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| Author | Thieving and Caravans |
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I need some opinions here.
A strategy by some players is to setup ambushes with minimal artifacts, with the intent that each time they lose the next caravan (of that faction) will be a a little weaker. The intent is to conduct sustainable ambushes with minimal artifacts.
<I read that players did this down in Congratulations and had it confirmed in the Ambushers FAQ on page 1 - I didn't know the mechanics of this until a few moments ago>.
However most players are usually wise enough to travel with full artifacts when travelling to different regions in case of ambush. Also succesfully ambushing other players yields considerably more XP than what a Caravan does.
So what is better
1. Dumbing your combat potential down to make ambushing caravans easier in the long term, cheaper artifact maintenance and accepting you will win far fewer player ambushes thus missing out on potentially large amounts of XP.
or
2. Ambushing with full artifacts knowing that caravans will be tougher in the long term, cost of artifact maintenance will be higher, yet you will have on average greater success in ambushing other players thus earning more of the large XP rewards.
Cheers | i prefer min AP
art maintenance cost is practically nil, if you lose the hourly wage takes care of art loss, and in case of wins the gold looted covers the battle cost with profit TG3 onwards!
also min AP is best for faction training in case you change factions at higher levels, with hunts and quests well out of reach for the new factions i change to, thieving is the only way to raise racials.
if you don't care about xp, min AP is for you, because the sp gain for caravans remain 1 no matter 50AP or 9AP. and fighting full art thief hunters can be difficult even when you are all geared up.
and if you are thinking that min AP isn't challenging enough, think again, quite a few of my caravans take everything i have got to kill. | #2
I agree with gurumao and all his points sound good, but here's the drawback not mentioned:
If you do min AP arts to conduct sustainable ambushes:
1. It will take many hundreds (if not thousands) of straight losses in order for you weaken the 50+ different types of caravans (There are more types as you level up). I purposely lost 200+ caravans by wearing min AP arts and there was only a slight drop difficulty. And yes I do mean slight; so slight that if I were to wear 3-5 AP less than normal, then my caravan difficulty would be exactly the same as before the 200 losses.
2. Sustainable ambushes is accepting 35% win rate because winning increases caravan difficulty more than losing decreases it. | I have only done a couple of caravans, but what you guys have said thus far sounds very daunting.
I'd like a lot more than a 35% win rate.
Keep the feedback coming on this please. I had a strategy on dealing with Ambushes and that was full artifacts all the way.
If the consensus is to lose alot initially for greater and more economic gains later, I am prepared to rethink strategy.
Cheers | I prefer min arts as well.
1. Caravans
If I recall correctly caravans get 7% harder if won and 5% easier if lost, this means you end up with winning 43% of your ambushes. The only difference between full arts and min arts is whether this is preceded by some wins or losses. At a certain level the money from ambushes pay for min arts. (at my level min arts cost 100g and a won ambush yields ~300g)
With full arts you also have the option to stop if you drop under a certain win-loss and hope for caravans to get easier when you level up, but at some point it takes quite some time to level up.
There are exactly 40 different caravans (refference:http://www.witchhammer.ru/viewpage.php?page_id=26) and while it takes some time to lose them down you start seeing progress really soon since clusters are likely to occur. Of course if you switch from full to min arts it's a really long way down.
2. Players
There are in general two different types of player, those who travel in full arts and those who travel with none. With min arts you win most of your encounters with the later and lose most of the encounters with the first.
With full arts you win certainly against no arts and have moderate chances against other full arts player, so in my eyes it's not really worth it.
The one advantage of full arts is that you win and lose on a higher level and with an artefact bonus and thus get much more xp. | I personally don't get the min art route. As Pantheon pointed out in #3, and what I read from other earlier threads, it would take a lot of consecutive losses for us to see a discernible lowering of the caravans' difficulty. Also, though the per battle cost is comparatively low, the sheer number of losses one have to do makes the accumulated cost pretty substantial.
Another point to note is that it's generally agreed that caravans 'reset' at a higher level of difficulty once we level up, so unless u do it at the beginning of a very high level (>11-12 maybe), it makes no sense to lose a lot of ambushes, while continuing to do hunts, quests, PvPs etc, and by the time u the caravans are lowered enough, u are close to leveling up, and the caravans are reset... to a higher level (?!) | | #6 Well, if you start fresh, you'll probably have to initially lose 3-5 combats per caravan type, to get them down to a doable level. This means 12,000 - 20,000 gold, you can easily burn this in 20 full arts battles and I didn't experienced that caravans became substantially harder when I leveled up, so once the are down they stay there. | hmm.. wait.. what u guys (and gals) are trying to say is to bring them down to a level where u can win most of them with min arts? If so, i really don't think losing 3-5 combats per caravan type is gonna do it. Not at my lvl (9) anyway. Even if some of the caravans I faced were 50% lower in numbers, I highly doubt I would win them win min arts.
Also, I have a fren who's lvl 8, and she has been ambushing with min arts for quite a while now and as far as I can see, she still have a very low win/loss ratio (20-30%).
Of course, I don't have precise data to back this theory up so I might be wrong. :) | I didn't experienced that caravans became substantially harder when I leveled up
I don't know when u started, but when I leveled up from 8 to 9, the increase was VERY evident. I only had a few Swords extra for leveling up, but the caravans in general went up by around 30% (caravans goes up in numbers/difficulty by about 30% for each level, as told to me by a friend). | | I started thieving at level 7 and most of the time used rather light arts (best weapon, defender shield, 1 or 2 steel items) to be able to defeat most players I encounter, reaching level 10 I deceided that the number of players I meet is negliable and deceided to use min arts and I'm quite happy with my choice. | #9
From 7 to 8 things got easier with EFK, from 8 to 9 things got a bit harder and from 9 to 10 things were about equal. I agree with the 30% increase as it roughly matches my experience, so if that's the case difficulty doesn't reset on level up, so losing down is viable and worth the effort. | #11
The 30% increase is the boost to the caravans as a result of you leveling up. But in your perspective they might seem less than that or even easier because you have changed as well such as new units, talents, arts, etc. The 30% increase should be compared to the caravans you saw from your previous level.
So if you are comparing with your own character, then your faction would change your perspective. Not everyone gets EFKs or EFK eqivalent units at level 8. Other factions level 8 units can be argued to be weaker or stronger than EFKs against caravans.
I agree with you that losing down is viable and worth of the effort, but Ravensclaw's idea of sustainable caravans is just a dream because of the difficulty increase for winning. I'm just happy with losing so that winning with full arts is sustainable. :) | | I know, I never meant to show anything else than my personal experience to contradict that it's generally agreed that caravans 'reset' at a higher level of difficulty once we level up. | | to jedi-knight .. i begun in lv 8 to ambush and now im lv9.. and its VERY true .. its a bit imposible to win caravans at this lv.. and for answer to ravenslaw; i would begin with min ap but later when money increases more ap.. because i think its a bit stupid (sry) to loose caravans for less difficulty.. so u will never win if do that.. do that at the beggining but later more arts.. or u will be bored of loosing.. | Thank you everyone.
I am glad I asked this question. I'll have another good read of this tonight with the intent to formulate strategy.
Cheers | so if that's the case difficulty doesn't reset on level up, so losing down is viable and worth the effort.
Hmmm.. lemme give an example:
Let's say you are now at level 8, and a DE caravan (totally random) has 10 x 20 units Shrews. you wear min arts and deliberately keep losing to bring it down to 10 x 10 units Shrews. Once at this numbers (10 x 10 units Shrews), let's assume u can wear min arts and still win a good number of them.
But all this time, while losing ambushes to bring the numbers down, u are playing normal and doing hunts, quests and PvPs, thus gaining XPs.
Now let's say u have started winning a few ambushes wearing min AP coz of the lowered numbers in caravans, and u get the numbers to 10 x 13 units Shrews, which is still very winnable with min AP, but u find that coz TG wins give tons of XPs (+ all the XPs u have accumulated from hunts, quests and PvPs), very soon, you level up to 9.
Now let's say the 'starting' numbers for a level 9 DE caravan is programmed as having 10 x 30 units Shrews. Your caravan will start at this numbers and not continue from the 10 x 13 units Shrews u had at level 8. You would have to now lose another tons of ambushes to bring them down to a number winnable with min AP again, just this time, u have to lose even more coz of the higher starting numbers. And by the time u do that, and start winning again, u are close to level 10, and the cycle continues. Get what I mean?
This method would not be worth the trouble if u are at low levels like 6-8. I believe this method is most suitable for higher levels like level 11 onwards.
Just my opinion. | #16
That's what I'm trying disprove, I did this from level 7 on and never experienced such an increase which leads me to the conclusion that the roughly 30% increase is from the current level and not some preset standard. So if you have 10 devils in a caravan and level up you get 13 and if you have 20 devils you get 26. | That's what I'm trying disprove, I did this from level 7 on and never experienced such an increase which leads me to the conclusion that the roughly 30% increase is from the current level and not some preset standard. So if you have 10 devils in a caravan and level up you get 13 and if you have 20 devils you get 26.
Hmmm.. interesting.. That's not what I read from previous threads. Can anyone confirm this one way or another?
Thanks. | Just did some checks on my TG logs, and here's an example of the same type of caravan I did for level 8 & 9. There are all a single stack of Hell horses flanked by 4 x Scubbies/Mistress.
{8} https://www.lordswm.com/warlog.php?lt=-1&warid=12677832 - 27 (Won)
{8} https://www.lordswm.com/warlog.php?lt=-1&warid=12888605 - 28 (Won)
{9} https://www.lordswm.com/warlog.php?lt=-1&warid=13104347 - 43 (Won)
{9} https://www.lordswm.com/warlog.php?lt=-1&warid=13303511 - 53 (Lost)
As you can see, once I went to level 9, the jump was not the normal increase of around 7%. It went from 28 to 43 --> 65% (!!). So I believe once u reach a new level, there's a minimum 'preset' number to the creatures we would face, regardless of whether we had won/lost the previous ambush for that type of caravan.
Anyone have any other example(s) to prove that this is not true?
Thanks. | Well i prefer min arts too but however at my current level its almost impossible for me to win min arted, so I do some combats full arted and when i lose i switch to min arted (ofc im talking about thieving) and lose about 5 or 6 or even more then switch back to my full arts and repeat, It keeps the caravans at good % of winning.
Although min arts are likely to have you lose more (normally losing 55% of the time ) if your patient enough then go ahead and do it. Otherwise i would do what i said above.
(if this is completely off topic just ignore me lol) |
This topic is long since last update and considered obsolete for further discussions.
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