The Rat-pack-playstyle

In a nutshell

1. Fill your Troops and empty your yard
2. Finish training and healing all soldiers – do not press Complete.
3. Go out and start ratting
4. When someone arrives, fight them or allow them to port you.
5. Start again in whatever area you landed.
6. Crown yourself king of the world

The rat-pack playstyle

This playstyle was prolific in the days of old when s12 were nothing but a desolate warzone. The Ruslan alliance ‘NMLS’ fought the Ydvia alliance ‘PH’ over server dominance. The three whales of server 12 banded together in PH to take on NMLS – whom had strength through numbers – no where in Noeheim was safe.

Eventually, NMLS were driven from their cities and had to abandon their capitals. In a spectacle of 10v1 the whales barely won – but won non the less. This is where something interesting happened. In being defeated and driven from their territories, NMLS had “nothing to loose” and renamed themselves ‘Ratpack’ as they ‘ratted all other castles in the server’ growing like never before and preparing for their inevitable migration.

What is ratting?

Goal is to attack as many castles as possible and loot their resources while keeping empty training grounds and only ‘safe’ resource levels. Spending resources on tech and buildings as quickly as you can gather them – When you have nothing to lose you have everything to gain!

You can attack anyone at will and if they attack you back you either garrison against someone you know you’ll win, or you let them port you.

But what if I get ported?

If you get ported, you gain resources from Second Wind and a free teleport to a new location with new castles to loot/rat.

How to keep soldiers with empty grounds

You have two primary battle troops and two supply troops to pick from. If you just have one main unit, you should employ the others as supply troops and keep the first on Auto. The supply troops have the same frontline immortals as your mains, allowing you to allocate soldiers to your mains as they are lost. Mark your supply troops as not to be filled automatically, while your main fighting troops are. You will manually take soldiers from your supply troops to allocate to your fighting troops when you attack and lose soldiers. You don’t have to maintain assigning to your fighting soldiers all the time; it’s fine if they aren’t fully stocked but strive to keep them above 90%.

Keep no extra soldiers in the yard. Only troops in barracks and hospital, ready to be completed.

You avoid 100% training ground deaths by having no troops on the grounds.

Maintain completed barracks and hospital troops

Before venturing out there, one of the first things you do is train and heal a full force of soldiers. However, do not press the “Complete” button. Keep them there as backups; they can’t be killed. Only push complete to fill your troops; if you have too many, recycle them for resources and keep going.

BEWARE: Allowing wounded to pile up without being healed can lead to death.

Banking too many resources – out of speedups!

They certainly do. You also have a few options for concealing them. The first is to use them to heal or train new soldiers. However, if all of the queues are full, you can commit your resources by creating a large amount of artifact material. When you’re finished fighting and the material isn’t ready, you can cancel the procedure and get 80% of your resources back. If you run out of resources and the forge is running at full capacity, simply cancel and restart. Yes, you lose more, but your adversary will not obtain it, and you will lose less than if you were attacked.

Training all types of soldiers and recycling are two more wonderful ways to store non-lootable resources.

You welcome others porting you – maintain low prosperity

Being ported is the best part, it teleports you to new hunting grounds. The only thing that hurts about being ported is losing soldiers, losing resources and losing prosperity. None of it really matters, if you follow the instructions you won’t have any resources to give up, you won’t have any soldiers to be killed and you will get enough resources so that any gathering speed limited by prosperity loss is insignificant.

You want to keep yourself at low prosperity, once you arrive in enemy territory and start swinging someone might teleport in to deal with you. You either defend if you know you can win, or you don’t and get ported. You will then arrive in new hunting grounds, ready to repeat the process. Another way to keep resources in the bank is to close the Second Wind popup and use it later.

Must have rat-pack-talent

If you are very active with this playstyle, you will eventually reach a point where you cannot spend or bank resources quickly enough. But if you keep being one-hit from ported (maintain low prosperity e.g. through the Last Stand talent) you don’t mind being ported and losing one-attack worth of resources in exchange for new hunting grounds!

Published: 04-03-2022