Lowmanning Campaign

[Shadotter]

I've been wondering for a while about strategies that might be used to make the impact of a small amount of people have a large impact in campaign. So far my strategy involves heavy abuse of SCNMs and camping in the strongholds using a large amount of blms to use -ja spells and possibly meteor with another group to take care of the nms. This really is all effected though by how much SCNMs lower the enemy stats and raise ours. Ideally a couple small groups could get things to the point where the allied NPCs can regularly win the normal battles without our help.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

As a PLD99, I can tell you that whenever I wade into a campaign battle I am a taru god! Judicious use of some area-effect moves (<3 Griffenclaw) gets most of the enemies on me, and I can easily go toe-to-toe with formerly scary opponents like Shadowhand and Kaiser Behemoth. The only NMs I really can't solo are the megabosses (e.g. still took a light party to whittle down Bagodicks over forevar! And he didn't even drop a coin...).

Other than going drunk with power, having the bad guys "hit" me (for 0 HP lulz) means they aren't hitting friendly NPCs or fortifications, essentially pinning them down and preventing them from having any influence on campaign.

[Shadotter]

Well true, but doing regular battles, there's only so much you can do. Basically what I'm wondering is if certain strategies might enable a relatively small coalition to use scnms and base attacking to basically reduce the enemy stats to the point where things tip much more in the allied force's favor.

[Urthdigger]

I've talked this over with Shad before, and the main issue is being unable to be everywhere at once, plus how quickly your work can be undone once you're no longer actively fighting. The idea behind using SCNMs is that the items dropped from the NMs remove stats from the beastman army and give them to the nation. For example, a Brass Letterbox from Bres, when turned in to Kevan, will reduce the resources of the Quadav and increase the resources of Bastok. In addition, campaign battles in a nation's city are said to drain the stats of that nation... and it is assumed the same goes for the beastmen. Furthermore, we believe that simply fighting the beastmen armies in their stronghold, doing the SCNM battles themselves, as well as the campaign ops to fight the beastmen leaders may also damage the stats of the the beastmen army.

Using campaign ops to increase the nation stats has also been considered, especially for the troop training ops which seem to increase a stat all their own that the intelligence NPCs don't talk about (Considering doing the healer training is the ONLY way to make them more effective). However, with a limited group campaign ops can only do so much.

It's our belief that doing this would enable the NPCs to pull their weight in battle, so they may win battles on their own... or at the very least that they wouldn't lose battles so swiftly.

[Shadotter]

Looked up some information and found that SCNMs are each a 5 hour pop. This could be a good or bad thing. Bad because that means they aren't easily spammable, on the other hand however, I doubt that SE would add a way to effect the stats that wouldn't be able to do more than a pittance, which means it would be easier for a small group to keep camping all of them for maximum effect (Or rather, a couple small groups cooperating to make sure there's people online at each spawn time). That said though, when not getting the containers, each campaign mob killed even out of a battle (or maybe only out of battle) is two fortifications lost to the enemy, near as I can tell, damage done to the home base is top priority, which would mean they would rush to repair those fortifications using up supplies and resources, which in turn would also effect production and funds. All this combined with the fact that campaign mobs not out in the field idle in the home base means that an effecient means of killing them would lead to the enemy pretty much hemorrhaging money.

[Urthdigger]

I think when you hit the "A couple small groups" phase, you're no longer lowmanning it.

[Shadotter]

It's a comparitive lowman. A couple small groups is lowmanning compared to the efforts of an entire server

[Babekeke]

Irrelevant how much you reduce the stats of beastmen forces, when the beastmen forces attack an area that the allied forces aren't defending. Also, if your plan is to get to the throne room, you need to weaken all 3 nation's beastmen, plus you still have the dark hordes to contend with, and idk if they will even be affected by the SCNMs or campaign ops.

[Randnum]

Just throwing in my two cents if it helps at all.

One of the problems with Campaign is that, 'as usual', the method that benefits single players is the opposite of the method that benefits the effort overall. I have had the fortune of working with friends to make sure that the Allied Forces stomp the enemy quickly and efficiently whenever they can, and over time, this has a very large effect on battles.

Anecdotal only so take with a grain of salt, but it follows the logic that if even attacking forces lose less soldiers they redeploy faster. You can, with some coordination, tip things in the favor of the Allied Forces fairly fast but you can be held up by that one player who wants to solo for exp and make the battle last longer.

It is possible to bring Yagudo Theomilitary Morale down by half in a four hour stretch, just one afternoon, if your goal is to make the Allied Forces win every sortie as quickly as possible and with minimal losses. I can say with great confidence that this effect then cascades for pretty much the rest of the week if you do it on a Sunday or Monday.

It's actually ineffective almost completely to defend any fortification that has no allied defenders presuming you could be somewhere else speeding up a different victory.

[Urthdigger]

Irrelevant how much you reduce the stats of beastmen forces, when the beastmen forces attack an area that the allied forces aren't defending. Also, if your plan is to get to the throne room, you need to weaken all 3 nation's beastmen, plus you still have the dark hordes to contend with, and idk if they will even be affected by the SCNMs or campaign ops.

The need to lower all three beastmen is one reason why I've looked more towards SCNMs than campaign ops. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even a foreigner can collect the drops, turn them in, and do the battlefields, yes? The 5 hour wait means you could go and do another nation while waiting for a previous one to repop.

Just throwing in my two cents if it helps at all.

One of the problems with Campaign is that, 'as usual', the method that benefits single players is the opposite of the method that benefits the effort overall. I have had the fortune of working with friends to make sure that the Allied Forces stomp the enemy quickly and efficiently whenever they can, and over time, this has a very large effect on battles.

Anecdotal only so take with a grain of salt, but it follows the logic that if even attacking forces lose less soldiers they redeploy faster. You can, with some coordination, tip things in the favor of the Allied Forces fairly fast but you can be held up by that one player who wants to solo for exp and make the battle last longer.

It is possible to bring Yagudo Theomilitary Morale down by half in a four hour stretch, just one afternoon, if your goal is to make the Allied Forces win every sortie as quickly as possible and with minimal losses. I can say with great confidence that this effect then cascades for pretty much the rest of the week if you do it on a Sunday or Monday.

It's actually ineffective almost completely to defend any fortification that has no allied defenders presuming you could be somewhere else speeding up a different victory.

This is perhaps one case where the unpopularity of campaign rides in our favor. While having few, if any, players participating in campaign has led to the nations being stomped currently, it also means less wrenches being thrown into the works. That all said, it is a valid concern, albeit one we can do little about.