Ever face someone with the same or similar army size, same upgrades, and same units, but find yourself inexplicably losing the battle? Chances are, if he was a higher rating than you, he used small things, micromanagement, to give himself the edge.
This thread is designed to help you learn the inner tricks of the elite, post your own tactics, and help others get better at the small things in this game. I will keep updating this post with the tactics that you post arranged in three categories, beginner, intermediate, and advanced level.
I'll start off with a few in each level. Feel free to post your own (credit will be given).
Dont question my godly knowledge, Im probably right.
Beginner:
The Castle Archer Advantage
If you are fighting in a skirmish outside of your gold mines, and have a castle archer, why not use it? Move your army back a little, enough for their melee units to feel the pain of splash arrows going through their heart, giving you a slight edge.
Similarly, if they have a castle archer and are leading you into it, don't follow them! Run back to the tower or home if you have to.
Targeting (Kill List)
When facing an enemy army, you should have an order of which units to kill first. Magikill should always be the first on this list. Then Merics. Next, low health/high damaging units should be taken out. These include swords, archers (if they don't kite), exposed albows, and ninjas. Lastly, are the high health but low damaging units, the tanks. These are the giants and Speartons.
Garrisoning units
When one of your units, like a Spearton is at low health, and you have several more with you, a good idea is to garrison it, let it heal, and use it again for later.
Escaping the castle archer/dead
If you are attacking their miners with Swordwraths/Archidons, and notice that they got a castle archer, You must obviously run right? The best way to avoid and get as far away from the arrows is by running away diagonally upwards. this is because you are traveling on the path perpendicular to the path of the arrow, and therefore are moving the farthest away from it as possible.
Ex www.stickempires.com/play?replay=replay4444703&version=1.88 watch as I escape the castle archer epically hehe
Focus Fire
In any battle situation, focusing many/all of your units to attack one is usually the best thing to do. Try to also target weak units. This is because when you all attack one unit, that unit dies faster, and therefore their fire power is reduced.
Archer Sword vs Archer Sword
When using the Archer Sword start on short maps, before attacking, keep the archer in front. He will take the first shot, meaning that your Swordwrath will live longer than theirs, winning you the vital early skirmish.
Rage Away
TheForgottenUser
If you know your swordwrath are going to take a beating, especially from ranged units, you can use Rage to become the fastest unit in the game and run away.
Reserve your magikill
In a skirmish where you know the enemy has a ninja, medusa, or V, it is beneficial to instead of attacking with all of your units, to keep your magikill far back, away from harm. Then you can use melee units, ninjas, or try to snipe their "one hit kill unit" to death. After the dangerous unit is dead, you can bring your spell caster back in to deal heavy damage to their army without worrying.
Intermediate:
The Impenetrable Iron/Magic Shell of DOOOM (credit to fatty)
Although not really a micro tactic, (more of macro) this still deserves mention. By having just a few key units, almost any advance can be stopped.
What you need is a Spearton with shield wall, a miner wall, a meric, a magikill, and a castle archer. With just these few units, you can stop any early game army in their tracks, and obliterate them should they feel... daring.
The idea is that the Spearton will tank and reduce any damage taken from archers and melee units, and the Meric will heal some of the already reduced damage. However, the Meric + Spearton combo cannot tank forever, and that is what the Magikill is for. It can scare away any archers that continue to shoot foolishly at the Spearton.
"Well just kill the Magikill and Meric, right?" Wrong. That's what the wall is for: stopping any melee units that want to kill the key low health units. Kill the wall? The wall. Kill the spearton? poison and blast. That is what makes this so terrifying. Once you have these few things down, you are free for some time to build whatever you please, whether it be giant spam, Magikill spam, albow spam, there is almost nothing they can do to stop you.
Tanking Castle Archer Arrows
Units: 1 Spearton (with Shield Wall) + low-tier units
Position your Spearton a few feet ahead of your other units. Then, while selecting all of your units, you can attack the enemy castle. The castle archer should lock on to the first unit, your Spearton, so your low health units (I prefer archers, but swords can work too) can do work on the castle without much harm.
When you're in the range of the castle archer, send the Spearton to the top corner, and activate Shield Wall. The castle archer will keep shooting at your Spearton, which is far away from the other units, so splash doesn't hurt.
Hiding Units
See that statue head of yours? You can hide units behind it. If your facing Order as Chaos, hide a Bomber or two behind it, and when they send their army of Swords at you thinking that all you have are Crawlers, spring the trap and bomb their whole army! Or keep an Archer behind it and get the necessary first shot against their unsuspecting Archer. Its also good for making yourself hard to target.
Giant Chasing
Normally a Spearton or Shadowwrath trying to escape a Giant can do so easily, and after a few shots, get out of the range of the Giant. To prevent this from happening you can use the animation cancel to your advantage. Every time you throw a boulder, immediately after, walk towards the stunned Spearton. After the time it normally takes to reload a boulder, attack the Spearton again, walk towards, etc. This ensures that the Spearton cannot escape, and stays within range of the giant.
Archer vs. Archer Tanking
In a 2 archer vs 2 archer situation, what's the best way to attack? Obviously targeting a single archer is the right thing to do but if you both did that, you would probably end up eliminating each other.
There's something else you can do! After your first archer has taken 4 shots and is nearly dead, move your healthy archer in front to block arrows and target the opponent's HEALTHY archer.
Each digit represents an archer's health. The left 2 are the enemy's, and the right 2 are yours. Here is the math for archer micro:
55 55
53 35
51 15
(switch places)
40 31
20 21
00 11
As you can see, with good micro, you can win the skirmish with both archers surviving, and manage to kill both of their archers.
Magikill Tips (by buddeh)
Not mine, tips from the magikill master himself!
http://forums.stickpage.com/showthread.php?55848-Magikill-Tips
Miner Shield
TheForgottenUser
Early game if they have better units than you, you can use a miner as a cheap shield to even the playing field. If done right, you will win the skirmish with a slightly injured miner.
Garrison Block
TheForgottenUser
This one's helped me out many, many times. If they are trying to garrison their units, move speartons not to attack their miners, but in front of the garrison. Go into shield wall and bash them as they retreat. You'll kill more that way. Same can be done once already garrisoned to buy time/protect a horde of archidons/albows attacking their statue.
Animation Cancel
A very helpful thing o do in battles and specifically in chasing units is Animation canceling. Specifically in chasing enemy units that are slower than you, you can reduce the amount of time it takes for each hit to finish by canceling it and moving towards the enemy right after doing damage.
-In Order vs Chaos, you may be able to exploit this to get more hits on their crawlers with your sword. Yes, you heard me right. when your sword approaches their crawler, immediately after the first sword strike, the crawler should try to run away for a few seconds. Right after you get your first hit in, move your sword towards their base for half a second, then target the crawler again. If he was even slightly slow at retreating his crawler, then you should be able to get a second hit in, while he only gets one in.
-You can also do this when chasing miners who are trying to garrison. Right after you see the damage dealt, run towards their base then target again. You can get a couple more hits in this way, perhaps even killing an extra unit or two.
-Order is the only one that can exploit this. With chaos, crawlers are much faster than swords and archers, and therefore they can anim cancel when chasing them down. Doing so greatly increases the damage that can be done to fleeing units.
Rain of Fire Arrows
After the buff to fire arrows, they have become a great asset to archer users, as well as a great siege breaker. They are particularly effective when you have the offensive position; by raining fire on their miners they have to either block the arrows with their tanks, weakening them, or let their miners take the hit, weakening their economy. As a reference, fire arrows do about the same damage as a bomber, after the burn.
Advanced:
Shoot Around Stuffs
If your ever in a Spearton+archer vs Spearton+archer battle, with each side having a few Speartons (1-3) and many of archers(6-8 ) you may notice that the archers are all fanned out, while the Speartons are clumped in the middle. You can use this unit layout to your advantage. Select the top and bottom archers, and have them target the archers at the top and bottom respectively. If your enemy doesn't notice, you can get away with killing 2-3 archers, giving you a (relatively) big advantage.
Adding on to the situation above, assuming that the enemy Speartons don't use shield wall, and instead directly target your Speartons, you can basically control their position. Sending your Spearton to the top/bottom will make their Spearton follow you, giving you an opportunity to target their archers.
Spearton manipulation
In a battle such as the one above, with multiple speartons, You only need one to be in shield wall, the one in front. This lets your other speartons keep attacking, adding to your total DPS.
SW vs SW: Fakeout
In a Swordwrath vs Swordwrath battle with say, 6 Swordwraths each, normally one would charge at the enemy and activate rage while doing so. You can use their haste to your advantage, by keeping some distance between you and them, and RUNNING away when they do activate rage. Their premature rage will mean that they waste some health trying to catch up, and that their rage will end earlier than yours, sealing you as the winner of the skirmish.
Trolling Castle Archers/deads, miner walls
Because the Castle Dead takes longer to attack, and guts fly slower and don't have splash, using a small group of archers (3-4) you can do guerrilla attacks on their miners. You just go in, release a volley, and go out. The castle dead should not be able to hit you if you're fast enough. With a decent number of archers, you can harass their miners and slow their economy down. (it helps to go in from the bottom, and run away upwards)
See tanking castle archer arrows from above.
What you need: 1 sword and 3 archers. (5 archers work, no big improvement when using 4, as you still need two volleys to kill each miner)
It takes 5 arrows to kill a miner. So having 3 archers means two volleys. Using the same idea as above, but with swords instead of spears, you can harass their economy early game. Go in, fire TWO volleys, and get out. You just killed a miner without even using a Spearton. The SW will die of course, but that's pretty good sacrifice for killing a miner. Once you have 5 archers you can get to killing 2 Miners every wave.
If they put up a miner wall (for some stupid reason) and have a Castle Archer, you should still be able to attack it with your archers. Instead of manually targeting it, you have to inch the archers closer and closer. Stop when they start to raise their bow. You should be able to destroy any walls put in their base without need for a tank.
Kiting "Sweet Spot"
you may notice that some people tend to keep their Swordwraths and Speartons some distance ahead of their archers. you can use this to your advantage by having your Archers start running/kiting while In range of the tank units, but still out of range of the enemy Archers. This takes some skill and time to do, as you need to start running as soon as they start raising the bow, but if you pull this off you can have a several volley head start on their tanks.
An extension, Kiting Fires
Due to their short range and slow projectile, it is possible to kite fires with archers without being able to be hit. When a fire approaches, wait until the moment that the archer raises the bow, then run away. Then start kiting. You have a bit of leeway in how far you can be from the Fire. If you make a slight mistake or are to slow in running, and the fire gets a shot off, run diagonally upwards to increase the chance that you will dodge the slow moving fireball. You can do a similar thing with airs, though it is slightly harder.
UBERRRRR TIERRR MICROOOOOOOOOOOO
kite
Once again, feel free to post your own tactics. Right now theres an overabundance of archer tricks, and we need others as well XD
