Atlas Basics | Guide by Gox1201

7. Battle!

Feeling brave, are we?

Battles in Atlas are highly strategic, the individual fight is fairly straight forward, the battle/war per sé is more strategy driven, but the long term implication is significant.

And while I will not explain the latter, a solid grasp of the basics will help you as player, and more importantly you as team, understand how to Battle effectively in atlas.

At the simplest – a battle should be seen like a War hit. You want to do it right the first time, you want 5 flames, and you want to avoid defenders. Simple.

Let’s start:

In order for you to fight someone in Atlas, you need your primarch, to move to their primarch, and attack it.

An important point to highlight here is you need TROOPS on your primarch, if you only have 1 troop, you will only destroy 1 troop, and gain 1 Glory point.

Wait what?

Ok let us take a step back:

The GOALS of fighting in Atlas

1. Win without losing much overall strength
2. Make the enemy lose overall strength
3. Gain Glory! Points (G-points or simply G)
4. Recover well from the fight

Now it’s a little bit tricky to explain the calculations, but I’ll try give you a few rules of thumb when planning an attack

1. Decide what the maximum amount of troops are that you are willing to lose in a battle (please note: the idea is not to lose them, but if things go south, you limit your losses).
2. Pick the prime you want to gain G points on, and transfer that amount of troops to the prime (e.g. if you can’t afford to lose more than 5000 troops, don’t go with more than 5000 troops)
3. Pick a target wisely (more on that below), and pick a location (fort or mine or poachers)
4. Move there, and attack
5. Treat it like a war attack that you MUST win. Aim 5 flames (it rewards twice the kills than 4 flames)
6. Once fight is done, evaluate outcome and regroup – retreat or attack another.

Now let us flesh the above out a bit.
Different primes have different attributes. As discussed previously, Rushers are great at defending, but horrible at attacking, and Siegers the opposite.

So…. If you want G points on your Rusher, get someone to attack it. If you want points on your Sieger, attack someone.

Also, using the same logic, you don’t desperately want to go attacking someone’s Rusher, when you could hit a sieger, makes sense right?

When you attack there are a few things that factor in what the outcome is

Important things:
Your attack rating vs their defense rating
The presence or absence of a fort (forts add +attack and +defense to the owner)
How well you do in the battle (5 flames gives you twice the ratio to 4 flames 100%; there is a dropoff at 70% again; and below 10% you will have a dismal outcome)
And lastly the amount of troops involved.

• Scenario 1

Simply put: if your attack rating = their defense rating; you have similar amount of troops; and you 4 flame 100% them almost equal win:loss

Same battle but you 5 flame them - you will have close to a 2:1 ratio

Same battle but you lose with less than 10% killed - you will have a 1:10 ratio or close to that

• Scenario 2

Sieger vs sieger Your attack rating 250, their defense rating 50 – you start with a 5:1 ratio against them, 5 flame them, you will have a 10:1 ratio……

• Scenario 3

You get attacked on your sieger with their sieger, but at your home base that gives you +50 (number for example only), and you defend heavily;

Their attack rating 250, your defense rating 100: so ratio 1:2.5; you defend heavily and they only get to say 40%. Now its something like 1/2.5 * 100/40 – so ratio is quite close to 1:1 again.

These numbers are rough guesses on my part, as I’m illustrating a point. It is not easy to calculate the exact outcome, nor should you bother.

Now strategy wise, it might seem like a great idea to hit that taunter with 150 000 troops loaded up sitting all alone on that poacher. Hey you looked at your taunter, and it has only 150 defense rating.

BEWARE!

See that taunter’s level? A levelled up primarch gains troop capacity, and attack and defense rating. Hitting a level 15 taunter is …. Painful. You might win the fight (and even then probably not going to 5 flame it if it’s a high base), but due to the amount of troops it has loaded, you might end up wiping out your army.

8. Riders

Dragon Riders are one of the major features of Atlas.

Atlas launched with:

1. Grogg – from the seasonal tree, most of you know about him

2. Three riders, each aimed at a specific dragon type
   * Vanquisher – for Hunter fliers
   * Conqueror – for Sorcerer fliers
   * Warrior - for Warrior fliers

3. Defender rider – for Base Defense (Perch rider)

It is important to note that the riders fit “best” with a certain dragon class.

Riders are accessed via the Active Dragon Roster, click on your dragon, and top right there will be a “rider” menu (red arrow)

Clicking on that brings up a “hired/unhired” tab, the lists the various riders. You hire one by spending 5 Riders stones. These are also used to level up riders, and as such are very valuable.

Once you hired the appropriate rider for the dragon you want to assign it to, you need to Bond the rider to the dragon. This is done by clicking the bond rider button, and takes roughly 60 minutes. Once completed, you can access the rider info screen by clicking the rider info button. (white circle)

This brings up a menu system — Inventory, and Level & Skills

Inventory is for rider gear, discussed under point 9 below.

Looking at the Level & Skills menu:

To the left you see all the possible skills for your rider (purple square), they work similar to research trees, in that you have to complete an earlier part, to unlock the later part. Many of the skills have multiple “levels” usually 5, so putting one point into the Rider skill, would give it say 1/5.
You need 5/5 before the next tree unlocks. I am unsure if 3/5 in one, and 2/5 in the other on the same “progress level” in a tree will unlock the next path – I’ve never tried. (Green square)

You will see how many rider stones you have, and how many you need for the next level (red square)

You can also see the amount of stored G points your rider has (yellow arrow), and needs for next level.

It is important to note that skills get more expensive as you move along the line, and also more important to note that you cannot obtain all skills. It’s a choice – not just a pick everything. So plan your rider well. There is no “undo” button – picking the wrong skill is permanent at this point in time.

Now it isn’t my place to tell you how to level your rider, but for a basic hunter rider I would go as follows (the options in bold are choices, rest are mandatory)

Level 5 in Dragon attack
Level 5 choice is between rider xp and dragon xp I picked Rider, doesn’t really matter
Level 5 Increase dragon HP
Level 5 decrease Enemy totem debuff
Level 5 decrease dragon healing time
Level 5 lightning resist (truthfully you can pick any resist, but the dragon you put rider on must have that resist for it to function)
Level 5 hunter HP
Level 5 Hunter attack power

Once you are there (roughly a level 43 rider), you have 7 levels left to go pick other skills you want, etc.

9. Crafting

Another major features that Atlas brought to the table is the ability to craft Gear for your Rider.

This is done at your normal Forge building, through the new “Gear” tab

This is how the interface looks:

 

A) As you can see, you have scrolls (one of the consumables), and then you have each of the different elemental shards and the numbers you own.
B) You have various filter options, eg. Dragon type (hunter sorcy warrior), slot, and element type
C) And then the various gear options – note that for each ELEMENT (blue circle) there is an OFFENSIVE and DEFENSIVE gear type (green circles), and sometimes multiple options per slot
D) You have crafting que slots, similar to normal forge (note: can only speedup crafting with rubies)

Now with crafting there is something important to note:

Gear can only be put on a dragon of the same element – in other words you can’t put dark element gear on Noctua (a wind element dragon), you need wind element gear.

Right, now back to crafting

Each item you craft, had certain crafting requirements – let’s look at them in detail in the photo below:

 

As you can see Gear can be found in different rarities. Each gear piece, can also be upgraded a maximum of 10x

Each time you craft an item, it uses a certain amount of scrolls (most items are 50, some 100, and the weapons 500!). The requirements to craft 1 item of a type is listed in the picture, it’s different depending on element.

When crafting you have a dice roll chance of getting a specific rarity, common is common, rare frequent as well, epics are fairly rare (?10-15% - guessing), and legendary items are well… not frequent. So it is entirely possible to get that epic bow for Noctua on your very first craft, but it’s much more likely that you will get 3-4 common ones, then a rare, then some more commons etc.

The main difference between crafting and upgrading is twofold: upgrading doesn’t require scrolls, and upgrading improves the CURRENT quality item – it’s an expensive process, so perhaps focus on only upgrading really good pieces (Long-term vision).

 

The take-home message is that crafting is VERY worthwhile, it makes a massive difference to a dragon in combination with the rider.

10. Getting up to Mischief (Fight Planning and Execution)

(Note: this is a slightly different take on the Battle section - it is written from a different perspective, hopefully it adds/illuminates some points I’ve made elsewhere)

Ok… so you have gotten the basics down of Atlas, and now you want to earn some G-points for your primarch and riders, without wasting too much opportunities along the way.

School fees are fine, but you would prefer to not pay for years and years to come? Right let us see what we can do.

In my mind, Atlas fights (whether small scale skirmishes by 1 player, or large scale alliance vs alliance wars), can be broken down to a few simple steps

1. Planning
2. Scouting
3. Execution
4. Debriefing/evaluation

The planning phase is fairly simple for a skirmish

• You need to decide how many troops you want to lose maximum
• You need to figure out what meta you will use (more on this just now)
• And you need to maximise the G-points you get, while minimising long term losses.

Right so troop losses

• You need to decide on what percentage of your troops are disposable in trade for G-point. Put otherwise, if it all goes horribly wrong (or right) and you lose everything that you take with, what amount of troops do you feel comfortable losing, without weakening your team.
• Now there is no magic number for this, but generally speaking you can either use a flat value (e.g. 5000), or you can tailor it to your goals – let’s say you are short 2400 g points for your next primarch level up, it would be a good idea to take around 10000 troops if that’s your goal.
• Once you have decided what you can or cannot lose, load those on your primarch (primarchs) and advance to meta-planning

Meta

• I refer to the “meta” as the summary of your strategy you will use
• Essentially whether you go in as a solo player, small group, or large team you need a strategy that will give you an advantage – you need to kill a lot, and lose a little, with some sort of contingency plan for things that can go wrong.
• The “meta” is the combination of primarchs, abilities used, and execution.
• There are many possible “meta’s” and becoming a good player / good atlas team is dependent on you figuring out your own ways.
• I will provide one or two simple meta strats, and you can work from there.
• Being rigid in your meta, is a sure fire way of getting a bad outcome – maybe not this time, but eventually.

Primarchs and their roles

• It is critical once again to understand which primarchs for which duty
• Simply put a primarch has an attack rating, a defense rating, a special ability, and a troop capacity.
• This was discussed elsewhere, but in summary
• Attack rating of attacking primarch vs. defense rating of defending primarch gives you a ship loss ratio; this is influenced by the presence or absence of a fort bonus, and by how well you do in the fight
• Successfully getting 100% 5 flame attack doubles the ratio in the attacker’s favour, it scales in a mostly linear fashion down to <10% of a base destroyed which turns the ratio completely against you. There is a stepping point at 70% destroyed as well.
• The “name” of the primarch is irrelevant – a level 15 destroyer could be as much a threat as a sieger, or rusher etc.

Examples:

Sieger attacks rusher
Sieger attack power 250; rusher defense power 250
So ratio is 250:250; aka 1:1
If attacker gets 5 flames 100% - the ratio becomes 2:1
If attacker gets 4 fllames 100% the ratio stays 1:1
If attacker gets wiped out having killed less than 10%, ratio becomes 1:10

Rusher attacks Destroyer
Rusher attack power 50; destroyer defense power 200
So ratio is 50:200; aka 1:4
If attacker gets 5 flames 100% - ratio becomes 2:4
If attacker gets 4 flames 100%, ratio stays 1:4
If attacker gets wiped out <10%: ratio becomes 1:10

Sieger attacks sieger
Attack power 250: defense power 50
Ratio is 5:1
If attacker gets 5 flames 100 – ratio 10:1
If attacker gets 4 flames 100 – ratio 5:1
If attacker gets wiped out having killed less than 10%, ratio becomes 1:10

The “ratio” is troops lost — so assuming you brought 5K troops, a ratio of 2:1 means you kill two for each 1 you lose, so you kill 10k, lose 5k.

There is a maximum amount you can kill in an attack (generally 15k)

So what are some highly effective metas?
Well I don’t want to give away all options, but here are a few obvious ones

1. Destroyer alone (good attack and defense
2. Sieger-taunter (you attack with the sieger, and refill it from taunter. Taunter protects your sieger from direct attacks)
3. Destroyer-Rusher (rusher traps taunters, destroyer attacks siegers)
4. Sieger-Rusher-Taunter (rusher traps taunters, taunter protects sieger, sieger attacks)
5. Taunter-taunter-sieger (if enemy has more than 1 rusher)

Scouting

• Ok so once you have identified a target to attack you need to scout a little
• Scouting can be as much as sending a 1 troop fighter in to get a complete idea of troop numbers, primarchs etc., or as little as just eyeballing the primarchs around an island/mine/poacher/nml zone.
• A quick critical assessment of what you are up against, is the key to a successful campaign.

Examples

• If you are attacking a fort, and you see 5 rushers at the fort, you will need a much different approach than seeing a fort with 1 taunter and 4 siegers
• Also, if you see a level 15 taunter for a 500 base, you need to weigh up your options, vs seeing a level 1 taunter with a level 130 base attached.

Once you have assessed the situation, you need to (a) move on, (b) change /adapt your meta, © lower your expectations or (d) go ahead.

Let’s get back to our top two examples

In scenario one – 5 rushers at a fort, you need to have a look at their levels (both base and primarch) – you need to understand attacking a rusher is a painful exercise (you will take high losses), and if you do decide to attack them, you probably want to use a sieger, so you can get close to a 1:1 ratio. This is not the battle to be fighting with your destroyer. On the plus side, since they have very few offensive abilities, you are probably fairly safe bringing in your sieger without a taunter as cover.

On the other hand, in scenario two – the 1 taunter and 4 siegers – I would ideally want to create a scenario where I evaluate the taunter. If it’s from a low level base – I would hit it straight out, if it’s a high level taunter, I would bring a rusher to disable the taunter, and then hit the sieges as fast as I can, inflicting mass casualties. I’m very likely to want to bring at least 1 rusher, and probably a destroyer. If I decided to bring a sieger, I would need a rusher with it as well as a taunter or two – so becomes a mult- player affair.

Lastly – it is completely fine (and rational), to walk away from a fight if it is stacked against you. Simple running your destroyer into a high level rusher over and over covered by a fort is stupidity – you gain nothing, and lose a lot.

It is also important to have an exit strategy. Whether you hit till destroyed, or plan to hit and run – make sure this is predetermined and stick to it. “just 1 more hit” turns a highly successful attack into a poor campaign very quickly. Imagine hitting with your sieger two times then retreating could have resulted in 20k killed, 2k lost. If in the beginning of your third hit they hit you first, while defending your attack, you might find yourself in a situation where you get killed during their attack and you lose 10k, and they defend your attack on them, losing you another 10k. So you end up down 22k killed for 22k lost, vs 3 mins earlier being 20k killed, 2k lost.

Execution

Right – so you have found your target, you’ve decided on your meta, and now it is time for execution.

Steps are as follows

1. Load up primarchs
2. Get close (travel to nearby launching point – safe zone / allied area etc.)
3. Make sure everyone that is part of the attack is up to speed – have your wings ready, have your defenders ready, make sure you have an exit plan.
4. Don’t announce your arrival
5. Trap first, then hit fast and hard. Always have a wing. Time is critical, so a well-co-ordinated strike can usually take out 2-3 primarchs before retaliation. Once the enemy team starts mobilizing, it is time to fall back.
6. Priorities are (1) trap taunters / destroy taunters (2) hit squishy targets/high threat targets like siegers (3) re-assess (4) attack next wave, or fall back.
7. Execute exit strategy

Debriefing

• One of the critical points of any attack is to analyze it afterwards
• What went well, what went poorly, what was unexpected, and what can you do better in the future.
• See if your pre-war planning was accurate (did you gain the G you thought? Did you lose less/as much as planned? Can you revive the numbers you bargained on?
• If you do not do this – you will not get better at it. Haphazard learning is slow and painful, directed learning is efficient (but still painful)

Calculating G points, revives etc.

(based on current understanding) [3.92]

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario

This section is now out of date due to the change that just went live - will correct as soon as I have enough experience at the new system to make sure I don’t give out wrong information

Rules (simplified)

1. Potential glory gained is based on the amount of troops you kill (0.75* Troops killed)
2. This gives you the potential glory available (eg if you kill 10 000 enemy troops 7500 glory is available)
3. This is then tempered by the amount of troops you lost, in that it can never be higher than 1.5x the troop amount you lost,e.g. in the same above scenario, if you lost 5000 —> 7500 glory is awadred, if you lost 10 000 —> 7500 glory is awarded, if you only lost 1000 —> 1500 glory is awarded (the remaining 6000 potential glory is lost, because you picked on someone a lot weaker than you).
4. All attacks have a MINIMUM revive percentage of 66.6%
5. Cost of revive is roughly 20% of what a new troop is worth
6. All 5 flame attacks will give MINIMUM revive, aka 66.6% for the attacker.

There are a few things I would like to stress

1. There is no “ideal” primarch to attack with/defend with
2. There are some bad choices (attacking with a rusher, defending with a sieger)
3. I abhor “kill trading” and will not promote it
4. Generally speaking, suicide attacks might make you think you are doing well in the short term (eg you are gaining G points), but in the long term you are weakening yourself
5. Same goes for “poorly” executed attacks to gain a lot of G points. It might look great in the short term (eg everyone that uses a rusher to attack another rusher), but practically speaking you are massively weakening yourself over the long run.
6. Always do the most successful attack you can - stack ratios in your favour, aim for 10:1. Yes you might “only” gain what seems to be a little bit of G points, but in the long run this is by far the superior strategy, all things considered.

10.2 Startup Blueprint

Ok … so you’ve ventured out, taken a land of your own and had big dreams of building an empire where you will …. BOOM!?@WTAF!@#@? … ok safezoned by D1.

Now what?

Right let’s regroup.

First order of business – get a plan. Second - stick to it. Third - start small go slow.

So…

Here it is

• Step 1:

Find a nice cozy safezone spot. Ideally, you want a safezone spot that gives you access to a few different colors of elements, in other words near a transition area, so you can say get wind and fire, by going left or right.

Get your entire team there, and have them set the safezone island as their home base.

• Step 2:

This is going to be your daily routine for the next 4 weeks

• Your hats regen at a rate of 1440/hour, or put otherwise, you can safely build 399 troops every 3-4 hours.
• Now no one expects you to be able to pull that off flawlessly, so with a bit of leeway, its pretty reasonable to expect your team to be able to AT MINIMUM do it 4x in a day - in other words 1600 troops per player per day
• That’s 11200 troops a week, or 44800 troops per player for the 4 weeks
• If you have 50 players, that’s 2.24million troops for your team in the month you wont be pvp-ing actively.

So back to the steps

1. Hit the gold mine enough times every 3 hours so that you always have enough gold to build the 399 troops.
2. Make sure that you hit enough poachers each day to use up all the poacher multipliers
3. Avoid “atlas events” that expect you to kill off your troops.

• Step 3:

In this month you need all your players to pick up a little bit of pvp experience, without getting themselves wiped out. Specifically, you want them to pick up enough experience to understand the basics of combat, know the atlas pvp map, and navigate safely.

You all start with a fighter primarch, and your entire team’s goals should be to level that primarch to level 5, so you can unlock the research for other primarchs. That’s it. No more pvp than that. You need every troop you can get, G points are secondary gain later, makes very little difference when you have a small army only.

So do small skirmishes at best – usually good during normal game major events, as your primes can move around freely - go to No man’s Land zones with small amounts of troops (1000) and attack and defend.

Don’t attack big players at their bases – your loss ratios will be stupidly high.

So now – at the end of the third week, you have 2 primarch slots, a level 5 fighter, and the ability to research new primarch types.

• Step 4

Picking primarchs for your team:

Just about every member of your team should be using Destroyers and Rushers. Rushers to defend, destroyers to move around and attack.

If you are lucky enough to a >lvl350 player on your team, s/he can consider getting a taunter.

A select few of your better fliers that can take out high level bases can get siegers. But generally no more than 5 out of the 50.

• Step 5

Decision time!

It’s the end of a month, everyone is twitchy, and you want land. Ok… so how do you get it.

PLANNING is key.

You need three elements
I. Identify the correct zone
II. Identify the correct timing
III. Execute
IV. HODL! (ok old jokes aside), you need to hold what you take….

Let’s break this down shall we?
(1) So careful zone planning is important. You need to locate a zone 2 area, somewhere in the periphery. Its generally pointless trying to take a zone off the very big teams, since they can come take it back easily, set your sights a little bit lower — find another sapphire team that has say 2-3 zones - they are probably over extended, and if you take 1 zone, they will likely not take be able to defend it successfully. They will also have to think carefully about taking it back, since it might weaken them to the extent that they might lose other territories as well.
(2) Be careful for sapphire teams that are sitting between Diamond teams – they are almost certainly part of an alliance.

Now on the topic of alliances. Have you considered one? Or more specifically, why aren’t you in one yet? Atlas is team sport, or more correctly – multi team sport. A few friends make a huge difference – you can attack together, defend together, and take over zones together! Hah, now there is a thought.

Ok so now you have a zone targeted, what now?

Scouting of course! Summon a 1 troop fighter and run into the zone you are interested in’s fort. Get stuck, now open up the castle view, click on garrison and have a look. A detailed look. How many troops? How many rushers? Siegers? destroyers? Size of garrison (NB), Taunters? What level are they?

Ok that was informative… (ps your primarch has been freed, you can resummon it)

Right. So …. Too strong? Pick another target (Phew… disaster avoided), weak? Why? Is the team over extended? Over confident? Something else?

Ok… so either this is the right target or move on.

Target good? Watch them. See what times the team is active, mostly offline, and what your teams profile is. You want to hit them right at the start of the time that your team is active for 4-6hours, and their team is mostly offline. This is important. Hitting a team on the front door is hard – doing so while they are online and defending is stupid.

One more thing about timing, has to do with conquering and holding

If the team has more than ~75k troops present (garrison or primed), it will activate a PVP bubble, which gives them 24 hours to regroup. Ideally you want to hit a team with less at the base, so you can actually conquer it without the shield going up, but if not, you will need to hit them twice 24-hours apart. So plan on this – makes it much harder.

Also the BEST time to hit a team is roughly 60 hours before a major pvp event starts. Why? Because it allows you 2x 24h attack windows to conquer the base, and then doesn’t allow them 2x 24 attack windows to conquer it back before the pvp shield activates and gives you 5 days to consolidate.

By then most teams will give up, and the new land is yours.

Now, once you have taken over your new pad, don’t over extend! 1-zone is more than enough. MORE than enough. Did I say 1 zone is good enough to start with? For the next 2-3 months, 1 zone will do you just fine. As soon as its yours, get your team organized. At all entry points into the zone, you need to fortify well. That’s where all these rushers and destroyers are good. They are made for defending. So get your major entrances properly fortified, try get a fort up in the shielded period so you can control access to your lands.

Make sure to leave your siegers in the safe zone – so they can’t be sniped. And get your team settled in, split troops so all your bases are defended, but the major choke points need to be able to pop shields.

Welcome to your new home! Now – wake up – stop dreaming — and go find a cozy safe zone to start your empire from!