Empires & Puzzles: Egypt & Alliance Wars

I'm still hacking away on Empires & Puzzles before bed.  I have made it most of the way through those Season 5 levels in Egypt.  As a throwback to 1st edition D&D they have a hieracosphinx to fight, and Bastet is apparently a super-cute flying kitten in this universe, while Cleopatra is somehow frumpy and unattractive.  I'm gradually making my way through all the usual gods & heroes.  This season is very well put together, though the battles in each map get very redundant: 10 levels per map with 3 to 5 waves per level -- you get really tired of mummies after a few hours.

I signed up with my old alliance again -- The Knights Who Say Nee -- and some of the names sounded familiar from a few years back.  I'm not sure why the alliance wars start at 6am on work days; I suppose the developers are in Europe somewhere.  The titans are annoyingly difficult, they're up to 10 or 11 stars these days, and I think the alliance gets 24 hours to do the full 3 or 4 million HP of damage.  The more harpoons we use, the more titan parts we get as loot.  I have no idea how team members manage to do 200,000 hp damage in these fights, when I'm lucky if I get two rounds (busy schedule) of 3 flags each for maybe 70K at best.

There is some strategy to those alliance wars.  The idea is that you get 6 chances (6 "flags") to go fight teams from the enemy, but you can only use each of your heroes once.  I start with a first team of about 4350 strength and by the time my team 6 comes up they only have about 2900 points.  When the battlefield opens, I try to find some teams that I can beat completely with my "A" team, which is worth about 45 points for the alliance.  Most of the opposing teams are in the 4600 to 5000 range, but I do routinely beat 4600s in the personal raids, so those are good practice for sizing up your chances against different lineups.

After the A team, I try to find lightly injured teams where I can be most effective.  Maybe my allies have already eliminated or injured one or two members of that team.  So a team that was 4800 is down to 3800 and could be beaten.  Or, if I don't see a team where I can help finish them off, just pick one hero on the enemy team and use my whole team to knock them out.  Use the color strengths as well, so if my next team has two green heroes, I will look for an opposing team with a blue hero who needs to be eliminated.  If I see a team with only one or two guys left, I leave those for the weaker alliance teams to choose from.

A real issue with alliance wars is how to deal with the enemy healers.  If you play all the way through and lose, you might end up leaving the enemy team stronger than when you challenged them, due to several rounds of healing beefing up their heroes.  Even worse are healers with a chance of reanimating fallen heroes, like Mrs Claus and her darn porridge or the guy who blows that horn -- do NOT let them power up and use those special abilities, or a team that had just 3 heroes when you got there can end up with all 5 positions filled again.  That's a pretty serious fail.  So, sadly, the move here is to fight right up until the first healer is charged up, and then flee, leaving the enemy team as weak as they're going to get for now.  Then one of your allies can go mop them up.  It's tempting to keep fighting, but yes, fleeing right before they heal up is a better move for your alliance.

There's usually a pretty brisk and supportive discussion in  the chats while the wars are going on, giving strategy tips like these, and encouraging the weaker members to keep on trying.

I still like this game.  It has a good range of a few hundred characters while not too getting complex or bogged down in details.  At this point, my castle and buildings are just routine.  The stronghold is still maxxed out at level 20 or 25, and no new building types have been added in a year or two.  When you go back to the castle screen you get bombarded with 3 or 4 popup ads trying to get real $$ for things, but there are free offers sprinkled in there, and once in a while I will spend $10 for a bunch of summons tokens just to see what happens.