Large scale operations

Everything about operations - leaders role, creating and coordinating Battlegroups, planning and preparing your operations, different targets and goals, some general tactics and few tricks.

In the previous parts I covered timing and organising your attack waves in order to conquer a city. However as players and alliances get bigger, it will be harder to take their cities. In order to do that you might need to organise large scale operations. As I mentioned in the introduction to War Tactics, well coordinated operations targeting many cities at the same time can be devastating to enemy players and even alliances in the medium and sometimes advanced stage of the game.


Table of contents

1. Introduction
• Leader's role
2. Battlegroups
• Small working units (role of structure and communication)
• Procedures (obligatory reports)
• Functional system which made us stronger
3. Planning your operations
• Planning and spies
• Timing your attacks
• Your team
• Operation goals
4. Enemy key players
• Biggest players
• Locating your target
• Leaders
• The most active and strongest players
5. Different tactics against strong players
• Be mobile and flexible
• Fake and diversion attacks
• Enemy resilience and being consequent
6. Creating a blame game

Introduction

In the previous parts I covered timing and organising your attack waves in order to conquer a city. However as players and alliances get bigger, it will be harder to take their cities. In order to do that you might need to organise large scale operations. As I mentioned in the introduction to War Tactics, well coordinated operations targeting many cities at the same time can be devastating to enemy players and even alliances in the medium and sometimes advanced stage of the game.

When I was leading wars against big alliances, operations were my favourite if not the only military tool I used. I didn't like players from my alliance to "go solo" and every member was always waiting for orders and detailed plan before acting. Its quite easy to defend against one player and gets even easier when an alliance have many towns and can coordinate support. Most of the time good alliances will just stack units in one place and massacre your incoming army. After that they can simply recall their units and use them in another place. In a conquest world, even if a player manage to park his CS, it might be quickly sunk by thousands of incoming LS. By going solo, you will lose your army, deplete your resources, gain nothing and let your enemy to be ahead of you. When people have many cities, losing one is not such a big deal after all.

Organised operations are deadly if prepared properly. You have to know your long term goals, carefully plan according to them and to the information you collected before, create a strong and unified team of players and implement some procedures to follow. You must build a war machine, that once started will not stop until full victory. Your attacks should be always planned and organised beforehand, goals, roles, procedures (tactics) clear for everyone participating in them. 

My favourite style resembles wolfs pack attack - a sudden quick assault. Me and my team were all attacking at once, everyone knew its target and role. After that we would fall back, regroup and strike again or if we managed to hurt someone badly, we would sit on him and not let to recover. After many months of playing together and executing various operations, me and my team knew exactly what to do and could cooperate without anyone giving instructions. Everyone knew where to look for information about targets and time and what to do, without being told to. 

Leader's role
I was responsible for developing main strategy (analysing enemy structure, players, looking for weaknesses), creating temporary balltegroups (packs), checking stats, results and members participation level. I could focus on what is the most important and what every war leader should do. I didn't have to spend my time coordinating every single conquest attempt or support mission - my guys knew what to do from A to Z. That way we won very difficult conflicts facing much bigger alliances than ours. It didn't happen over the night of course. If you would like to read more about how to create such a team, read my Leadership guides Part 1 and the most relevant to this guide Part 2 - Activity Monitoring, Structure, Communication and Procedures.

Lets start from the practical and more detailed part, covering some basics of planning and executing an operation.

Battlegroups

If you read my previous guides you will notice that this chapter partly repeats what I said in my guide about leadership, however keep reading as it is only part of it.


First of all you have to be organised. You cant just post an info like: "go, attack that player". No, you have to organise people into smaller working units. Why? Because you will not be able to coordinate 20-30 people at once and by coordinate I mean to tell them exactly which cities are going to be attacked, at what time, decide who will be the conquering person, who will support with defensive units and then check every single person what he/she actually did. So let me give you an example how I organised my team.

First I would prepare a general strategy and decide which players/cities should be attacked (I will write about it more after this part). Then I would post a list of targets (players to be attacked) on our forum and ask members who do they want to attack more or I would decide myself about the operation target and all cities to be taken. We would discuss time of attacks that suite most of us  (which day or 2 days of the week) and set a date. I tried to limit claiming process to the PMs (Personal Mails) but it wasn't always possible.

Small working units (role of structure and communication)

Then I would split 20-30 people into 4-6 battlegroups, making those members who claimed targets (cities to be conquered) leaders of their own battlegroups (not permanent leaders but just for this operation). Each of them would be in charge of their own battlegroup, which means they would contact every single member of their team by mail, inform them about planned ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) of their Colony Ships and ask for support. They would have to organise clearing and defensive support waves of all people in their group - agree to who will send what. Obviously their motivation was high as they were trying to conquer a city, so every clearing wave or defensive reinforcement was helping them to achieve this goal.

Procedures (obligatory reports)

Then we would all wait for results and check forum to see which Colony Ships landed successfully, which not and which need extra help to hold on (the last one is not required in a revolt world). Each battlegroup had its own thread in which every member had to post his/her battle reports. Those reports were source of valuable information (we could estimate enemy casualties and activity level of their members, maybe learn more about next potential targets) and were also a proof for the person posting them that he/she did actually send army and participated in the operation (activity check). Even if a report was showing nothing (no battle) it had to be posted. I was also receiving reports/letters (mails) from battlegroup leaders about their operation, telling me who was responsive and who didn't participate at all.

Functional system which made us stronger

By having those reports from guys and checking battle reports on the forum I was able to see who actually played with us (actively supporting the team) and who was just a leach doing nothing. Also I could see who is sending what and in which order. That way I was able to find weak players in our team who didn't know how to construct a proper attack wave and could correct them by sending instructional mail or directing them to guides. Thanks to that our next operations were more devastating and effective. After that we were rebuilding our forces, preparing new operation and maybe switching roles (those who were supporting would send Colony Ships now) or we were just quickly regrouping and punching again weaker enemy (that depends on how much of support enemy could gather).

Naturally mistakes were happening and sometimes luck wasn't on our side or we were just properly pushed back by our enemies but that sort of cooperation let us to achieve few goals:

• It saved lot of my time as a leader (leading can be time and life consuming)
• Weed out inactives - we knew who is active and who is not (so we knew what can and should be "fixed" in the future);
• There were no "lost sheeps" and mistakes were minimised  - everyone knew exactly what to do and when (if you try to coordinate 100 people by yourself alone, set their targets, roles and time it, you might get confused or make mistakes);
• It strengthened us as a team and built strong ties;
• Every battlegroup leader would experience what the team play is about (timing, communication, dedication) and in the future would know exactly how to support/help other teammates. 

Planning your operations

 
Planning and spies

Always plan ahead your moves. If you pick your targets, make sure everyone knows its role and timing of attacks, however be smart about it. People don't have to be aware of other members targets. When I was posting a list of possible targets or just deciding myself who I want to attack, I tried not to post an exact list of cities or CS ETAs on the forum, just in case of a spy or leak. The list was visible/posted after first attacks were sent. Only battlegroup leaders knew their targets and ETAs and dint know what other BG leaders are going to hit and exactly at what time. Even if a target player was informed that there is an operation against him in progress, he would not know which cities are going to be attacked with a CS. If you are afraid that some information might leave your forum organise battlegroups like I described above so only BG leaders know all details about their own conquest attempt. Its not bulletproof but limits spy activity a lot.

Timing your attacks

In the beginning I thought that attacking a player at the exactly same hour is the way to go. We did few operations like this with a great success, however it was really hard to coordinate many players and demand from them that sort of strict timing. I had people from Australia, USA and Europe in my alliance, all of them with different job/bed schedules. It was impossible to organise this kind of operations on regular basis. Therefore I stopped caring about exact timing. I let people to hit in the morning and at the evening, in the middle of  my night or even early next day. There are few reasons why timing is not that crucial:

1. Its easier for leader to prepare such an operation and members to execute it. 
2. It doesn't matter that much - make a rough calculation how much time your target will need to send his troops from city A to city B. If most of his cities are for example 4 hours away, he will have to send them, defend his city, recall them and send back to another city. In total its something like 12 hours. If you hit many cities around the same time that's good enough.
3. Its less restrictive and people enjoy it more. Remember that you need to keep morale high and you will only turn people away by being too restrictive. You cant force anyone to wake up in the middle of the night to send his units, and even if you can it will be short lasting strategy. If you give people some freedom, they will be more happy to participate and it is more important to have few moderate operations than one perfect. I think that my team liked to participate in our operations and we were able to repeat them every single week for few months! That's more devastating to any enemy that one super attack, after which he/she can easily rebuild only because nobody in your team will be interested in attacking again.

When planning attacks remember that it is not only important when you hit the target but at what time you send your waves. If your enemy notice a CS early he/she might start sending support much before realising there are more CS approaching his/her cities. By controlling little details like this you can lure enemy support into a fake CS attempt. Like in boxing you fool your opponent into guarding the wrong place and then hit hard his uncovered areas. However to make it happen you have to plan it before (organise and prepare people), otherwise your punch will be too weak and ineffective. That tactic can be executed on one player or on few of them, after all we just want to get rid of the whole alliance support. More about it later in this guide.

Many players try to plan attack when they think their enemy is asleep. Knowledge of enemy GMT, his online activity times can give you big advantage, but don't base your whole strategy only on this factor. How to know your enemy schedule? You will have to observe his reactions and it might take a while. Don't think that only because he/she used Divine Powers at this time, it means its his/her logging hour - it might be related to the availability of Favour Points. You will have to spy often and try attacks at different times.

Its actually not that easy to find out someone's real life GMT. However if you can be flexible with timing your attacks then take into consideration that large amount of players in Grepolis come from United States (GMT-6, -7 and -8), the second biggest group are Europeans (GMT-1 , 0 and +1), the rest are some Australians and their neighbours (GMT +8). For example almost 40% of my readers are from States. In my alliance there were even more Americans than other nationalities.

Observe your enemy reactions. If for example your time travel is really short (lets say 5 hours) and you sent your army at 8am ST (Server Time, which is GMT +1) in the middle of the week and your enemy didn't react at all, there are high chances he/she lives on the US east coast (GMT -6). 

Other way to know a players real life schedule is to mail them. Start a conversation with them, even an argument. By watching when they opened a mail you can see their online activity times. You can also ask another person to do that for you. I used that method very often and it didn't matter for me what we were talking about. It could be as simple as a trollish childish message. For the same reason sometimes I was opening emails from enemy players just before going to sleep or when coming back from a late night party ;)

Your team

When planning an operation think about what kind of players make your team. For example if you have 5 battlegroups, 10 strong and active players and 15 less active and smaller ones, spread them evenly. If one of your good guys is going for a conquest, add to his group another strong and reliable person. These 2 will be the core of their group. Later when roles change they will be more than happy to help each other again. I always believed that brotherhood is born in battle and war ties are the strongest ones.

Sometimes for the sake of operation and my group unity as a leader I would put into my group the weakest players, because I knew I can manage alone and even if not, then my partners, super active guys, will achieve their goals. As one of the top fighters on Delta I didn't need that much help, but as a leader I would never leave other strong teammate alone. Be fair, think about operation but also try to build strong and friendly team of players. We all knew after a while who we can count on and who was there just sometimes but we also understood the importance of cooperation and helping each other, even those weaker players for the good of the whole alliance and war in general.

Therefore when one of our most talented and active players was a battlegroup leader I was adding to his group a reliable person who would help him to clear the city. Also some people have more units of one type than others, take that into consideration as well. Battlegroup A might have a strong offensive player so you know he will be ok with clearing, help him out by adding to his group a weaker player who has only defensive units. Weaker players can be used not only for defensive support but also for early clearing - don't expect from them good timing skill, just ask to send something hours before the CS.

Operation goals

What's the point of organising an operation? You will try to get as many cities as possible at once, lose as little resources (army) as possible and achieve your goal. There should be always some underlying general strategy behind your war actions. You might think that taking a city might be the end goal as it makes you stronger and your enemy weaker. Well, its not the case in more advanced stage of the game. As I said before, cities can be easily replaced and you might achieve something opposite to what you hoped for - you will actually make your enemies stronger, motivate them, they will become a "tighter team", more unified and bonded together group of players. In the consequence you will make it worse for yourself.

So what should be your goal? Well it depends on your current situation. However as a general rule you should aim to make enemy alliance weaker by breaking its structure and disorganising it. One way to defeat the enemy alliance is to organise an operation against their key players - when they are gone, the alliance will die.

Enemy key players

Biggest players

You might target enemy key player or the most powerful one. Sometimes there is a difference between these two. Some players have the most cities/points but are very introverted, silent or just selfish. They don't really participate on the forum and don't help much other teammates, therefore they are useless for the team. In that case they should be ignored by you. I knew such people and they didn't help during wars at all. They didn't send support troops, not attacked anyone unless they were looking for resources or BPs, but it didn't matter as their targets were weak and non relevant. I used to even have one in my team, who I had to tolerate for political reasons. After months I realised he didn't speak English and never read forum...

 I will not focus on it in this article but you might have some information from the enemy camp (your spies, friends, people who used to be in the enemy alliance, people who know the guy etc) that will help you to locate the right target for your operation. So don't always aim for the biggest guy.

Locating your target

If you don't have any information from the "inside", you will have to evaluate the situation basing on your own observations. Every good leader should be aware of many things that happen around them. I was always checking grepostats of the most important/active players around me and my alliance. When a conflict was on the horizon, I would carefully study enemy alliance, their page info, stats of their biggest players, leaders, location of their cities etc. That could bring me an idea who in their team is the most active/aggressive player. Usually they pull the whole alliance. Every member of that alliance looks at them and put their faith in them. "I'm not worried, we have X-man in our team, he will kick their asses" sort of belief.

Leaders

Leaders usually are not the strongest players, unless they can spend a lot of time in the game, however sometimes they are the ones who hold the whole alliance together. They are often recognised as the alpha and omega of the alliance. In that case they might be a good target of your operations. The problem is that those guys will most probably receive the most of the support. They invited many people into their alliance, gave them ranks, organised forum and decide about things.

Therefore I almost never made an enemy leader my military operation target. I attacked them but on a different level - on the public forum with PnP threads, by emailing their main captains (local leaders), making friends in their team, showing their incompetence etc. That's a material for another guide.

I remember when an enemy alliance tried once to take a city of our main leader. Something like 50-100 players sent their army at his ONE! city... It was a massacre and ended up with the Defender of the Day title and huge boost of his BPs. That was one of the most retarded "operations" I have ever seen. Their so called operation was badly planned and organised. What was the goal? To take a leaders city and show us? Show us what? Attacker to defender casualties ratio was something like 10:1! We just stacked all our troops in his city and were casting City  Protection whole day long. The enemy leaders, wasted a lot of time, resources and credibility.
You can try to break an enemy leader but do it wisely, evaluate your chances and costs. If its too expensive just leave him/her alone.

 

The most active and strongest players

These guys are not easy targets but if you break them, you will break their alliance. They are very active and will in most cases react fast, including asking for help on their forum. However they are the most active players in their alliance, which means that if there are no other similar guys in their team, they will be left alone to do their battles. You see, if you attack an inactive or semi active player, he/she might get support from other active teammates, get away and even if not, then nobody will really miss that person. It will make no difference to the alliance if a weak or semi active player is out of the game. However when you kill their stallion everyone will notice that. The blame game might start - "who is responsible for that"? Their leaders or inactive members? Losing the biggest gun hurts as well - "who will protect us now?". "If they can take him out then they can take out any of us".

Breaking a smaller player might not be easier than defeating a strong one (because of their active strong teammates) and it might not be worth your time and resources. Aim for their bigger guns and local leaders (a local leader is not the main leader but usually the most active player in the area). Smaller players can be attacked for few reasons: because they have really good placed city; if you want to scare them/shut them off; or when you do "mind games" and try to divide their alliance from the inside (more about this later in this guide).

It is not always possible to break the most active players - in the advanced stage of the game some guys will have 40+ cities and will be just irremovable and their spirit indestructible. I'm speaking about people who are like the top players on the server, having 2 or 3 times more cities than an average person. If you hit them hard, they will recover very fast, conquer some more cities elsewhere and laugh at your face, creating an image of undefeated ones (which is very easy in the advanced stage of the game, when there are more cities available than players willing to take them). This will not help you at all, so just leave them if you know that you will not be able to chase them or if they are out of your range - instead focus on closer located players. I don't say to ignore them, but don't try to break them at all cost.

However if you decide to go after them, be prepared. Don't just take few cities and celebrate. Regroup and hit again and again. Keep organising operations, lure them away, make some fake attacks and hit few cites at a time, rebuild fast and keep chasing them till the edge of the world. If you want to be successful, once you start attacking an enemy alliance biggest gun, don't stop, keep pressing. It is quite difficult to constantly coordinate all your troop/resources movements from many cities. You have to wear them down. I speak from my experience. I had to fight few times against such players. Once we didn't take any city from our target player but after weeks of constant attacks he switched on VM and never came back. Another player was more resilient, constantly taking new cities to compensate those he lost, but after awhile he gave up to.

They might have huge armies and vast amount of cities/resources but it is still only one person (at least should be, if not, then report it). Few smaller players can tear him apart if they cooperate with each other and keep attacking.

Different tactics against strong players

Be mobile and flexible

Sometimes you will manage to surprise your enemy and conquer all your targets, but other times your results can be not as good. Your teammates could have made a mistake or your enemy was lucky or just really active/good. Don't treat it as a failure, always look at positives. Maybe you killed big part of his army, or took some cities. Your team had a good lesson and practise - it will be better next time. Just rebuild fast and roll the ball - don't stop. However be wise about it. Reevaluate the situation, again look for weak points, prepare yourself and only then hit again.

When you face really strong players who are far behind the lines and you cant hurt them much, leave them alone. Be quick and mobile. Jump fast from one target to another and with that tactic you might be even able to take out their front-line cities, leaving them only those at the back, but don't focus on them. You can try once but then quickly move to another target. When I couldn't reach a really important player or he was rebuilding too fast in other cluster, I was going after his other strong friends.

If you focus too much on one target, he or she will get help from all other members, reflect your attacks killing most of your offensive units and will have time to rebuild, recover and in the worst case counter-attack. Don't let your enemy to create a defensive point! If you bounced back and didn't achieve much then rebuild fast and quickly hit other place/player. If you hurt him/her badly, make his friends busy but keep pressure on the same target. It is a mistake to try to "prove" something and hit the wall with your head. If you see thousands of Biremes, strike their other city, destroy walls there or just take it.

Some of our operations were targeting only few cities of our main target, while simultaneously we would hit smaller enemies as well. It could be for few strategic reasons: a city was in a good spot or we didn't want the small player to support our main target, or we just wanted to turn his alliance attention away from our main target before hitting it, which leads to the next thing I want to speak about.

Fake and diversion attacks - luring enemy away

If you hit him (the big guy) in one place, he will be forced to send his support there. You can then quickly hit with your main forces his other cluster or his friends who sent him support leaving themselves vulnerable. You can also hit a smaller less organised guy and lure his alliance support there some hours before and then open fire at the main target. Naturally you need to be prepared for it beforehand, have everything planned, including fake attacks and give different roles to players, find those who are willing to sacrifice some of their army to create a "smoke bomb", while the most of your team forces are awaiting to hit the other spot. Arrange who is going to hit which city with what kind of units. Set up a date and time so everyone knows when to send attacks. My friends who still play on Delta use this tactic against big players with 100+ cities and it works like a charm.

Enemy resilience and being consequent

If its possible (his other cities are in your range) keep pushing. Lets say you made a fake attack on the cluster A, but you actually attacked and took some cities in the cluster B, then shortly after that go back to A or hit C. It is possible for a defender to move units around but his army needs time to do it - they have to travel all the way from location D to A, then come back to D to be able to be sent again to C and so on. This might take hours/days, while your armies are nuking and conquering his cities.

Therefore as I said before be mobile, flexible and plan ahead, make him dance to your music. He might get tired or frustrated from having to move the whole time, not being able to get everywhere on time, rebuilding new cities he had to take to compensate those he lost and counting on his teammates help. Also people get tired of supporting the same player over and over again and start to slack.

I was fighting against a guy who was really active player and managed to defend many of his cities with little forces he had left. When we were taking 5 cities, he was getting 5 back next week in other location. However we didn't stop and chased him through the whole ocean. We were organising operations against him almost every week. Just rinse and repeat. Of course we targeted other players around who were supporting him, just jumping back and forth from one target to another. After a month or two, (cant remember) he gave up, stopped trying. It could be that he was tired of all things I mentioned above or that he didn't see any progress of his team. Even though he managed to keep around the same amount of total points, he lost 15+ cities, while his alliance didn't take even one. Constant pressure might break any player or alliance.

Creating a blame game

To destroy a moderate or good alliance you will need to be more creative. Take cities that don't have necessary any strategic value but taking them can disorganise another alliance and divide it inside. Its the best to have an informant inside the enemy camp but without him you can manage as well.

First, attack some weak players, but not those who are inactive - pick slowly growing ones. This should be such a type of players who log in quite often, check forum once in a while and post maybe something there, but they are not top players - they lack knowledge about the game mechanics, are lazy with farming, consider making a colony over conquering another city and for some reasons are always behind all other people. These can be guys with many cities who have never really learnt how to fight and they still send unescorted land attacks. I hope you get the picture.

Attack them but in a lazy fashion, so not by a total surprise. Give them time to scream on their forum asking for help. It doesn't matter if you take their cities or not. Of course try to take them but don't get crazy about it. Hopefully more active players will participate and send some units to help defending or in a conquest world to sink your CS.

Straight after that hit enemy strong players - maybe they haven't managed to recall all their units or rebuild their nukes yet. This time press hard. If you manage to make one of them really vulnerable and weak press him more. If you don't have any great successes just go back to attacking small players.

What you try to create here is the situation when strong and active players help their less advanced teammates and get punished for it, as they become targets straight after that. When you come back to small ones, big guys will be busy rebuilding. Also 9/10 times when slow growing players are under attack they panic and focus only on themselves. If you hit them, they will scream for support but after that when those who supported them need help, they will be "busy" rebuilding their own puny forces or actually don't have any units left to be used. If you come back to them, you will switch them off for a long time, as they will be just preparing for another attacks and not "wasting" their units to help others. Considering their size they will not be able to support too much and even if, they will be too scared to do that.

Strong and active players will feel angry and disappointed and might stop to defend their smaller teammates. It can create a really bad atmosphere in the enemy camp. Leaders might start blaming some people, while other active members will blame leaders and/or small guys. You just need to keep constant pressure. 

I used this tactic against an alliance made of 300+ members, having only 10-15 active people in my team. Additionally I was sending friendly mails to those of them who were giving us the most trouble, congratulating them but also pointing out weaknesses of the MRAish style of their alliance or incompetence of their leader. After a month they had enough, even the leader gave up. We took in about 10 of their best players leaving the rest out, creating a big whole in the map. The alliance once "ruling" 3 or 4 oceans stopped to exist. They all grouped up again into some smaller alliances but they were no threat to us any more and never become. Those who joined us were happy to get the right to farm and conquer whatever they liked in their neighbourhood.

In our next war enemy alliance was made of better leaders, more organised and with more "big guns". We took them out one by one, attacking like wolf packs. If I noticed that a small player is using his forces to support our targets I would punish him for that with a little operation. Sometimes that little operation was wiping him out of the map (for example we took 8 out of his 10 cities) or damaging him so much that he would not come back to action again for a long time.

It was a long war but because we were often changing targets, attacking all together at once in a coordinated way, we managed to destroy their whole ocean, killing many players on our way, including their ocean leader and few top players. Many of them left the alliance or server, before being totally conquered. I know for the fact that there were many complaints on their forum and lot of drama. One guy posted "You left me for the wolves! I didn't receive any help, I quit!".

As always I encourage to leave comments or questions below. Lets help each other and make these guides as good as possible. I am open for any new ideas or opinions.

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