After writing Waza’s Journey I went to the database and searched for the fleets that the been trough more battles. When a fleet is destroyed we erase it from the DB, so we have this data but we don’t have the name of the fleet. Here is the information per fleet and the owner, of all fleets that survived ten or more battles:

• Ashis, 21
• Ashis, 17
• Agni, 16
• Dark_Websterr, 16
• LaCrux, 14
• Eladamri, 13
• James, 13
• xpto1051, 13
• edisms, 13
• kulen, 13
• JBarata, 12
• rgcaldas, 12
• dragongr80, 11
• Sasuke, 11
• Mawhrin-Skel, 11
• Ashis, 11
• Yo-kun, 11
• stoneage fan, 10

Waza was a fleet I created a long time ago 3 months ago and it has a great story to tell. She was destroyed yesterday against a mighty Queen, just after an epic victory. Week and without reinforcements, there was nothing left for Waza but to destroy as many of the coward enemies as it could. After the battle ended I went to see the battle history of this fleet. This fleet was created before the Relic Wars and got a pretty nice journey.

• Against Ashis - 07/04/2009 - After leaving System Lords, Ashis started to attack me. He raided many of my planets and I had to create fleets to patrol them. Waza was created at this time to protect my borders and was sent to battle against Ashis minions. It was an average fleet: 810 Worm, 56 Spider, 150 HeavySeeker, 120 Destroyer, 386 Stinger and some lights

• Against Ashis - 07/09/2009 - After destroying the first Ashis fleet, Waza went to the next. Ashis didn’t have strong fleets and he was suffering some losses

• Against Ashis - 07/16/2009 - Easy win

• Against Ashis - 07/16/2009- Another easy win

• Against Ashis - 07/20/2009 - Another easy win… this is getting boring…

• Against Basaf - 07/28/2009 - Another easy win while patrolling my borders

• Against Danceman - 08/03/2009 - Yet another easy win… this will get interesting, I swear!

• Against Danceman - 08/04/2009 - Yet another easy win…

• Against Danceman -  08/05/2009 - Another easy win, all these battles against Danceman were to slow me down to get to their relics. It provide me with many bounty points

• Against Punisher - 08/07/2009 - The battle I described earlier here

• Against Punisher - 09/24/2009 - The final battle… after an epic battle, Punisher cowardly attacked my unprotected Waza and got the win

Humz… When I saw that Waza had a spree of 11 wins, this sounded more interesting. After all many of the battles were very easy. Even so, my brave spartans made a great job against all the thugs on the universe!

Some time ago I wrote When the numbers and the skill aren’t enough, a battle analysis where I had the bigger power but lost because my opponent was smart and had a greater fleet to strike me down. This battle taught me several things: the Levyr light units aren’t very helpful when the opponent has Raptor and/or Samurai; Worms are a great weapon against Raptors, Samurais, and against light cannon fodder.

I got another match under the same circumstances. I had a lot of raw power (700 Worm), but my opponent had the best zone control units (80 Eagle, 50 Kahuna, Raptors and Samurai). Also, my fleet has just finished a battle and I had very few light units. So I split a lot of worms to use as cannon fodder.

This time I had the Destroyer, and I thought that it would make a difference. But it did not: destroyers are very powerful, but hard to put on the center of the action. And my enemy’s Eagle and Kahuna made sure that the Destroyer would not be a problem. But the Worms did their job, and I was able to take the strategic advantage from my adversary. It took a lot of patience and hard work, but I was able to win, with this new Worm Swarm  strategy.

On my own personal wars I’m getting a lot of interesting battles.  The other day I was attacked by another player form Death Squadron, with a fleet far greater than mine. He isn’t an experienced player and I got a massive victory. However, I was very afraid to loose the battle when I saw his deploy. He made a great firing squad deploy:

As you can see, he has 6 long range units on the six central squares. And he can easily put into play the kamikaze menace on the sides of the board (as he did). When fighting against a firing squad we are usually left without the front cannon fodder. Having kamikazes heady to strike is a great option for heavy and quick damage.

The other great aspect of this deploy, is the Doomer combo behind the Firing Quad units. Normally, we use medium and fast combat units to break the firing squad. And that types of units have low range, meaning that they could easily become a pray of the Doomer. This was a great Firing Squad deploy and my opponent could easily get the win if he played it well. He could have destroyed my medium units with the Kamikaze or with the Doomer. Luckily for me, I won, and this is just another example of how to break a Firing Squad.

Early today I suffered a devastation on three planets and a fleet. At this moment we don’t provide much information on the messages, so the only thing I knew was that someone fired a devastation somewhere that damaged a fleet and three planets from my empire. This direct attack cost me 50 low level combat units. What a waste.

But that’s not all… a couple of minutes ago I was attacked by several players on several planets and a relic This seams to be the second part of a planned attack against me. I even got attacked by a player that I never saw and that isn’t on any of my enemy alliances! I think it’s just a coincidence.

Spending so much time and resources planning an attack against me isn’t very smart. The only justification is that I could be more fragile after a previous journey. These thugs did a major mobilization to destroy just a couple of combat units. They might raid me, but fortunately for me, I spend all the resources that I need, and those that I don’t, I put yesterday on the alliance’s storehouse. So, all this attack will take time and resources from them, and it won’t do me much harm.

War is mainly about economy. When the System Lords engaged on the Relic Wars the objective was clear: win relics, gain income. This attack’s objective may be to weaken me, but I guess it won’t work as expected. Even so, I’m very proud to make my enemies gather like this just to strike me. I’m the Special One! You mess with my family, I kick! 

Att.

Alexandre M. Semmer

I’ve been building up a master fleet to attack my enemies on the Relic Wars. I had a Queen and I spent a couple of weeks building the following fleet:

• ~550 Spider; 1550 Worm; 200 Stinger; 105 Heavy Seeker;  350 Seeker; 70 Raptor; 36 Eagle; 35 Vector and of course: the Queen

This is a very powerful fleet, even more powerful at my hands. As you can imagine, I bought at the auction house the Vector, Eagle and Raptor, to balance the fleet (considering Levyr weaknesses). They were supposed to give me the zone control I needed to open ways for all the raw power that I had.

When I started to move it, I made the error of bragging about it to an admiral of Death Squadron. I said to him that this fleet was unbeatable, no one could win against it, or at least I tought so. Death Squadron are a really organized alliance and they played very well their cards against my super fleet. First, they detected it under their radar when I was a system way from their relic. They started a combat with a dummy fleet to check me out. Then they gave up and fired a Devastation on my Queen. I suffered losses, but I had so many units that my Queen was still very strong.

Then they allocated one of their renegade warriors to battle my fleet face to face. This warrior attacked me with the following units:

• 53 Kamikaze; 300 Toxic; 137  Vector; 84 Doomer; 1100 Anubis; 550 Dark Crusader

This was a remarkable fleet. Many combat units were lost on this epic battle. I won the battle but with heavy losses. The most important one was the loss of my Queen. At the end of the match I had left:

• 378 Stinger; 432 Spider; 1300Worm

All the rest was lost. I tought about going back to my hot zone and rebuild, but I was attacked the next instance by this fleet:

• 1 Queen; 169 HiveProtector; 1201 Worm; 150 Heavy Seeker; 40 Interceptor; 40 Spider; 400 Seeker

Wow… Some heavy power on this Levyr brother. Without light units to use as cannon fodder I had quite the challenge. I didn’t think I’d make it, because my opponent could easilly bring to life many Maggots that would destroy me. I used Worms as cannon fodder and the fight was balanced until my opponent made a mistake, and then run away. Even so I lost againt many units, and at the end of the battle I was left with:

• 681 Worm; 268 Spider;  278 Singer

At this point I was able to retreat to my private zone. I could hunt down his queen, but my fleet was already very fragile, so I choose to go back and rebuild it. This epic journey was very cool and taught me one thing: no matter how strong is your fleet, it can be taken down! No stronger player can win against a well organized alliance.

A player, probably checking finals, wrote me a private message asking why I gave up against reborned on the final of Mini tournament 14. Here is the match, it was my turn to move, we both had the same quantity of Fenix, Stinger and DarkRain. I also had a small amount of Scarab.

I gave up for one reason: Kahuna. I didn’t have any fast units that could make a difference (the Stringer may be very powerful on some situations, but it isn’t useful on this particular one). The movement advantage of the Kahuna would break my Fenix and the rest. If the battle was against other lower ranking player, maybe I’d continue. But I knew I had lost.

As an exercise, what would you do on this situation to get the upper hand? It was my move, I could bring some DarkRain to protect the Fenix, but I’d loose a lot of movement points to make a defense that we’d destroy with little movement points (hence, gaining even more advantage). I can only see defensive moves that would prove useless on a couple of turns. Can you see any good moves?