Big issue in wars – 1* Defense Teams (Bad Strategy, see discussion for why this doesn’t work well)

The last wars our alliance has seen a lot of 1* defence teams.

The strategy behind this is simple.

By ordering every player below a certain team strength level putting up only one star heroes you make sure to minimize the points you loose.

What happens is that fair balance is lost. By doing this you fool the mtachmaking system. You get the correct opponent but make sure that your alliance lower teams will not loose what they are supposed to.

This ruins the fun in wars. One way to adress the issue would be better loot for stronger defence teams. Or ban teams below a certatin level to enter wars.

Please look into this developers since it is destroying a big part of the game, wars.

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Bad strategy.

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It sounds a bit cleverer than the idea of using 1* teams across the board.

The score for each player is dependent on team health. If this is allocated after matchmaking, then it would possibly skew the war.

If an alliance has two 4000 power teams and two 1000 power teams but the two low power teams take just 1*, potentially the difficult to beat 4000 teams will be worth even more points.

This would possibly work for mid strength alliances with a high disparity of team strengths.

@kerridoc is that the correct reading of it?

The total points are fixed, regardless of what defense teams your opponent puts up.

What they’re actually doing is giving you an easier win.

The link @Olmor shared has a few posts explaining more about how points for each team are calculated, and why this strategy tends to fail.

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This might help, from the thread @Olmor linked:

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Thanks zephyr :relaxed:

Sounds like the underlying flat rate keeps manipulation to a minimum.

20 points

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Not sure i get that. If my teammates below say like 1800 puts up 1 star hero teams they will loose less points since those teams would be taken out at reset anyway.

The stronger teams are harder to take out every reset so they are put up as usual.

Or am I missing something here?

Yes, but not a lot fewer. 1/3 of the points are split up evenly across teams no matter what.

And the remaining ones split up based on hp will drop for those teams and raise for the others, but that’s only going to change the points so much. And in exchange for that drop in points for those teams, you get a guarantee that your weakest team members can use their weakest heroes and one-shot those teams.

That removes all risk from clearing the weaker teams repeatedly, since you know it’ll be easy, and leaves every single one of your strong heroes available for killing the strong teams when you go for a clear.

And when you do clear the board, you’ll get all the same points as you would have anyway — and have had an easier time doing it.

That even potentially means you’ll kill more teams after the reset than you would otherwise, since you’d have more stronger heroes left having not wasted them at all on clearing weaker teams.

So I don’t think it’s a sure-fire way to reduce an opponent’s score. It’s actually pretty likely to make it easier for you to win in the end.

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Thanks for the reply. However I still think you can benefit from the ”strategy”. But probably not as much as I was worried about.

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I think you’re right — it could potentially prove beneficial. But it’s definitely not a sure thing, and I think it could turn out badly for an alliance doing it just as easily as turning out well.

Presuming you brought this up now because you’re facing a team doing it in this War, I’d be aiming to coordinate your alliance mates to go for a strong clear when the time comes, and then pick off teams thereafter based on where you have good heroes left.

If you think you can get a second clear because of the extra-weak teams, then that’d be ideal, of course. And I think you’ll have a better shot at this than usual, because you’ll have more flags and heroes than usual, if anything.

If not, and you only go for one clear, you may want to kill some of the mid-size teams again instead of or in addition to the ones with 1* on them.

Either way, I’d certainly love to hear how it goes, and insights you have from the experience to help other alliances crush this strategy. :slight_smile:

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Ii could see this go to the extreme with one single star hero in the defense team, minimizing the HP part of points. I hope I´m wrong about this however. Time will tell :grinning:

Defenses have to have 5 heroes now — that was one of the changes they made to Alliance Wars early on to deal with people using intentionally weak defenses.

In the original system, the total points for the field also weren’t always the same, so you could reduce the total available points with weak defenses. That hasn’t been true in a long time either.

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Thanks for clarifying that!

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You’re welcome!

Just adding this for future reference about that, for anyone else looking at this thread:

These will cause a player to be forced into Spectator Mode:

  • Your defense team is empty: You emptied your defense team by sacrificing the Heroes on your defense team.
  • If you have less than 5 Heroes in your War defense team.

Source:

https://support.smallgiantgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003367193-Why-am-I-in-Spectator-Mode-

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I can noew confirm this is a very effective way to ”cheat”

Latest war we faced 8 teams with only untrained 1*, they gave 24p each. That is probably half of what an average low team would have given otherwise.

Assume at least 15 points per team and respawn in loss. That is 120 pointa every respawn.

That is a loss of almost 400 points, that is a huge advantage, sadly.

How can I get the developers to notice this issue?

If I was an investor or (buyer) of sgg this would concern me since things like this could potentially decrease player base if it gets to spread.

I can see how this would be a disadvantage to fight them, especially as those extra points are distributed to the other (potentially much stronger) opposing teams especially if your (our) alliance can’t beat them.

Plus the waste of flags required to take out multiple 1 star teams.

Hopefully this doesn’t become the next thing to suck the fun out of the wars!

This is the 2nd war I see this. And I see these 774 team strength teams take out our hurt 3500+ teams. So the potential loss could be well over 400 points.

At least for me and some of my guildies it takes the fun out of wars.

What do you think would be a good solution to prevent players from doing it?

One way would be to force players to use a defence team of a certain % of their max team strength. Below that and you are spectator.

Another one would be to have better loot for teams with total higher defence strength or worse for lower.

Another solution that is not as good is to set a min lvl for participating in wars.

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