Gaining control & conquering Campaign

[Antithesis]

Feel free to move if this does not belong here.

Recently, I have been doing more Campaign to level up my newest job to 75. As I have been Campaigning, I have noticed that the Beastmen armies are just constantly winning and destroying the Allied forces with everything they have. The concern I have here is the fact that since the introduction of the BCNM Campaign Operations, there have been very very few times in which people can participate in those battles.

A friend of mine on Asura has all but given up on attaining his Roundel Earring. No matter how hard he tries to influence Campaign (not to mention the extremely low supply of Roundels on the Server.) The fortification update pretty much deterred many people from attacking Beastmen controlled areas since most of the time Fortifications are the only thing up.

My question now is, what can individuals and, hell even low man groups do to influence Campaign battles and troops to help conquer and control regions so that these highly sought after events can be played?

[orson]

Killing a campaign Beastman lowers their influence in that area, SCNMs are a good way to weaken them, but the best way to gain an area is to kill all the campaign mobs even if it's not during campaign battles. You're best off trying to gain control of an area in the last 12 hrs before the tally so that all you work doesn't go to waste by allied NPCs constantly killing themselves.

Personally I think that SE should reconsider the requirements for the special ops and give us an additional way to make them available. On my server Bastok has never gotten access to the fight and even Sandy only gets it maybe every 2 mths, I'm betting a lot of servers are in the same boat.

[Gergall]

You're best off trying to gain control of an area in the last 12 hrs before the tally so that all you work doesn't go to waste by allied NPCs constantly killing themselves.

Indeed, La Vaule takeovers on Valefor are always staged shortly before the conquest tally.

On my server Bastok has never gotten access to the fight and even Sandy only gets it maybe every 2 mths, I'm betting a lot of servers are in the same boat.

Same on Valefor. Only exception is very recently, with the announcement of new campaign medals coming, the interest seems to have been revived a bit in the past month. We unlocked the Op 2 weeks ago, then last week lost only La Vaule, and this week gained it back to unlock the Op again. This is not typical.

I doubt we'll see this Op again for a long time. Everyone is going to be trying out the Northlands, and when that dies down, people will forget about campaign until the next update gets close.

One of the flaws of the system is that it's the opposite of the The Little Red Hen. People who don't help unlock the Op still get to spam it as much as everyone else.

[Yugl]

http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/63381...ml#post2899568

Rocl had a strategy for La Vaule posted somewhere. Also, your best bet is to kill standing Campaign mobs either by picking them up one by one as they move from link range, or having a THF with RR flee them and you pick one off to kill.

Edit: The link is just to show that you need a decent amount of people to influence the region.

[Aristio]

You could solo offensive campaign battles if you know what your doing. You also have to be a job that can take a beating. (PLD, BLU, RDM, NIN/DNC, ect) When the campaign starts and there are beastmen idling around the fort, pull them 1 by 1 towards the advancing NPCs. When the mob is about to die, get another one and wait for the NPCs to finish the first one. Rinse and repeat untill all that is remaining is the MB of the defending army. Being one of the jobs that can take a beating is for when you pull a link of 2-3 mobs by accident. This allows you to wipe out the army, without fear of NPCs getting rushed by 8 mobs at once.

[Rocl]

You could solo offensive campaign battles if you know what your doing. You also have to be a job that can take a beating. (PLD, BLU, RDM, NIN/DNC, ect) When the campaign starts and there are beastmen idling around the fort, pull them 1 by 1 towards the advancing NPCs. When the mob is about to die, get another one and wait for the NPCs to finish the first one. Rinse and repeat untill all that is remaining is the MB of the defending army. Being one of the jobs that can take a beating is for when you pull a link of 2-3 mobs by accident. This allows you to wipe out the army, without fear of NPCs getting rushed by 8 mobs at once.

This is a very good strategy to use in any beastman-controlled zone. However, in the beastman strongholds this should only be done by someone who is uh, very skilled at pulling, as you can have the entire beastman army there at one time.

[Suiram]

I made these posts about Beadeaux takeover, but ignoring the maps/positions it can be modified for any stronghold (just learn the routes the NPCs take) and for that matter any regular zone if you're on a server that's having issues holding those.

http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/69744...ml#post2505263

http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/69744...ml#post2511505

[Antithesis]

Would the takeover strategy apply for The Sarutabaruta and Arganau fronts?

[Suiram]

Yes. The strategies we used to take over Beadeaux/Oztroja/La Vaule were originally developed (not by me personally or my friends but sort of a collaborative effort with a group of hardcore JP bastokers at the time) when Campaign was overpowered and almost every server had nonstop city battles. We used it to take over Pashhow twice, Grauberg (maybe also twice) and Rolan. (Not simultaneously, just one zone per week--see next paragraph.)

The thing is, with the amount of effort it takes it's only really feasible to apply to one zone a week. So it works when you have stronghold campaigns and are trying to take over to unlock the BC, and it works if you lost or are on the verge of losing all regular areas and you just want to prevent a city campaign by taking one zone. But it won't really work to take over multiple zones in order to unlock stronghold campaign battles, unless you've got 4 of them locked up and just need to take over the last one.

One other thing worth mentioning that not many knew until someone here posted about it, is that if you are focused on taking over a stronghold, don't worry about any other zones. If you take over Oztroja, say, but lose Saruta and Garlaige the same week, the Yagudo won't try to take back Oztroja yet, so you can spend then next week focused on getting the regular zones, and then you'll have Plucking Wings access the week after (and during that week the Yagudo will try to take it back, but by then you'll have had your week of Ops and hopefully your Roundel).


Edit: Also, if you are just trying to take that one zone to prevent city battle, it's sort of an art to picking the best one. The battles seem to prefer 1~2 zones over the course of the week (random each week), and so you need to keep an eye out for that, and that's where you'll want to mount your effort when the time comes.

[Yinnyth]

You could solo offensive campaign battles if you know what your doing. You also have to be a job that can take a beating. (PLD, BLU, RDM, NIN/DNC, ect) When the campaign starts and there are beastmen idling around the fort, pull them 1 by 1 towards the advancing NPCs. When the mob is about to die, get another one and wait for the NPCs to finish the first one. Rinse and repeat untill all that is remaining is the MB of the defending army. Being one of the jobs that can take a beating is for when you pull a link of 2-3 mobs by accident. This allows you to wipe out the army, without fear of NPCs getting rushed by 8 mobs at once.

I've done this a few times, and it usually works, but the npcs have some weird AI glitch that makes them occassionally drop what they're doing and blitz the tower. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen... one second, all the npcs are attacking a yagudo, the next second, the commanding officer rushes off and engages the Yagudo commanding officer at the tower (and immediately gets destroyed). I've seen it happen twice in a single battle at Sauro once. First the commanding officer rushed away ignoring my pull, then 3 pulls later, the rest of the platoon ran away ignoring my pull.

Some things I've noticed about attacking beastmen controlled areas are that the little pissant beastmen continually respawn if you kill any of them until they're forced to retreat. What causes them to retreat is really hard for me to pin down. There have been times I've helped defeat Vee Seju the Condemned in Garlaige, then the NPCs killed about 40 of his followers before they finally retreated.

Because of the constant respawn cycle, having those annoying PLD/DNC who always hold 3+ normal mobs way far away from the fight is actually useful. 3 normal mobs being held away from the tower are 3 mobs that can't constantly respawn and beat on the npcs. A few plds holding normal mobs and a few healers for the npcs, and most battles can be won eventually.

blm/rdm is the strongest job I've had luck soloing beastmen controlled areas with. Gravity is good for pulling single enemies towards your advancing forces with. Sleepga can slow down the damage the npcs are taking, and hopefully pull hate off them so you can kite for a while. Cures are useful when things get too jumbled for the enemies to be seperated out. But more importantly, certain NMs can be manaburned fairly easily. Dee Xalmo the Grim is completely deadly in close quarters because he spams hundred fists and gets endoom and doom as a WS at low HP. But his movement speed is lower than other NMs, so you can outrun him with gaiters and bad pathing until you can land grav again. I've solo'd him down to 58% on my best day, but at that point he was completely resisting gravity and had no more MP to aspir. I'm betting 4 or 5 decent BLMs could take down nearly any NM.

I've been trying to get Windy to take control of Oztroja on Fenrir for a while, but the fighting there is just plain brutal. There are no safe places to pull because of all the normal mobs that can aggro/link. There's almost always 2 or 3 enemies forces guarding the tower, and Windy sends forces 1 at a time like idiots so they all get slaughtered. The NPCs don't help you with the normal mobs who aggro you, and even if you kill them, they respawn so fast it may as well be instant. The only way I can think of reliably taking control is by having 18 blms there, picking 1 target, and timing aga III on it.

[Suiram]

I explained this in one of the threads I linked but (at least for strongholds, and probably all areas) it's 10% of forts lowered. So like, if you're just starting La Vaule takeover and forts are at 300 when waves get sent, the mobs will retreat at 270. However, if you get to, say 282, and another wave arrives they'll hop up to 292. Usually this means you have to kill 10 more mobs than you otherwise would have, but sometimes they retreat earlier, I'm not sure why.

With the NPCs randomly rushing the fort, are you sure they were going after the lead commander? Every time I've seen this happen it can be explained by something like this: a NPC gets hate on a mob but doesn't kill it, fights another mob (gets hit so attacks it instead). People kill the other mob with hate and it respawns at fort, after 1~3 mobs that NPC is out of possible targets, so instead of aggroing the one nearby, it goes after the respawned one it had hate on from earlier, and all other NPCs link and follow. This wouldn't make sense if they were going after the Beastman unit leader though, since that never respawns, but maybe they chased an NQ and the leader aggroed and got hate on them all quickly and so it seemed that way?

Also, I personally like the infinite respawns. Especially in regular campaign, you can take a mob and hide it off somewhere to solo without being a dick because people never run out of mobs until they retreat. Unlike in defensive campaigns where there's 10 per wave and if you hide one people show up and stand around for 10min until you kill it and waste their time (which is why I don't do it in defensive campaign, and try to avoid them in general).

[Gwynplaine]

The system is a really bum deal the way Square constructed it.

Firstly the timing of the sunday tally excludes most of the NA population from being able to participate. You either have to reside somewhere approximating a Japanese time-zone (most of Europe and Australia seem ok as well), or commit yourself to staying up through ridiculous hours of the night, or just be one of those people that likes getting up late at night/early mornings.

As if that weren't enough, you need to commit yourself or convince others to help you with the effort over several hours. It's not like you can just drop by for a bit, kill a few mobs, and then assume everything will turn out. It's all or nothing. If it doesn't work you just wasted lots of valuable time.

There is only one reasonably sane and realistic way to do it as far as I'm aware. Which is to just house a long merit party (of the non-merit earning variety) at the fort to continuously kill enemies in between battles. Then line up mobs in the path of the incoming NPCs for them to mow down. The frequency of the battles and how well they actually do is affected by the nations stats and weekly voting outcome which is just another crapshoot.

So it's doable if you're willing to bend over backwards to suit Square's arbitrary and non-fun whims. (Some people are, there's a lot of potential money to be made after all)

One idea I had considered was making a thread in the WotG section for players to announce their intent for staging a stronghold takeover that week on their server. That way other people who are interested could be notified ahead of time and help out if they like. On the other hand some random people could be more of a hindrance than a help. Maybe it could be a decent idea now that stronghold takeovers have become even harder, and advanced has merged with standard though.

[Suiram]

I agree with everything you just said except for the first part. And I don't really disagree with that either (it would be nice if it updated in a fashion like mog tablets where different times of day got an easier shot, although in a predictable non-random fashion for this) but unless these things are radically different from server to server, my own experience has been if you can get enough people to do the NA-afternoon-to-late-evening chunk, and if you make a decent amount of progress in that time, then the serious JP campaigners will show up as your people start to get tired and log to help carry you over to majority and sustain it until conquest.

National affiliation doesn't much matter, either, since people (NA and JP) who--few as they may be--can see the cause-and-effect between helping and getting a mantle/sash/gaxe(lol)/roundel will show up knowing they can just switch nations after.

[Yinnyth]

With the NPCs randomly rushing the fort, are you sure they were going after the lead commander? Every time I've seen this happen it can be explained by something like this: a NPC gets hate on a mob but doesn't kill it, fights another mob (gets hit so attacks it instead). People kill the other mob with hate and it respawns at fort, after 1~3 mobs that NPC is out of possible targets, so instead of aggroing the one nearby, it goes after the respawned one it had hate on from earlier, and all other NPCs link and follow. This wouldn't make sense if they were going after the Beastman unit leader though, since that never respawns, but maybe they chased an NQ and the leader aggroed and got hate on them all quickly and so it seemed that way?

I can't be certain the commander was the original target, but when I caught up with them, that was definately who they were fighting, and they would have needed to have some bad pathing to find him there.

On that Sauro battle where I saw it twice, there were only 2 players there. One was me, and the other my dualboxed whm mule. I was pulling Yagudo to the closed gate that the npcs always come through and sleeping them there. Since it's a choke point, they have no choice but to see the enemies I sleep there. Sometimes I'd get 2, but 2 against 10 is still no big deal- especially with my mule there healing them. Then suddenly the commander (either Haja or Vhino... I forget which) just rushed off for the tower leaving her smaller units fighting my pulls. When I caught up to her, she was fighting Yaa Haqa and about 4 of his blms. About 3 pulls later, the rest of her forces completely ignored my pull and ran off to their deaths.

Salt in the wound, they still had hate on my pull, so when they wiped, it linked Yaa Haqa, and he came looking for me. You'd think the battle would have ended when all the NPCs were dead, but Yaa Haqa ran up to me, used sweep, then did a flying pile driver on my face and the battle ended the moment I hit the dirt.

Edit: I went over the posts you linked, but couldn't find anything about the effect of killing enemy commanders and the imps. I like to target the imps since they stop healing and buffing if you keep them occupied, but I don't really see the point if they keep repopping and have no impact on the fortifications level.

[Shamaya]

I agree, Asura's definitely not a server to care about campaigning. To be fair though roundels aren't impossible to obtain. I think they bounce between 500k-2m more than the price on servers which supply them. Just checked the price and it seems to be about 5m. Guarantee you that at that rate more will be sold soon.

[Suiram]

Regarding killing the commanders, it's difficult to tell now because every mob you kill has an effect on the progress bar, but back before that was the case (when progress bar would only go up/down as a result of units retreating or warping victorious) it seemed like killing the commander would increase the amount of progress changed when they retreated.

A lot of the commanders are considerably easier to kill when you are fighting without tags. Can duo Crimsonarmor, for instance, melee+mage, since he doesn't melee, and his AoEs only hit one person. And any AoE spells/WS that they use (or any mobs use) only hit the target, (and any NPCs or anyone nearby with tags), without tags you don't get hit even in the same PT. (Although I haven't done this in a while, this could have changed in the last version update since they always ninja change stuff.)

Imps I wouldn't bother, like you said. Just try to keep NPCs far enough that they won't run over, since they have a semi-regular pattern.

[macross]

I think they retreat sooner sometimes cause of morale. I remember back when we first recaptured grauberg to liberate bastok, we won so many fights there in a row that all we needed to do was kill 3 turtles and they would retreat right away, before our npcs even showed up. This was over a span of 2 days of battles won.

When I go to attack the hometowns, we are usualy sam/dnc or pld/dnc with soboros and joytoys. Pulls with 5 mobs are fine cause everyone can solo a mob np. You just have to kill as many mobs as you can, as each mob you kill gives you a little more red in the bar.

There's no need to change the tally times for campaign. If you got an army of people to attack it during NA times, they can go to sleep and the JP players can take over from there. No one will go there if they see no one there and no red progress. But if you put like a big 10-20% chunk in there, people will start to show up. The last time bismark got lavaule, I had a group of 6 NA friends, and there were 4 random jpn helping out. This continued for 4 hours and we got like 10%, then a bunch of jpn players started coming when there was 8 hours to go, and we easily captured it.

[Ivana]

You could solo offensive campaign battles if you know what your doing. You also have to be a job that can take a beating. (PLD, BLU, RDM, NIN/DNC, ect)...Being one of the jobs that can take a beating is for when you pull a link of 2-3 mobs by accident. This allows you to wipe out the army, without fear of NPCs getting rushed by 8 mobs at once.

You can solo offensive battles with probably any job. You can just RR if you pull a link. Sometimes you want to pull a link anyways if the mobs are dying too fast.