FAQ written by Diremage.

Intro

Ok, so you read the First Blood article, you went through the tutorial, and you have a couple of rounds of the free for all under your belt - hopefully with the treasure points and cash to prove your skill. Now you want to face the gut-wrenching next step: conquering another player's empire.

Preliminaries: Making sure you have an army to war with

Every empire starts with 4 jeeps already commissioned and ready to go. It is not much, but with surprise on your side it's more than adequate to take out another player who also only has 4 jeeps. If you have lost your jeeps somehow, you need to commission some other units before you declare war.

Preliminaries: Organizing your force

When you want to attack with a single unit, you can simply mobilize it and fire away. However, most attacks consist of multiple units. For now, click on the Lances tab and create a lance with your jeeps. Do this by selecting a radio button for each jeep, one selection per column. Then pick a name for your new lance. Next, because you expect to use all of your jeeps in the attack, mobilize the lance. Also, now is a good time to check your ceasefire and surrender settings. Hopefully you will not have to either ceasefire or surrender, but a wise tactician is prepared. For now, a surrender rate of 30% should be fine, and also scroll down to ceasefire expiration time and pick a time that, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, you are likely too be on. Finally, it's a good idea to check, in Settings, that your empire's time is matched to your local time.

Preliminaries: Finding a likely target

Neveron is rather picky about who can attack whom. First, you can't attack anyone who has a lower empire level than you. You must pick on people your own size. Second, you cannot attack anyone more than 1 level higher than you. You are further restricted to people whose faction is not engaged in a war, and who have not lost a war recently. Third, it is more expensive to attack someone who is already at war with someone else. This is called gangbanging and is generally frowned on. Within these limits, you'll find that there are hundreds of empires you can attack. Probably some of them are right next to you, and you might not even know it. To find out, click the Map tab in the upper left.

The tan square in the middle is you, the green squares are empty, claimable land (or possibly water) and the dark brown squares are empires other than your own. The circles represent cities: the larger the circle, the larger the city in that zone. To differentiate which empires are which, you can click the Change Map Colour link, which will change the colour of the area that empire owns. It uses a RGB255 colour system, so you might want to play around with it until you find something you like, or at least can stand.

You want to target someone your own level, preferably with a nearby city you can claim a path of zones to.

Preliminaries: Preparing your troops

If the square you want to conquer, the target square, is right next to you, so much the better. Skip this part. If its not, you need to claim a nearby zone. There are two ways to do that. First, you can simply pick the zone you want and claim it. This is expensive, however, and probably out of your price range. Second, you can claim zones leading up to the zone you want, and then claim it. This is likely to be cheaper, even though you wind up with more zones. As long as you own an adjacent zone, it costs only $200,000 to claim a zone. But if you claim one without an adjacent zone, it costs $25,000,000. If your empire is already at least level one, you can take the mercenary class to reduce this to $10,000,000.

Next, you will want to move all the units you want to attack with to the zone adjacent to the target hex. From the map, click your home city, select Unit Info, Lances, your lance, and then move it to the square next to your target hex by clicking that hex and confirming the move. Alternatively, you can move the lance via the lances page. At this point, if you have any units in the lance that are not mobilized, you should mobilize them. If you know what the terrain is like in the target hex, which at this point is likely not the case, you may want to pre-place your lance in a clear area so they do not begin the battle stuck.

The Declaration of War (DoW)

So, you have a zone adjacent to your target. You have troops in that zone. Now click on the target zone, and instead of a claim button, there is an attack button. Click it. As you learned in the tutorial, this does not immediately attack the zone. Now you need to declare war. Once you do declare war, you simply attack the zone just like you did in the tutorial.

Why wait so long to declare war? Why not declare war first, and then do all the mobilizing, the manoeuvring, the claiming and the moving? For the element of surprise. In a small empire it takes seconds or minutes to do the preliminaries. In larger empires it can take a lot longer. And it becomes much more difficult to attack while the other person is simultaneously trying to attack you.

Piloting more than one unit

Until this point, most likely you have only piloted one unit at a time. Piloting more than one unit at a time is relatively simple. Claim all relevant units, either via the unit info, or clicking the icon on the Friendly Units List in battle. The best strategy is to move the unit at the lowest initiative first and work your way to the highest. Select units as usual, by clicking on them on the bar across the top of the map. Having multiple units allows for more diverse tactics. It gives you more firepower, and if one of the units is lost to a turn of bad luck, you still have others to fall back on.

The CeaseFire (CF)

If your opponent has ceasefires turned on, then shortly after you destroy a unit or two the battle ends and your units are returned home. This breather allows your opponent time to check his empire, realise its under attack, and get ready to battleplay. Be sure to check when his ceasefire expires: that is when you can attack him again, and more importantly that is when he is likely to attack you. If you can, be on at that time. Otherwise, prepare your units as best you can but resign yourself to possibly losing one, or all, of them.

The CeaseFire - Again

So, between 12 and 36 hours has passed, and you just tossed your opponent his second sound beating. Or, he rallied and destroyed some of your units, and it is your ceasefire that is ticking away now. If the former, bide in good hope. And if the latter, look at possibly replacing your destroyed units. Or even getting better ones.

Victory! - or defeat

Eventually, one of you will run out of ceasefires. Either you defeat your opponent on the field of battle, or steal his infrastructure, or he does unto you. At a surrender rate of 30%, you will lose a significant amount of your base daily income, if you were defeated, or gain a sizeable income from your opponent, if your opponent had that surrender setting. At 40% it is much less and at 50% its none, but at 50% surrender the empire will already have lost either all its military, all its infrastructure, or a mixture of both. If, through your superior training and tactics, you won, excellent! You can war again, or spend some of your ill-gotten loot on building your domain. And if you lost, it is not a big deal. At this level, you probably have enough saved up already to buy more jeeps--or maybe even scorpions. And 100 population is laughably easy to come up with. There are two things no enemy can take from your empire: the cash you have already saved up, and the skills you learned.