Guild Wars 2

Just curious, if we assume that we have three 24/7 perfectly coordinated servers, I wonder what the optimal strategy for victory is in WvW?

Let’s make some rules to simplify the discussion:
- Each server has maximum number of players, 24 hours / 7 days.
- Every player is perfectly obedient and equally skilled.
- The entire server has perfect communication.
- Players are playing to win, not for personal rewards.
- Only resources from WvW are allowed. (ie. don’t farm PvE to get money to buy stuff, etc.)

I make these rules because any server that doesnt have these things would probably get beaten by one that does – thus these things are pre-requisites for the ultimate strategy.

Also, when I say strategy, I mean STRATEGY – ie. the large-scale planning of your war. Portal bombing and other stuff are tactics.

So given these things, what’s the best strategy?

I’m not a WvW expert, but I’ll make a guess just to get the discussion going.

I get the feeling it might be like tPvP in a way. You’ll have small groups of “bunkers” defending your various objectives, and some larger zerg “roamers” to take poorly defended enemy points.

For WvW we might also have smaller groups of roamers to kill dolyaks, and scout.

That’s my guess. Some unknowns:
- Is it better to have defenders on all of your objectives, or just the “front line”?
- Is it better to have all defenders inside your objectives, or to spread them evenly across the “front line”?
- How many roaming zergs should you have? Just one? Or is it better to split into many smaller zergs?
- Is it better to fight the enemy, or just avoid them and always try to take poorly defended points?

IF all players/numbers/skills are equal it should be a stalemate.

Same.4687:

IF all players/numbers/skills are equal it should be a stalemate.

That makes no sense. If one side decides to pile their entire army into a huge zerg, and another side decides to spread out their entire army into every objective, then one or the other should win more points and thus win.

The players/numbers/skills are equal, but where to send them and what to do are not. That’s where the strategy comes in.

If every server decides to use the same (best?) strategy, then it might be a stalemate. But I want to discuss what that best strategy is.

(and it might be possible there is no single “best” – it might be rock-paper-scissors)

You should read Ender’s Game.

Divide and conquer.
Deception and misdirection.
big force/small force.
Pressure and starvation

i’ve seen all these work at different times.

There is no answer really. If you want to talk in very broad terms then sure control the majority of all maps, but thats not what you’re looking for.
WvW is dynamic. Every move effects all three teams. Stragedies are made constantly.
More often then not your stragedy at the time gets trumped by something another team is doing

In a perfect world scenario, where every force is micromanaged down to single person, it should be an absolute stalemate.

That being said, I love eternal for it’s craziness in strategy and dynamics. On EB, it comes down to near diplomacy and morale based combat. One of my favorite strategies is creating a siege blockade on the side routes, and using minimum manning to operate the siege, while taking the mass zerg over to the other side.

The implication is that one side will have to dedicate their forces to break your blockade, or they will redirect their forces away from you, which creates a sandwich situation on the side you actually want to take.

In your proposed scenario, no single strategy will win, but all strategies will involve fortifying & defending gains to maintain them. The reason being is that the winner of a match is who has the most points at the end of a time frame. Since points are accumulated by how much a side holds, you’re going to see more competent players defending rather than attacking.

So, in the end the side that “wins” is the side that holds Stonemist, even if its for 15 minutes more than another at the end of a week. You can try to draw what-ifs, but assuming that all servers are competent and equally skilled, then Borderlands will end up staying just the same for all servers because the two invading forces will never attack each other except to gain the southern supply camp and their only objectives will be marching up along their respective sides. The Defenders will always be outnumbered in this regard, true, but since they are equally skilled and competent, they should never end up losing their keeps and towers as it takes a force of 1/2 of the Invader forces to defend (this is under the assumption that the Defenders will always have a lot of siege to defend with, as competent players would no doubt have).

So it all comes down to who can take and defend Stonemist the longest. Even if Side A has Stonemist and Side B & C decide to push into Side A’s side of Eternal, Side A has the ability to launch attacks in any direction from Stonemist.

I don’t agree that it would be a stalemate. A stalemate scenario would be the probable scenario if only 2 forces entered in equation. However, in a 3 force scenario, other things enters in the equation:
- I will focus mainly on EB. By this i am assuming that each of the borderlands is equally distributed throughout the servers evenly.
- When talking about EB, then one must have SM castle. This creates an odd point for the one defending. While the other two can have a bigger force attacking and defending their side of the EB, the owners of SM cannot defend SM and attack and defend their side at the same time, so :

If A owns SM, B and C don’t, it’s logical that B and C are in a stalemate. However, B can attack A side to force them out SM, C can do the same or attack SM to force them defend it. Also, while C is attacking, B can steal C’s points.

The unpredictability of a 3-way system lies just there. There is no defined strategy.
For example, if i am B and C is attacking A @ SM, then it makes no sense clearing A’s supply camps. Doing so would create a choke point on A, and might make them fall to C. Is better to take the towers and keep, then the supplies to maximize the points got while A was defending C. But i can also take supplies to ease C’s pain of taking SM and by this removing the reinforcements of SM, for a later takeout. I can drive to C’s side and start taking C’s points, while C is doing just that!

A big amount of possibilities arise from a 3-way system, but that’s the role of the strategists to analyze and to the commanders to enforce. Yes, because in a competitive WvW, the commanders are not there to define the strategy, they are there to lead the platoons. The strategist must be stood still and checking the map 100% of the time!

Hope i could help!

I’d say 1 small strike team to hit camps, 1 medium strike team to hit towers, and the rest in your zerg ball to specifically defend. Given rendering issues, the zerg is far better off chilling at garrison and waiting to defend a tower than pressing and attacking.

I genuinely hope that there is no winning strategy that can be applied in all situations.

The perfect strategy, as I see it, is to allow the enemies to fight over trifles while you hold the big ticket items.

Shinigami.5932:

You should read Ender’s Game.

This. Or, learn how to play chess. Whatever works.

Guys. If everyone employed the same strategy, it would not result in a tie. It’s possible that the result would be unpredictable. But it wouldn’t be a tie. Obviously, SM is a big heaping wall of not-tie. Almost all rolls in the game have some randomness, which equals no-tie. And then the EB map is inherently not symmetrical, which leads to some reliable predictions. Blue and Green are close together. Red is far away. Blue keep can treb SM from its vista tower. WC is probably the most defensible forward tower. Anz is probably the least defensible forward tower. When someone gets SM it would be in the other two’s best interest to double team.

The question was, what is an optimal strategy. The goal, I think, is speed and communication. You can have a bigger army than everyone else if you can be at two places at one time. This means optimally, you want Mesmers holding Road Markers to facilitate travel across your interior. You need group speed buffs.

Organization-wise, you’ll definitely want an interior cleanup party to get back supply camps and a forward infiltration party to mess with the enemy’s supply camps. But zerg-wise you’re going to want to be able to break off into smaller units quickly based on what you own and where you’re being pressed. You’ll also want a chain of command similar to the Army’s, but I think that’s implied in the question.

The larger the zerg, the more you’re going to want AoE healers and long-range glass-cannon AoE damage dealers. The smaller the party, the more you’re going to want self-reliant 1v1ers.

If we’re also talking literal robotic optimal behavior, you want each map to be exactly full without any queue. So people can choose where to grab supplies from across four maps. Also, for that matter, during lower population hours, you want to be able to marshall troops across all four maps based on where they are needed most.

Finances, propoganda, espionage rule the day (from my History of Modern Warfare/ROTC class years ago)

Shinigami.5932:

You should read Ender’s Game.

One of my favorite books ever!

Really wish they came out with a movie

SmokeyNYY.7841:

Shinigami.5932:

You should read Ender’s Game.

One of my favorite books ever!

Really wish they came out with a movie

Wish granted: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/

EDIT: Agree, its an awesome book btw

Mouse.4782:

Shinigami.5932:

You should read Ender’s Game.

This. Or, learn how to play chess. Whatever works.

well….. yes and no. you should definitely plan a few moves ahead at all times, but there’s no king to capture to end the game. there are only territories to occupy. which is actually the model used in this game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28game%29

as for a set “ultimate strategy”, there really isn’t one nor can there be. you have to adapt to the situation as it continually changes. every strategy can be countered, if given enough time to figure that counter out. so sticking to one strategy will inevitably lead to a counter being created. there are strategies that can dominate for the short term, but will eventually be made obsolete as things evolve.

so really, the ultimate strategy is to adapt.

Roo Stercogburn.9671:

SmokeyNYY.7841:

Shinigami.5932:

You should read Ender’s Game.

One of my favorite books ever!

Really wish they came out with a movie

Wish granted: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1731141/

EDIT: Agree, its an awesome book btw

omg harrison ford is in it!!! Yes!!! I Just hope it does justice to the awesome book.

You have a small group, maybe 4 per tower and 10 at keeps defending, and the rest go zerging. The zerg go in a big group and turtle, while building siege to kill anything that goes near them and countering any siege the enemy builds.

The zerging sounds pretty crappy, but that’s the way Anet designed the game.

Strategy can evolve, but what really you need is information. Every server which have better information will win the game (in evenly match). Scout is a must.

Nice responses all. I was also thinking about whether it’s worthwhile to have people standing around guarding points that aren’t under attack. are they wasting man power? can they be more effective if you have fewer people on defense, just have a couple of scouts patrolling your points every now and then, and rely on your zerg being able to come back in time to save points under siege?

Ultimate Strategy in a perfect environment?

Take a tower → build a trebuchet, 4 arrowcarts, a catapult behind the door, and ballista everywhere you can. Siege walk to each tower/keep/supply camp making it impossible to make advances behind you. Repeat the treb/arrowcart/catapult strategy until you own the whole map. End by building tons of ballista around the enterences to the enemy camp.

This is why I hate when people say to get rid of the ‘zerg mentality’. The alternative is kittenier.

The best strategy is not actually strategies, but rather how you counter them. It’s how you read other server’s initiative and moves. From there you play accordingly. Strategies should be thought up off in the heat of battle and not written down, because you can’t say that one strategy is a guaranteed win.

Rieselle.5079:

Nice responses all. I was also thinking about whether it’s worthwhile to have people standing around guarding points that aren’t under attack. are they wasting man power? can they be more effective if you have fewer people on defense, just have a couple of scouts patrolling your points every now and then, and rely on your zerg being able to come back in time to save points under siege?

it depends on the point, really. towers/keeps with siege and upgrades should always have at least a couple people in them to tick siege and be able to give incoming calls. orange swords on the map just means 6 or more. it could be 10, it could be 50. personally, i find 5 to be a good number of defenders at each tower. enough to man some siege and make a call, while slowing the attacking zerg down a bit, or at least softening them up. keeps might want to have a few more defenders, due to them having more places that can be targeted.

i’ve found that camps are just plain easier to retake later. unless you absolutely need yaks getting somewhere, then you’ll have to leave a decent sized group to stop any 3-5 man ninja groups from rolling through.

scouts, however, should be out and about regardless of anything else.

This bit about scouting strikes me as super interesting. Normally I’d say that the side with the better intelligence would win, provided they could get it in time to respond to threats. I feel like normally there should be lots of scouting and counter-scouting, feints and stealth moves, and that that would go a long way to creating initiative for one side over another.

That said, in the current environment and with “perfect” squads, it’s actually very difficult to deny your opponents information. Perma-stealth rogues can’t necessarily get into (all?) the fortresses, but because they only need to be able to see bigger movements (and don’t need to be up-close-and-personal all the time), I find it hard to imagine opposing commanders wouldn’t have all the information they could ever want. Maybe troop movements underwater would become more popular!

vutak.3186:

This bit about scouting strikes me as super interesting. Normally I’d say that the side with the better intelligence would win, provided they could get it in time to respond to threats. I feel like normally there should be lots of scouting and counter-scouting, feints and stealth moves, and that that would go a long way to creating initiative for one side over another.

That said, in the current environment and with “perfect” squads, it’s actually very difficult to deny your opponents information. Perma-stealth rogues can’t necessarily get into (all?) the fortresses, but because they only need to be able to see bigger movements (and don’t need to be up-close-and-personal all the time), I find it hard to imagine opposing commanders wouldn’t have all the information they could ever want. Maybe troop movements underwater would become more popular!

it’s definitely pretty easy to relay information in WvW, as long as it’s actually done. it can often go overlooked, or sometimes never even thought of. the scouts mainly need to keep eyes on the enemy zergs, and look at the defenses each of the enemy areas have. an area with few defenders, and even less siege is a much better target to focus on then one that has a fully manned arsenal on the walls. the problem is that often the assignment goes overlooked, or even abandoned in favor of doing something with more action. it can be boring, it can be lonely, and it can be unappreciated, but it’s a crucial part of success.

something tells me youre not very good at chess.

I’m a big fan of slow pushing.

You have 2 sets of 5 man groups roaming disrupting supply lines/camps. This forces the enemy to defend the objectives you take or suffer from never upgraded supply camps. A solid part of any WvW strategy.

Next is the slow pushing part. You take your tower, you set up siege and make it hard to take back. You take tower, siege and so on. On certain towers you build trebs as well. This makes it so that it takes far more offence than your defence to take your tower which is simply good, as it means your offence can be still be big whilst under assault.

Next bit is where you take ground in the open. You need ballista’s mainly for this. You march forward, find a strategic location and setup camp. Then you get cracking, say, with a treb on the next tower.

It’s expensive but it means once you advance somewhere, you have a solid hard to break line to fall back to, and that line also serves as long range bombardment of the next objective.

Oddly I did not play Terran on SC2, but rather Protoss.

Bleed the supply. I don’t see enough of that. Station enough players so that you can effectively defend the supply camps. Eventually they will have to respond with a rather large zerg, thereby giving your team an opportunity to strike. I would also have a squad of 5 guys making sure no supply reaches anywhere. This is the more silent and efficient way of doing it. Simply get a small group to go around and quietly cut off the Dolyacks without anyone every knowing.

I’m not going to comment on strategy, but I’ll point out that a perfectly even match like you suggest would boil down to who ever controls SM longest would win.

I’d go with a supply centered setup. Assuming borderlands map with 75 people (Not sure of actual limit)…

Assign a 5 man team to each supply camp. Each supply team would also be responsible for the two objectives adjacent to it (South camp gets SE and SW tower, SE camp gets SE tower and E keep, etc.) Tasks in priority order:
- Kill any enemy dolyaks originating from your camp.
- Capture/defend your camp.
- Zerg assist, 4 people help the zerg when attacking a responsible objective, last man stays to keep eyes on the camp.
- Scouting, one person to each responsible objective – purposes being assessment and harassment – auto-attack the gate to get those white swords up.

That leaves a 45 man roaming zerg which is boring to detail.
The exception to this boring-ness is if the enemy doesn’t properly counter your supply camp domination. It would then likely be safe enough to break the zerg in two to be able to hit multiple non-overlapping objectives at once, best taking advantage of the 4 man zerg assist from supply camps that aren’t being contested. (Say hitting SE tower and W keep, each objective could get 22 zerg+8zerg assist players attacking it)

Edit: Note that this strategy ignores Garrison for purposes of adjacent objectives, as it really isn’t one for any supply camp. I’m okay with this, the enemy can have the garrison on each borderlands, they won’t have any supply reaching them and thus will be able to be easily overtaken by just the roaming zerg.

The things you’ve mentioned are pretty important, but one of the biggest ones is having decent timezone coverage. While its great to have a well-disciplined force in your prime-time that’s all for naught if its a ghost-town while your enemy is on.

There’s probably an optimum balance of points for a location and the cost of defending it. For instance, is it worth committing “x” players to taking stonemist for two hours, vs using the same force to take and hold a certain number of other assets. I’d be interested to see any theorycrafting or numbercrunching to help decide what makes sense to capture and hold and upgrade based on the return.

Don’t leave out the jumping puzzles… In a stalemate of fully organized teams, controlling these is key to victory. You can put down portals in obsidian vault for instant blueprints for your team while defending against anyone trying to breach you. Do not think about putting arrowcarts on top of the arena, have some perma stealth thieves in the dark room and siege at the exit there.
As for the borderlands, I always feel like these jumping puzzles are underrated. It’s an easily defendible position which can hardly be sieged if done right. Plus it’s not some kind of “out of the real map” stuff like the EB one. You can actually use it as a base for operations.

The ultimate strategy might have more focus on the jumping puzzles than you maybe want to admit.

About zergs … Even if right now they are the best way to win grounds, I feel like so much potential is wasted … Mainly because most of the time, a zerg is not created through any planifications, but only because of the individual desires to encounter and kill more players (because it’s much more fun / rewarding / …). That is resulting into a chaotic group only motivated by short-term pulsions.

What a deadly and beautiful tool a truly organised and disciplined zerg would be !
To achieve that, I also think that taking into account the potential of each profession would be a key factor, for every player to fill the best role for the community (I think WvW gives a lot of opportunities for cannon builds completing each others).

Elementalists and Necromancers forming the core of the zergs, the firsts dealing direct AOE damages and the seconds controlling the flow through conditions.
Gardians protecting this core by absorbing the damages and boosting their allies.
Engineers dealing with siege engines, using them to help the zerg, and protecting those placed on key points with their owm short-range devices.
Rangers scoutting the land for informations and protecting the buildings thanks to their range, making death rain on the assailants.
Small fists / groups of Warriors, Thieves and Mesmers roaming the land, killing doliaks, scouts and soloists, taking camps and moving on, helping our zerg when needed with scissors tactics, attacking the sides of the other zerg and killing the remnants / runaways.
…

This is a rigide caricature of an example, but it would be beautiful to see this kind of (more flexible) organization, taking those dynamics into account. It would indeed require for everyone to embrass the greatest plan, and also some authority, but it would be a great base to apply any winning strategy described above or by Laozi / Ender / the Go / [Insert any strategy school here].
(So I guess I’m more dealing here with tactic than strategy, my bad, but in my mind they are kind of intricate/dependent)

My 0.02$ dream.

I don’t believe in one ultimate strategy to rule them all even under the balanced conditions you mentioned. There’s many viable strategies but all are situational and which one to use largely depending on what the enemies are doing.

holska.4127:

I don’t believe in one ultimate strategy to rule them all even under the balanced conditions you mentioned. There’s many viable strategies but all are situational and which one to use largely depending on what the enemies are doing.

Perhaps, but I’m hoping that people will propose a basic strategy and then discuss what other strategies will counter it, and then how to respond to that, etc etc.

I proposed something pretty simple in my OP, and various people have also mentioned their own plans. So now we can discuss weaknesses and counters etc.

ie. If you were playing GW2 Real Time Strategy, able to direct your entire server with the click of the mouse, how would you beat the various strategies people have mentioned?

Also, unless WvW manages to have a nice circular design (which would pretty much occur by accident, since I don’t think ANet intends to manage gameplay so tightly), then when we sort out all the counters and counter-counters, then usually there is a general strategy that is safer and more optimal than most others. You see this happening in most RTS games that aren’t as competitively refined as Starcraft.