I have seen many guides on this part of the forum detailing how to "do well". Well, to be perfectly honest, you can do as well as you like, if you don't know how to war, then you're going to lose. I am going to cover basic tactics and some advanced tactics, as well as what NOT to do.

Also, here is a key for some of the acronyms I am using:
OP = Outpost
ETA = Estimated Time of Arrival
EOT = End Of Tick
NA = North America
SA = South America
E = Energy

First, the very basics. You'll want to make one chassis for yourself, and your alliance, and one chassis only. If you join an alliance, and the alliance chassis is Inf and you have vehicles, switch immediately. Because in massed attacks, your vehicles will die very quickly. Now, the ratios of squads. Since we will only be using 1 chassis, there is also the very best, optimized squad builds for each one. This is:

Infantry: either 10 armor 20 range, or 9 armor 21 range. I use the latter, but there isn't much of a difference.

Vehicles: either 4 armor 11 range, or 5 armor 10 range.

Tanks: 3 armor 7 range.


Basic tactics

1) Always always always be online for impact. It can be to anything. Outposts, colonies, mines/wells. If you aren't, you run the risk of losing however many squads you sent to that particular thing. For example, I send a full squad of "Inf Against Inf" (IAI) to a neutral colony. I checked stats beforehand. 9 units recruited. After scan, it reveals it is all inf. Now, that is all well and good, and I have sent to it 3 ETA. However, if I go offline, and am not online for impact, what if the guy comes online, sees he is under attack, and builds x amount of units? I run the risk of losing that squad. Even if I don't, I will probably lose more than I should.

2) Never do very long eta moves. ALWAYS try and get as close as possible to your target. 3 ETA. This is because if you attack an enemy OP with a long ETA, every tick increases the chance of them being able to get enough people online and squads into position to counter your attack. And if it's long ETA, even if you recall there is a chance you will get trapped! Also NEVER move long ETA even to your own OPs, if they are in a warzone/potential warzone. As I said before you can and will get trapped if you do either of these things. The only time this is acceptable is in the early game when you wouldn't have good OP coverage or decent infrastructure. Refer back to 1 if you are forced to long ETA moves in this case.

3) Always try to make a fight as one sided as possible, in your favor of course. For example, if there are 50 enemy squads on an OP, and assuming they will not move for whatever reason (lockdown'd, offline), then send at least 100 squads. This is because you want to take as small losses as possible. To do this you want to make sure that your battles last 1 round to minimize casualties. Even if you send 50 to counter the enemy's 50, you will most likely win a Pyrrhic victory where even though you have won, you will have lost so much that you cannot possibly advance afterwards. Which leads onto my next point..

4) Do not leave your army on an OP over night or if you are going out/away for an extended period of time. You can do this if you are fighting an even or weaker enemy, but only if the OP you are going to "park" on has lots of spy protection, and even then you should try and pull back a little so you don't park right on the frontlines. If you aren't pulling back in force, and only you are going offline, park far back from the frontlines. If you go off for a long time and do not pull back, you are leaving yourself open for nukes, spy attacks and all sorts of manners of death. However ALL of this can be mitigated IF your alliance has your phone number. They can simply miss-call or text you, you wake up and move where appropriate.

5) When possible, always try and send EOT, or end of tick. Meaning, try and send any and all attacks with at most 5 minutes on the tick timer left. If you are confident in your internet speed OR you think that the ticks won't lag and end the tick with 1 minute remaining ( ) then you can try and do it with even 10 seconds remaining. You will want to do this because it gives the opposing team much less time to react, and therefore, counter your moves.

6) Do not just try and rush to your enemy's colonies. This is a sure way to get yourself trapped because A) you're doing very long ETA moves to reach them and B) Even if you somehow do reach them, if the colony you're attacking has a shield, you're screwed. Because not only would you have ignored/missed all the OPs leading up to their colonies, but you probably would have ignored all their armies as well. All they would have to do is attack the origin OP and you lose. Even if you have a bigger force this is a horrible, horrible tactic. Just don't do it. Take a slower approach, prioritize gates, radars, even TBs first for spam making and (hopefully) armor replacing. Be patient. You'll get there eventually. And you will have taken large swaths of territory with it.

7) Do use the art of spam. Spam = squads of just 1 or 2 units in them, usually inf, but can contain tanks or vehicles as well. Spam is REALLY useful for several reasons. A) If you send a spam at where the enemy units are, you get a BR showing every single one of their units. This is useful because you can calculate upcoming battles using the battle simulator. This also works in reverse, say, you're moving off an OP because the enemy is ETA 1 away. Leave a spam so you know what they were attacking with. B) It is very useful in taking undefended OPs. If the enemy is retreating, then instead of wasting full squads on taking OPs they leave behind, use squads of spam to take them instead! And C) Even if your spam wave didn't accomplish much, it wears down the enemy. No one likes dealing with spam. And if you have plenty of oil or E, this can be a good reason to use spam.

8) Very simple. When you're defending OPs, always match the attacker's ETA, by using delay. This is important because if you do not, you will land before your attacker does, giving him/her a chance to scan your "anti-spam" and decide whether or not he/she will be able to take the OP or not. It is also effective because this also nullifies spy attacks.

9) When laying down new OPs to advance with, try to make it pinpoint accurate. It can be frustrating to have to move 3 ETA when if you had moved your mouse cursor a little closer to the left/right, it would've been a quicker 2 ETA, also saving oil.


Advanced tactics

Spy attacks

Spy attacks can make or break a battle. First off, with the agent update, it is now significantly easier to pull off spy attacks, because you can now lockdown your own OPs! Now this might not sound significant, but it really is. Say the opposing team is attacking your OP. You have an agent on your OP. They are ETA 1 away from it then.. You lockdown your OP end of tick. Now, to be absolutely sure you can hit them, you HAVE to send at your own OP end of tick as well. Otherwise, if you send after they have taken it, but are locked down, if they are lucky, they will escape. Because lockdown lasts from between 3-6 ticks, and if you send 3 ETA to their (formerly yours) OP, the lockdown might end in 3 ticks, giving them a chance to escape when you are 1 ETA away. Furthermore, if you want a truly crushing victory, then you will have more than one agent on your OPs. Coordinate with your alliance members. You can lockdown AND virus/burn fuel supplies. This is a certain way to make sure you win in one round (refer back to Basic strats: 3) and therefore minimize losses. However, if your opponent is using tanks or vehicles, then you will haev to spy attack multiple times using more agents to get all their units down to 1 HP. This can be difficult to pull off, but even if you can't, 50% Health is still good. You can try and spy attack enemy OPs, but if your opponent is any good they will likely have spy protection on the important ones i.e the gates, radars and/or OPs that have a large amount of units on them. Still worth a shot though. Moreover, due to the above reasons it is now very risky attacking important OPs with a massed attack. If you want to enter an enemy area, then it is much better to make your own OP, because that OP is guaranteed not to have any agents on it, AND your squads go to that OP much faster. However sometimes when making your own OP is impossible or impractical, if you have to attack an enemy OP do so in force, so even if they lockdown, they still will not attack you because you have more squads than them. If you do not have a larger force, or do but don't want to get locked down, then you may have to refresh EOT to see if the enemy has locked down their OP. If they have, depending on the situation, you may have to recall.

Missile Silos and Nukes

Nukes are sometimes useful. They are useful in a war of attrition. For example, say you own NA, SA and Greenland, and your opponent owns Africa and Europe. It is useful to have nukes in Iceland/South East Greenland, and on the "tip" of SA. This is because when you shoot a nuke at an upgraded OP, when it lands it will downgrade the OP and move it's control ticks down to 0. Therefore they are good for prolonged wars of attrition. Nukes are also useful because when they hit an OP, they also destroy 10% of the units on that OP, AND they reduce all the unit's HP down to 1. This sounds amazing in theory, but in practice nukes usually move to slowly to be of much use, because when you launch a nuke, even if it is at the closest target you can launch it at, the minimum the ETA will be is ALWAYS ETA 6. This is nullified somewhat by a mechanic that if a nuke is ETA 1 from an OP, even if you launch off that OP, your units will still suffer from the full effects of the nuke. Due to the above reasons, nukes generally are not that useful, but that doesn't mean they are useless.

Here are a few common places for nuke fields:


Note on recent updates

Radiation and Spy cleansing

When a nuke hits an OP, all agents on that OP are killed. This "cleanses" the OP, and makes it somewhat safe to attack. However due to Radiation (When a nuke hits an OP, radiation is left behind for 6-12 ticks and reduces units's HP by 1 every tick, but does NOT kill any) you probably will not want to attack aforementioned OP for at least 6 ticks.

Spy updates

I) "Agents will fight hostile agents when both are on the same spot and one of them performs an action."
When you have an agents with fairly long infiltration time on an OP, it could be safe to attack. But it might not, as the hostile alliance could have their own agent(s) on the OP you want to attack, making this form of protection not as reliable as the other two. Still useful however.

II) "In order to lock down your own outpost, it has to be fully controlled (24 ticks)."
Simple. This is an easy to understand formula for checking if the OP you're attacking will be safe or not. x = your launch ETA. y = control ticks enemy OP must have at the most, for it to be safe. So:
24 - x - 1 = y
If the hostile OP's control tick is above y, it is NOT safe to attack, and the enemy may lock.

III) "Outposts that switched hands can't be locked for 1 tick."
Again, simple, 1 tick immunity against lockdown, and lockdown only. You can still get spy attacked (i.e Virus'd), and can still get locked once the immunity is over.


That should cover most of the tactics used in war, though I have left "secret" ones out. Because it wouldn't be a secret if everyone knew it!

Feedback would be much appreciated. Also, if I missed something, please let me know and I will edit. Cheers!

Solid guide Gonna show this to people i'm teaching the game to lol. Goes over everything i'm too lazy to explain xD

Thanks! Finally some feedback, and positive at that.

This is going to make some newbie very happy one day.

waw nice guild

thanks for share

This is a very good guide, thanks for sharing.

Nothing in there I didn't know yet, but i'm certain a lot of people can find it very helpful.

Cheers!

some part in the guide is quite outdated (eg. the lockdown ur own OP)... I recommend to fix it since I'll be sending this around for a while

I'll update it soon.

Updated.

guide needs advice to follow



in war it is never good to have the home feild advantage

the road to success is always under construction