World at War Tips

This is a compilation of tips from several players. There is no guarantee that whoever follows these tips will win the game or even be alive by game's end, but following them will definitely make you a tougher nut to crack.

Further comments, suggestions, tips are welcomed.

Capital

Choose your Capital carefully. One option is to move it away from naval invasion to an inland area if applicable. Keeping it in one of your 60 production centers will insure a ready supply of troops, if it is not in one of your big two then you will have three critical areas to defend as opposed to two. Another thing to watch for are the airbases that your agents discover at the start of the game. Try to set it up so there is no airbase 2 areas away from your selection. A paradrop could cost you the game.

Always protect your capital at all costs, lose it and you are eliminated the following turn. Very few players have ever taken their capital back after losing it.

VP Areas

If you are not sure where you will be going, it is hard to know where to put these, but the sooner you place them the more they will be worth. The moral here is you need to decide early. There are two-three schools of thought on how far away to place these:

Tech

The starting techs you get to initially allocate are crucial to your style of play/plans and you must use them wisely.

HQ 5 is a must and you should raise it to 6 and repair your starting HQs to give them range 2 effects. You can also get it to 7 and repair again to be able to blitz with your armor and mech units.

Land units are your primary combat units and therefore should get some of your tech points. Armor is great but cost double in supply and maintenance, Mech is solid perfromer with 2 moves for 1 maint/supply, MAR get some important bonuses, INF is a solid performer which costs very little outside of food. The three guns all can be used to great affect, but you don't start with many so it is hard to invest in the future when your original units will be taking the majority of your neutral expansions.

Air Units these units gain double benefit from tech, not only do they gain combat bonus but they get increased range with tech. Light bombers should be the primary beneficiaries of this increase. They can reach an average of 5-6 areas with a range of one (you will probably own 3-4 of these already), but with a range of 2 they can usually reach out and touch 13-16 areas. Their effectiveness will thus be greatly enhanced by giving them tech 5 or higher.

With naval units the advantages gained are similar to those of air units, but as only heavy fleets can affect the land situation, there is no need for tech investment in the navy. That is, unless your strategy will be based on naval domination and marine invasions.

Pay attention to the tech levels of your enemies. If you fall too far behind you will be in serious trouble.

Because you can not go to war for the first three turns, you can afford to spread your techs out at a lower level and build them up. For example rather than making LB Tech 5, instead make LB and FTR both tech 3 and then do increases to their techs so they are at tech 5 by turn 4. So rather than take 3 units at tech 5 to start with, take 5 units at tech 3.

Neutrals

For the first three turns, rapid expansion is the name of the game. Players can't attack you durning this time, so grap as many neutrals as possible.

View the map with an eye towards encircling neutral areas with your troops. Take everything you can, especially areas closer to your home areas than any others. Look for strategic position which can either block approaches from others or open them for you.

Don't get bogged down fighting neutrals, make sure you take them out in 1 turn so you can continue on attacking the following turn. Neutrals have no HQ bonus, so you will have a high chance to hit them, while their defensive fire will be quite low. For areas with large number of neutral land and air units do diplomacy, not only is this easier then fighting them, but it also increases the size of your own forces when they join you.

Other Players

No one can attack you during the first 3 turns, but everyone will be jockeying for positon and trying to divide the neutrals. It is important to decide on who will be your friend and who will not during this time, and having a secure border or two is crucial to your future success. You will not have enough troops to defend all your borders, so you must make friends.

Relations

The downfall of many a great tactician.......

The best ally is one that has room to expand into. Once someone becomes blocked from expanding or has a lot of units not doing anything, it can become very tempting for them to attack you.

Negotiating

As mentioned above, you must make friends to survive in this game. A quiet neighbor is often plotting against you (this is a war game after all) so you need to send diplomatic messages to your neighbors in order to become "known". People are afraid of the unknown. So if you aren't talking, what do you think your neighbors are thinking? You must develop your own negotiating style, but please, remember, the only player you can trust is your permanent ally. No one else! If an ally declares neutrality, he'll eventually attack you. It might not be this turn or the next, but attack you he will.

Conversely, protect your border even with your allies, make sure they can't wipe you out with a sneak attack.

Back Stabbing

A quote from Bo: "Just my .02 here also, I'm not a fan of this tactic (I never stab other than for revenge) and having been a PBM'er for over ten years, I can tell you for sure that it will come back to get you if you continue to play after doing it, sometimes even in a different game. On the positive side it is a way that can often lead to a win. "

Supply

This is crucial to your success and you need lots of it, without it you can't do anything and you need lots to sustain an attack. For example an ARM unit uses 2 a turn, 3 to blitz. Thus moving or fighting for three turns would use 6 or 9 points of supply.

If you use more than you build then you are running out. Seems obvious, but even experienced players sometimes get caught short.

SLN with your moves in the first three turns, as the neutrals will seldom kill your units. Be careful when attacking another player as they often kill your units and you don't want the supplies to be wasted.

Use SMS and MS commands to get your supplies to the front, because just building them is not enough, you must have them with your units to be able to use them.

Be careful with the partisans you let live within your lines. They can block your supply movement to the front and make you come short at a crucial point.

Also pay attention to the supplies your enemy has. If he has a large force with no supplies you don't have to worry about them this turn.

Builds

Make appropriate builds in accordance with your tech's. Build as many units as you can in your home areas, so that they will start with high tech/exp and full capabilities. Use your captured production centers to build agents, tech advances, supplies and replacement points. None of these things suffer from being built away from home and the supplies will be closer to the front.

Watch your gearing limits. Your current turn builds determine how much you can build the following turn, so try and plan ahead what your future requirements will be. There is nothing more frustrating than needing some FTRs to defend against enemy LBs and having a gearing limit of 2.

Resources

If you are a planner then you can calculate what you will have and move resources to the appropriate areas, so you will have enough to build what you want and sell the rest. One way of doing this is to balance the amount of fuel and food in an area, and build 1/2 supplies and 1/2 units because they use them inversely for the most part. This is very rough and you must decide what is in your best interest according to your situation.

Make sure you will have enough credits on the following turn to pay for all you maintenance, for any declarations of war you make, and for any new units you plan on building. Players have bankrupted themselves and not had enough credits to build anything after paying for all their maintenance. This type of problem can typically ocurr when you are not at war with anyone and have a low income multiplier.

Permenant Allies

A PA can be a real benefit in that they will give you a totally secure border which you will not have to worry about. In the early stages of the game, this is very usefull as it will allow you to strip the border clean and have the maximum number of units attacking else where.

There are a couple of downsides to PA though. You share VP and you have a 10% penalty for having a PA, so if your PA goes down, so do you. Also some PA aren't quite as reliable as you would think. Case have occured were players have abadoned their PA rather than support them in a war.

If you have a PA, try and find a target both of you can attack together. If you each go off and do your own thing, you are forfitting one of the main benefits of a PA.

On the opposite side. If you can attack someone who has a PA that can't come to their aid, then you will be knocking down 2 players for the price of one.

Attacking

Plan your attacks carefully, try to be in HQ command wherever there is fighting, and only attack where you have superior numbers. When attacking neutrals it is often possible to use higher quality units under HQ command to attack successfully at less than 1.5:1 ratio of steps. Against other players, who have their own HQs and equal technology it is often neccessary to have 2.5 or 3 to 1 odds. Remember the defense fires first, so if you have a low ratio, you may not even have enough steps remaining (assuming they all hit) to destroy the target after the defensive fire casualties have been inflicted.

Once involved in a multiple turn combat the defender will retain the defensive fire advantage turn after turn, while both players will have the opportunity to reinforce. This can turn into a meat grinder for both sides, eating men, machinery and supplies.

Don't leave combat units idle from turn to turn. They're needed in the front or in the reserve. Leave behind the lines only the units necessary for beach, airdrop and partisan defense. The rest of them should be in the front or the reserve.

You should only attack for 1 of 2 reasons:

Exploitation movement (ARM and MECH only) allow you to move after combat provided you are not pinned. This is extremely usefull for breaking into someones rear areas and either capturing it or pinning their units on the next turn.

Strategic movement allows you to plot to move into new areas that you plan to conquorer this turn (or allies areas if they grant you access). This can allow you to have fresh troops in areas that you just captured ready to attack the following turn. You can totaly take someone by surprise this way as you redeploy large forces right up to your new borders.

When attacking rough or extreme terrain both the attack and the defender will get the benefit of the terrain if they do not move. This means as the defender you want enough units to eliminate the attacker so they can't enjoy the benefits of the terrain the next turn. While as the attacker, if you can pour enough units in that you have a strong surviving force you will get the terrain benefit the next turn.

Reserves

Always keep a reserve behind your front line. If all your units are engaged and pinned you will not be able to respond to a break through. Thus leaving your attacker free to wreak havoc in your rear. Soon after your front line units will also be dead, as you won't be able to get supplies to them.

A counter to the reserve is to airdrop PAR on the reserve force and pin them. Which then means you should provide some air cover for your reserve if there is the potential of them having PAR dropped on them.

Spying

Spying on your enemies not only lets you find out about their units but gives you estimates on port size, airbase size and amount of supplies in the area. This is very important information. With it you can predict how large his attack force or defensive cababilities are.

Also remember that your spies help defend your areas from all other spies, so if there is something you don't what the other player to see such as where all your PAR and ATRN are, place a 3-5 spies in the area to defend it.

Also don't forget that spies can be placed in water and give you early warning of a naval invasion coming your way.

You also need a spy in an area to do diplomacy with it if it is neutral. Place spies in areas that you think other want and do diplomacy against them to make the area go anti them.

Land Units

HQ are super important. They give combat bonuses, are required for units to blitz and allow FTRs to fly automatic CAP missions. Always make sure you have them on any front you are fighting on.

It is important to have a large number of ARM and MECH units, as they determine which move is successful when players try to go from A to B and B to A.

Airdropping PAR are best used for dropping behind the front lines in lightly defended areas, making an attempt on someone's capital, or for pinning units so they can't move.

MAR are of course great for naval invasions and can be carried on HFLTs and LFLTs as well as NATR and NTRN.

Art, AT and AA units have great attack changes against certain types of units and cost very little, but are very vunerable without supporting units to protect them.

Air Units

Air units are great for softening up defenders when attacking them. Just make sure you have enough airbase points for all your units. You look real silly having those nice new air units sitting on the ground unable to do anything.

Naval Units

If you control the seas, you will be able to have secure coastal areas and threaten other coastal areas. Being a large naval power early allows you to eliminate all other potential naval powers first and then ravage everyone elses coast line, while they are unable to lanuch any sort of counter attack on you. The down side is that your land and air units are weaker since your builds are split among more types of units.

Winning

To have a good shot of winning you need to eliminate 2 other players, capturing most of their home areas and their capitals. So keep this in mind when planning where you are going to expand. Just taking neutrals will not do it, you have to fight other players.