This is for you Ironforge!

Official Answer to all of Ironforge's emails arrive:

"Upon close inspection, the Espionage system is difficult to exploit in any practical fashion. Any given nation can only sustain a few successful espionage attempts in one day. After each successful espionage attempt, the chances of an ensuing success against that nation decrease by 15%. This means that the standard number of possible successful espionages that cause damage is 4 per day. University upgrades and the size of the nation’s Police force can cause the exact number to fluctuate. After a point, it becomes impossible to successfully espionage a nation for the remainder of that day. Also, as further attempts become increasingly difficult, opposing nations will likely fail several times before their attempt succeeds, costing more in resources than the damage they will inflict. Players can increase the likelihood of thwarting espionage attempts by purchasing university upgrades and increasing the number of peasants assigned to be Police in Peasant Management.

Similarly with raiding, once a player has been raided and their buildings damaged, it becomes less and less effective to raid them (because they have nothing to steal!). Also, as wilderness territories are an opt-in system, players should carefully consider the advantages and consequences of moving their territories to wilderness.

After long and careful thought, we have decided that the system works well in its current state – though changes will continue to be made, particularly with regards to world conflict. Claims of “excessive” raiding and espionage will no longer be entertained when they are conducted in the normal spirit of the game. (Given that this is a combat game, “normal” spirit certainly involves destroying one another’s armies, cities, etc.) We will continue to monitor abusive behavior, and act on specific instances of bullying, harassment and poor sportsmanship (including retaliation against game moderators)."

Let me translate into English:

Don't whine about getting attacked either through Espionage or Raids.

War Room - Part 1 - The RULES of War

We need to talk about War, and warring with your neighbors in Saga.

Firstly. You know you want to fight. Playing Saga to collect lumber is, well, - lame.

Yes the missions are great, yes, but seriously you are here to fight.

First step is admitting it. Next is learning how to do it.

1. PvP is Op-In. This means you have to CHOOSE to fight. You can't be raided unless you go wilderness, you can't go wilderness unless you build a Keep. You can't fight 1v1 unless you start a battle. If you aren't ready to fight then don't go wilderness. The ONLY thing someone can do for you is espionage you. And there is a limit on how many times a day they can espionage you.



2. If you BUILD a wilderness, expect to be raided. However, the raids aren't that bad really.



3. If you store alot of mana shards, then it becomes PROFITABLE to raid you. Raiding cost 5 shards and 1500 god favor. So a level 35 with a full tank of god favor can raid about 4 times without doing quests or donating to the church. They have to make more then 5 shards and about 500 resources to make the raid perceived as SUCCESSFUL.



4. If you make raiding unsuccessful for the raider you will limit the amount of times they WANT to raid you. They will continue to raid you ONLY if they have a personal issue with you. (ie they hate you and want to grief you.)

So how do you make raiding unsuccessful for the raider?

1. Firstly. Spend your shards. Don't hoard them, spend them on enchants.


2. Second. Make sure to have at least 10 mid-level troop units in your territories OR 20 level 1 common armies. If you have decent level troops, level 6+, you can get by with 10 full units. If you use commons, you will want many waves. Troops come out at 5 units at a time. Destroying 5 units takes about 30secs to 1min. Any of those units can interrupt a cap. You want to busy the raider for 5 mins, thus 4 waves of 5 units will work most of the time.


3. You do not NEED to repair anything but lumber/gold/ore/farms. House/mana mines/shrines/etc do not affect your daily production. Let them burn! Your normal build/repair will eventually fix them to full.


4. Bless your hurt building, its CHEAP.

I wanted to go through a couple of PvP definitions:

Going to War Footing:

Going to "war footing" is a concept that is pretty logical, and I figure, lets coin a phrase for it.

• War Footing is where you start a war, and fighting the war is most of your time spend. This involves taking most of your troops out of your main army, and sticking it into your territories. If you raid or level, you move them back into your army, then stick them on defense while you are offline. This also involves increasing your police, and perhaps even dumping your spare production on friends or alts.


• You want to go to war footing when you are getting raided, or when you decide to espionage the entire server.

An even more EXTREME tactic is to delete everything in your territory but mana mines and watchtowers. I will tell you this is VERY unprofitable for the attacker.

Shock Ryder is the first to do it, we now coin it the "Shock Ryder Defense Tactic".

Don't QQ:

QQ is the universal sign for crying or whining. This is QQ:

from - http://sagathoughts.blogspot.com/2008/07/ancestral-not-getting-point.html

I know you might be tempting to QQ, but here's why you don't do it.

1. It shows that PvP made you cry. Seriously why cry about PvP, its supposed to be fun?


2. It makes a pro PvP'r smile.


3. It may get you featured on a Internet website.


4. You won't intimidate a pro PvPr. We get QQd every day. It almost clique


5. The best response to a raid is a raid.


6. See above. QQing can make it personal for the raider. He likes to smile so he raids you to profit on your QQ.

Don't Nut-Cup:

Nutcupping is a PvP term that is somewhat adult in context. If you can't handle the terminology, please close the blog.



Nutcupping is defined as when you need someone else to hold your nuts while you have to urinate. In PvP its where you need a bunch of friends to help you fight someone 1v1.



If you nutcup, then you are admitting that you CAN NOT stand by yourself. You have to hide behind friends. You are afraid to stand by yourself:

"A Knight's Tale Movie Quotes (2001)
You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting. In what world could you possibly beat me?"

So how do I stop Nut-Cupping?

So if you are fighting two people, you fight with a friend. You fight a guild, you bring a guild. Zerging is in just bad taste. First how hard is it to kill with a mob behind you. Second can you even count that as victory?



Let me leave with a final case-study reference. Illian raided a guy yesterday that sparked some drama. Guy wants to quit, alot of QQ. Click for a quick read https://www.playsaga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6714

I'm sorry I scared your son! - Espionage Part 5

Wow this is kinda sad at the same time as being a little funny.

I hope his son keeps playing!

LOL Elrandor!

Eldaror, I can't come out to play, I'm at work!

Oi! Swiper no swiping! - Espionage Part 3

I got returned visited today.

• After espionaging 600 people and getting success only 200 times, (successes don't tell the victim who hit them), out of 400 only 13 felt froggy enough to jump.

Thats a 4% froggy ratio.

• The only two nations that got froggy that have wilderness are Ancestral and Tortal.
• Ancestral of course being a level 35 nation who spends all day playing on his level 12 alt Dawnbringer spamming "Level 12 looking for pvp with 14 or lower". Of course I've been told he has leveled up a couple rank 10 troops on his level 12 nation so if you fight him, he fields all Level 10s.
• Whatever floats your boat.
• Tortal is a level 19 with a single wilderness.

Poor guy, seems like he just started.
Well I only started a month ago, and he DID felt froggy:

My raid didn't pay my costs in going to visit him. 143 gold, 92 wood, 147 stone and 159 food.

6 shards, it cost 5 to go play.

Kheldara says if you raid 5000 times you get a statue in the center of your town. - 4999 to go!

Espionaging - Part 2 - Profitable? Nope

• So I ended up espionaging about 592 Nations.


• Yes I really did copy and paste in almost 600 nation names.


• It cost me over 80,000 gold. I am very serious about my testing.

Here are the results:

1. On average even including the 31% bonus's from the University, I was hitting at about 1 in 4 for successes.


2. I would get on average about 220 supplies from a success.


3. It cost 600 gold for 4 attempts, so overall espionage costs the espionager more then the espionagee. This is even disregarding police, because I avoided espionaging people that most likely had police setup.

Here are the Nations I successfully hit.

See below on the left for the screenshot of the attempts. As you can see most are very minor successes.

Kheldara told me tonight that espionage was draining, and it was better to go raid and "Fill your Chariots with loot".

I have to agree with him...

Espionage! Part 1 - Are Pirates or Ninjas Better?

So I espionage today until I ran out of time. I hit about 30 people with my 150 gold investment.

Who paid off?

All these guys gave me money and resources.

If you are looking to make a little bit of profit, and ALOT of drama, feel free to try the espionage lottery game:

Here is your list to start from:

http://www.playsaga.com/guilds.php

Start off copy and pasting random player name into the espionage steal screen.

You pay 150 gold for your spies, sometimes you get the money back sometimes not.

There is also a cap on the number of attempts you can do on a single player per day. I can usually get 2 off successfully then the rest are failures.

Your university espionage trains help as well.

The one thing to remember is there is an artifical cap on certain players because their nations might be semi AFK or inactive. If you see a failure:

This doesn't mean their police caught you, (unlikely as most people don't field police), but instead the nation might be inactive and protected by the mighty Monk.

Drama Incoming:

• If you DO care to do a bit of espionage, be aware of the return trip. I call it people getting "Froggy".
• The froggy response to an espionage is either return espionage or raids. I personally plan on keeping a list of froggy nations here on the blog, for return response. In fact responding to an espionage attempt is a great way to be profiled and identified for army size and depth.
• Obviously there will be people bigger and meaner. Or there is the fear of the zerg response. As long as it's fun, why not do it. My response the bigger meaner people is find other bigger meaner people to help fight. Or just to get bigger and meaner. It's a video game, lets have some fun.
• Espionage is a good way to make money and resources. For a measily 150 gold I have occasional doubled my money in resources.

• Stay tuned here at sagathoughts.blogspot.com to see what happens next, or as I espionage even more people to find out the frogs.
• Oh, and what is better a pirate or a ninja? Vikings count as pirates, so it seems like pirates are better...