King's 2nd Tournament - Bloodthirst For Knowledge

Think of it as a much more peaceful and considerate alternative to sending assassins. 

I know that some people are upset that this tactic has been employed, and Harmless would like to publicly respond.  We have done so here:  http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/topic1852_post19176.html#19176

Congrats to those that bawawawed so hard the GMs felt moved to make a public statement revealing your competitors tactics.

edit: Although I see that those that were bawawawawwwwing had no problem with hijacking the same tactic to use in retaliation themselves before sending their petitions complaining of exploits.


Edited by Createure - 02 May 2011 at 12:01

Hi all,

There's been quite a lot of comment, Petitions etc regarding the use of diplomatic units to "lock down" spawn sites.

This tactic takes advantage of the fact that an NPC node does not re-spawn if there are units incoming to it, and so a player can "force" an NPC node to remain of a certain type/number.

How this tactic works

• Identify a major competitor for a particular tournament category
• Look at the spawn sites around this competitors' cities
• Wait until a very large spawn appears (Horde/Legion etc)
• Send a single scout (or slowest diplo unit) to that spawn square
• When those diplo units arrive, send another one - thereby stopping that node from changing to something the player is likely to want to attack

We feel absolutely 100% that this is not an exploit, for the following reasons:

• It's a clever, legitimate use of an ingame mechanic to hamper a competitor's tournament progress
• It's available to everyone with minimal technology or building requirements, and rewards people who put time and effort into deploying this tactic, rather than simply having yet-another-tournament where the biggest armies win by default.  This tactic substantially levels the playing field between big alliances and small individuals.
• It introduces some non-violent PvP elements to a largely PvE tournament.
• Whilst it may be slightly underhand and sneaky, I suspect most tournament participants would prefer this tactic to be the one in use rather than (eg) another perfectly legitimate tactic to hamper a competitor that might involve Siege Engines.

Regards,

SC

Do armies returning home with animal parts at midday on 11th May get counted?

The "problem"  (not really sure it is a problem) is that you can use significant overkill on smaller spawns and thereby reduce your army losses substantially.

With a legion (even those of the wild dogs or spiders that Boromir likes so much) it's much harder to get the same amount of overkill and thus low enough troop losses to make it worth while regardless of the stats about what your returns might be.

SC - for that reason alone I'm willing to bet several beers that the number or instances of legions bearing massive fruit are dwarfed by those of small attacks giving large returns per unit lost.