Forums / Questions and Answers / AotD attack technique

The extremely tl;dr short answer to your question is that as long as you have 1% on the enemy (they aren't 3x your power) you can attack them without your army getting slaughtered, which allow you to abuse AOTD+Healing Injuries in cities to continuously hammer the enemy army over and over for higher and higher %'s. This is extremely effective vs enemies who cannot AOTD their army when your army contains easily AOTD's units like Nazgul, as the cost of AOTD is based upon dead unit count and excludes MU.

If you think about AOTD is a power multiplier of sorts it would make a unit like Nazgul 9~ times as effective, because you can 100% slaughter armies that are 2.99x your size that would otherwise have 3x slaughter on you.

I hope this helps, I can write a wall of text about AOTD or something like that if you want because it's a REALLY powerful and important spell.

I was told in the past you needed to remove all soldiers from army and only have injured there and the dead, for easier casting, but it was changed and now it does not matter? Someone please confirm?

I think it should be based on total op,do making the naz zero am exploit less of an issue...

I definitely like how the spell works now compared to how it used to work, I think it's fine how it makes certain units worth more or less in the lategame and functions as a victory mechanic for certain races.

Also Halfling can AOTD, 120k Pony Rider day 10-11 is a very strong Halfling timing attack. You can AOTD your own 120k Pony Rider army after getting bounced at 99%, so Halfling can indeed AOTD it's just that AOTD doesnt function as a 'victory mechanic' for Halfling/Dwarf because you cant AOTD 500k dead units over and over from your 1million+ advent or axeman stack.

I do not understand the aotd attacking,
I had enemy attacking me that I had 2% on last era.

So I tried attacking, failed miserably,
Lost 2/3 of my Archmages, and killed just a few of the enemy army
Obviously just a few cause the enemy was much stronger.

Then I casted aotd on my army, and then I had 0%...
I don't understand how I can have more than 2% considering I lost that many in the first attempt. And by this I mean lost many dead that came back but still had 30k AMs that were injured.

Am I supposed to wait for injured to come back for this to work?
Waiting just lead to enemy taking over the city.

Could someone explain just how am I supposed to have better chance than 2% after I hit the enemy?

If you have a very low % then you need to hit the enemy the moment they prep your city because your injured units have reduced power. Your units can only exist in 3 states: Healthy, Injured, or Dead. With AOTD that means that you are only ever going to have healthy units and injured units, and the best place to have injured units (and the best place to attack an enemy, and the best place to cast AOTD) is a city you control.

When it comes to slaughtering an enemy army that you have a very low % on Nazgul are the best unit to use- they are cheap to AOTD, they heal quickly due to low unit count, and if you mess up you can potentially escape with Force March and BT. Catapults are a decent unit as well because they are 40 OP units and you won't have more than 100k of them until very late in the era.

Berserkers can slaughter an enemy on a sub-100% attack, but on a bad roll you could lose your Berserker army if you attack someone on a low %. Archmages have the issue of being very numerous, thus they require a lot of MU and take enough time to heal that you won't be surprise-slaughtering anyone at super lower %s.

As far as slaughtering someone on a low % using AOTD is concerned it's ideal to not only have high medical science but also to have lower military science than your enemy. An injured unit is worth less to you than a dead one as far as AOTD-attacking is concerned.

In any kind of military engagement in VU there is a % of casualties and out of that % there are a number of deaths, injuries, and unaffected units after battle. The player with lower military science will take more of his casualties as deaths as opposed to injuries, and when it comes to AOTD-capable armies an injury is worse than a death. The only way you lose units is injured units dying and the outright slaughter of your armies.

Whenever I play AOTD Orc I go for Military 5. If I were to go lower I'd value higher medical science over mining. I've considered going lower than 5 since you can MW up to 5 and the idea seems appealing on paper (very high unit retention) but I've decided that it has the same flaws as low mil high med berserker armies (very good vs the players you would probably kill with any build and not good vs powerful non-AOTD capable Halfling and Dwarf armies around day 15). 5 is appealing because it's the lowest level military science that you can get without it being apparent that you have low military science and most Halfling/Troll/Elf builds end at around Military 6.

Here's an interesting way to look at AOTD armies: It's all about getting more value out of less cost effective units. The way you do this is by taking favorable trades and a battle at any% with an army that cannot AOTD itself (or cannot AOTD itself as cost effectively as you) is a favorable trade because your enemy will lose units and you will not. The only way you cannot AOTD your deaths back is if the armyID is removed via your army being slaughtered, which is a very real risk given that the whole idea is that you leverage the AOTD spell to compensate for having lower OP/DP than your opponent.

I agree isn't a good science build for any playstyle in VU that doesn't involve Med 4 or higher, the difference between Med 3 and Med 5 is actually very noticeable.