CheapStack Guide

From The Five Pillars

Seeing how Kazarian contributes his ideas to the community, and been asked several times to do something like it, i think i will just write something about cheap stacks, i guess...

The thing with most players is, when they see a massive land/power mage, they start to think that's too powerful for them to mess with. in a way, that's true, and i can understand, but after being one of those mages several times, i saw the weakness in them, they're very beatable just like anyone else, sometimes even more beatable, because they don't expect to get hit.

Therefore, i ask you to think differently, i've taught or tried to teach many of the experienced players to cheap stack efficiently, rarely new players, not only because dying is the risk you have to take, and more importantly, you must know you can beat those big mages, if you're afraid of them, even if you mastered the skills, you still can't use them fully. alot of the vets had mass land in the past, so they know they are not as strong as they appear to be.

Ok, if you know you can beat them, great, let's begin this guide:

First know that the game is designed no stack or assign or anything is perfect, everything has weaknesses, so if you want to take the big mage down, it's your job on finding them. the easiest way to do that is to find all the weaknesses of units in the stack, although alot smart mages knows how to cover the weakness with assign and etc, worry not, that's when modifier come in handy, to put it in the easiest term, if you can stack your biggest army to lower position, using modifiers, to get the perfect match up, you are increasing your chances of winning by lots. that's not necessarily cheap stack that's usually how i play my mages on defence(don't care bout landrun, hit with whatever ) note that simple units have alot higher AP compare to other type of units, so do remember that when finding weakness, (The well known Acid Beast is the example of combination of the use of knowledge on finding weakness and modifier)

We know the big mages have alot of advantages over the smaller mages, now we just have to create our own advantages. Of course, sometimes your mage might be too weak to do the above, and then, we use cheap stacks, focus your damages, and use fakes stacks to distract other enemy stacks. to do it successfully, you must apply the knowledge of unit and modifiers to it. knowing enemy's stack before hitting is important, but to avoid giving warning, you should know what target stack roughly, and summon up not fully, scout, then set up the key units to get the perfect match up. of course, some stacks are really tough to beat, if that's the situation, you'll need your friends, one 3k land mages might not be able to bring down a 10k land, but 3 of them should be able to launch a successful surprise BBQ, to do that, you try to configure the enemy stacks using the known data like their stack, assign, and figure out the change after your friend's hit, and modify the target stack to your liking.

as a player with cheap stacks, the things you need to remember are, although multiattacking is necessary, but that's against most guild's RoE, so do take note of the consequences before you start. You're the farm, and the % of your loss is usually multiple times greater than normal stacks, you constantly lack mana, so the mage dying become a serious issue. imagine ppl can put you in protection with 60% damage instead of 30%... it's ok to have more than 10 stacks of fakes, in fact, i remember seeing Shivar getting 60+ fake stacks for a big BBQ, how many you need is up to you, something like if you have planned or enough confidence that you can live and easily recover, feel free to loss as much NP as you want to bait, other wise, more fakes never hurt. and at last, one can never always use cheap stacks, because you loss land fast, therefore you must do big landruns, that you need to either get low enough, or use long stacks, depends on your mage's status.

OK, The big question mark above some of your heads might be: Why are those big mages sometimes vulnerable. Well, Let's give it an example, assuming there is a 10k land white mage in top 10. I use this dumbest way to find out who's fat and my potential target(yes, as some of you know me, i'm lazy to think anything complicated):

Number of Land * 4,000,000 > that mage's Netpower = Undersummoned.
Number of Land * 4,000,000 < that mage's Netpower = Oversummoned.

(just a reference, if you see a 10k land mage with only 20 something million powers, that's like having a sign on his head says: "Farm me!" i guess that really comes down to the topic of how to play to suit the environment, you gotta use a bit of brain, for example if you see a mage with reasonable landsize (6~12k) and gaining land from 50~250 everyday, it doesn't really matter if he has 50mil power, please take into your consideration to farm him, it's just such an invitation... well, kinda off topic, i'll discuss no further on this.)

Now, depends on how much power the mage is at, say the 10k land mage is sitting at 35mil, i assume the land+nodes+spell level power is at least the 1.5mil times of his land size, which is 15mil, therefore the army is at most 20mil, most of the time you find the actual Amry power is between 70%~90% of the presumed Army power(because we assumed the less nodes used, no extra gold and no items, heroes etc, and most of the time they do have alot of those).

Now 20mil army might look pretty impressive, but imagine if the mage has 7 stacks, his army set up would be quite balanced, for the reducing the risk of losing hero reason. Then we're maybe looking at around 4mil NP top stack, is that alot? any 3k mage can get 12mil of army power in one stack easily, much more if prepared so need i say anymore on that?

A little on the unit stats, yes, because of the all the factors in the battle system, a 4mil stack can sometimes deal 8mil damage, and a 10mil army might only hit for 1mil damage. so try get the units better matched up instead of better power pair up(of course, would be better if you do that after stacks been matched perfectly).

To those really addicted mages, you can try use full army stand to scout, and re-stack for target stack after that, because not only can you tell stacks/assign from it, you can also tell the numbers of most of target stacks, but you need to have some ideas like it takes how many unit X to kill unit Y(yeah, use excel you excel freaks ).

Alignments:

Red's strength in cheap stacks lies in the mass AP and the use of modifier, easier to recover from BBQ than other colors, and with Stone Crumble.

White's another good color to use cheap stacks, because their unit types are balanced, boostable, and some good attack types. But managing resources is more difficult than other colors.

Blue has the most options to cheap stack, lots ranged units, awesome attack types, but the use on modifier is very poor, generally low AP units is just another problems for yous to overcome.

Black is somewhat more difficult for cheapstacks. Harder to recover from BBQs, though they do have their natural enemies to target, with fine simple/medium units, but that's the color i played least, so i'm not gonna make a fool out of myself now.

Green is the last color you want to use for cheap stacks, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have lots options, it only means it's usually quite easy to defend their cheap stacks. Still alot of potentials though...

Slaya aka Eternal Tears of Sorrow

PS: To encourages the new stack development, and not limit your creativities, i'm not going to add the popular cheapstacks. If you can understand the above, you're capable of using any.