BATTLE
Slugging it out is the heart and soul of war. It's great to win a game before the magic comes out because things can get really hairy for us righteous humans.
Always remember to put your men on patrol so they attack new targets that come up. That ways they won't sit around idle while their buddies get killed and they won't be working on some building and being killed from behind. Duh :)
Everyone uses patrol now and you can take advantage of it. I call it "patrol bait". When the ogres are coming to town, take a knight or two and tell them to run through the group of ogres. A good number of them will chase the knights. Once you can see for sure that the ogres are following, send your main body of knights after them, they'll just contact the ogres when the lust runs out.
This also works well with a mage combination. Leave some knights or peasants or an empty tower for the ogres to attack when they are attacking on patrol. Then blizzard everything :)
Feel free to run from lusted orges. After a while, you'll figure out when you should turn around and attack.
Hezekiah taught me something cool. Archers take buildings down faster than knights. Mages destroy buildings even faster. That's because buildings have no armor protection.
When you invade an enemy town early in a low resources game, don't try to stand in the gold line with a couple of footmen. Give each chopper a whack on the head and he'll run away. We all know how tight lumber is on low. Kill or hit as many lumberjacks as you can, unless you have 3 or more. In that case, hit the choppers once then go park it in the gold line
Everyone is towering in these days. Lots of people put a tower right behind their town hall. If you tell your guys to stand ground right next to the mine, that tower won't be able to reach them. I finally learned that after many sad experiences :)
Keep the pressure on the enemy. It is sometimes worth the risk to make tons of knights instead of going to castle. While your enemy is busy upgrading, launch an attack with everything you have. Backlash was so successful because he made tons of knights. He didn't really use mages much at all. This can even work in the footman stage. Smokedog used to kill some of the best players by making a ton of footmen instead of going to keep. I emphasize that this is a risky strategy. In general, staying on the offense is sooo important. When orcs are on the offense, they have time to lust up. Keeping the fight in the enemy town also allows you to expand and even tower the enemy in without them noticing.
Thrugg has pointed out the error of my ways. I get a little tower happy sometimes. Towers don't always reach where they need to, and they don't help much when it's time to expand. Later on in the game, they're just sapper and death knight bait. It is still wise to wall in a tower or two at a new town, but wait until you have enough units to protect the area before putting them up.
Try to funnel the enemy into small areas. I'll try to get a capture of this to show the principle eventually. Not only can you kill them off with flame shields or blizzards in the narrow area, you can outnumber by 2 them on the front line. With even numbers, you'll win every time. Here's an ugly little example: T=tree o=your guys x=enemy
The day after I wrote this strategy, Shlonglor created a section about this very thing. Go read it, it's much better.
Invading an enemy island is a real chore. You have to coordinate ships and men. Creating a distraction on one side and attacking on the other is an old favorite that works pretty well. A hit and run mage attack is the best way to soften the enemy up. Sometimes you can't stay invisible from the time you leave your shipyard to the time you reach the enemy. It might be necessary to land on an island near the enemy and make you ships invisible there. If you're really close, you can make a mage or two invisible, stick them in the transport, make the transport invisible and move in.
On water levels, always try to combine your ships with those of an ally. Keep them together and you can move from enemy to enemy overwhelming them. He'll call for help from his ally and the other enemy will come in nice and disorganized.
Early in a game when jugg fights are so critical, take all of your battleships and move them away from your sea buildings where the enemy won't see them on their way in. Group them there until you have enough to attack with. If you are attacked before then, they will come in and start on your buildings. That's when you start training another battleship if you haven't already. If they have equal numbers, coordinate your attack on the ships to right after they have fired on the building. Each of your battleships should be able to squeeze off a shot before the enemy returns fire. If are outnumbered by one or two, coordinate the arrival of your hidden ships with the time your new ship will pop out. If you are outnumbered by more in a team game, get help, then come out of hiding when your ally appears.
Once a water level gets full of mages and death knights, battleships are way too easy to kill and they won't stop transports. Get destroyers and put them on patrol across your ocean borders.
Once you have the sea on water levels, you can spread your advantage to the land. Place your battleships next to the enemy shore and land a transport or two there. Take a couple of peasants and start building towers, with your battleships to protect them. Once those are up, put up barracks. If you think you can hold the spot, build a mage tower and maybe even an inventor on the enemy island to get rid of towers. Once the towers are up and operational, get your ships on patrol around the island to prevent the arrival of reinforcements.
In a footman-stage invasion, it often pays to take an archer if the opponent is walled in without towers. You can hack at a farm and hit peons trying to repair it. This works really well when you are double-teaming a player.
You can also take a peasant with you if there is a small opening in the enemy's town. No, don't build towers. Look for the hole and run into it with your footmen. Then, start a farm in the gap. You can gut the town from the inside and the enemy's grunts won't be able to come in. With the building patterns in the IWL these days, this works sooo well when you catch them early on.
NEW Sometimes when you're going down and you know it you need to pull out the do or die strategies. A couple of these really mess up your opponents and they can be used at any point in the game.
The Low Oil Strategy - on low resources, you only start off with 1000 oil.
Since most people only want to play land, you can use this to your advantage. If you take out your enemy's smith 3 times, he'll be out of oil. Upgrades to strongholds cost like 200 oil. If you can take out the enemy stronghold with demo teams (5 of them) or a flock of mages, then get the smith twice, he'll be out of the ogre business for good. Collision was the first player I know to really use this effectively.
The Farm Extinction Strategy - after a while in the game, people stop caring where their farms are. If you save up your demo teams, take out as many farms as possible. It's important that you do this all at once so the enemy doesn't start protecting them again. Then take your knights and kill peons that are chopping wood. Chances are, they'll have so many peons on gold that they won't be able to get any out or train any in order to make some new farms.
