Lessons from the Tyrant War

[twilight]

Should be geographical. Ocean based - eg I could get going with Wolfie and Warliter and anyone else in Ocean 6.....?

[Arminius]

twilight said:

Should be geographical. Ocean based - eg I could get going with Wolfie and Warliter and anyone else in Ocean 6.....?

OK, that's great. Yes, they should be close together so that sail times aren't that different. Makes planning and coordination easier.

They also don't need to be all of the same size.

[Pose]

I suggest we draw up a neighbourhood map, im willing to do this if admirals are otherwise engaged???... this way we can see if there are any natural groupings before we decide on squad sizes...

I have found that there is no real benefit in trying to 'force ' an even number of members into groups, the only limiting factor is the ability of the admirals to effectivly manage what they have.

I do however think that a grouping of less that 5 is not of much use, depending on activity etc.

I beleive an ideal grouping apart from being close in terms of support is to be as close as poss in terms of online times ... this ensures that we have fair communication and 'bonding' within the teams .. and it goes without saying that the admiral of each group needs to be a daily player..

a PM to each player asking for
general playing habits(ie times best to contact them/activity)
location can they be found, but would be easier if they posted but a PM would do and any expressions of interest for the new admiral positions that would be needed..

If we were to do this over the 2-3 alliances we would need to have a proprtional representation from each alli heading up teams though.

"in times of peace , plan for war" yada yada.. just say when and I will do if needed.

[mmupatton]

Quick question here (yes, too many threads, loads of unread posts): What was the best number of catapults for an attack?

The reason I am asking is that at a point in time I hope to have a million warships (or there about) and would probably like to split it up so I can hit more than one target at a time. But then I'd also have to split up my less than a million catapults. So how many catapults should I have, at least, for an attack? I saw Malin going in with 110 LWs and 75 cats but that was against a heavily defended island so that's probably OK, since he didn't have more LWs and therefore not many fighters onboard. I saw attacks with 30 cats that erased a building in one hit. So should it be 600 spears to 120 LWs to 30 cats.

[Pose]

The number of catas needed is dependent on your desired aims... to clear troops then send as many as poss and DONT aim them at anything... to destroy a troopless isle then I have found that around 200 would raise it to the ground(although the maths dosnt add up?)

If you are specifically after taking out one building then the magic number is 23, 23 catas aimed at any building (without troops) will take it down (from lvl20) to lvl 1 (with minnimal collateral)damage elswhere.

This info is based on my ik.uk experiences, not tested here. i may have a calc somwhere, will have a looky

[inyati]

A big hand to Shendemiar´s effort! Morkiners always know that someone will popup and do the planning (in the past we´ve had Soiram, Arminius, Skulkrinbait, Natmus in other wars). Though no one had a doubt of his capabilities, he did a recomendable job considering the time in which it was done (and an operation done during his anniversary).
Morkin has always been somewhat democratic, in the sence that anyone can take the lead in planning. We do designate members to be Admirals, diplomats and Administratores, but many times in warefare other people take the lead (usualy because they have more spare time on their hands at the moment). We rely mainly on that! You may have noticed that many times Shendemiar would throw names about for a specific task, BUT also request that they themselves get organised. What am I getting at? Well I'm getting at that you can always become a natural Planner or whatever when a war breaks out. If you feel that things need doing in benefit of the alliance feel free to say so and propose yourself for it here in the Forum (ofcourse doing it behind our backs or without admins knowledge at least is not welcome though, and we like to talk alot, so please post).

Our planning:
It went well considering, as said before. But we did have some luck. The setup was dificult to follow. Too many posts, etc...
I myself was compeled from time to time to help organise it, but stayed back as I thought that I would probably just make it worse. Still the backbone of planning such a campaign seems the right way to do it (creat ea sub category specificully for the campaign; each island in a thread etc...). It works very well with 10 islands, but 21 was quite alot. So we need to think on it a bit better.

Geografical leadership:
I have nothing against it. Its a good idea for peace time and should work well, but I dont think it should be thought out in a ridged grid, esspecialy in wartime. The system should have some flexibilty when that period arises, and have more of an organic grouping in relation to target distances rather than groups of oceans, added to this equation that some members will have big fleets and other wont, may put them under someone elses command outside of the geografical region....
Take Tyrant Campaign as an example. Militarily we could have organised it in 3 diferent ways:

Which is best?

(Putting aside my modesty) Morkin was always a good survival alliance, precisly because we plan exhaustively, BUT mainly because we have a solid group TOTALY LOYAL to the alliance. That counts alot. WE COUNT on That! We know Morkin will stand its ground till the last man (without any member deserting). We hope FoM will do to. Most people fear attacks, fear losing. But what is there to fear? No one can take out your last island ;D

[Arminius]

pose: just go ahead. We're an informal alliance, and there's no need to fear you're treading on someone's toes.

inyati: I guess these groupings will be somewhat flexible. We should start with some way of splitting, but that doesn't have to be carved in stone. And different groups could have different capabilities/tasks, such as espionage and support/production, or suicide squad, or demolition crew.

[SkulkrinBait]

Lessons learned:

First of all let me get this straight, I’m not compiling this because Morkin/FoM etc aren’t effective alliances. We are very effective and we have an enormous amount of talent within these alliances, but of course things are never perfect and so perhaps my thoughts might help us to improve our performance in future.

This document highlights the lessons learned from the Tyrant conflict and also contains information which could be used as a basis for planning future wars. One problem we had (in my opinion) was getting things organised in the short timeframe we had once we learned about the Orc attacks. This type of information should reduce the amount of time needed for planning.

Overall the operation was a success (so far) but there are a number of issues highlighted:

1. Definition of Objectives

It is important to decide what the aim of any future conflicts is and the make sure than the conflict is continued up to the point that these objectives have been achieved. Depending on what the objectives are it may be necessary to put into place mechanisms to see how things are progressing and if the objectives have been met.

2. Forces

Assimilate forces, who owns them, where they are and put somewhere for reference.

Probably best to have a thread for each person with their forces listed in the title of the thread for easy reference (or maybe use a Wiki) the thread can be updated with attack reports, orders etc. The title of the thread could also indicate if they have any orders or need any as well as their approximate travelling time to the target eg:

Skulkrinbait – 1:59:7 80 LWs 2 Cats Attacking 2:33:7 ETA 15:30 GMT

Or

Skulkrinbait – 1:59:2 24 LWs No Orders ETA 7 hrs

By using this we can easily tell who has orders and who doesn’t and also we can assign people as “reserves” etc.

Perhaps we could use something like the Excel spreadsheet currently on the forums for this? You could then potentially (I’m not sure if it supports it) sort the list of targets and forces by distance, number of ships etc.

Maybe we need to code something?

3. Allies

As above but for allies

4. Targets

Find out where targets are spy on them and list. Then cross reference to work out which force is best suited to which target taking into account time to get there. Spying regularly will help spot when fleets are out etc.

We need to decide what we are going to target with cats, here are some ideas:

Main house – only target this is colonisation is imminent
Stone Wall – target this is the defender has a good amount of defending forces
Storehouse – target this to cripple the enemies economy, ie to stop production of cats etc and to stop framing, moving resources etc
Watchtower – blind the enemy, good idea if they are moving fleets and stoners around etc

Again, maybe worth putting this into an Excel spreadsheet?

5. Communication.

I think the default mode for communication should be the forum (the roope one) but we need to tell people by PM when they get some new orders etc.


Summary.

As I stated at the start I think that Morkin/FoM/Corleth are strong alliances where the sum total is much greater than the component parts of those who make up the alliances. We’ve got some very different personalities and skills in here and it seems to work wonderfully well, there’s always someone willing to “step up to the plate” to take charge as and when needed and nobody has such an ego that they aren’t prepared to take orders. At the same time people will speak their minds if they feel something is wrong etc.

We’ve got planners, organisers, diplomats, motivators and strategists in abundance.

Time for a group hug……….

[SkulkrinBait]

Here’s my idea for improving organisation in times of war, it involves some coding which I don’t have time to do but perhaps someone else might.

It’s a fairly simple database. Each member of the alliance will enter the details of their islands, the locations, what forces they have etc. Some of this information could be taken automatically from the Megadatabase to make is simpler, such as the island names and locations. Members would only be able to amend their own details, but there would be trusted admins who could amend any details.

There would be a timestamp so we know the last time the details were updated, we’d ask members to try to update these figures regulararly, so they are accurate, say once a week as a minimum. If the figures weren’t up to date there would be a message saying so when they looked at the database.

When we decided that we were going to go to war, we would enter details for our targets. This would be done in a similar way to how the data is held for members, the target island name, who owns it, coordinates and details of the defences and building levels on the island.

I’m thinking the main view would look like this, for admins only:

		Tyrant	Th0r
		2:16:22	4:17:1
skulkrinbait	1:79:7	3hrs 12mins	6hrs 18mins
Shendemiar	2:72:1	6hrs 48mins	8hrs 22 mins

You’d have all allies islands listed down the left hand side and the enemies across the top. The information displayed would show the time taken for a fleet to arrive at 5kts, it would be possible to sort the columns to be ordered by shortest time to journey to each enemy island. Also I am thinking that the background colour for each cell could change to indicate the relative strengths of the fleets.

For example if the allied fleet for the island is much stronger than the defending fleet, you would indicate that with a green background, if the opposite is true it would be red etc.

Also you could highlight enemy islands with no recent spy reports in black or something.

By using this it should be fairly simple to decide who would attack which target, ensuring they have the right fleet for the job and are fairly close to the target.

You could also have a mechanism for admins to give orders to allies, but I’m not exactly sure how that would work, perhaps just a free format text box saying “spy on 11:2:3” or “attack 12:2:6” etc. You could have another mechanism to say what each enemy island status was, ie under attack by Arminius etc

What do we all think?

Needs refining, but this might be the best way to organise things in future.

You could also have some kind of system for counting total units lost/killed etc as well, just copy and paste battle reports in etc.

This method would mean that you can tell at a glance who has orders and who has not. You could also see who is actually taking notice of the orders.

You could click on each island to bring up a history for it, listing in date/time order what has happened to it, spy reports and battle reports etc.

If nobody has time to do this I wonder if I share the idea with Digg if they might code it? I know they have some very talented coders, not that we don't, but they might have the time to do it?

This idea would help reduce the chance of spies getting hold of info. Each member would have their own login and would only be able to see the target islands and their own islands.

Admins would be able to see everything but would only be trusted members of FoM and Morkin. They would also be able to create “admiral” users who would be assigned other members for them to control. For example we might make AeroS an admiral and give him control of 2 or 3 other members who are close to him on the map. He could then see their islands as well as his own and assign orders based on that.

[inyati]

Nice. Will surely help planning and for admirals to coordinate. This would be a good too for us, just as the wiki would be a good tool for inter-alliance-nformation-exchange.
Of course someone will have to do it, and it aint going to be me ;D

[Arminius]

Oops, I accidentally deleted exproy's post. He asked about whether it was possible to have a wiki behind a password for *access*, not just for *editing*

The answer is yes, you can set up private wikis as well.

[eproxy]

Perhaps if we did that it would aid in organisation? Not entirely sure how it would be different from a forum that we all have access to anyway but it's a thought... we need some out of the box thinking here oO

[2kcastle]

skulkrinbait said:

Some of this information could be taken automatically from the Megadatabase to make is simpler, such as the island names and locations.

megadatabase ?

[SkulkrinBait]

Yes, it's a tool for storing historic data, stuff like spy reports etc.

As long as there are entries in it for everyone who is in FoM/Morkin etc and the enemies we are attacking, it would help to automate the process of displaying who is doing what etc.

[2kcastle]

sounds good, whats in it at the moment then ? i get the feeling from your post that morkin are already using it rather than it being a new idea.