This post was inspired by a comment/question and it's now a post as it may be useful to others.
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Fighting is harder in SAD for a few reasons. Mostly the AI is just broken in regards to advancing troops.
Fast troops often fail to advance far enough to get first
strike.
Champions just hang around the baseline and get picked-off
by longer range units.
Rogues are pretty much useless in SAD as they also don't
advance and enemy targets regular units unless only a rogue is available.
Artillery only fires every other round.
No keen eye.
SAD truly is a rock/paper/scissors fight age where every
unit has a counter unit and if you match troops and fight manually you will do
a lot better than auto-battle with the same unit config.
So despite the fact that the SAD troops are more powerful on
paper in practice this is a much harder fight age.
Before the age came-out 4 champs + 4 rogues was awesome. I don't know what happened between that time and beta/live server launch but it's completely different.
It's not all doom and gloom. You can do high-volume, high attrition fighting in SAD but you'll have to pick a lower trial level to do the same attrition.
To give an example I could do infinite fighting in SASH on trial 15 but lose a lot of troops and the occasional fight.
On trial 12 it was easier. Still a lot of troop loss.
On trial 5 didn't lose a lot of troops and 1k+ attrition was the norm.
In SAD with slightly better fight boosts I can infinite fight on trial 5 but with a lot of losses like trial 15 in SASH.
On trial 2 it's like trial 5 in SASH.
Trial 50 in SASH I was hitting about 130 attrition before the troop loss made it not worth continuing. SAD in trial 50 I couldn't hit 120 auto battle. My guild flips sectors too quickly to test manual but I suspect I could get to 130 by manual fight and match troops.
So it's harder but the world isn't ending and it's not a reason to not age-up. In fact players are better-off aging up now so they can continue to level-up their settlement city which will continued being developed over the next several ages.
So I described the troops above and mentioned how artillery only fires every other round. Well because the AI keeps troops near base the artillery is very good now in SAD.
Here's what I use.
- 3 artillery
- 1 champ
- 3 fast
- 1 range
After thousands of fights at full attrition this is the combo that has worked best for me. I used to use 4 artillery and 4 fast but the champ improves overall survivability and allows fast units to get more retaliatory hits. By including one range unit it changed how the AI targeted my troops and helped when enemy troops included light units.
Please feel free to experiment and comment about what works best for you.
