check the information under the building screen. It looks something like this :
Economy:
Protection for 0 gold.
Market places enough for 10,000 (10,000) population.(The first number it shows you is what your actual building will cover, the second number in () is your current population)
Coliseums enough for 11,153 (10,000) population.
Estimated income for next turn is 36,418 gold.
So you have covered your initial population with coliseums, and look at that you are actually making some gold:) Time to expand your kingdom! As you are making excess of gold you should start hiring laborers. Laborers help you to build your buildings faster. Whenever you have some extra gold between land searches or building hire laborers. There is a neat trick to find out how many laborers you need to build more buildings in one turn - you start off with capability to build 1 village per turn, insert number 2 into the field click build - the game will tell you the number of laborers you will need to build 2 buildings per turns (insert 3 and same thing happens and so on). So aim for those numbers. As you generate more gold, keep checking how many laborers you need to build more and more villages per turn. You can check this for any type of building this way. However you have to remember that you have to house those laborers, thus make sure you build barracks whenever necessary in order to house them (unhoused troops will leave)!!! Continue building villages, market places, coliseums, barracks and farms.
Here is your first goal.
120 Villages = 10,000 population (aka 10k pop)
30 Market Places = Covers 10k pop
23 Coliseums = Covers 10k pop
Enough Farms to support your population and troops/laborers.
Enough Barracks to house your troops laborers.
As you start generating quite a lot of gold you should also hire rangers, which help you to search more land faster. Continue building up your kingdom. For every race it varies how many laborers you will need, but you should aim 5k laborers 5k rangers for your first two goals (these are just some simple numbers, as you get more advanced you'll learn that each race usually has their own number of needed laborers and rangers)
Your 2nd goal should be
180 Villages = 20k pop
60 Market Places = covers 20k pop
40 Coliseums = covers 20k pop.
- For races who can build well, it is possible to get up to 30-40k population with supporting market places and Coliseums
When you start nearing to the end of your turns (50-30 turns left or so) you should start hiring your troops and start building barrack spaces and out posts ( your defense buildings ). Try to always hire troops that you have good base %.
Fighters - Have Medium Absorption and Damage. Are used for military & raiding
Rangers - are your explorers, used to search land, maps food, the unknown, help to protect against covert operations. Are used for military & raiding
Clerics - Have high Absorption and very low Damage. Are used for military & bombardment Defense
Mages - Are support units that give their % equally to other troops, mages divide their power evenly among all troops.(ask for help on this one or read up more on wiki, mages are very important)
Archers - Have high Damage and very low Absorption. Are used for military & Bombardment Offense
Thieves - used for looting and as a defense against looting combined with rangers. Are used for raiding, if there is unprotected gold on target kingdom they will loot certain portion of it
Assassins - Have high Damage and very low Absorption. Are used for covert operations and as defense against covert operations combined with rangers. Also fight very well in military attacks.
If you have achieved this, then you have managed to master the first steps of building up your kingdom :) congratulations.
Your future goals is to expand your land and your kingdom, either by searching land or attacking for it and building up your economy. I'm sure many more questions will come up, but the first lesson has been learned.
Indepth Help guide
By Assaram
This is a basic guide for new players, nothing more. I took some important basic concepts of SM and tried to explain them, translating the wiki into something newbies can wrap their head around and get good results from. Several things mentioned in it are more my personal style, I didn't include other useful strategies other players use because it simply would be too long. On to the crazy.
Ok, some tips. First off, I'll cover troop ratios. Good troop ratios are very important in SM. When you defend, you want to have your dmg and absorbtion about equal, and if anything, just a little heavier on the absorb side. For attacking, you want the same thing, except if anything you want your dmg to be a little heavier. The reasons I say this is because your overall combat performance is determined by (dmg) x (absorb). The more balanced, the better off you are. But when attacking, you won't break unless both your (dmg) x (absorb) is greater than your opponents' and your dmg is greater than their absorb. That is the reason for the "if anything", higher dmg when attacking and higher absorb when defending. Obviously, you have to take note of their troop ratios off spy/scry reports if you're attacking. If they have little dmg but a lot of absorb, it will probably be easier to have your dmg * absorbtion greater than theirs, but that doesn't matter if your dmg isn't higher than their absorb. You will bounce if its not.
For military attacks, the following is a list of the troops and their dmg and absorb values. Dmg is the 1st number and absorb is the 2nd.
Fighters: 1/1 Rangers: 0.8/0.6 Clerics: 0.15/2 Archers: 2/0.15 Thieves: 0.8/0.8 Assassins: 2/0.05
Fighters, rangers and thieves either have equal dmg/absorb or have close to equal. Because of this, as long as your clerics = archers + assassins, you should have a fairly balanced dmg/absorb.
Ok, the second part of troop ratios. Prep defense. If you want a nice balanced army, not only is your overall dmg and absorb taken into account. You have to defend against different prep methods so they don't tear you up. Below is a list of what troops defend against what preps.
Fighters - mostly defend against raids and summon spells.
Rangers - mostly defend against covert ops such as looting, spying, assassinations. rangers housed in guard towers have their effectiveness increased.
Clerics - very important for prep defense. defend against quite a few spells, including death-type spells. help on most all prep types to reduce casualties.
Mages - also very important prep defenders. defend against tons of spells, and of course, at least assist if not fully count towards most all prep types since they attach themselves to your other combat troops.
Archers - mostly defend against bombardments.
Thieves - mainly help defend against covert ops like looting, spying, and help assassins in sin defense.
Assassins - help defend against spying and are big defenders against assassinations.
Scholars - primarily defend against the spell Poison Water.
Laborers - primarily defend against Fire spells.
Now, a lot of a kingdom's potential to have a balanced army is influenced by what race they are. In an OM uni, obviously you can buy or contribute to what you need by simply buying it. Sometimes you may have no choice but to hire your own crappy troops if the OM has none or they are too expensive. An ogre at the start of the universe having a nice balanced army is laughable for obvious reasons. They will basically have all fighters of course. You see my point.
A lot of kingdoms in SM are landfat a lot. Being landfat is bad, unless special circumstances say otherwise. If you want to break people easier, spend less slots on preps, get more land, and bounce more people...a big part of that is cramming in as many troops as possible on your land, for your race. Wood elves, centaurs, etc have ranger farming, there are food spells for a lot of races that have at least decent mana, and there are certain things you can do with buildings to help you cram in more troops on your land. Buying food on the OM is obviously another thing you can use to help.
For a race that has fairly easy access to mages either in the form of fairly cheap bought ones or good % hired ones...Mage Towers are extremely important. They single-handedly allow you to have considerable more troops on your land. The reason is that Mages do not need outposts/guard towers to cover them when defending. If you're a mana race (like DE, lep, sprite, HE), there is virtually no reason to NOT run with a 1:1 mage ratio to your other combat troops. Essentially, half your combat troops will be mages, the other half everything else. The mana races I mentioned hire good percent mages that are easy to train up and are usually going to be better percent than anything else you have. Some of the hybrid races, like Wood Elves (hire at 200%) hire decent mages but not great mages, so unless you can acceptably supplement your mage percents with higher percents from the OM, you may not want to go with a 1:1 ratio. Maybe have 50-75% mages to everything else, until you can buy some nice mages on the OM that you can afford in bulk. For Mage Towers, its usually a good idea if you do NOT tear down your mage tower pieces unless you absolutely have to. I am saying this mostly for mana races, since their build mod isn't so hot and mage towers are one of the tougher buildings to build. Also, if you don't tear down your mage towers, you train your mages every single turn and don't have to worry about spending relatively considerable turns building them back up when you move. In addition, when you study you will already have at least a good portion of your mages needed. Less troops needed for study = good.
Now, I will visit spells. First off, some of the basic spells I have found handy personally: Create Food, Scrying, Healing, Fasting, Poison Water, Gaea's Presence, Ressurection, Frenzy, Animate Dead, Mana Sap, Mana Drain. I didn't include any pure offensive damage spells in this list and didn't include any barriers. Those will be up to you to decide which ones you want to study and when. Personally, I hardly ever run with barriers since that's not my style of play. I depend on my army to defend me and don't waste turns studying to get barriers specifically. If I have a barrier up, either an ally has cast it on me, I am trying something very risky I expect to go south, or I am simply screwed regardless.
I also didn't mention the spells of create weapons, create armor, and enchant. For a DE, WE, HE, or another race with good mana that also uses weapons/armor at 1, these can be pretty important to pull out every ounce of strength you can on your given landbase. Basically, I will buy 1 of each armor and weapon from the OM once they get to a decent percentage (i usually start around 3k% or so in a normal uni if I started in the beginning). Then I will enchant them up as high as I can affordably take turns to do so. Once I have my 6k% (or whatever) enchanted weapons/armor, I will use create weapons and create armor to make more. Weapons/Amor used to be a little too score-heavy per their effectiveness IMO, but for quite awhile now, they have been very close to troops score-wise. They will need armories to protect them, but fortunately armories don't need many pieces for the numbers they protect. If you're wanting to reasonably cram as many troops (combat-score) as possible on your land (especially later on in a reset), weapons and armor are great for the races that use them well. Of course, upgrading your weapons and armor to higher percents is a good idea if you can do so.
Now, on to study. For most races, you will want to take your study runs as just that: a study run, as opposed to an occasional running study. Get familiar with Stein's study calc to see how much land you need for your next study run. It will tell you how many mages/scholars, schools, mage towers, and castles you need to study to what you want. I prefer naked study runs if at all possible. Naked runs are made easier if you are running 1:1 mages already. That way you can sell all your combat troops except for mages and hire/buy the mages/scholars you need for your study. A lot of times if I can do so, I'll just run with mages (for combat troops) and they will jump considerably in percent by the time I'm done with my study. That training while studying will help ease the fact that you very likely have lower percent troops for everything else. However, sometimes it just isn't smart to sell all your troops and study naked. For example, your fighters or clerics will take a huge hit if you sell them, don't sell them. Mix and match exactly how many of what troops you have to sell based on your current situation, the OM, your current troop percents, food situation, etc.
Back to defending for a bit. Housing and protection cushions are important. Meaning, you have more barracks/mage towers and outposts/guard tower housing than you currently need for your troops. This is because you don't want your troops to be unhoused and unprotected should an attacker knock down buildings. I set up my cushions based on what race I am, what troops I have, who I've pissed off lately, impending retals, etc. If you just got done giving 10 retals to an ogre, there's a great chance he will raid the crap out of you, and if he has an alliance, there just might be a crapload of buildings being torn down. Under ordinary day-to-day circumstances with no special situation, (as a mana race) I like to have roughly 55-70% cushions. What I mean by this is take your troops in question and divide that by your appropriate housing. (total housing or protection) If anything, I like to have a bigger cushion for housing than protection. This is because (considering I have healing or ress), if they do knock down a good chunk of buildings, I hopefully will still have a small cushion for housing. I don't have to worry about building housing before healing/casting ress. As you know, more mana is required to heal/ress the same amount of troops the longer (turns you have taken after they went in the buffer) they have been in your buffer.
Keep track of your food harvested/food consumed next turn if you aren't sure. Few things hurt more or are more anger-inducing than starving yourself. Know your enemies. Spy/scry reports are huge to see what's going on with their kingdom. Take note if any opponent is in an alliance. Know their alliance mates if possible. Try to estimate opponents' turncounts so you know roughly how many turns they have left when that might be a good thing to know. If in an OM uni, use it well. Sell troops, etc for good prices when you can, and also try to reduce the impact selling troops has on your troop percents, if possible. Remember the importance of having a balanced army if your race permits it, in regards to working the OM.
Prep as well as you can. When looking over a potential opponent's spy/scry report, make sure you take note of any weaknesses they have if you are looking to prep. Sometimes you may not be able to do anything to take advantage of a noted weakness, such as your race, current troops, spells studied, etc. But sometimes you can tear them up. Also take note of their housing and protection cushions. If you can unhouse troops, they don't fight while still giving the same score. If you have horrible mutiny, you could theoretically attack someone twice your score and tear them up if their cushions and everything else is just right. Take note of their race, their current gold. While you are mostly shooting blind, taking note of their current economy study might give you insight to exactly what theyve done studying. Use their race, turncount, etc to make an estimate. Maybe you can't unhouse them but if you can un-protect some of their troops or they already have very low protection (outposts/gt), take advantage of that as well. You may not have to prep them at all if they have very low or no protection. It's simply your army vs theirs.
If you are a race with horrible mutiny, taking advantage of bad cushions, retals, and taking advantage of prep weaknesses are your primary options in gaining land. (for most low-mutiny races) Obviously, if you are a mino, WE, etc that can gain good land by searching for it. (depends on your landbase)...do that if you have to.
Joining an alliance with players that know what they're doing is huge. If you want to learn, that would be a good idea.
(new players, please refer to the first bits of advice, this is a little of date for now)
Ideal Strategy for a defensive setup
Okay, I know that everyone who is new to the game is sick of being hit so hard by other people, and are wondering "why is my gold always stolen" or "how does he keep breaking me?". Well, here is a basic idea of how to have a decent and manageable defensive setup.
- First things first are the troop setups.
---Fighters--- It's always a good idea to keep fighters on hand. I have found that 35% - 40% the number of clerics you have are good for a decent defense. They are well rounded, provide balanced defense and offense, and are crucial for protecting against the beast spells notably the summon dragon spell, and raids.
---Rangers--- Though they often seem to be useless unless exploring, rangers in guard towers can provide excellent defense against covert operations. 10% the number of clerics you have is a good amount, so long as they are covered by guard towers. They also help defend against some of the beast spells, and raids.
---Clerics--- The big number modifiers for defense. These guys should be your main arsenal, and should occupy approximately 20% - 30% of your total available barrack space. Clerics defend against many death spells.
---Archers--- It's always a good idea to have archers on hand when defending. Not only do they increase your damage, of course, but they provide damage in a bombardment. A kingdom with no war machines or archers is a prime target to be bombed to nothing, as the attacker suffers no losses. Archers should number between 30% - 40% the number of clerics you have.
---Thieves--- Thieves really aren't necessary unless you can't cover many rangers with guard towers. They defend against theft.
---Assassins--- I see so many people leave these out of their defense, it sickens me. Thieves do not defend against assassinations! Keep about 20% the number of clerics you have, and you will have a decently protected kingdom from assassination attempts. Especially when combined with rangers in guard towers.
---Mages--- The most optimal number of mages to keep is easily found by the following method: FIGHTERS + RANGERS + CLERICS + ARCHERS + THIEVES + ASSASSINS (NOT War Machines / laborers!)
So pretty much, 45% of your total number of troops should be mages... (unless you're carrying WMS)
At the very least, you should have mages to cover all the troops associated w/ each type of physical prep: raids (fighters + rangers + thieves), bombards (clerics + archers), and covert (rangers + thieves + assassins).
That is, if you've got 40k Fighters, 80k clerics, 40k archers, and 40k assassins, you would want 40k mages at the very least. That way, on a raid, you've got your 40k fighters all backed up, against assassinations/loots, your 'sins are backed up, and on bombs, the mages split their power between the clerics and archers (it's OK to be quite absorb-heavy for bombard-defense, so long as you've got a little 'return fire' of your own).
---Laborers--- You need these guys if you have a war machine defense. Laborers also protect against fire. Keep a moderate number of these (20% of your cleric amount).
---Scholars--- Another troop type that is often neglected. Scholars protect against poison water, which can be devastating when combined with animate dead on a kingdom. Keep about 10% of your cleric numbers.
- Next is building setup. I will concentrate on the basics first.
---Barracks--- You must have these! It's always a good idea to have more barracks than you do troops...
---Guard Towers--- Build enough to cover your rangers. You really don't need any more than that.
---Outposts--- Build as many of these as you can. It's a good idea to have more outpost room than you do troops...
Useful Information
- When you have 50,000 population you should also have 50 Coliseum Parts. This will increase your income by alot.
- Don't retaliate on kingdoms much larger than you unless you know you can destroy them(you can't). This gives them the chance to "rape" you without restriction.
- Always have more Barrack space and Outpost space than you need. Double what you require is the best bet, but it can be very hard to accomplish. The idea is to still have enough Outpost and Barrack space after someone has trashed your buildings before they attack.
- Other strategies for the first 200 turns include more use of Coliseums, and the usage of the spell Aphrodisia. Play around if you like... The test server univereses (except sarah, not sera, sarah) allows multies, so go ahead and test there.
- Check prices on the Open Market. See what is really selling. Food is quite often insanely priced... if you are a race that produces alot of food and there is a demand, sell it every time your Graneries fill!
- Mages add their percentage to other troops, so a ratio of 1 to 1, One Mage to every other Fighting Troop in preferrable.
- Assassins are like archers in battle. (Nice) Thieves are like titties in battle. (Pretty but not very useful)
- When you finally feel brave enough to attack people you should try and get a spy/scry report first so that you know what you are getting into. Some races will not be able to do this and must attack blindly at low scores. (Ogres, Trolls)
- Vampires have a very different starting strategy that the other races, one in which they spend their 200 turns very aggressively. You should ask someone else for a guide on that race. The general rules for having a strong economy are still useful though.
- Werewolves play half life Vampires and half like regular races down low, I think. You should ask someone else for a guide on them. The general rules for having a strong economy are still useful though.
- VERY IMPORTANT: Never have useless buildings. Keep full buildings and no more. I hate it when people do this, and almost everyone does. If you have 4 Castles, 44 Graneries and 102 Farms, then destroy 4 Castles, 4 Graneries and 2 Farms. Only use full buildings.
Links
Race Specific First 200 Turn run
- Explicite First 200 Turn runs are written for this races: