I would be the first to admit I was wrong...
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 1:54 pm
I thought heroes were the most powerful thing in the game and liberator and trophies a close second.
As an obessive TBS player, you are always looking for the most obvious, most powerful strategy to get victory on the hardest difficulty.
However, I have come to realise more and more that I was wrong and that the most powerful thing in the game is not these things, it is capturing/encirclement and the abilities that make it easy.
These abilities are:
Permeter Control.
Master of Blitz.
Flexible Command.
Deadly Grasp.
I am calling these "The power 4" and any 3 or 4 of them basically sets the difficulty to rookie mode. Even denying yourself air or artillery doesn't make them any less powerful. More on this below...
Lets talk about economy.
Economy wise, these abilities blow Tropies and Liberator out of the water. Captures are made against "Corporal" value. I.E. you get the full value of the item you capture in prestige as if you were playing the second most easy difficulty. While tropies doubles that value, without the "Power Four" you will never get that many captures nor will they normally be that high in strength when you capture them.
The reason why is because Flex allows you to split units down and thus make very weak units that can "poke" enemies into surrender doing the minimum damage of 1. It also allows you to surround a unit so it can't move, meaning you can avoid having to drain an enemies movement to make a capture. The encirclement with grasp, does 4 perminant suppression at the start of the enemy turn, so even if they took no damage from your bombers or artillery, most units will lose at least 40% of their fighting ability at the start of their turn, infantry a little less, but you can make the infantry a high priority for level bombing and thus remove their ability to fight without really doing any damage to them.
Combat wise, it's not as risky as you'd think, once it all clicks into place.
Suppression from encirclement happens at the start of the enemy turn. That means, with the movement bonuses provided by Blitz and Perm Control, all you have to do is plan out if you can surround the enemy or not and these skills make that much easier. As long as the encirclement is in place before your turn ends, you've won. You don't have to fight or risk anything, because at the start of their turn they will take the suppression damage that ensures that fighting back is almost impossible. Your units may be split, say a 10 stack into two 5's because of flex. But the enemy will be drained of 4 units by Grasp, making a 10 stack fight like a 6 stack. This is only on the very first turn and only if you don't add additional pain with cheap 1 slot level bombers or artillery. On the second turn, the enemy might as well be dead, as they will be totally or near totally disabled.
Since the enemy basically, in the vast majority of maps, does not move... you can build a wall around the edge of the map if you like and just have to close it. The only real threat is supply hexes. If they don't exist or can be easily taken, clean up is childs play and thousands and in some cases even 10's of thousands of prestige can be yours per mission.
In conclusion.
I am not sure yet what to do about this or how it can be balanced out, but it's clear to me that this combination once you "get it" vastly decreases the games difficulty and allows prestige printing to the point that you can just "buy" victory in later missions (if you like, or are bored and just want a head on fight) due to the unbelievable wealth that can be generated by the strategy.
The problem is, even if you tied capture gains to difficulty level, the fact that encirclement/grip basically "switches off" half the enemy before they can react, and basically disables them entirely by the second turn.. means they have absolutely no time to defend themselves or fight back. If you can see the possibility to make the circle on your turn and do so, they are effectively already dead with no chance of counterplay.
A complex issue, but yeah.
Still love the game and love that there was something even more overpowered to find than heroes are. Now I know about it and find myself joining in, I do feel like I am optimizing the fun out of the game a little bit...
Edit:
If you are unsure about just why this combination is so good, I hope this video will help to explain some of it:
https://youtu.be/ngWHrCe9DwA
As an obessive TBS player, you are always looking for the most obvious, most powerful strategy to get victory on the hardest difficulty.
However, I have come to realise more and more that I was wrong and that the most powerful thing in the game is not these things, it is capturing/encirclement and the abilities that make it easy.
These abilities are:
Permeter Control.
Master of Blitz.
Flexible Command.
Deadly Grasp.
I am calling these "The power 4" and any 3 or 4 of them basically sets the difficulty to rookie mode. Even denying yourself air or artillery doesn't make them any less powerful. More on this below...
Lets talk about economy.
Economy wise, these abilities blow Tropies and Liberator out of the water. Captures are made against "Corporal" value. I.E. you get the full value of the item you capture in prestige as if you were playing the second most easy difficulty. While tropies doubles that value, without the "Power Four" you will never get that many captures nor will they normally be that high in strength when you capture them.
The reason why is because Flex allows you to split units down and thus make very weak units that can "poke" enemies into surrender doing the minimum damage of 1. It also allows you to surround a unit so it can't move, meaning you can avoid having to drain an enemies movement to make a capture. The encirclement with grasp, does 4 perminant suppression at the start of the enemy turn, so even if they took no damage from your bombers or artillery, most units will lose at least 40% of their fighting ability at the start of their turn, infantry a little less, but you can make the infantry a high priority for level bombing and thus remove their ability to fight without really doing any damage to them.
Combat wise, it's not as risky as you'd think, once it all clicks into place.
Suppression from encirclement happens at the start of the enemy turn. That means, with the movement bonuses provided by Blitz and Perm Control, all you have to do is plan out if you can surround the enemy or not and these skills make that much easier. As long as the encirclement is in place before your turn ends, you've won. You don't have to fight or risk anything, because at the start of their turn they will take the suppression damage that ensures that fighting back is almost impossible. Your units may be split, say a 10 stack into two 5's because of flex. But the enemy will be drained of 4 units by Grasp, making a 10 stack fight like a 6 stack. This is only on the very first turn and only if you don't add additional pain with cheap 1 slot level bombers or artillery. On the second turn, the enemy might as well be dead, as they will be totally or near totally disabled.
Since the enemy basically, in the vast majority of maps, does not move... you can build a wall around the edge of the map if you like and just have to close it. The only real threat is supply hexes. If they don't exist or can be easily taken, clean up is childs play and thousands and in some cases even 10's of thousands of prestige can be yours per mission.
In conclusion.
I am not sure yet what to do about this or how it can be balanced out, but it's clear to me that this combination once you "get it" vastly decreases the games difficulty and allows prestige printing to the point that you can just "buy" victory in later missions (if you like, or are bored and just want a head on fight) due to the unbelievable wealth that can be generated by the strategy.
The problem is, even if you tied capture gains to difficulty level, the fact that encirclement/grip basically "switches off" half the enemy before they can react, and basically disables them entirely by the second turn.. means they have absolutely no time to defend themselves or fight back. If you can see the possibility to make the circle on your turn and do so, they are effectively already dead with no chance of counterplay.
A complex issue, but yeah.
Still love the game and love that there was something even more overpowered to find than heroes are. Now I know about it and find myself joining in, I do feel like I am optimizing the fun out of the game a little bit...
Edit:
If you are unsure about just why this combination is so good, I hope this video will help to explain some of it:
https://youtu.be/ngWHrCe9DwA
