WW - Strategies

Following my post with the general information about WW Age (click here), some might find some of the strategies that we worked out useful.

Note: No one strategy is perfect, each will work the best in their own way if you are organized, communicate well, and work as a team.

- Defensive Strategy
As we did in Delos, we worked hard to pick islands that were as far away from the enemy as possible to make them the safest possible. While the travel time to them were an inconvenience, you'll see in my other WW post, that it still paid off. Due to the nature of the enemy in our case, we were worried about someone being caught inactive for a day and us losing a city before we even knew what was going on. To prevent that from happening, after much deliberation, we all agreed to stack each city with defense. This proved to be the best option as we ended up having the enemy colonize nearby and try to sneak a CS in. (it failed miserably because of our stacked defense). We also made it mandatory that the god of each WW city was Athena. Many of us large players had pegasus nukes (click here to find out why) that we could send on a moments notice. On several occasions we had a "fire drill" and rushed the the scene only to find that we were in no danger, but it was good practice anyways.

By the time WW Age rolled around, we had each city with a fully upgraded wall and each harbor had a minimum of 1000 BR's. Land unit numbers differed based on who the owner of each city was and what they could send. This, combined with the WW island locations proved to be amply sufficient to hold them against an fairly un-organized enemy.


- Offensive Strategy
I've never done this personally, but have seen it done with huge effect. While always wanting to try it, because of the way our alliance worked and other factors, I've never been able to experiment with it. The idea is opposite of what most people think. Don't build a wall. Build slingers. As weird at that sounds, its true. Build nothing but slingers. They are cheap, fairly fast over land, and powerful in a nuke. It only works how ever if every city on a WW island is set up like this. It does take a high level of activity to pull off though, or just an attack alarm so that you can dodge. Having no wall doesn't effect using BR's though. So you can always defend against a CS that way, and if that doesn't work, you have 18-20 cities with a +2500 slinger nuke in them. If done right, nothing should be able to stand against that.


- Breaking Up a WW Island
There is just something satisfying in taking something away from someone in fair fight. And taking an enemy WW city is one of the most nerve racking part of this game. Having taken +5 enemy WW cities in my time, it comes down to a few simple things.
#1. Take, or colonize cities that are close to one of their WW islands. If possible, and they don't think better of it, try and pick a spot that is close to 2 or more of their WW islands. Once you are able to send a CS out of it, the potential targets are a lot more for you, and a they have a whole lot more priority cities to defend (also draws off valuable defense that they could use, or be using against your alliance else where)
#2. Work as a team. While one city near their WW islands is okay, the more your alliance has, the better. In Delos we colonized something like 10-25 near 4 of their WW islands that were close together. Needless to say, we saw a lot of action and kept them very busy for a while. Eventually, they got tired of taking the cities we kept colonizing and we eventually were able form a hub of cities that was able to land several CS's on their WW islands. (2 of mine ended up sticking)
#3. Look at stats and look for targets that have large inactive periods. To test if the stats are right, check some of their other cities no where near the WW islands.
#4. Finding a traitor/malcontent. Nothing is easier than just walking into a WW city that someone just hands to you. While not the greatest way of doing it, it still gets the job done.

WW - General Information

Since it has been a while since I've actually played grepolis, please bear with me.

On each island you'll see a cleared spot appear sometime during the game (I can't remember if they are there at the beginning or if they show up later). When ever they appear, if you click on them you can see the estimated time remaining until the server thinks that the world will reach WW Era. Depending on what speed world you're playing the total points required differ (I think), if that's not the case, it'll just take longer to achieve the points required on a slower world. After a world has been open for 6 months the total required amount of points required will start dropping by 12 million a month. (The points that are counted toward meeting the total required is the top 50 alliance points added together)

Once the world meets the required points, there will be an announcement that appears on your screen that the world is now in the WW age. Long before this you should be planning for it and be already to put that plan into action. Below is what our WW tab in our forum looked like. As you can see we noted what was needed for each WW after the # and the name of the WW. This proved to be the most effective (along with daily Mass Mails). It provided a quick reference and saved the leaders a lot of redundant questions. Some people are bothered by the level that we took the organization, but I think overall, a organized alliance will toast a larger, but un-organized alliance.

As crazy as it sounds, both of the times I've been through a WW Age we started prepping about 3-4 months ahead of WW Era. First off, the alliance needs 7 fully colonized islands that are in a safe area on which to place your 7 WW's. We found it useful to have more than 7 ready, more like 10 or so as right before WW Age starts everyone tries to disrupt the others by taking out their carefully laid plans. The next thing we did was to direct everyone to focus on making sure their temple and market was fully upgraded. Also, where it could be spared, to build Divine Statue to boost favor production. (if you have read my beginners guides, you should hopefully have your resource buildings maxed out long before this.)

Along with having the forum organized and preparing for several months in advance, we set up a command group that had authority over everyone in regards to the WW progress. (At this point we had 15 or so leaders) These people were picked not only because of their leadership skills, but also because their online times. The goal was to have at least 1 online at all times so that we had updates ASAP and everyone wasn't waiting around for direction. Below is what one of our priority WW's looked like. The enemy alliance had gained an early advantage because of the close proximity theirs was to their core while ours was put way back in deep safety. Over time, because of the great leadership in directing the building and managing of the WW's we caught up easily over the next 3-5 levels and finished it almost 2 levels ahead of them. While some of us, like myself, were big and could send a TON of resources from their cities, some of us were over 11 hrs away. But, because you can send more than is required for the level you're building, we almost always had enough resources for the next level. So in reality, we were sending faster than it would build the next level. This proved to be very effective as the priority WW's were only open for sending resources to for 6-8 hrs at a time before the next level started going up. Some times, we were forced to wait just so that we had a WW to send to because we had the rest leveling up at the same time.

Once we had them upgrading to the next level, the leaders in charge of the WW's decided which WW's were our priority for speeding up. You can speed up the build time of a WW by clicking on the WW, or the link to it (which we always put in our MM's and in the forum) and then clicking "accelerate construction". This will cost you 400 favor from each god (or at least that was what it was when I was playing before the game re-balance update) When you have it sped up 50 times in one day, that cuts a considerable time off of the upgrade time.

In the end, the more you organize, are prepared before time, and have a solid strategy to holding your WW islands and maybe even taking an enemy one or two, you'll be on the high road to victory. And maybe you'll be able to pick up something like this. :)