Territory Defense Recommendations

I have already shown off my city build in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8rdP2RqXk0

Here is how I setup my territories, and what I concentrated on. (Click on picture to see it larger).

New Patch Notes

• Patch 1.42.3 - LIVE •
25 July 2008

• Fixed PvP building bugs. Garrison, gatehouses, and attacking should now all work as expected!
• Gift system revamped to be more user-friendly and less confusing.
• You can now undo the building things during that session. After relogging or crashing, your undos are reset.
• You are now able to rotate already placed buildings by right-clicking (soon to be a GUI button).
• Peasants cap determined by how many territories you have, 100 for city and 50 for each territory.

Domain

• Move to Wilderness tooltip updated.
  Build dialog is now considered a HUD element and will stop mouse clicks.
• Clearing your nation will now sell off all buildings under construction, refunding exactly as if the player destroyed them manually.
• You can no longer clear your nation if you have any damaged buildings.
• Gatehouses only take up places they appear to.
• You can now select buildings if you can see them.
• Building cursor will not show up in dialog windows.
• You will no longer be notified that you don't have enough resources to build anything.
  

Battle

• You can no longer get XP from killing your own units.
• Flying units will no longer flock around large units.
• In a 4 player PVP, if one of the players exits/surrenders in during placement, the others do not have to wait for the timer to run out.
• Units will no longer spawn in unpathable regions during Raids.
• During a Raid, you can now only deploy troops around the edge of the map.
• Large troops will no longer twitch when they are attacking an enemy.
• You cannot move your own units when you have a unit from another army selected.
• When a computer unit is sieging a building and it's siege is broken, it will not continue trying to siege that building.
  

Miscellaneous

• Trade notes are now subject to the dirty word filter

Tourneyments Start Next week

"The tournaments should also be available next week." - Slava - Saga Games

https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6883&start=45

Epic end game 4 player match

So several of us got together to demonstrate a big epic battle.

One thing I know when talking to friends that play Saga in the 10-20 Nation level is that they don't understand how fun and epic PvP can be. They spend so much time doing quests with 3 troops per side that the epic nature of the game isn't as obvious.

If you "watch in high quality" I think it looks pretty good full screen too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEF9H4vnCK0#

Thanks to Kheldara and Dark Rage and others for helping set this up. Kheldara was the big winner, and won 3000 or so gold.

The winner of a 225CP FFA can win up to 5000 gold from "Gods" depending on how many troops die in the battle. Also a 2v2 FFA match is no rating change, and give shards.

Defending your Territories - Based on Ironforge Nation

So I wanted to profile a couple armies each week to analyse what people are doing vs raiding.

This was started BEFORE the massive raiding nerfs in the free-build patch. Nerfs that we assume eventually will be fixed in a future patch but for now take raiding out of the game.


These nerfs I have referred to before: http://sagathoughts.blogspot.com/2008/07/raiding-and-several-pvp-features-are.html

• To start off, I sent spys to look at the main army and territory of the opponent. I picked Ironforge because since the raiding nerfs he's been rather chatty all of a sudden.


• Lets see why raiding shut him up for so long:

First of all, it looks as though he is in love with his Iron Tanks. This unit is a good PvE unit, but with it's horribly slow movement in PvP, it is pretty avoidable.




On his territories he does a little better. He stacks two troops of Bombardiers with one troop or heavy Cav.

Now ranged defenders are very buggy in raiding defense, they often don't agro on the attacking armies. But if they do agro, bombardiers woudl at least have a long agro range.

Ballistas are also talked about as good territory defense. This is incorrect except on a territory that is flat, with few rivers.

How would I change his defenses?

First,

If I were doing machine for territory defense I would use units that had awesome passives. (Specials don't fire well for the AI)

• Hunters for anti mounted. Auto Ballistas for anti infantry. Dwaven Axeman for living forever vs ranged.


• I would mix in the awesome commons like Light Cav.
• Light Cav with speed gear is FAST to attack. And cheap! 60cents a unit. http://www.sagaunits.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_6&products_id=125

• Get together a ton of speed gear and stick it on every unit. Speed is better then anything for defense. See above this light Cav has a 23 base speed. It will run in fast enough to prevent a cap, if the attacker is spread out trying to cap multiple buildings at once with single units on each.


• Make sure you have enough units in the territory. They don't die, so the more that swamp your opponent the better. I like about 600 CP in each territory.

Discussions on Tourneyments:

So there has been a heated discussion since Slava released the prize chart for Tourneyments.

They are giving 4 for winning 3 for 2nd place 2 for 3rd and 4th places.

My thought is that is too few prices for an 12$ entry for even a small eight person tourney.

Here is the math:

• 8 people buy 3 boosters and 2$ in tickets = $96
• 4+3+2+2 = 11 boosters = $33 in prizes?
• Top winner is 4 boosters who wins $16 for his $12 entry fee.
  

And for those that say that you can sell the cards. Fine. Tell me how many boosters are worth MORE then $3.

To demonstrate this, I just bought 4 boosters, here is EACH of them:

Human Javelineers
$0.03
Human Light Cavalry
$0.05
Human Spearmen
$0.03
Elven Archers
$0.15
Elven Warriors
$0.90
Wood Spriggans
$0.05
Rage
$0.75
Giant Bowmen
$0.90
Human Light Lancers
$0.25

Sub-Total: $3.11



Ballista
$0.45
Human Javelineers
$0.03
Human Mercenaries
$0.04
Human Pikemen
$0.03
Elven Archers
$0.15
Elven Druids
$0.50
Elven Sabretooth Riders
$0.35
Dark Elf Bowmen
$1.75
Holy Light
$0.40

Sub-Total: $3.67




Human Javelineers
$0.03
Human Light Cavalry
$0.05
Human Swordmaidens
$0.16
Make Haste
$0.10
Elven Saboteurs
$0.15
Green Dragon
$3.50
Wood Spriggans
$0.05
Ogre Halberdiers
$0.40

Sub-Total: $4.44



Elven Saboteurs
$0.15
Wood Spriggans
$0.05
Orc Infantry
$0.04
Take No Prisoners
$0.75
Human Heavy Infantry
$0.03
Human Pikemen
$0.03
Human Spearmen
$0.03
Elven Druids
$0.50
Dwarven Mechanists
$0.25
Giant Bowmen
$0.90

Sub-Total: $2.73

TOTALS:

Pack 1 Retail Value: $3.11
Pack 2 Retail Value: $3.67
Pack 3 Retail Value: $4.44
Pack 4 Retail Value: $2.73
---------------------------
Total - $13.95 (retail value)

I spend $2.95 X 4 packs = $11.80

Assuming Sagaunits give me 85% of the card value, I can sell them to him for $11.85

5 cent profit!




Here is the rest of the discussion from the forums. I will address only on writer:
https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=38427

• He is making the mistake assuming that I am complaining about prizes do to my income.
  http://sagathoughts.blogspot.com/2008/07/deck-profiling-nature-ccie-part-1.html
  There is my army. Don't make that assumption. I can and HAVE bought frankly any army I want. My income isn't the issue.



• And don't let your experience working at "the card shop" apply here. This is a game with 100 times the number of players that your card shop can draw. The model is more scaling.



• Also MTGO don't work comparing it to Saga. In MTGO you cap at FOUR OF THE SAME CARDS per deck. Saga it maxs at 25. Much HARDER to collect armies then a 60 card Magic Deck.

I am championing for the person who ISN'T like me, and can't afford to throw hundreds of dollars at a hobby.

I will restate my position again, and if anyone want to "fan boy" how smart Silverlode is, and their ideas HAVE to be perfect on the first go, fine. I'm trying to help Silverlode not attack them.

My position is:

1. If you give more boosters as prizes, you add supply to the market of free cards.
   
2. Free cards leads to more supply at the card vendors, (http://sagaunits.com/) thus LOWERING the pricing of expensive army builder cards. Have you not noticed that Saga Units can't seem to keep certain cards in stock right now? Dark Elf Bowman? Grythons, Eagles etc.


3. That's due to the the fact that we DON'T buy boosters right now. Most people find it hella easier to buy from Saga Units, and the supply of free boosters is going down.
   http://sagathoughts.blogspot.com/2008/07/wwwsagaunitcom-and-why-we-buy-card-from.html We need the tourneyment scene to be WILDLY successful to bring the overall cost of the game down. If the game were cheaper their would be more people playing and more cards circulating in the market.


4. If you run the guild list into excel, there are about 3000 players of saga right now, that are in guilds. This is pretty much a 90% list of all saga players. http://www.playsaga.com/guilds.php If Saga had 200,000 players there would be 1000 times more cards circulating.


5. I've brought over two players with me so far from other games. You know the first thing that they run into for trouble? Collecting a large enough army to play without investing $100 in the game day one.

We need the prices of cards to go down. Tourneyments are how that worked in MTGO. You could draft and get great cards and lose. You could draft for rares and popular cards, and don't even worry about winning. The players that won would try for infinite and dump great numbers of cards on the market to buy more event tickets to tourney all day long.

All I want is more boosters for prizes, to increase the card supply, and to help keep the prices low enough for new players to be able to buy a decent army.

Having Heavy Cav (a common) at $6 a full unit is not helpful for new players: http://www.sagaunits.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_6&products_id=122

$17 level 35 leveling army?

This is a recycle of a forum answer, but it's a slow day for content.

So people ask how to level 1-35 without spending alot of cash: https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6751

I'd do it this way: (3 X is three FULL units of the particular troop, etc)

3 X Behemoth
5 X Heavy Cav
3 X Cav Archers
3 X factional common (elven archers etc)
3 X dragons
5+ fireball cards
5+ Hold Fast cards
= 527 CP worth of troops. Plenty enough for any mission.


Profit 1-35

Why?

• Heavy Cav plus archer units are great for leveling. Good synergys.
• If you need a tank Behemoth is easy to level and use.
• For Area Effect maps, the Fireball is a 1.25$ rare. Pretty easy to acquire. With a short cooldown, it is a useful cast.
• The best spell in the game right now is Hold Fast. It makes any unit able to tank off a ton of troops.
• You need flyers for some missions, dragons are the best flyer for cheapness. Most are easy to trade for.

This army costs about $40 or 250,000 gold and $17.

This is assuming you have no boosters.

To give a perspective, you can easily make about 50k to 100k per hour at level 35 if you are farming.

Tourneyments and going "Infinite" in Saga

https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6883

Tourneyments will cost $2 and 3 boosters. This is $11 in cost to win 4 boosters for first. Assuming a first place finishing, you can use your boosters to reenter in the next tourneyment. If you can trade one of the cards from your spare booster for 10 event tickets, you can run the next tourneyment for free.

This is called "going infinite" in games like Magic the Gathering Online. Where you win enough to play for free every tourneyment.

Can you go infinite? Most likely not in Saga. The prizes aren't high enough to allow you any losses without having to rebuy in.

(See the first comment to this. Sagaunits wants to buy your tourney cards to help you go infinite.)

Spells

• So as we know, spells are getting revamped. Discussion has been for them to be removed from the CP cost and given their own CP totals.

So basically you can field 150CP for troops and 30CP for spells or w/e.

This will help alot, I love spells, but using them is a waste sometimes.

The "Pulling a Christian" Video by Illian

By popular demand, here is the video that is referred to the most in /conflict in the last couple of days.

Shrine rush in the 1v1 PvP is defined as trying to take early shrines from the other player.

In this video, the player Christians rushs Illian's shrines. As you don't see where their initial units are positioned until the game starts, this ended up bad for his lone Chariot Archers.

This tactic although not strategically valid was not the problem. The problem was immediantly after this, he concedes the game (surrenders), complaining about a phantom itch on his butt.

Wow Christians, if you want to make up an excuse, here are some better ideas:

• My mom needs me to go get something from her car.


• My mouse unplugged.


• The game locked on me.


• Sorry phone.

or the best way to concede a game.

"Good game, get you next time."

The Final Charge of the Behemoth Video.

This is a quick video I made of Mithril Mines.

If you haven't played Saga at the end-game PvE, this is a pretty good representation of the scope and density of the troop fights.

Note all of these enemy troops are level 10 troops, so they take a bit to kill down.

If you click over to YouTube, they have a "watch in high quality" option that looks even better.

Undead Release Date!

The Undead expansion is due to be released in Early August, both online and in hobby stores across North America and in select UK locations. - Source - http://www.tcgplayer.com/db/game_review.asp?AID=2483&PID=232&DBID=4

10 days till August 1, so we are looking at 3 weeks minimum until the release.

Raiding and several PvP features are broken - Use the time wisely!

- Source https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6800&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=45

So the following features are currently bugged or happening in the game:

• Raiding god favor costs on Raiding are doubled. It costs 3000 god favor and 5 shards to do a full raid.
• Walls are untargetable in raids right now, so if the defender has a wall between you and plunder, its UNPASSABLE.
• You can put full walls around about 75% of your territory mana mines.
• In PvP the Gatehouses do not open.
• In raids the Defender Archers are getting bugged and often will not shoot through alot of the free-build.
• Alot of the new walls are causing LOS issues for your defending troops.

Ok, with all that going on, it is a perfect time to use the safehold time to pump up your army.

You should think about doing the following:

• Leveling your raiding army and defending troops for World Conflict.
• Setup your walls for your city and wilderness for how you will like them to be.
• Grind shards for enhancements of your army.
• Get ready for the Undead release by farming gold and moving it to Brotherhood if needed.
• Grind gold for upgrading your University. Level 3 police are nice vs espionage.

Sure we can all complain about the state of raiding as this thread shows, but you have to look at the Free-Build changes as an improvement. I like them, if other things are broken temporarily, its just time to do something new.