War: Individual Player Tips and Tactics

March 2, 2019 1 Comment

If you’re looking to improve your individual performance in our wars, below are some good tips and tactics to keep in mind. This may be especially helpful if you find yourself struggling in wars, and find yourself often blaming your “weak heroes” or bad luck with tiles.”

The Golden Rule: USE ALL FLAGS!

Nothing is more important than using your 6 war attack flags. You could literally follow and flawlessly execute all the tactics in this post and that would still be suboptimal to using all 6 war attack flags.

Conversely, you could play like an idiot and attack a 4500 power team with 5 Sharan heroes, and still have some chance of scoring more than 0 points with that attack. But if you don’t attack at all, then that 0 point score is guaranteed.

This alliance has unfortunately had a few situations where we had players with great hero rosters and smart tactics, but who couldn’t consistently use 6 flags every war, and we had to let them go. So… don’t do that.

Reviewing the Battlefield

So, when it comes to wars, do you do something like this?

  1. Aimlessly tap through the enemy teams of the battlefield, one by one.
  2. Find the first team you feel relatively confident you can win again.
  3. Hit the attack button.
  4. Select your 5 strongest heroes.
  5. Attack.

If this sounds like you, then… you’re probably not scoring as many points in a war as you should.

Your Heroes and Your Target

Each of your war attacks should be viewed in the lens of this: given my available heroes for attacking attack… which defense should I attack… that I’ll have a decent chance of winning against, and will yield the most points for that win?

  • Cycle through every team before you do anything, and look for things like:
    • Defenses with a tank of a color weak against your strongest remaining heroes.
    • Defenses with flank heroes that are weak against your strongest remaining heroes, and a tank that is neutral.
    • A tank that can be countered by your strongest remaining heroes (e.g. Jean-Francois vs a Kunchen tank).
    • Partial defense teams that you can “mop up” with your weaker heroes, and save your stronger heroes for another attack.
  • When you’ve got your heroes selected… before you hit ATTACK, first imagine you get a mediocre board. Then, ask yourself some quick “sanity check” questions you should ask yourself?
    • If the tank charges and fires his special once, can you recover? Or will it probably cripple your team and result in a lopsided loss?
    • Imagine killing the tank but losing your strongest hero immediately after doing so, before he charges his special. Can you still recover or are you implicitly relying a single hero’s special to get the win?
    • Is the war defense buff going to cause any complications at some point during the attack? e.g. If the defense buff is Field Aid, are you going to be able to heal your own heroes so you don’t get worn down by attrition?

You don’t have to overthink it, but most Empires and Puzzles player attack without thinking at all. Spending just a few minutes to judge your best war attack matchup, and prudently selecting your heroes, can make a big difference in how you perform during wars.

No Good Defense Targets? Just Wait!

If you’re relatively new to Empires and Puzzles, you might have a nice stable of 3* heroes… yet we might end up matched against war opponent that seems to have an entire board of 4000+ defense teams.

In these wars, the best thing you can do is check periodically and see how the rest of the alliance does with their attacks. Very likely we’ll attack and leave “partial defenses” on the board. A 4000 power defense may look intimidating, but if someone else already attacked in took out 3 out of their 5 heroes, then it’s entirely possible for your 3* heroes to finish them off.

Applying this strategy is most efficient for you and the alliance. It’s efficient for you, because of the bonus points you’re awarded for finishing off a defense. And it’s efficient for the rest of the alliance, so we can conserve our stronger heroes for attacking any of the full-strength defenses still on the board. It’s win-win!

Don’t Attack Partial Defenses With Underpowered Heroes

So let’s say there’s a partial team on the board that has three 4* heroes alive and mostly full health. You definitely don’t need five 4* heroes to take them out, but five 3* heroes is might be too weak. But it might seem really tempting to use those 3* heroes and save your 4* heroes for another attack, right?

However, this is a mistake. A partial team means someone in our alliance already spent 1 attack flag on attacking that defense. If you underestimate the heroes you need to finish off that defense…

  • You’ll miss out on the bonus points you get from finishing off a defense.
  • If you attack that partial defense again, you’ll likely use some of those stronger heroes you were trying to conserve.
  • Or maybe you won’t attack again, but either way the alliance will need to commit a third attack flag to finish off that defense.

If you err the other way and end up using an overpowered team against partial, then… sure, it’s possible you’ll get a good board and wreck the other team in three moves and roll your eyes and think “yeah, I guess I didn’t need all those heroes.” But that minor distaste pales in comparison to how much you’ll kick yourself as you think, “ugh, if only I brought Grimm instead of Ulmer…“

No Partials? No Problem…

In addition to checking the war defense board for partial teams to take out, here are some other things you can do:

  • Find a dead team that’s going to respawn soon, set a timer on your phone, and come back and attack them then.
  • Communicate as much as possible in the LINE app group chat. You should be able to find other players in the alliance that will gladly coordinate “dogpiling” one of the defenses on the board (ie. one player attacks with heroes that maximize taking out the tank, leaving the remaining heroes for you to mop up).

Flee!

You may have noticed the option to “flee” in the game, shown by the little running man icon in the upper right corner. If you’re on the ropes and going to lose anyway, you might want to consider fleeing, especially when the war defense buff is Field Aid. Here’s a good example:

This is just entirely hopless, isn’t it?

  • All the enemy heroes are buffed and have most of their health.
  • My remaining heroes aren’t close to charging and are going to die from the fire debuff within 1-2 turns anyway.
  • Almost any tile move would do negligible damage at best.
  • And most importantly: The Field Aid meter is fully charged and will drop a big deal on all the enemies after this turn.

By fleeing now, I’ll “preserve” the damage on Azlar and Cyprian, and they’ll be softer targets for whomever attacks them now. But if I make a move, I’ll probably do zero damage, watch Azlar and Cyprian get healed to nearly full health, and then likely immediately die from the fire debuff and/or enemy attacks.

I’ll admit it seems especially “unsporting” to flee, especially because Empires & Puzzles has that little “Flee” icon for every aspect of the game (quests, titans, world levels, etc), and it always seems pointless. Even if you’re about to die fighting that quest/titan/world boss/etc, why not play it out? What’s the downside? And the answer is always “none”, except for wars.

So if you’re attacking in a war, and things aren’t looking good and you think you might be on your last 1-2 turns, ask yourself… can you still use specials or do some damage with tiles in those last 1-2 moves, and will that damage offset any healing that the enemy heroes might receive? If so, then by all means, go down swinging. But if you’re just going to end up doing impotent damage while the enemy heroes receive a huge heal, consider hitting that “Flee” button before that can happen.