The basics to attacks

[Munkee]

Stolen From VGN hence the bollocks english

1) Picking a target

When picking a target you should first start from battle calculations – adding your future target’s ship to the battle calculator and your attack fleet and see what it’s like. When done with that people usually think everything is done and they just need to claim the target. But there are some more things to be done here:

A) Checking planet scan – some players save resources so they could do a self cover when they get incomings. Usually those players pick cath race and look to emp whole your fleet. Typically avoid picking targets with many saved resources, but if you really want to you should calculate how much anti-your ship class he can build with the saved resources. Then add them to the calculation.

B) Checking development scan – here you should look at the amount of factories and amps. Factories are needed if he got saved resources to calculate what amount of ships he can get IN TIME with that amount of factories. You should look at the amount of amps to know if he can get a scan of your incoming fleet or no. Its not good when he can, but you can still launch if he got a crap alliance. If you attack an active planet you need to look only if he got incoming analysis researched. If not then you shouldn’t care about his amount of amps.

After these steps you are free to claim your target, if everything is ok.

2) Before launching tips

A) Ask officer for information about your targets alliance and if possible his nick, when coords unveiled. For fun you can put his nick as your fleet name, its usually irritating your rival. If you got his nick look around your galaxy for a player from the same alliance. If there is such you can ask him about how active is your target(using his nick, not cords and telling him he is your old friend from past rounds). His answer can decide if you can prelaunch or not. If he is active don’t prelaunch, if he’s not that active its up to your to decide.
B) When you have coords of your target you can look at his galaxy partners – if they got much anti your ships class. If they got there’s a big possibility he will get them as defense, although, they may use their defense ships for alliance defending. Anyway, that shouldn’t make you recall or something, its just information for you.
C) Some people use covops to irritate their future target, some find it wrong. I use covops only when I know that my target does not have big amount of security centers, so I’m sure he won't catch my men.

3) Faking

Faking is a very good thing, if you know how to use it. Sometimes it’s a very easy to find out that someone is faking and there is no real sense of doing it. Before trying to fake look at the surface scan of your target and make sure he cant get IA of your fleet. If he can scan you don’t use fake. When faking remember to make the eta right. For example when you fake corvettes as cruisers you should add 1 cruiser to your fleet and remove 1 corvette from it. In that way you will have the exact amount of you current corvette fleet and eta like cruiser fleet. If your target can’t get IA of your fleet, you have the perfect fake.

4) Draining defense

That’s a rarely used strategy. Anyway the results are pretty good. If you have launching tick, for example, 100, you launch at 98, recall at the end of the tick(last 30 seconds), launch again when your fleet is back. In that way if he get defense from ally, they wont have enough time to recall and they cant use those fleets in you second attack. If needed you can do it 2-3 times(One our member did that for all 24 hours and in the end land)

5) Getting defense and calculating eventual battle

When you get defence on your attack you need to:
A) Get Advanced Unit Scan (AU) of the defender(s)
B) Add all their ships to your calculation(Always do the calculation in the worst situation)
C) If its still green – land, if not get news scan and check if some of his ships are not already out. If they are he could be faking, but landing in that circumstances is always risky so avoid doing that.

6) Fleet Names

Change your fleet names often – once in every 48 hours or just change your ships. For example if you have fleet names: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and in Alpha is your cruiser fleet, in Beta your corvette fleet next time you attack change their places – put corvettes in Alpha and cruisers in Beta/Gamma. That makes your hard to understand from news scan.

[Wishmaster]

Originally Posted by Munkee

Ask officer for information about your targets alliance and if possible his nick, when coords unveiled. For fun you can put his nick as your fleet name, its usually irritating your rival.

really?

Originally Posted by Munkee

C) Some people use covops to irritate their future target, some find it wrong. I use covops only when I know that my target does not have big amount of security centers, so I’m sure he won't catch my men.

I kinda stopped reading here. When I get covops at 20:15 I know I m getting fcrew / ass incs and just go to bed early - smiling, knowing I will get donations.
Why on earth would u covop the same one as you are attacking? I never got this. Does the fact that hes your target make him a better covop target? Or do you really just help him giving him a hint he will get incs that night?

[Mzyxptlk]

Not better, but easier: you already have the scans. Besides, gal raids seldom stay secret for long, so cov opping your target before launching on him won't hurt your chances that much..

[Zaejii]

just because you're being cov opped doesn't mean that you are going to be raided

[Wishmaster]

its either I m being attacked, or its someone in asc checking if my security lvl is low enough to **** me a bit!
so, 50% chance!