Tribal Wars
Posted on January 6, 2008
Filed Under General |
During my layoff from work I found myself with free time on my hands. I would sit and send out emails and handle phone calls throughout the day but there was still a quit a bit of free time and there is only so much home improvements you can do without spending cash. That is when I discovered a free online war game called Tribal Wars. (http://www.tribalwars.net)
In this game you start with a small village worth 26 points and build up troops and buildings in order to conquer your neighbor’s villages. There are several different worlds you can play with the latest being World 13. I play W8 and W12. When you take a village with your Noble you switch its loyalty to you and the player who owned the village starts over somewhere fresh with a new 26 point village.
In W8 I have 33 villages all in the 10k-12k point range. In W12 (a newer world) I have now eight villages at various stages of growth. The object of the game is as the title describes, you join a tribe and you go to war. This has proven to be a highly addicting game as all the battles are fought in real time. Growing a village to the 10k range in points can take upwards of two to three months so losing one can be quite traumatic. But if anyone loves strategy war gaming like I know many of you do, this one is worth trying. So far myself, Betsy, Brian and Steve Winegarden have tried it out with great enthusiasm. I have included the link to the site in the lower right of this blog site for others that may want to take a shot. 
We had an interesting turn of events in our Tribe in World 12. I have 10 villages now and we went to war with a neighboring tribe. I was the Secretary of War for our tribe and had developed a pretty good battle plan for driving the enemy tribe from our territory. After the first day of the war we had them on the run and the plan was working like clock-work. An ally of ours then collapsed and half their tribe joined the enemy.
At first we thought our tribal leader (Duke) had panicked and prematurely called cease fire. He then entered into negotiations with the enemy tribe where they would absorb all of our larger players and toss the smaller ones to the wolves. I objected to this course of action. We held a tribal council and I with two Barons siding with me we carried the day. Immediately our Duke and another Baron quit the tribe and joined the enemy. They then began recruiting our top players as well.
It was obvious that they had planned this from the start. My guess is our Duke had betrayed us even before he unilaterally declared a cease fire. Well, our tribe has held together and I am now the Duke. I must say the reluctant Duke as I much prefer the title of Sec. of War. We are now merging with another tribe in our area and will soon be even more powerful than before as result.
I pity the fools that left our tribe and tried to throw us under the bus. Their day of reckoning is coming.
OK, we just launched our first full war in TW under my Dukeship. I will let you know how it turns out.
It took all of 24 hours to cause the tribe we attacked to disband. The Duke and his group of traitors went running to the protection of another tribe like screaming little girls. I call these guys traitors because in the previous war, the war that left me the Duke of this tribe, the entire groups of players we are now attacking had deserted in the face of the enemy and formed their own tribe. Now, they are all dying to a man as we capture their villages one after another.
The tribe they ran to are screaming bloody murder of course and are threatening us with war if we don’t stop. To that I had one response: “Bring it on.” More on this later.
Well, we won the war with ATA and the few remaining players switched to a distant tribe. We were then attacked by an enemy to our right who is much stronger than we are. The distant tribe offered a peace deal so we took it in order to concentrate on our new enemy, the same tribe our traitorous previous leaders had fled too. The northern players in our tribe around me are doing well, the eastern and southern players are not doing so well. The tribe may not survive this one. We will see.
As we were nearing the end of the war with ATA those traitors that left our tribe and joined a now larger tribe to our east attacked us in violation of a Non-Aggression Pact (NAP) we had with them. This is considered poor form and the act of cowards when this happens in TW. Because most of our troops were in the west finishing off the now destroyed ATA, our eastern flank was at the mercy of the new attacking tribe, called “-R-”.
We made peace with the few remaining ATA players and refocused to the east. In the first week of this new war we took some hard blows and lost some valuable players. At the same time our Tribe founder decided to also quit the game leaving another gap in our leadership ranks. We made some tactical moves to merge with first one tribe in the area that was also losing ground in a war of attrition. Our two tribes together was now stronger and we made peace with their enemy to focus on -R-.
In the second week we slowly turned the tide and began to capture -R- villages and completely destroyed one of their larger players in our area. I was able to personally capture several of his villages as I was the first one he attacked. My counter-attacks destroyed all his offense and 50% of his defense leaving the rest of his villages vulnerable to our tribes men.
Things were moving along swimmingly up until last night when their tribe launched a massive assault at all of our members. On account that I am sitting for a fellow member had 398 attacks incoming at one point. I am still fighting them off and I do not know where that will end up. My own personal villages were also attacked, but I held the villages and now my counter attacks are in transit to take one of the opposing villages. That is where this war stands at this point. Two days ago we absorbed a fairly large number of our Academy tribes members into the full tribe as well as those players had grown large enough and we had some openings. In my next update I will let you know how all this turns out. -R- is a formidable tribe that is easily twice our size. Our only advantage is we are fairly tight in our clusters and can fight well as a unit. We will see how this ends.
The player I was sitting fought bravely, but was overwhelmed. 40% of the incoming attacks were real and continued for 2 days. When I finally passed off the sitting to another player this morning I had managed to save 11 of the 17 villages, but still had 33 more incoming attacks. I have since learned that we have a spy in our camp and that he/she has been instrumental in planning the attack. It was the first part of a larger plan to attack our Tribe and divide our cluster in half. The account I was sitting was dead center of the cluster.
We are still fighting bravely against tribe -R-. We are holding our own having taken out another of their major players but attacks coming from the east are relentless. Due to their size they will eventually wear us down unless they get distracted by some other large tribe that attacks them.
Our diplomat has been working on just that but in the meantime another tribe (FTM) has decided to expand and has ended their NAP with us. They are attacking several of our players including our diplomat. In return I have personally already sent one of their players “to the Rim.” This means I captured his only village and he gets to start over on the Rim of the world if he wants to keep playing. I am now up to 23 villages in W12 and am still the Reluctant Duke of he tribe.
I made a fateful decision last night and called our tribal council together to discuss it. I am disbanding our tribe FAN today at 6 pm EST.
With FTM coming in on the side of -R- we are now completely out-gunned and out-manned. While a few of us larger players in the tribe can hang on and slug it out with these guys, our smaller players will all get Rimmed. It would be unfair to them to continue in this fashion. By disbanding our tribe, everyone is free to join other tribes in the area assuring their survivability, at least for the short term.
Thus ends my days as the Reluctant Duke of tribe FAN. I am not sure where I am going to land as of yet, but this clearly is the dismal end of chapter one for my TW battles in W12. I personally have done well and have over 25 villages so far. Let us hope chapter two provides such rich opportunity for me as well.
In W8, things have been quiet and I have now reached nearly 60 villages there. I have also started a single village in W14, a barbarian world. This should also prove exciting.
With sadness in my heart, I now close to go and formally end our tribe in W12.
As fate would have it, I ended up leaving W12. I joined the enemy tribe there for awhile as a spy, but I was really unhappy. In the meantime, in W8 where I was a baron and co-leader of a continent, my fellow Baron had a falling out with our Duke and was dumped leaving me the sole leader of the continent.
My time online is limited so I decided being happy as a good Baron in W8 was better than being an unhappy ex-Duke in W12, so I quit that world to concentrate on W8. Thus ends my ventures as as Duke and my time in World 12. All I can say is “never again.” I enjoy playing while leading a tribe is too much work. I will be a Baron in W8 and a simple player in W14 from here forward.
In W8 I now have near 70 villages and in W14 I have 3 villages, soon to be 4.