V. Enemy Activity Display

As mentioned in the previous section of the guide, on the main map screen in the left-top-corner just below the Level Icon is the Icon for the Enemy Activity News Page - a column that lists all of the recent enemy activity in your game.

There are several classes if information that are displayed on this column-page, the most common being the loss of native villages via Blackguard and other enemy attacks.

Losing the native villages is bad news for you for several reasons - the first and most obvious being that it means you are losing control over the region, but the second is that you are then losing the Victory Points associated with that village as well as the resources and gold it generates for you!

The different types of display include the following:

This type will appear as a thin tan line in the list, showing small icons with a number showing a summary of Scouting Events, Attacks, and Deaths, and includes the time elapsed for that report.

Tapping on the Daily Summary Event in your list will reveal the statistics that apply to YOUR home base - typically that report takes the form of a information bubble that looks like this:

20h ago

Scouted 2 times by 2 players

Attacked 1 time by 1 player

Raided 1 time by 1 player

This is fresh information that tells you a lot more than you might think. From these brief stats you now know how many players know where you are, and how many felt you were weak enough after scouting you to justify attacking and sacking you.

It can also help to teach you when you have made costly mistakes. For example one such mistake is leaving your base as an attractive target at the end of the day;

Nobody wants to undertake a costly attack in which they will lose men and money if there is not a profit to be had. So when an enemy Scouts your base and sees that there are very little or as close to no resources or gold present, and stiff defenses, they are unlikely to attack.

If on the other hand, they see LOTS of resources and gold, then even if the base has very good defenses they will likely still attack because the reward for doing so is obvious.

Basically what this teaches you is that you should always try to limit the amount of resources and wealth on hand at the end of the day.

If you have resources and gold contributed by grateful natives that are still uncollected, on the boats in your harbor LEAVE THEM THERE. An enemy attack can NOT destroy those resources or gold, and they can not be looted - they are safer on the boats where they will be the next day when you log in and want to collect and use them.

If you have a lot of gold in your Vault at the end of the day, spend it. Visit your Armory and spend the gold upgrading something. You may think that spending gold to update Mines or First Aid Shells or whatever is rather dumb, but since the enemy cannot take those upgrades as loot, transforming the gold that they CAN take into a better tech position for your side is a no-brainer!

If you have lots of wood/stone/iron then see what the most expensive and time-consuming base infrastructure or offensive unit upgrade is and then DO IT.

Making your base less attractive to an enemy will often prevent them from attacking!

Each of the Village News entries displays the Village Lost Headline, along with the time since the loss happened.

Tapping on that specific event in the list will re-orient your map pointer to the actual village that was attacked and lost.

Tapping the event lists is a really good idea because in addition to showing you WHERE the particular village was that was taken, it also pops up an information balloon that tells you WHO took the village.

A typical balloon will read: "Blackguard Invasion -1 Victory Point. The Blackguard invaded this village."

You can also see what strategic form that the village defenses now takes - which will be anything from the following:

• Double Slugger II

• Echelon Right

• Flanking Speed

• Mercenary Invasion

• Priority Target

• Queen's Gambit

• Rocket Rain

• Rocky Bay

• Shrapnel

If it does not include one of the basic defensive strategy names sampled above, then it shows you the name of the player who has occupied that village now as their own home base. That means that unseating them - taking back this particular village - will be a bit harder than otherwise.

The listing in the news column tells you that your Home Base was Raided and when (by revealing the elapsed time) which gives you an idea of how long after you logged off that your base was attacked.

Tapping on the news event also reveals the following information, which while most of it is simply informative, some is still useful to have:

Our base was raided by PLAYER NAME with Level and Victory Points (-1 Victory Point)

Resources Lost

4480 Gold + 2450 Wood

Troops Deployed

x6 Level 2 Heavy

x4 Level 1 Zooka Girls

Troops Destroyed

x1 Level 2 Heavy

x1 Level 1 Zooka Girl

What did we learn from this? Well we learn that certain types of attacking troops do better against our current defensive setup than others. We learn that the enemy players who have attacked us have a better than usual understanding of basic offensive units and tactics.

We learned that all of the players who are attacking us have tech levels above Level 11 - and that is interesting because our defensive setup appears to be too intimidating to players with lower tech levels. We need to find ways to use that information since we pair to acquire it with damage to our base and loss of gold and resources!

There are a number of lessons to be had from this type of entry, especially over time.

The first lesson? We need to upgrade our defenses and maybe add some additional cover to the right-hand side of our base, which is the direction from which the attacks are coming from because that is the side our HQ is located on.

Another tactic we might try is to move the HQ towards the center back of the base to increase the chances that the attacking enemy will be engaged by ALL of our defensive units, and not just the ones on the right-hand-side of the base.

We learned from watching the attacks that the enemy all chose to avoid our mines - and that is food for thought about how we might make use of that tendency to channel the attackers into a killing field situation.

Obviously the Enemy Activity Display is FAR more useful than it might seem at first as the info that it offers can, if we learn to read between the lines, be very revealing indeed!