POHM vs. Aussie

I’ve been asked to give some insight into the war that no123 and grel fought in last week, where we the POHMs caused the Aussies to forfeit even though Gor-illa was on their side.

In the initial war the POHM’s played tactically and won because they only put a tiny handful of players out who managed to keep themselves pinned but were winning gold

The war no123 and grel were in the story is slightly different.  50% of the clan had to be active at the beginning, and we were.  What won it for us were things that you will already seen that we’ve discussed before

• The POHM’s were just way more active than the Aussie’s, loads more hits and steals made, this appears to have been the main reason for the win.  The number of wins may be related to the fact that the POHM’s kept themselves pinned better when they weren’t active by people outside of the clan
• The times where the POHM’s lead increase was when there were times when tactics were being called and there was a clear lead.

There was the possibility that this war could have turned nasty.  Gor-illa had his osf in the war, who had allies.  At some point in the war one of his allies sold, it wasn't bought by anyone on our side.  When no123 and others noticed what must have happened, UK decided to stop hitting silverback.  Screen shots of this conversation were taken.  Negotiations happened and there were some tense moments but it all worked out well.

So all in all it was a fair war but what won it was the number of successes, the active nature of the POHM’s, the careful pinning and points where clear direction helped us increase the lead more.

Oh and BTW… I have spelt POHM right… the English are known as Poms but it originally was Prison Officer Her Majesty – POHM’s which was written on the uniforms of the prison guards when people were transported to Australia.  Not gonna make any political comment about whether that stuff was right or wrong.

Plunder War Update

Yay... test results were right... confirmation just in from majesty... kicking is dead, leaving is fine in hit and run plunder wars........

............................................. doesn't explain the war where we lost both though..... hmmmmmmm

Re-test Complete

Ok the retest is complete … and I want to shoot myself.  We have a different result.  Let me lay this out kinda like a science test… because that will please 123..lol

Methodology

• Each player hits or steals to make over 5m
• When all the hits and plunder are registered kick one player
• Wait until this change is registered and shows on war summary
• Another player leaves
• Wait until this change shows on the war summary
• Forfeit war

 

Results Summary

OK… there’s the summary of the test. Link to spreadsheet on google docs

If we were following the same pattern as the last war Chewy should have won about 2.5m… instead she’s won 6.2.  The awarded tax always seems to be a little over the individuals totals, so to get this figure the tax from Shadow must be included. 

Below is the last test



As you can see from this result the tax awarded would indicate that its only the tax from the two remaining players which has been awarded.

 

Analysis

The conclusion of this

• ugh this sux
• it is possible the dev’s have changed something in the background since the last test
• what is clear is that the tax from kicking does not stay
• as the results don’t match.. I guess I’m testing again… ugh
• There was a subtle difference in the timing of the end of the war last time, it was within 10 minutes of the player being kicked and leaving.

Steals

There were some weird things we noticed along the way as well, which we need to look into a bit more.


If you look at the figure for WOMO, the plunder is too low, it should have registered 15.4m… All the hits and steals are accounted for but the plunder is wrong and it’s a lot to be missing.  You will notice the plunder for the underworld is too high by 3.6k



This was after lady was kicked, she was the one who had done the steal and the tax is nearly spot on now, so the only conclusion to this is that there must be something strange going on with the steals



This was after shadow left, and the discrepancy with the underworlds plunder is still there indicating that there is something going on with the steals

 

Conclusion

Ok where does that leave us

• In need of vitamin alcohol
• In need of retest
• To complete a retest without steals
• It would appear that the constant in both of these tests is that kicking not only looses plunder but looses tax.  This would be in line with what one of the moderators told Scru was going to happen.
• it would appear that there is no clear answer about what happens to tax if people leave

Is Hit and Run Dead?

Ok.. so this is evidence that I’m a geek… and I’m firmly blaming No123 and Eric for outing me.


Why Are We Testing?

After the first double plunder war with Triumph, the Dark Moon OSF’s got all the war tax and we repeated the process at Triumph so they could get all the war tax.  Only something went very wrong.  Whilst we got all the tax we expected, the Triumph war was down on tax by possibly 200b.  And when you are a hard working OSF who needs to grow and re-pot, that is a lot of money.

Previous tests we did when rumours around plunder wars being dead proved that plunder wars were still alive and kicking.  However the results this time round are not so promising.

The picture is the spreadsheet from the last round of testing we did (I did, 123 told me what to do to replicate his findings) to find out what is going on with the war tax.  It strongly looks like if you both kick a player or they leave not only do they take their plunder but the also take the war tax.  On the left is the players and the hits/steals they made, on the right is their name, the total they made and then the outcome of the war.  For hit and run to be alive, Chewy should have received a lot more tax.  Clearly there is still a discrepancy in the figures, but it gives a very strong indication that hit and run is over.


What Might This Mean?

Now if this is true it could mean that

• “Hit and Run” plunder wars are dead, but clan plunder wars (stay and play) are fine as long as no one leaves.
• Any time someone leaves a plunder war they are taking from the OSF, both in terms of money and time, with no repayment from the tax.
• Plunder war revenue to start with will go down if we do not get outsiders to join and stay in the clan, so OSF’s will not grow as fast
• We need to stick to our stats entry to ensure we get the most tax possible
• I predict clans will become more protective over big players to ensure they can grow their own OSF
• Smaller players will be looking for places to go as clans will stop allowing them to join
• I guess some clans will bring in reprisals if people leave a plunder war to early
• We may see an increase in people hitting OSF out side of war

My guess is that this is all in preparation for the PVE (Player Verses Environment) update, when clan identity and clan strength will need exist in order to be able to do the quests.

I think that this is good for the clan as it causes us to grow a deeper sense of unity but we will need to consider

• how do we get players to join the clan
• how do we grow new players
• are there new ways to determine if someone becomes a clan member
• what happens if someone leaves the clan during a plunder war, are there reprisals?

Its interesting to me to see how something that is so relatively small in terms of changes creates all sorts of questions in my head.

What we will do is repeat the testing to confirm the outcome

Lessons Learnt from Chronos

This article needs to be read in conjunction with the last one.

Having been beaten by Chronos last weekend I was given the opportunity to fight with them to see what was going on behind the scenes on their side during war.  What was fascinating was for them this was a war where they had less active players and smaller sized players, so actually very similar to the situation we were in last war.  As we did, they started in the lead and slowly lost control of the plunder.

Active Players/Balancing Rosters

Something that they had changed since their war with us was to have a clan specifically dedicated to the war.  There was a sense that this really helped with the organisation and planning of the war, it meant they knew who was there and people were balanced against the opponents more easily.  Unfortunately several people who said they were going to join didn't.  This is something which has been talked about for Dark Moon, so I propose we create “Dark Moon Battlefields” to fight our wars in.

I didn't get to see the whole of the balancing of rosters as this happened in their pal group.  What  I did see was an interesting technique of balancing.  The top 10 attack players stats were added on both sides so see if this was even, this was repeated with the spies.  They then checked the mid range 11-20 then the smaller players to make sure there was an even balance through out the clan. 

Action

• create new clan
• review how we balance clan members

 

Leaks

interestingly when we knew about active war players who were not playing we handled it better.  We were actively trying to pin our own players, they kicked a couple of people without trying to pin, which probably cost them a billion or so.  I was also chatting to them about the folks we considered as leaks, and they said they genuinely hadn't found any leaks.

The good news is, when we communicate we do well with our leaks.  We have also had an offer from the guys at Triumph which we could consider, which is to let them know who is active, but a potential leak and they will hit out of war.  This is possibly something we could organise in house as well.

Action

• Either partner with a clan like Triumph to pin our leaks or have people who are not active in the war specifically tasked with this job.  If they are in cc they can see who needs pinning

 

Communication

Listening - In comparison to us, they are completely drama free. (we had too many voices giving instructions and people were not listening, and not following through with instructions.)  There were 5 clear voices who people listened to and followed. There was a sense that most people were communicating on cc but it was generally emotion free comments, it felt really calm in comparison.  There were only a couple of drama points when I was on and they were resolved really quickly.  Both of these were around when they realised that they were loosing and deciding what to do and whether to forfeit or not.

War shouting -  people shouted out who was hitting them as well as who they hit. This made up the bulk of the communication in cc.

War Admin - For much of the war they did not appear to have a war admin role, however when someone stepped into that role, the war became very co-ordinated (see strategy) and they did start to pull back briefly.  They only did this for an hour, I’m not fully sure why, but the person in that role was working very hard, and they were pinned for the whole time. This person was not only checking pin times, they created a spread sheet, they were also alerting the clan who the next people to pin were.  They were tracking leaks and identified several big problems.  It showed me how effective the war admin role can be.

Action

• Listen, listen, listen
• Identify 4-5 clear leaders
• shout out who  is hitting as well as who has hit you.
• Develop war admin role either active or not (will be much harder if active)

Strategy

I will probably get in trouble for saying this, but I think their war against us gave them a sense they could beat anyone, so initially there was a bit of planning, but not a huge amount.  However when the planning kicked in I saw the following strategies.

• Always keeping the opponents spies pinned, Key job at the beginning of the war, and then the smaller spies kept the huge spies pinned.  So I spent over half the war scout pinning a pure spy, 6.5 half times bigger than me, that got him really fed up but that's another story. Two of us alternated sitting on him half an hour each, then regen.
• They developed spread sheets on loses to seek out leaks
• They developed spreadsheets for pin times and seeing who was active.  They didn't use it in this way, but it could have been used to work out time zones
• Crystalling all together and then pinning top down
• identifying who the active players on the alternate side were and only hitting them as it was easier to make plunder and made the other side pinned so they couldn't win plunder
• Saving up spies for a spy attack, which at that point there were way less Chronos players, it again enabled the bigger players to be pinned.
• Hitting only 12-18 as the big players were too big to hit, but all together we could made the mid players leak
• Sending in the big spy to assa followed by attack players
• There was a lot of morale boosting by the biggest player.  I’ve already talked to Eric about him doing this and he has threatened to put on his cheerleading outfit with its short skirt and dancing around with pom poms.. this might actually be more scary and asks the question why does he have that outfit?

Action

• use some of these strategies in the future
• spend time with other war clans so that we can pick up more strategies

The really interesting thing at the beginning of the war for me was the sense that Chronos really weren’t that much different from us.  All they do better is listen and communicate more effectively.  They have a couple of tricks up their sleeve from their experience of war.  But we lost, as they did, because we were out gunned and out manned.

Planning For The Future

Ok… so lets look at what we did wrong first then come up with some solutions.

Poor Negotiation

Those of us who were there put our hands up and say we made a mistake.  If we had wanted to practice being smaller to fight a big opponent we should have worked this out before we went in, otherwise we should have asked for more players to stand down.  Bella had done some awesome work behind the scenes so we knew what we were going up against, it just somehow didn’t come off in our negotiations.  We will try our best to get it right next time, and we are sorry we got it wrong.

 

Poor Preparation

We ended up with too many inactive players who we thought were going to be active.  We need to co-ordinate this better.  There are a couple of options I know that have been mentioned so far

• Create a clan just for friendly war and if you are joining you have to be there 24 hours before declaration. There will be tax free opens during this time.
• That it is an opt in war system and that if you haven’t told a war admin you are going to go to war you are marked as inactive.  If you then join the war you will be kicked from the clan for the period of the war.

 

Strategy

There are lots of game plans out there, but the key strategy we were missing was around having war admin, squads and squad leads.

War Admin

We would need 2 war admin in different time zones.  There role is the following

• not to be an active player in the war
• watch cc to have a full picture of the war
• direct the squad leaders regarding targets they may have missed or how they can support other squads
• update ca with the time players are pinned
• keep track of the number of pots the opponents have, looking for weak targets
• Act as a leak checker, posting win/lost stats on players walls (although this may need to be delegated)

Squads

These are basically 4-5 man teams (or bigger).  We were talking about having 5 within the clan.  These teams contain a Hansel or pure spy, and attack players. They will have a lead and a second for when the lead is unavailable.  The squads will be build around size and if possible time zone, so that different size opponents can be targeted.

Squad Leaders

The squad lead directs their squad, keeping check on what is happening to their players.  The plan is that under direction of the squad lead, the Hansel goes in first assa the target.  The Hansel then say who is attacking them, as these are the people who are now weakened on the other side.  The Squad lead directs the attackers to pin this player using as few his from each player as possible.  Squad lead then directs a player to keep this person pinned.  Allow a bit of regen, and repeat

1. Hansels go in first
2. wait to see who attacks them
3. attackers attack
4. pin player (and keep pinned)
5. rinse and repeat

Ironically this is how we were working at the beginning of the war when there were only 6 of us playing, although it wasn’t planned… and apart from a leak we couldn't hold, we were actually up for the first two hours so it definitely works.

 

Communication

Hopefully the above will sort out some of the communication issues.  The key with this is to listen to your squad lead and the war admin.  Even if the instruction leaves you pinned or not making money, we all need to be working for the good of the team so instructions need to be followed.
Everyone has to shout out their hits or we have no idea if you are active.  It has been suggested if we know people are active and not shouting out that we kick them because they are a liability as we have no idea what is happening with them.

 

Leaks

• Please only join the war when your squad lead says ok.
• Let your squad lead know when you are not going to be on so you can be pinned
• War admin will be tracking losses and who is active to see if we have leaks
• if you are asked to pin someone who isn’t there, please keep doing it rather than forgetting.
• Invest in some allies for protection as well as max plunder

 

Their Strategy

With War Admin and Squad Leaders we will be able to track their strategy better, to work out who they are using for what and put some counter measures in place. 
Seriously, they worked in teams and it worked as above… and damn those scout bombs they sat on grel for 14 hours only letting her out of pin for 20 minutes the whole war, most of that time at 0 spies.  

 

Build

There may be things we need to consider regarding build and the amount of pots and crystals we have to enable us to be more effective. 
Also ally strength is probably one of the key solutions to some of these problems but I have never seen us talk about this in clan.  As we have only plunder warred before we have only concentrated on allies as max plunder.  In war they are so much more and are what keep you defended.  Its why majesty and gor-illa are such a force to be reckoned with

So these are these are the ideas which are bouncing around at the moment, please make comments below if I have captured this information wrongly or if you have ideas which will make this better
Thanx

Ugh We Lost... But We Did Stuff Well

Loosing badly sucks, but also being on the winning side when you beat someone so effectively sucks as well - been there done that. 
What we hope would be a fair even war didn't quite work out that way

The good news is guys that we did loadsa stuff right. Remember this was our first friendly war as a clan.

• We got their top 5 guys pinned at one point
• For the first 2 hours we were up on plunder
• People were really enthusiastic all the way through
• We all fought from pinned, which is so tough, and kept going
• We kept our integrity and didn’t merc
• I’ve been involved with other wars where the loosing clan has called for a cease fire within 4 hours, we didn’t
• We made over 9b which is awesome given their strength and size in comparison to us
• If we had beaten them when they were so much bigger than us, numbers and strength, they would have been way bigger noobs
• It was an awesome learning experience, both personally and as a clan, and we need to capture all that information
• We now know things we need to change, which we couldn’t have known before this.

It is fair to say that clans loose members after losing a war like this and people feel as if they want to leave. There can be a number of reasons and it is totally normal

Anger

• at our own clan for being rubbish
• at the other clan for doing so well
• at those organising the ceasefire if you wanted to continue
• that it was allowed to go on for so long
• for being pinned all the time
• for losing money in pots
• at other people for not listening

Guilt

• if you made a mistake which kept you pinned
• if you were someone who made losses

Frustration

• that there were leaks that we couldn’t stop
• that no one seemed to know what they were doing
• that you never want to have to go through that again because it was awful

To name but a few…

Let’s use all of this to make us stronger. We had a great de-brief afterwards and more information will be heading up onto this site soon about how to improve things. We don’t want to lose any of the clan, we want you to stay and learn and grow with us. We will become a fighting force to be reckoned with as well as an awesome clan which does plunder wars well.

Why Did We Loose?

Ok so we lost, but why… ultimately they made more plunder than we did, simples.
But why?

 

Poor Negotiation

We negotiated a deal which meant they had more stats but we had more hitters, then 29 of our expected hitters hadn’t joined by the time of forfeit. (I know some folks were on route but that doesn't explain everyone). Whilst its possible to win a war with that balance with our lack of experience of friendly war it was a bad decision to agree to that.

Strategy

Err… wot strategy.  We didn’t have a coherent game plan.  We had discussed a ‘Hail Mary’ plan where people join in waves with specific targets because of how our time zones in the clan are.  That didn’t happen, people joined individually and were pinned as soon as they arrived. 
We didn’t work together for much of the time, it was all very individual, which meant we didn’t have clear targets till much later in the war.
Our clan is one time zone heavy, we need to recruit in other time zones as we will always have a weakness if we are not careful.

Communication

Our communication sucked guys, really bad.  We had people giving instructions, which were only half followed.  People not listening to advice.  Everyone behaving as if they knew what they were doing and we didn’t.  We were not shouting out who we were hitting let alone who it us.  We had 4 people join the war without even talking in cc first to find out who to hit and then not talking at all.  When we started working as groups it began to work, but it was too late to make any real difference.

Leaks

We had a major problem with leaks, not just one person,

• some of this was due to time zones,
• some of this due to not keeping ourselves pinned when on,
• some of it is due to the fact that since the highlands up grade they haven't changed the pots so with out help you can not easily keep yourself pinned when you are not there
• some of it is about the fact that later in the war we had no idea who wasn’t there as we hadn’t been told so didn’t know to try and keep them pinned.
• we didn’t keep track of leaks effectively once more players joined,
• when when we found leaks we didn't keep them pinned

Their Strategy

We were being seriously scout bombed and did nothing to start with to challenge that threat.  They were clearly working in teams and we weren’t telling each other what they were doing. 

Build

There may be things we need to consider regarding build and the amount of pots and crystals we have to enable us to be more effective. 
Also ally strength is probably one of the key solutions to some of these problems but I have never seen us talk about this in clan.  As we have only plunder warred before we have only concentrated on allies as max plunder.  In war they are so much more and are what keep you defended.  Its why majesty and gor-illa are such a force to be reckoned with


So bottom line guys we got some things wrong, and there may be other things I’ve not put in here, please post comments to say what they are so I can update this.  However each of these problems has solutions.

Oh and just for your information, I don't plan to keep this post up forever, don't want our enemies in war to know how bad we sucked.