Strategy: Industrial Juggernaut

[Devari]

Name: The Industrial Juggernaut
Skill Level: Variable (Medium to Hard)
Description: The Juggernaut is a almost purely troops based strategy family focusing on the ammasing of large amounts of troops. A fundamental principle of the Juggernaut is to ignore the economy in favour of massive military production, and then supplement troops through the capture of cash and food.

Execution:

The principle of Juggernaut is quite simple - amass a massive army at the expense of economic endeavors and rely almost completely on your ability to successfully break an enemy's defenses. Land is almost completely used up in barracks and one has little or no hawk army. In order to maintain your army, you completely depend on utter superiority of numbers to gather enough food to supply your army through attacking, building, and healing.

In terms of massing your troops, it is probably wisest to first invest completely in a single troop type and later expand into other troop types. The intial massing is so you have a troop to break people with; the expansion into other types is to prevent you from losing all that you have gained.

If you are playing a variant that uses at least a few towers, Raise Defenses will seriously impact a hawker's chances against you. Raising defenses will cause their missions against you to deal 2/3rds less damage - an example is murder (1% of troops killed instead of 3%)

It is hard for a Juggernaut to get a hero, but if you start off with a hawk-loot strategy and plan on later switching, the best heroes to get are (in order of importance):

Perigord (Although Martin or Brome are tempting, it is a reality of Juggernaut that you will run into shortages. A Perigold hero will save your life.)
Matthias
Grumm (absolutely not necessary)

Strategies in this family:
Name: Total War
Divisions: 100% Barracks
Notes: A Juggernaut will definately need to use markets and foragers to raise to a position where Total War is possible. Once the player has acheived an army that can break at least half of the game, they can switch to Total War. As the name suggests, Total War involves spending turns in three distinct ways - Attacking, Building, and Training/Healing. Essentially, this is one of the most aggressive strategies of all. IT depends completely on capturing all of your resources from other players, and has absolutely no self-sufficiency.

Total War's main weakness is when it is impossible to gain enough resources to support your army through attacking and healing time or when you lost too many troops in an attack. If you play Total War, be prepared to see your army fall into pieces if you are not careful.

--More to Come--

Pros:

Rise quickly
In terms of gathering troops, probably the absolute crown jewel of strategies
Great for taking down powerful players
In only 500 turns, you can amass a considerable army.
You can amass considerable wealth and power through attacking
You can generally gain a lot more troops than a hawk-looter, therefore giving you a slight edge against a powerfull strategy
You can laugh at food massers
You can have a lot of fun

Cons:

Fall quickly
Hard to pull off
Does not work well in a game where there are not many players
Is completely reliant on your ability to break another player
Is completely reliant on there being many breakable players that you can capture resources from
Is completely reliant on gathering enough resources in attacking time to get through healing time successfully.
Shortages can take you from superpower status to a sitting duck
Vulnerable to Hawk players Murdering and Poisoning you into the ground (Especially if you play Total War)
Defenses can suck until you expand into more troop types.




This is a work in progress and is at least partially theoretical (I have not necessarily tried it on FaF). Does anyone else have more points to add?

[Boar the Fighter]

In order to maintain your army, you completely depend on utter superiority of numbers to gather enough food to supply your army through attacking, building, and healing.

uh. That would be hard to do in this game... Not very many people.
Not to say you couldn't do it though... *laughs*, and what's to keep the mad guy with
a bunch of hawks from totaly killing you?

[Devari]

Well, Hawk attack is the weakness. Basically, you need to be able to smash the crap out of someone to regain enough land to survive.

One point is, though, that you will 90% of the time have more troops than a hawk-looter, so there should be no retaliation problems.

[Boar the Fighter]

But he could murder you... If you were not going against a clan or something it would work...

[Zephyrus]

Well, Devari's doing my strategy going guardless, apparently.
It seems a bit weak to most, but I assure you it's not.
You get up to 100 mil mice per run, theoretically, on several tens of thousands of land.
i.e., even if I murder everything, and get it to the max, he comes back in 100 turns.
If I destroy structures, he still has the troops.
Well, in theory.
I've tried this and fallen, but have seen it work.
Especially with so many hawk-looters advertising themselves as free resources.
Even with guards, 20 mil mice a day is a decent goal around my net.
Without, be ready for suffering, but know you can break anyone.
Devari has yet to tell me the amount of mice you need.

[Devari]

Not sure for either, but at most 20 million is needed.

[Zephyrus]

Not any more, apparently.
Will go again tomorrow.

[Boar the Fighter]

I see now.