It’s a tricky tactic that can help you take a city before the defender can realized it and prevent him to use the curfew command.
To make the train work you need 5 lobbyist (4 for wei) or ask player of your league to help you by attacking with some lobbyist too.
The train is quite hard to do since you only got 6 schedule deployment and you have to have 5 different attack with a lobbyist, your clearing wave and your demolisher wave.

First : check when your lobbyist and demo of all your city take to get to the target. If the difference of time is less than 10 minutes you should be fine to launch them at the same time.

Second: Pick a time that you want the attack to land or just launch the attack that from the city that the farthest from the target, note the times of that attack will land

Third: Time your clearing wave and demo wave to hit before this time, the clearing wave first and the demo wave a few second after. Make sure to hit the annexe and that you have enough demo to clear the annexe.

Fourth  : Launch all the other lobbyist attack so the land after the other attack by less than 5-10 minutes, if you have enough schedule deployment left use them.

If everything go fine you should have the city in one sweep.
To increase your chance you can always fake a train by using fake attack of demolisher since they have the same speed.

Another variant you can do : attack normally with a clearing wave and a demo wave and clear annexe of their cities. And after send a train with a clearing wave since that only 5-6 attack it’s easier to do, but since you’ve cleared there annexe they probably think you want to steal there city.

Hope it’s help.

I ran on another interesting article about farmville today. Cultivated Play: Farmville from the blog media common.

My favorite part : “Again: if Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it?”

Read the article if you want the awnser but for me I’ve stopped playing farmville a while ago. Still don’t understand somebody willing to pay 1400$ for this game or even get fired for playing it, but it seem that the social aspect of it is really waht drive this addiction.

So go ahead and read it here : Cultivated Play: Farmville

Today is another post for the Art of War contest, which a contest about strategy to help player dominate there opponent in three kingdoms online. Today it will be about “Offense tactic” 

A traditional attack usally have a Clearing wave and Demo wave, here how they work how to counter them and how to use them effectivly.

Clearing wave

The clearing wave constitute mainly offensive troop, a mix of infantry and cavalry.
It might be a good idea to include ram in it to minimize the effect of the opponent city wall.
Defensive Counter : Dodge the attack if you expect to be overwhelmed by the attack or stack a lot of unit in the same city to minimize your lost if you expect to win.

Preventing the counter : Fake attack or Timing your attack (see below)

Demo wave

(more in my previous post)

A mix of demolisher and infantry or even only demolisher for maximum impact.
Your offensive level and number of demolisher should be high enough to be able to target to building.
Defensive counter: Defensive troop good vs infantry, if it a only demolisher attack just defensive troop is enough they are very weak when attacking alone.

Preventing the defense counter : Timing your attack with the clearing wave.(see below)

Lobbyist

The lobbyist must arrive after the clearing wave and have some offensive troop with him, so he won’t die when it’s attack land.
The annexe must be destroyed too in order to reduce the loyalty of the city.
Defensive counter:Dodge the clearing wave and have troop in your city before the attack hit. Curfew command, relieve if you’ve been hit by a lobbyist

Preventing the defense counter : Timing your attack (see below)

Fake attack

If you opponent have many city, it can be a good idea to mix thing up, send a bunch of fake attack to one city while launching a full attack to another city. That way he won’t know which city defend.

Timing your attack

So you launched a attack like a noob and the clearing wave was dodged and the demo wave was destroyed because he had enough time to bring is troop back before the demo attack hit.

Here how you can prevent this

Schedule your demo wave to arrive just one second after the clearing wave. If you really confident that your clearing wave will clear is troop, send the demo wave one second after. So if he dodge the attack he will pay for it and if not you will probably clear is troop and demolish is city.

if you have specialized your city with specific kind of unit (like only offense or only offense and demo) it pretty easy to time your attack with the schedule deployment feature.

Pick a time and make a schedule deployment in your clearing wave city that will arrive at this time and schedule a deployment in your demo city that will arrive 1-2 second after the first attack.

If your city consist of only the kind of troop for the attack, set the schedule deployment to deploy all troop if there are troop missing.

Use your defense for offense

Piking

This tactic is simple, you send troop to defend a city you know your opponent is plundering.

Since the attacker only launch part of his troops to plunder, you can actually do some pretty good damage.
While this tactic used to worked well in tribal war where you don’t know who is supporting the city. In Three Kingdoms online, since you know who is supporting the city you’ve attacked this can be considered has an act of war.

I’m trying something with my Lobbyist, and if it’s work I’m gonna tell you about it. Do any of you have other tactic that could be include here?

There a new version of TKO comming here the update:

New Hero Coalition System

It’s nice to be able to use more than one heroe when attaking, thoug it will help the player that have epic heroes (like they need help…)

Fortify Order and Cultivation Token

I don’t really get what the fortify order do, but the cultivation Token is nice … depending of it’s price in gold …

Share the battle report

Nothing big here but at least it give the fonctionality other browser game had.

Rename the league

Finaly we wanted to rename our league to become a state league but we couldn’t. At least it won’t be a problem with the next version.

More on the TKO forum here.

Today is another post for the Art of War contest, which a contest about strategy to help player dominate there opponent in three kingdoms online. Today it will be about “Using your demolisher effectively” 

Planning where gonna be your demolisher city.

Since the demolisher use six grains a hour, you will need a city that can produce a lot of grain or you will have to reduce the number of other unit you have.

Option one: in your main

Since your main can have resources at level 20 that mean your main will probably have a lot of grain so it can sustain the extra food required for your demo.

Step to have it :

During beginner protection focus on your field and completing quest for the extra cash, try to have 200 of pop by the end of beginner protection because that will give you around 300 of your base unit, you will need this to plunder. If you manage to build 500 soldiers by the end of beginner protection that’s even better.

By the end of beginner protection your field should be at level 5-6 and drill ground at level 5 at the very least.

With your soldier plunder all those zero point cities around you, they hold 800 of each resources so that mean you have to send 54 militias, 80 swordsman or  107 spearmens. And they refill to 800 every 2 days, so attack them every 2 days.

1st step build your drill ground to level 10

Now what, alternate between your ironwork and drill ground until they are level 20, you will have to upgrade the warehouse from time to time.

I you can build some unit to in case of an attack and to plunder.

You will discover something magical is that with the demolisher if you have it and they don’t you can juste prevent them from growing be destroying there building.

A city dedicated to demolisher

Instead of you main you can build a city just for demolisher or a mix of infantry and demolisher.

Pure demolisher city

This is probably insane, you will expect you other city to defend this city.

You build it the same way has explained for the main city except that you need to build some troop to so you can plunder at the same time your building.

The best spot for demo it’s probably a 4 timberland with 5 stone and 3 iron tend to require mostly stone, but that not entirely true since building the ironwork required a lot of iron

A city that have mix of infantry and demolisher.

Since infantry unit are slow the are a good fit with the demolisher and while your leveling your Ironwork and drill ground to level 20 your infantry can plunder surrounding cities.

Depending on the kingdoms the build look like this
Shu
Glaiveman + demolisher
Wei
Guardsman + demolisher
Wu
Sheild Infantry + demolisher

They all require a more iron but since the demolishers require mostly stone and wood probably 4 spot for every resource is better while 3 wood, 4 stone, 5 iron might work, demolisher usually need 900-950 wood each so you might be a little low in wood.

Where to aim

Aim the granary and the warehouse first, so he won’t be able to have the food for support and not enough resources to rebuild.

Aim the farmland after, his city food output will fall in the red and he won’t be able to produce any troop.

Note, if planning to take the city with a lobbyist here what you should do.

Aim his annexe, if you want to steal the city, don’t aim the mansion – It’s worthless, you won’t destroy the resource fields that are more than level 10 or more by destroying the mansion and you won’t be able to lobby is city if you destroy the mansion. Why because you’re confusing main city with city with a mansion.

Yes when you build a mansion in a city this city become your main city, but if the mansion is destroyed the city remain the main city. And the main city can’t be converted by a lobbyist.

The only way to change the main city is to build the mansion in another city.

Other Tactics

Destroying surrounding cities
If your planning a war or they are to strong to strike, you can always send your demolisher to destroy the granary and warehouse of the cities that you know he is farming.

Cutting him this source of revenue will slow down is unit production. and give you time to prepare for war.
Not that if they found out, they might get angry…

Countering the demolisher

Demolisher are actually very easy to kill if you have some defensive unit.

If you know that he is sending a clearing wave before sending his demolisher (it’s obvious when the attack come from a county since a county cannot build demolisher). Just pull your city army out before the clearing wave hit and return your army before the demolisher hit.

Note that demolisher cost a lot of resource and are slow so if you have a lot of offensive cavalry unit, you can attack his city and steal his food.

Your cavalry might even arrives back before the attack land and if your enemy food consumption is in the red a bunch of is unit will die.

The monitor office reduces the effectiveness of the demo so if you can build a monitor in every city (how to here).

Heroes can have a skill and an item that can help by increasing the durability of your building (like Lord Lu’s secret script)

It seem that farmville hit the news again when a kid spent around 625 pound (1400$). When the parent found out they tried to ask for a refund and zynga didn’t want to give anything back.

Should Zynga pay something back ? When something like that happen with cloth or material goods you can exchange back what was bought. But where the line with virtual good ? Should Zynga remove the virtual good from the kid acount and give some of the money back?

What your opinion on that ? The full article here.

Today is another post for the Art of War contest, which a contest about strategy to help player dominate there opponent in three kingdoms online. Today it will be about “What city structures are useless after a certain time.”  and more
It will be the part 2 of 2.

In part one we talked about which buildings are useless after a certain time and what building is useful depending on the type of player you are.

Today we will talk about the structure we didn’t talk in part one and which buildings are useful depending on what kind of city your building. (offensive, defensive, scouting)

So which buildings can be useless depending on the type of city

All city (from part 1)
Bunker
hidden warehouse (later)
Annexe (later)
Drill ground (when all needed unit are researched)
League flag (most of the time)
Theatre (you only need one of your cities)

So which other buildings did we forget

Annexe
When building a new city you should always keep in mind that you have to build an annexe, you need a command center level 5 and after that build an annexe after that try to update it from time to time so I can get to level 10 before you have enough commercial value to build another city.
Why ?
Because building a Level 10 annexe/mansion is way cheaper than building a level 20 annexe in other city or a level 15 or 20 mansion in your main.

Since your usually get to build only one city at the time with your current commercial value each time you build a new city by the time you got the annexe to level 10 the commercial value should be near what you need to build another city. Well maybe not, but at least you’ll be ready when the commercial value is enough to build a new city and you’ll save some buck down the road.

Don’t build it past level 10 unless you have something in mind, like having a lobbyist in your sub for a grand strike but that another topic.

Someone have noted that when you build a city with annexe or mansion you can destroy the annexe and the mansion and the city you’ve built won’t be lost, so if you need the space and you’ve built a city with your annexe you can always destroy it and this will give you extra space. Note that if you destroy your mansion and build it in another city, all resource field that have are level 11 and higher will drop to level 10.

Career Center
Depending where your city is placed you might just need the career center at level 1 if all your oasis around your city are taken by your other city or other player.

Valor camp
It’s a  late game building useful for both defensive and offensive cities. Since it’s late game and expensive pass a certain level, build it only when you need it. Note that city specialized in strike with ram and /or demo.

Market & Library
These to go together, you might not need them and put your surplus in the theatre to build more cities but they are cheap (the market is really cheap) they are needed for other building (theatre, monitor office) and it always useful to move your resource to new cities.

Monitor office
Useful if you expect to be attack by ram and demolisher. But can only be build in a city with a mansion so probably only your main will have this building.
If you want to have it in every city, check out the guide to build one in every city from yesterday here.

Ironwork
It’s really depend on what you want to do with your city, while you main probably need most of the building if you’re not planning to have
demolishers or rams in your city you can always cut the Ironwork.

Defense
If your city is pure defense and you don’t plan to support player that are far from you with this city, you you might not need the Stable (for wei though you probably need it for shu to get the lancer and for wu to get the heavy cavalry and female cavalry) Note that is you don’t build a stable you can’t research the scout unit. But you can always build the stable and destroy it once the unit is researched, you won’t lose the research and you gain the extra space.

You might not need the valor camps either, it very long to get and upgrading it is very expensive.

And support city, in this case you’ll probably need to have a lot of mobile defensive unit so you really need to build the stable and research cavalry unit with high defense.

In but scenario you probably don’t need ram or demolisher so don’t build the ironwork for these city.

Offense
You might want have a city that only build glaiveman or guardsman will it’s usually better to mix infantry with cavalry to balance you offense a cluster of offensive infantry can be really useful against a city that have built a lot of pikeman or to pair your infantry with demo and ram to clean.

So if you’re planning to have a single purpose to your city you can drop the stable and build only infantry.

Scouting city
Why on earth would you want that ? It can always be useful to have a lot of scout to help your league and to prevent from being scouted…
Imagine somebody try to scout your city full of scout all their scout die and they won’t have a clue what in your city.

A demolisher / ram city
I don’t recommend a pure ram city, you’re wasting your money, you need them to attack with some supporting troop to do real damage so you should not have a city that just build them.
For demolisher, you could have a city with only them in it since they attack after the enemy troops were cleared.
But It’s probably better to send them mixed with infantry like we describe previously.
Note that a demo city will need a lot of stone and a ram city a lot of wood.

So that’s all for the usefulness of the infrastructure, I’m not sure what my next post is gonna be probably a mix of 2 topic in the contest.

Today it’s a post that Thungbard gave us on our Forum, it’s a great tips to be able to build tougher sub city and have extra oasis.

The Basic Premise of the Strategy is simply to NOT have a Capital, letting your Capital Float from town to town as needed. The obvious downside is that you can’t have above level 10 Resource Fields in any of your cities, Other than that, the Benefits are practically endless.
Here’s a Step By Step Guide, let me know if anything is flawed in the concept, or if you need further clarification on something.

Step 1 : Demolish all of your Mansions and Annex’s

Yeah as crazy as that sounds, that’s the first step. Clearly you don’t need to do it all at once, and if you’re close to accomplishing one of the other steps in this guide you probably want to do that first.
Note: you might not have to do that if your starting on a new server, some of the step can be done at the same time.

Step 2:Build a level 10 Annex at your new villages

A level 10 Annex can build 1 new city, just the same as a level 10 Mansion, except the Annex is cheaper to build. If you demolish an Annex or Mansion you still keep control of the Cities it’s built, so pretty much once you’ve used a city to build a new city the Annex is useless anyway, since it’s a lot easier to build a new Annex at the new city than to bring the Current Annex up to level 20 in order to create another city.

Step 3: Build a level 5 Library … Everywhere

Sounds easy enough, all you need to do to accomplish that is make sure you have a level 10 Drill Grounds everywhere.

Step 4: Build a level 1 Mansion

Doesn’t matter where, as long as there’s a level 5 Library. Congrats, you’ve now got the criteria for Step 5

Step 5: Build a level 1 Monitor Office

The Monitor Office once upgraded to the max doubles the durability of your buildings in that city, which will double the number of Demolishers that your enemy have to send at you in order to beat your city into the ground. The Monitor Office lvl 1 can only be built at a city that possesses a Mansion, but … if the City loses it’s Mansion or even become no longer your Capital, the Monitor Office remains and isn’t automatically destroyed like resource fields above level 10 are. Please Note that a level 1 Monitor Office is enough, since once it has that, the city CAN upgrade the Monitor office even if it’s no longer the Capital, it just can’t build the first level unless it’s the Capital.

Step 6: Build a level 15 Career Center

That is the requirement to capture a 2nd Oasis for any city that has a Mansion. If your Mansion isn’t in the city that has the Career Center, simply Demolish the Mansion where you built the Monitor’s Office, and rebuild it here. Then go and Capture the Oasis … Just like Monitor’s Offices, if this City is no longer your Capital, you still maintain control of all of the Oasis’s it has, this way you can get your SubCity to actually Own 2 Oasis’s without having to bring your Career Center up to lvl 20. A Level 20 Career Center is mighty expensive, so I haven’t had a chance to test whether or not your SubCity can actually own 3 Oasis with this method, but it certainly can own 2 without a lvl 20 Career Center … ’cause mine’s doing it right now.

Note : The level 15 Career Center is required for the 2nd Oasis for the main city, so even if the mansion is destroyed the city remain your main city until you build a mansion in another city.

Step 7: Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Repeat the above steps until all of your cities have Monitor’s offices and own Oasis’s long before they should be capable to. One of the Beauties of this is even if they start attacking you with Lobbyist’s you can move your Mansion to any City you want in under an hour to protect it, without having to invoke the ‘Curfew’ command.
Like I mentioned earlier the fundamental shortcoming is that you can’t have above level 10 resource fields because they’ll be downgraded to level 10 once you change the location of your Mansion, but having an extra Oasis at all of your cities probably evens out the resources you could be gaining from larger resource fields. Plus at any point in time once you’re satisfied with your number of Cities, you can leave one as the Capital and start upgrading your resource fields above level 10, and still reap the benefits of extra Oasis’s and Twice as tough Buildings at your other cities.
It’s just every extra village you do this in the more versatile and durable you’ll be. If we had a large portion of people doing this,

Your enemy will now need twice as many Demolishers as we’ll need to flatten their cities and you’ll be more protected against Lobbyists.

Today is a post for the Art of War contest, which a contest about strategy to help player dominate there opponent in three kingdoms online.

Today it will be about “What city structures are useless after a certain time.”
It will be the part 1 of 2.

Useful

First of all there building that you absolutely need like the granary and warehouse, the barrack is pretty essential since you need it to build unit in it but you’ll probably will let it at level 3 for a while since at the beginning it’s hard to recruit more unit than the barrack can recruit for the same amount of time. The command center is important too, it’s required for other building and to recruit messengers if you are planning on plundering a lot.  Note that if you don’t have a Command center you can’t send attack or support to other city.

Useless

There are three buildings that are rarely needed, the Bunker with is ridiculous amount of unit it can hide,  is almost only built for the quest that asks for it and to store pioneers while you’re recruiting the other pioneer. The League Flag might me useful if your league is really active  and your league mate want to move away from an enemy and be near you, but to move away from an enemy the state token give more bang for the buck so the league flag is rarely used. Finally the theater, can be an useful building  to store extra resources but since you can take the resource from every city you only need one so you can builds it in a sub and use the extra space in your main for something else.

The others

For the other struture it can depend on the player stance and the stage of the game.

If you’re a very aggressive player that plunders a lot then you will have a lot of troop so probably you won’t really care about a protecting them in a bunker, protecting your resources with a hidden warehouse or increasing the resistance of your building with the monitor office. You’ll probably rather spend all these resources on units and upgrades.

But if you don’t play often and you fear you’ll get attack or other players are plundering your city often, building 2-3 hidden warehouse in your city make sense like we already talked about in my previous article tips to increase your defense that your can see here.

Note that hidden warehouse might be very useful at the first month of the game or in a newly built city but using a city space to protect a 1000 of resources when your city produce around 2000 to 4000 of each resource a hour is pretty wasteful, so once you get to that point you can destroy the hidden warehouse and build something else.

There are other building that can always be destroyed later once they served their purpose, once you researched all the unit you needed in your drill ground you can always destroy it you won’t lose the unit you’ve researched.

The same idea can be applied with Armorsmith, Weaponsmith and Valor camp, but If you badly needs that space they’re probably a league flag, bunker, hidden warehouse or theater that can be destroyed instead.

So this is the end of part one the next part will talk about the other building and which building can be removed for specialized city (offensive city, defensive city, demolisher city)

Game can be addictive sometime and sometime you just can’t stop playing. I remember having to login at work to lauch my troop in tribal war so the troop will arrive at the same time my allies sent them. (note that’s not on my current job at least …) Or waking up durring the night in King of Chaos so I could use my cash so nobody would steal it. It seem that someone have done even worse, he played farmville during a town council and got fired for it. You can read some more of it here

It’s not the first time that we hear these kind of story, WoW was probably one of the game that really mess up poeple, like on this forum thread :

“World of Warcraft stole a year of my life and ironically got me fired from Gamestop. It will take over your life, and just one month ago, I got out of the addiction.” -PsiRedEye22

They’re even employer that instruct their recruiter to screen any world of Warcraft players.  Note, it was just on recruiters if you dig up a little, but still should you have to tell your playing online game to your employer. Here the original article at f13.net. The thread point out that online game might have the reversed effect, it might actually help you get a job like here or that it helps you learn about leadership and project management skill (more here).

Did some of you got the same problem? Tell us your story.