Farming for resources.

Discussion in 'General Strategies' started by T******e Beard, Jul 29, 2015.

  1. I didn't find a post relating to the subject, but if you are new to the game then it is something I would encourage you to do. Farming is essentially attacking islands with exposed stores/pumps/mines with minimal troops just to gain loot (grog and gold). Your aim is NOT to win just to keep your builders busy.

    Tips :

    1. Look for islands with unarmed flame gates and/or mines.

    2. Only hit bases with high loot numbers that you are confident you can steal from.

    3. Test an exposed mine/pump with a gunner first before you commit to the rest.

    4. Be prepared to lose, you are after loot only.


    Troops to use are gunners, barbs, bombers and thieves so focus on them as your update priority.

    Good luck, PM if you need tips or pointers or reply here.

    Good loot out there, I am at a later stage of farming, more on that later, SS of my efforts below.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2015
    Captain Hakjka, Super-Nor and awbo like this.
  2. Kelani

    Kelani Commodore

    I live by farming. No kidding, probably 95% of my losses are from this. Where else can you get 7-12M of a resource in 20 minutes? :) A few tips to add to the above info:

    5. Look for plunderable amounts in the 200-250 and 300-315k range, and ESPECIALLY bases with identical or near-identical amounts of gold and grog. If you see that, it's very likely this is a neglected base, and all the loot is in their collectors. Drop a gunner near a collector, and see how much of the resource they steal per shot. If it's around 1k+, go after the collectors.

    6. This is a great way to rank-drop naturally. On your way down, try to look for loot sweet spots (typically between 150-250PR), where you can maximize your scavenging :)

    7. Expect to lose, but you can also sometimes get a few easy wins in on bases with exposed PHs and a lot of high value undefended buildings.

    8. My favorite trick: If it turns out the loot is in the defended storages, instead of undefended collectors, see if you can send a small squad to take them down. I've had great success by sending in a suicide squad of Sky Raiders, or Bombers, a few Gunners and a Jugg. This is usually enough to take down a few well-defended storages.

    9. When attacking defended collectors, don't send gunners in one at a time. I will typically send 1-2 gunners per collector, and maybe a few extra if there is a mortar, bunker or GP protecting them.

    10. PAY ATTENTION TO DEFENSE FIRING ANGLES AND RANGES. Many, many times, I will see a loot source which appears defended, but there is an indirect route to attack it, or an undefended spot where you can attack from. Sometimes, where you drop your troop in relation to the defense makes all the difference.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2015
  3. Here is an example base, I only had a few troops to demonstrate but the numbers are good (total loot available)

    [​IMG]

    If you look closely you will see that the mines and flame gate are unarmed, which usually means the collectors/mines/pumps will contain grog and gold

    [​IMG]

    Using gunners carefully pick off one exposed collector, is there loot there? If so carefully place gunners at range to destroy those exposed collectors, like so.....

    [​IMG]

    The result will be something like this, repeat repeat repeat :D

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2015
    Captain Hakjka likes this.
  4. Daddy P

    Daddy P Captain

    Very nice. Yeah I hit tons of the 315 bases. Those with exposed collectors with both resources available close to the same and just above 315k each. Use just a few gunners.
     
    T******e Beard likes this.
  5. Skye

    Skye Commodore

    Given the high cost of more expensive troops, when I'm going for stores, I just distract things with some brutes. Much cheaper per slot than any other troop. Even gunners get expensive en mass when you're recruiting hundreds over the course of farming ten million grog+ to keep your ac/vh trainings all going (grog is shallow lately, so a low cost army is important here). When just going for gold, gunners are the best choice per slot in terms of loot per gem spent.

    On PH8 (no shark traps here!) bases with open flame gate entrances, a squad of thieves can easily sneak in and take all the stores before they can be attacked. This is more expensive though, and 10k grog and 1 gem is enough to use gunns to snipe 315k of both resources, which has a better return on investment for sure. It depends if you want to farm faster (more expensive armies and more gems used), or take longer but make your gems last (4 gems completely fills all 70 slots for me, 80k~ for a full army, and I usually only use 1 gem worth per fight, meaning the 2400 gem package can net about 750mil gold and grog to a determined sniper).

    I always click next till I see a PH8 base with 300-350k loot. The second thing to check is: do they have the newest upgrade of stores? If they don't, they haven't been active since the update, and its all in collectors. This is a quick indicator.

    If they don't pass those two checks, or have such a massive amount of resources its worth taking a shot at the stores, click next. You're going to be nexting a LOT, but it will pay off.

    To cut costs even more, don't gem the last batch of gunners, and let them recruit while you're off sniping. Most will be recruited back by the time you find a base and the battle finishes, so you really only need to use 1 gem here or there when your army dips low, really stretching out your loot per gem.

    edit* my build is 10 brutes 30 gunners. brutes are used to distract as needed and to punch holes in walls. brutes cost more gems but very little grog. I'd recruit them in batches of 5 brutes 3-4 gunners per gem for the first 2 gems, then 15-16 gunners for the next gem, and either gem the last couple or let them fill themselves up for free while you're off clicking next.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2015
  6. Super-Nor

    Super-Nor Captain

    @T******e Beard and @Kelani
    This is excellent advice for new users. I appreciate anyone who loves the game enough to help others succeed.
     
  7. Kelani

    Kelani Commodore

    Great tips @T******e Beard and @Skye

    It's probably a smarter play to have a dedicated army for farming like Skye mentioned, but I'm greedy, and when farming, I still want to clean out the occasional 1-2M rich bases I come across. So, I take along my regular PH8-9 raiding party. However, I never use the most expensive troops. That army is as follows:

    26 Gunners
    2 Brutes
    6 Raiders
    6 Bombers
    5 Juggs
    2 WD
    1 HG
    (PH9, so 70 slot tavern)

    For a typical undefended/poorly-defended collector raid, I'll use 4-16 gunners. If I use less than 8, I'll rehire and go raid again while those guys cook. If I use 9+, they cost 1 gem to rehire, so I'll usually pay that and resume raiding.

    For attacking well-defended storages that are clustered, my first choice is to drop my raiders on them. They may not take them all out, but with a good drop and a little luck, they can clean out upwards of 50-70% of the loot AND a few defenses, letting you send in a few gunners to get the rest.

    If raiders aren't an option, I'll send 1-2 widely spaced Brutes, a few gunners down the middle, and maybe even a bomber or three to help soften up the storages.

    One more tip: When you see a base with pesky defenses sitting exposed near your preferred landing zone, drop a bomber. If he doesn't take out the defense just by attacking it (which is almost always what happens), then his dead man's trigger will take care of it. If there are multiple defenses in proximity, or distractor buildings, drop a brute or a few gunners, then the bomber.

    Glad to see some Thief tips in here. They definitely seem useful for this purpose, and I really want to start using them, but just haven't gotten around to it yet :)
     
  8. My standard farming party consists of the following :

    30 Gunners
    12 Bombers
    12 Thieves
    11 Buccs

    I can keep recruiting the troops I use in store/collector snipes in between raids so I usually keep my 'budget' raids going for a while.

    High value loot raids are pretty much the same as your BP farming troops, experiment, see what suits as mine is something I have become used to and would possibly not work for you.

    A few helpful pointers for using the thief :

    A thief has a useful ability but it is important to know when to use it, below is a rough idea to test to get used to making the most of that skill. If the thief is hit (either through splash damage or mine) the cloaking skill is removed. Here is how I use her, test the method out to get the timings all worked out, trust me, she is a very useful troop in a farm crew and has taken loot from high end bases endless times for me.

    Method :

    Using your gunners clear all exposed collectors/mines outside of the targets walls. Next deploy distracting buccs to draw fire away from the location in the walls you intend to destroy, drop the bombers. Release the gunners in a line accross the walls width so they gradually converge to the opening. Next let the thieves out, but you must set them off a bit further back so they will avoid getting hit and activate their skill. You can set off 6 followed by 6 after the skill is available again, this way they usually get in undetected and clear out main stores without an issue.

    Good luck, leave my base alone :p
     
    Captain Hakjka likes this.
  9. Kelani

    Kelani Commodore

    Oh, one obvious caveat I forgot to mention.

    Farming WILL piss off your victims, and WILL open you to a LOT more Revenges. So, if you're going to be an ass, make sure you finish the job, and spend all their loot before you sign off :)
     

  10. I'm not sure who left this pot o gold for me, but I'll oblige.
     
    Skye likes this.
  11. Skye

    Skye Commodore

    It's been 9 months since this has been updated, the strategy hasn't changed much, but I get a lot of messages in my inbox asking for the best way to get loot. So, I'm going to build again on this.

    For a FREE PLAYER, with ABSOLUTELY NO GEMS, to COMPLETELY FILL your stores, possibly several times, in ONE PLAY SESSION:
    -Recruit 70 gunners. If you're doing this for free you're going to have to be patient, and have to make every single slot count. No extra troops to tank; you can use an LP if you want, but no wasting slots on tanking troops or thieves.
    -Send those 70 gunners on a voyage that attacks ZERO battles. Exploring and farming sea battles will have to be put on hold. Use a route similar to the one I suggested in my gem-farming thread, that explores as many shallow tiles as possible, so they can at least get a couple free gems if you're lucky.
    -Recruit 70 more gunners.
    -For your first battle, forfeit, to start a streak. This will shave 8% off your first rehire time.
    -From then on, every battle, find a base with loot maxed out in collectors, and use 7-8 gunners to snipe as many collectors as you can. See above posts for identifying these bases easily; but they will have 315/385/420k in their collectors usually, with almost nothing extra in stores, no LP active, and mines will be unarmed. They get easy to spot. Only take bases that you can get a decent amount of the collectors with 8 or fewer gunners. If you can't get them all, don't worry. If you can only get one or two, but can do it with only a couple gunners, its still worth it. Try to keep it to one gunner per collector. The fewer you use, the better.
    -Rehire those gunners. Go back to your main island, and start your next battle while they rehire. Spend any loot you want while you're back at your island.
    -You will likely be hitting next enough time that most of those gunners have rehired by the time you find another collector base and the battle ends, but they will slowly run out. You get a minimum of 10 battles this way, but in reality it will be at least 20 battles.
    -When your gunners are completely gone, and you have farmed up probably at least 8 million of whatever resource you're after, go back to your island and cancel your voyage. Collect any random rewards it got for sailing, like a couple odd gems.
    -Repeat the process with these 70 extra gunners, for another several million loot.

    Using gems makes it easier obviously, and 8 gunners is one gems worth of gunners, but its not necessary. The point of this post is to provide an option for a free player that doesn't want to spend any of the countless free gems the game gives you to farm.

    The key to this is to not use your full army - to use is little as possible and stretch it out, and to use the insane amount of time you spend hitting next to rehire troops back. You will be hitting next a lot, expect to spend an hour or two straight if you need to max your stores this way. I probably spend 2 minutes between each base, its boring and tedious but it works and you will max everything for free. It will be tough forcing yourself to pass over the 1m loot bases you find, but they are much less efficient in general and take way too many troops if you aren't willing to gem.

    It takes half an hour approximately to hire 70 gunners, so it takes an hour to get both batches prepped up.

    People complaining they lose loot too easily and its too hard to save up without spending? Now you can save up as much as you want in one single play session, for free. Even if you can't do it all at once, the absolute most someone can steal from your stores is a bit over 1 million - which you can earn back in only 3 battles. And that full tavern should be getting you many more than the 1 million loot you lose. Given that you almost certainly get at least a 2hr shield when someone hits your stores, if not 12 hr, you should have plenty of time to get your next batch of troops ready to more than cover how much you lost.

    If you want to hit slightly more bases, and don't mind using one gem per battle, since you are going to be making back a few free gems from the sailing, then mix in a bunch of thieves instead. Use 5 thieves instead of 8 gunners - with cloak, 5 thieves can probably get most of the collectors even if they're well protected, and still take just over 3 minutes to rehire (or exactly 1 gem at max level, a perfect 3 minute 10 second rehire). Most will have finished rehiring by the time you finish your next battle still if you're doing it for free, and you can actually stretch your army even longer - it costs a bit more grog though, so if you're farming grog that may be a concern, and takes longer to hire 70 initially, but you can hit more bases than you could using gunners.

    The final step is to find the right range to do this in; if you go too low or too high you won't be finding them often enough. I currently find the mid 300s to be the best - people lower than that have sniped and forfeited to them enough times to push them up higher, and people above that will be going for 3* for points during rumbles, so they get pushed into around that range. It will change from day to day though, but do a bit of normal battles ahead of time to get a sense of the equilibrium point any given day.

    You likely won't be able to do more than one session at a time without your rank falling too far to find many, so plan to do a couple battles after you've finished off both crews to get your rank back up. If you see an exposed PH, it may be worth using an extra gunner or two to take it out, just to keep your rank from falling as fast. Keeping yourself properly ranked to find them is going to be the toughest part of this.
     

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