Aug 21st 2014, 15:29:55
I am a noob. Here is a bit of my noob experience:
After signing up, I tried Tournament server first. I think I chose tournament because, at the time, it was just starting. I figured that if this is like other turn-based games I've played, it is better to join closer to when a round starts than to join a round mid-way through.
Anyway, after reading through help pages, the Wiki, and forum posts, I decided to play Indy-Communism strat, producing lots of spies, since from what I was reading, spies seemed pretty important and particularly effective for small-acreage countries. I have to say, one thing I found really useful at the beginning were the tips that popped up at the top of various pages. This was helpful for the initial stages (not so useful later on, though). The arrangement of links to the help pages on various topics were well placed. The effective (but very basic) help pages and tips is one aspect about this game that is actually very exceptional.
And so, I could easily learn that by playing Indy-communism, I would produce military and sell military for profit. Basically, this suited my strategy to have a lot of spies because I could produce a lot of spies too. I figured that in spite of being small I could still be successful and even deter attacks from larger countries. For I thought success of an op depended on the ratio of spies per acreage, not on the number of spies, and so even against larger players with way more spies than me I'd still be able to land ops and thus retaliate against them for attacks. What I didn't know was that threat of ops wasn't all that much a deterrence.
Nevertheless, ops did prove somewhat useful. As I spied on other players, I was able to learn what ratio of units other players had, and basically, a bit about how other more experienced players were playing the game. I think I learned a lot by spying.
That being said, I wanted to quit many times, and, once, even messaged the developers asking how to delete my account. While playing and trying to learn, I kept getting attacked while my own attacks failed or, even when successful, cost way to much. I just didn't understand how to attack / defend.
I had learned the importance of land-grabbing, but not really so much about how to do it exactly. One time I was successful I think I did too many on one particular guy. Afterwards, he sent a really nasty message and then did like 50 ABs on me, completely destroying all my buildings. That was one time I wanted to quit.
Another time I wanted to quit was when some really high-ranked player attacked me. I didn't know how to join GDI. I thought you had to pay real-life money for it, or bonus points or something, so didn't bother with GDI.
I had had what I had thought would be enough turrets to deter attacks. I had learned through spying that a lot of players around my NW had about 500k-1M or so of turrets. I also had what I thought were plenty of troops (100k). I had learned from that previous guy who AB'd me like 50 times that I should have a significant amount of tanks, too. Primarily, I thought I was safe because my net worth wasn't all that outrageous compared to my acreage and so I wasn't sticking out as an appetizing target.
And then, boom. I get attacked. And from the battle stats, I instantly wanted to quit. The first reason was it seemed from the battle stats that he had attacked me with only jets. This made absolutely no sense to me (I had been attacking with a mix of forces). Moreover, he lost fewer jets than he'd destroyed my forces and that seemed even more insane. I had tried a couple of my own attacks, noticing that even when I won a battle I would always lose a lot more units than the defender. Also, in calculating the cost of units lost, the amount of land I could get in successful attacks wasn't worth the trouble. It was almost better for me to keep exploring acres instead of land-grabbing. I was even attacking countries with higher net worth and more acres than me thinking I could get more acres in reward, but sometimes it seemed I was getting even fewer acres when if I attacked a smaller country. What I didn't know at the time was that I as attacking someone with a lot of ghost acres. I had even been using planned strikes with all of my forces to try and get the most land from each attack. But still, for what I got the cost wasn't worth it. I didn't understand that in this game 'overwhelming force' was a bad thing - that you would lose a ridiculous amount of forces if you used more than necessary. I thought that overwhelming force would allow me to lose fewer forces rather than more. In other games I've played, the greater the force overwhelms the enemy's the fewer losses you can expect per capita.
And then here comes this guy from way up there on leader board with his jets and nabbing a ridiculous amount of land from me, with only a few jets.
What really made me want to quit was it wasn't a bombing run, either. He'd actually nabbed land! What is this??? How does what is essentially a bombing run nab land? This is dumb. I quit.
Worse, yet, he nabbed a huge amount of land. I think that is when I might have messaged the developers asking how to delete.
Another time I wanted to delete was when some ops seemed to work while others seemed buggy. The espionage op threw me for a loop for a while. I'd do the op against a player, supposedly successfully, but it kept saying "you stole 0 technology points". It was not a fail, but, rather, a success. For whatever reason I was only able to steal 0 tech points. though.
Now, I had spied-out the target and from what I could tell he had lots of tech points (like even as much as 100 points in some fields :) ). So I figured he had tons of tech to steal. But repeatedly I was successfully stealing only 0. What is this?
I kept thinking I was doing something wrong and kept wasting ops on trying to steal tech, even against other players (who also seemed to have a lot of tech points), only to repeatedly 'successfully' steal 0 tech points each time.
I eventually came to think that there was some sort of bug or that the the espionage op had been disabled for this particular Tournament round. I came on forum trying to get some sort of explanation, but nothing came of it.
It wasn't until later on when I spied out someone who had 50k+ tech points in a tech field that I realized what the problem had been.
Basically, my experience with the game as a noob has been getting attacked, unsuccessfully defending such attacks, not understanding why I can't defend, attacking and failing, not understanding why attacks fail. Also, in the odd times when attacks might succeed I'd lose way too many forces to make attacking worth doing!
For the first round, I think all I did was explore and build turrets, oscillating between trying to figure out how all this worked and how to delete my account.
Second round I played was on Primary server. Now that I understand a few more things about how attacking / defending works, it's a little better.
Starting Team server now and learning even more.
