3 vs 3 Strategy for the map Waste

[tabanli]

Stating the obvious, Horse Lord with Sandworm rules the land. Based on your preference, he is accompanied by Assasin, Barbarian, Valkyrie or Dread Knight. Elephant is a must at some point and the center is very important.

However I would like to point to coordination problem between the players in terms of production. I think the first turn is very critical for the team. Each team member must reveal their strategy to avoid redundancy. The way I see it, there are 3 ways to go.

1)Flyer, harrasers: Train Crows at the capital, capture the eagle city and keep sending flyers. At some point you may try Flying Barbarian for a surprise raid to enemies homeland or an Assasin Ghost Eagle Crow combo. Meanwhile slowly build your heroes and troops. Your homeland could be vulnerable for a while but you may end up razing a few cities or reducing the gold income from the enemy.
2)Scorpions:Train scorpions at the capital, plunder everything except the sandworm and keep training scorpions. You can't train too many stack bonus since you have to keep 5 scorpions in the stack for effectiveness. Scorpions have great mobility and you can get 6 scorpions together faster than your enemy getting a stack with Sandworm.
3)Rainbow: Use Heavy Infantry as defenders (or spiders later on) and train variety of troops. Occupy most of the cities. Make mix stacks using anything you can get a hold to like Sandworm-Battering Ram-Giant-Knights-Wolf Rider (Elephant-Unicorn if possible).

I think it is the best if each member of the team adopt one of the strategies above. otherwise you may end up with too many flyers, too few flyers or lack of serious hitting power or lack of mobility. For example if you start with Flyers and want to switch to scorpions, you will end up loosing money. So whoever trains flyers must teleport or send them to the other members, heavy infantries must be teleported to other team members hometowns so that the scorpions can start flowing and decide the game. Also sending gold to the team member to receive a high level heroes or heroes with Devil-Red Dragon ally can be game changing as well.

Thoughts?

[KGB]

First thing to note. The cities are not balanced. The north side of the river has 2 more cities than the south side (15 vs 13, not including the 5 in each start area). So you are a slight favorite to win if you are in the north.

After that, this is the map that matters most who goes first. Your entire game strategy must revolve around whether or not you are going first. It matters for 2 reasons. The obvious one is the speed at which the Sandworm moves basically rendering the entire desert terrain into one gigantic road so you can put the 2nd player/team on the defensive immediately. The second one is that the river cities all contain a LOT of gold that *must* be plundered (those cities are basically undefendable) so getting there first and plundering that gold is huge.

I've tried a bunch of different starting heroes. I now think you have to take either a HL or Assassin first. The HL not only gives extra movement but can search that close ruin on turn 1. The Assassin's ambush makes him very valuable as well. I think the Barb is pointless on this map. I see almost no use for the Ranger either unless you specifically need to counter a high level Assassin in the late game. Valk/DK/Pally can be used mid/late game when they can come at L3+.

1) Flyer strategy. I have not seen this work. Esp now that Fliers can't move with the Sandworm. They can lurk on ridges but they are SO slow (Esp Gryphons) that it's so easy to spot them and simply move back and defend when necessary.
2) Scorpions. This works well in 2v2 or 1v1 games where you get a lot of cities (10+). Not sure it works in 3v3 unless you go first. I've tried it in the last 2 3v3 games where my team has gone 2nd. It just hasn't worked that well. The cost of the Scorpions is high and the money is better spent elsewhere (Elephants, Sandworms, Heroes with good allies) and you typically end up with only 6-8 total cities so hard to make enough Scorpions.
3) Rainbow. I have no comment on this one as I have no experience with it.
4) Rush and Pillage. This is the key strategy to this map ESPECIALLY when you go first. This map is a PURE rush map thanks to the Sandworm. You pillage EVERYTHING you find other than a Sandworm. Ideally buying a 2nd Sandworm in the Capitol early on to speed expansion/movement etc since Sandworm can take out of the way neutrals/gold sites on his own. The rest is Hv Inf until you save for the needed Elephant. You must reach the river cities first (so ignore those isolated cities) and plunder their vast gold reserves (Hence the HL as your initial hero for the +5 movement at L2). This allows purchasing that Elephant in your home area and provides tons of gold for high level heroes with Dragons/Devils. Then continue on and pillage/raze enemy cities with your initial stack as it's a throwaway due to getting fresh high level heroes with your gold.

KGB

P.S. I'd love to know how many teams have gone 2nd on this map and won. I bet it's very very few.

[tabanli]

I think the scorpion strategy can work if your teammates help you out. Since scorpions are very expensive you may not have time and resources to buy other units. In one of our games, Igor send me HI to my homeland which freed my scorpions. I have scorpions at 5 cities and every 2 turn I can put together a pack and send either as replacement units to my HL-Sandworm-6Scorpion stack or send them solo to raise cities. However since I don't have eagles I ended up putting one scorpion to each gold site against crows. HI are slow to get there. So one crow can tie 4 scorpions to gold site defense. I should have coordinated that well ahead of time with my other teammate. So my answer is yes. Consistent scorpion strategy should work only if your teammates help you out in advance. And it could be the only viable strategy for the second team.

[KGB]

As I mentioned, I haven't been successful in 2 games trying it as the 2nd player. The cost in gold is very high as you noted and it's a huge waste to have to guard sites and cities with a single Scorpion so you need at least 1 city making 1 turn defenders or a teammate vectoring armies (not usually possible since they have their own stuff to defend).

The other problem is that you must accompany the Scorpions with a Sandworm even if they don't need it for travel. The reason is that otherwise you lose the -5 fear bonus to the enemy who does send Sandworms with all his stacks. Even worse, the Hv Inf/Sandworm stack can easily block those few access points on the map between the levels forcing the Scorpions to attack 20 strength Hv Inf or 25 if they build a cheap tower or worst of all 32 strength Hv Inf when Elephants appear (which they do due to the low gold cost of buying Hv Inf).

KGB