Googly's Approach to Defending

Most of the people who have played with me and tried to take me down know that I am a strong defender. I wouldn't say I'm great. I would say I am an aggressive conservative. I try to conserve troop losses so that I can take the fight back to the attacker. This is how I approach defending (roughly) - I would reccomend this to newer/inexperienced players more than experienced ones.

So you've just logged in, after a nice long sleep. Unfortunately, some idiots have launched heavily on you, and so you have a tonne of incomings. If you are relatively new to the game, lazy or inexperienced in defending heavy assaults, then this will be of more use to you than anything else.

Step 1. Take a breather. 

Go away from the computer for 1-2 minutes - the worst thing you can do is panic and jump right in, as that is when you WILL make mistakes.

Step 2. Look for likely trains.

Go to incoming, order them by village, and look for any villages which have a significantly larger number of incomings than others, and for obvious noble trains. Make a note of these.

Step 3. Alert your tribe.

Post in your tribe forums, alerting people to the fact that you have heavy incomings. In the post, say you are currently trying to work out what is what, and will update the thread as you have gained the information available. The earlier your tribe is warned that you may need help, the earlier they will respond in kind. It is a good idea if your incoming rate is rising, to ask people to send fakes/real nukes at the players hitting you - they will then be likely to slow down/stop sending on you, in order to defend themselves better.

Step 4. Tagging.

NOW begin tagging. An in-depth guide on tagging is viewable here - otherwise, follow this "rush tagging" method. Start with the likely trains first, and then work your way from start to finish. If in doubt, check the last time you were online - if you had no incomings at that point, or had finished tagging up until that point, you will have a rough timeslot they had to send in. Sometimes you can find likely trains are actually cat-trains or fake trains, because you would have been on when the nobles would have had to have been sent.

Ok, so you have just finished tagging your attacks. Some you couldn't due to not knowing when they were sent for sure. This is where attack IDs come in. When sorting incomings, you can sort by attack IDs. You can work out when some of the attacks on you were sent that you could tag, and as such work out a likely time-period the attacks were sent in based on the attack IDs.

I will give an example, as this is quite hard to explain otherwise.

Attack ID example:

 

You have 12 attacks with IDs ranging from 123456789 to 123456999, which you couldn't rename. You were offline from 00:00 ST to 12:00 ST. If they were nobles, they would have to have been sent at let's say 1:00 ST to 3:00 ST (you can work this out from calculating when each time attack would have had to have been sent). If they were rams, they would have to have been sent at around 6:00 to 8:00 ST.

You have 3 trains here in this example. One train has attack IDs around 123456790, one has 123456820, the other around 123456950.

 

You run a sorting script, and get the attack IDs in order. You notice that the first two trains (the smaller IDs) are next to each other, and there are several attacks between them and the final train. You have tagged these inbetween attacks successfully. So, what do you do? You check when these known ones had to have been launched (which is where using a good tagger comes in handy). You find that the known ones were launched between 04:00 ST and 05:00 ST. Therefore, the 8 attacks before these HAVE to be noble trains as they were sent too early to be ram speed, with the 4 after these being ram-speed attacks as they couldn't have been sent early enough to be Nobles.

Step 5. Begin defending.

So we now have the majority, if not all, of the attacks tagged.
We have a few choices now:
Sniping.
Stacking.
Dodging.
Backtiming.
Pre-Nobling/Recapping

I have spoilered below the pro's and con's of each method, from my point of view. Click here for an in-depth guide on how to do each method.

Methods of defending:

I wouldn't recommend backtiming unless you are an experienced defender - you can easily lose nukes on pre-stacked villages if your backtime is going across a large distance. The only time it is worth the risk is on packet worlds, backtiming nobles. This is because killing nobles at home does the enemy a lot more damage than them killing off the nuke(s) does to you.

Dodging.  should be used when you have a small number of ram-speed attacks that look likely to be fakes at a village. NEVER use offensive troops to stack a village. Always dodge with these where possible. If you lose a wall from a well-hidden nuke amongst fakes, so what? You can still hold a village effectively without a wall. You can't without troops. 

Stacking. If you can get large amounts of support to a village being heavily hit, this is generally (not always, but generally) the best thing to do. Whether this is your defense, or tribal/friend support. It will demoralise the enemy if you can take out their nukes, as they can't do too much. I would generally advise 3 full defensive villages minimum as a stack, as this way the losses you gain will be spread between villages, and on average their nuke losses would outweigh your defensive losses depending on how many defensive villages you can support the target village with.

Sniping. This is the single most valuable technique in defending. In both meanings of the word. Let's cover the first meaning - supporting a village between nobles landing. This is a great way to hold a village with minimal troops needed for a period of time. Eventually if they keep sending nobles you will lose it. However, each time you kill off a bunch of nobles it puts the enemy back several hours. There is nothing nicer than seeing a nuke or a noble go splat.

The second meaning I prefer to call re-capping. This method is the idea of letting yourself lose a village, but retake it straight after.This can be useful for holding villages - particularly if you pre-noble the villages before the enemy's train lands, so that they overnoble. Again, more effective on packet worlds than coin worlds.

 

The best defenders are the people who can hold on to the majority of their villages with small troop loss on their part. Bear this in mind when defending.

Once you have some experience in defending properly, you will know that it all comes down to judgement calls. Don't worry if you lose a few villages. If the enemy has an Op on you to take 30 of your villages, and only take 6, they will be demoralised. Although you will be pissed off for losing villages, does it matter? No! You have caused the enemy more problems than they wanted, and so you are in a better position to do damage. Plus, you should be able to recap your villages as the walls will be low and you will have known if they were sending support to land after noble trains.

~Googly~

Source : Tribal Wars Forum