2010

Rampart has the cheapest and meatiest meat: dwarves, dendroids, unicorns — the upgraded version is even meatier! :) Perfect for Hives and Dragon Utopias! :)

The chomping is good, no argument there. But what do you hit with? With 6 horses? Feeble. Well, even if it's 10, it's still not that great. Wolves and bears at the same stage deal way more damage.

So, you need angels and wyverns. But everyone needs them.

That's why we go for Griffin Conservatories — there, wolves under Tyris, with a lucky development, knock out a stack in one hit. And the bears help too. Without Tyris, it's more complicated, but still decent if your native fighter shows up.

But Rampart struggles with building elves and squanders the chomping. It's hard for them to clear several large Conservatories without significant losses (if there's no oil). For Barbarian, there were precedents when, on the second week, the very first Conservatory turned out to be max and was breached with only a handful of losses.

A similar story for Castle and Tower — reliance on a shooter stack creates difficulties in quickly farming Dragon Utopias, increasing dependence on the layout.

Whereas a primarily melee army (and the starting hero chosen for it) is more versatile, clearing territory, Conservatories, and Dragon Utopias with equal success. But it's also more difficult to manage, with more variety in combat techniques.

Plus the leveling factor — specialists in melee levels 1-4 quickly power up their core stacks, while shooter towns find it much harder to level up their 6th-level unit.

Say, for Tyris to have a good life, you only need 2 external dwellings of wolves, and you can even do without bears — a wolf stack on the second week will drop a dragon stack in a single hit.

Recently there was a game with BoaTong where the first week's construction consisted of birds in the fort. And it didn't really matter — external dwelling of wolves, rocs, native village, Tyris lvl 13 on day 117, hi Gosha :), he was cutting down 100 of Gosha's 10th-tier skeletons per hit. Of course, any Dragon Utopia would fall on day 121 without much resistance.