Why are we fighting?

Angrim wrote: replacement rate matters in a long conflict more than size, which is why land can be a better proxy for military strength in some situations--even better than actual troop count.  but the real measure over time is how many players leave one's alliance via fatigue or disgust.

Production (non-farmstead) sov is a decent measure of military production capacity. City size correlates to a certain point, assuming that the city is at about 65% taxes, which means it cannot be over-sized. City size is better representative of what the standing forces might be available prior to a war, and production sov is a better representative for replacement rate. If the war runs long, players will need large stockpiles of gold and items to rebuild units. That implies a good supply from support accounts and perma-sat accounts on the sidelines. Bigger, older alliances probably tend to have more farm accounts and bigger stockpiles.

Angrim is right. Alliance factors like clustering, endurance, coordination, and sheer determination are important. Obviously experience with tournaments and sieges helps a lot, too. It's tough to know the fighting abilities of the player except by reputation.

There's no good way to look at the numbers between two alliances and make a superficial judgement. However (and it's a big however), you can look through the individual players' cities and immediately get a feel for whether they know how to fight. You'll know it when you see it. 7-10 cities, all around 15-20k population, a few Farmstead V adjacent to each, and then 12-15x sov II. Often they will have claimed several +1-3% boost tiles for a particular unit type, occasionally outside the usual circle-square pattern, and the organized ones will have intentionally put their city near multiple bonus boost squares. Their cities will be placed on mostly plains, where friendly cavalry can rescue them from attack. Some players have have terraformed 7 food mountains.

If you leaf through the 50k-150k population players and see a tight clustering of cities like that, with the players having medium-high attack and defense scores, that's a good indicator that particular alliance might have some serious punch.

Kumomoto wrote: Fine. Population to military/gold isn't directly linear. But the simple fact remains that 100 player alliances with much higher population are far far more likely to have more troops than 20 player alliances with much lower population. # of accts absolutely has a direct effect on troop potential in an alliance.

twilights wrote: i think it all comes down to how crazy u are and how much u drink...maybe how good ur sex life is too...all these have the same importance and the proper mixture just makes u a terror in war....wheres my 40...i going all gangster

There might be non (or lesser) militaristic alliances not living at maximum troop numbers for their size... just saying... 

Edited by Hora - 01 Nov 2013 at 23:26

Vanerin wrote: This is probably a bit off topic, but this "Seriously dude, he who has more population CAN have more gold income " is inaccurate. I ran some numbers and found that you can have waaay more gold production at 18K than at 25K (assuming average sov options). Hmm, notice how players like Sir Bradly don't have cities larger than "Sprawling Cities"?

This is a reply for both of you.

The correct and maybe most accurate thing to write about population and gold is that there is a direct mathematic connection between it and the max gold generated and, yes indeed, it is not directly proportionate (nor linear) all the way but it peaks at some point (which exactly is a large discussion) and then drops off, but not by THAT much.

So I just thought to keep it is simple since we seem to have troubles in these forums in agreeing on simplier things than that.

So, yes, the OPTIMAL gold is not at the maximum population, BUT the usual convention of the whole server as long as I remember is exactly this. More pop=more gold=more troops and H? didn't create that idea, so noone can blame a particular alliance for a server-wide convention, even if it is not 100% accurate. And that is my point. Pointing fingers and blaming an old game convention on a particular alliance is imho a silly errant.

Now, back to the other thing, imho the innaccuracy of that convention is on the level that you cannot compare alliances with small population difference, BUT when things go on a different scale you can safely claim that an alliance with 1.5x or double the population of another one, can (or should have been able to) field more troops than the smaller one.

Agree or disagree .?.