Campaign Recap and Observations

[Not Kuno]

Transporter + co comes out every 4 minutes and don't do anything. I camped them for like an hour when I was bored in Eldieme one day. Whenever they got away I never saw fort/resources go up. They might only be for that campaign op or do something random like raise their nations prosperity/resources/funding etc.

I think the Bastok thread might have been accedently deleted or something. I'm not sure but I don't think it was intentional.

[Gwynplaine]

Also the red bar seems to empty every week and slowly fill up by the end of it. No idea what it's supposed to mean though, as I never see it go down.

I think youre right about them. They slowly fill up as the week goes on. Maybe they simply fill up slightly more with every campaign battle that takes place? So that they essentially display the general frequency of battles in each zone. Right now Bastok is open to battles, and the bar is maxed. Other zones have about 1/5th the bar filled, so it would sort of fit. Thanks SE for making this clear from day 1 assholes.

Edit: That can't be true because Windurst has almost half a bar and it's not open to attack. Orz maybe a generic "threat" level, idk...

[Ivana]

The same thing is happening on Asura. Since no one does campaign for Bastok on Asura, outside a few ppl, it has been easy for me to test a few things and find out exactly why bastok continues to fail, one thing being the fortification problem.

Plus a lot of the people that do Campaign in Bastok areas on Asura don't understand the concept of keeping the NPCs alive by simply pulling mobs to them and preventing them from rushing the fort.

The 2nd reason I have seen for fail with Bastok is the amount of helper imps that show up per wave of Quadav.

I've never had a problem with the imps, they don't seem to follow the mob when you pull them.

I think the non-battle repairs to the fort that increase beastmen influence/reduce Bastok influence make it really tough to win an area. That seems to force you to win every Campaign Battle which is hard sometimes because the Beastmen aren't always at the fort @ the start of the battle. Once the Bastok NPCs start attacking a fortification they become all stupid and focus on the fort unless attacked by Beastmen. The Beastmen will eventually pop up once the NPCs are stuck attacking the fort and pick off the NPCs one by one since for some mysterious reason only the person with aggro will attack and the NPC(s) next to him will just keep fighting the fort. Only way to win that kind of battle is to pull hate on the mob and drag the mob and NPC outside the fort but that can be hard to do.

[Melios]

I think that if a nation is struggling (usually Bastok, sometimes Windy), simply regaining one zone is the hard part. If that could be done though I think the situation would be much better already once people could travel easily and do Ops more often again.

Unfortunately, then - at least for Windurst - you have half the troops "undertaking the stalwart defense" of the city and effectively doing absolutely nothing at all while the beastmen steamroll over those that actually do fight in the other areas.

The fact San d'Oria doesn't seem to have this type of tactical stupidity makes me think SE sabotaged Windurst & Bastok campaign out of usual San d'Orian favoritism.....

[Gwynplaine]

I have been keeping note of the time between different waves in campaign and so far, it seems like there's always 16~minutes between the unit being "dispatched" and the unit spawning and beginning the attack. At least this seems to be the case for Markets, not sure for other zones or if other stats can make it differ.
Edit: Forgot to add, that this time between a unit spawning is included ACROSS battles. For instance if you get the message that a unit has been dispatched, then battle ends 6 minutes later, a new battle will necessarily have to start up again soon because that unit is still on its way and should spawn in 10 minutes.

I also encountered a windurst belfry that spawned Wildcat Vanguard npc's, which are NIN and use Ni level spells. Prosperity, I thought, factored into things like belfrys and mantelets etc., but windurst had almost no prosperity at the time... so what gives.

[tufrabza]

i think wafik hit the nail on the head, reason for sandy doing so well compared to the other nations is the AN gear is leaps and bounds better. i also think tanks are a slight issue, while i can nin/dnc, sam/dnc (soboro), or mnk/dnc and solo mobs just fine, i have seen no shortage of actual paladin tanks in any sandy region (while in windurst all i seem to find is crazy pups and poorly equiped mnks), and no offense, i do not travel to bastok regions so i can not talk about the battles there...(i still have not even been to bastok yet)

imps are pretty easy to kill, the horn breaks often and amnesia is VERY short duration...deegan forgot to mention that imps can also do aoe phalanx a huge nuisance.

[Gwynplaine]

Cliffnotes from new info SE gave in the gamewatch interview here:
http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60552

*Ops can somehow raise strength of medics
*tactical assesment has a larger effect than it may seem.
*When a city is attacked, it directly hurts their war funds and technological power.
*By taking back an area into their control, they can once again store up war funds and make a recovery.
*repeatedly doing soldier training in Campaign Ops will raise the average strength of your soldiers.
*if you perform Ops related to fund-raising and procurement of goods, those things will be improved.
*Specific units that win get stronger, and specific units that lose get weaker.
*when soldiers return home victorious and level up, training them vigorously is a big part of strengthening them.
*The Beastmen Confederate can send turrets out when they have the spare resources, it takes a lot of funds.
*Turrets use changes from week to week, one week they may appear, and the next they may not.
*Success of recon units raises likelyhood seige weapons appear.
*Certain Ops can appear/disappear because of funding.

[Ivana]

Some observations from our failed attempt to take back N. Gustaberg this past weekend:

The Preemptive Strike strategy seems to vary. In previous weeks, a lot of multi-units attacks were sent to Pashhow Marshlands. This past weekend the multi-units attacks seemed concentrated on North Gustaberg so we were able to get up to 50% influence just before the tally.

I had suspected but had not really confirmed it that after the tally your influence gets cut in half. After we hit 50% influence, subsequent victories did not seem to move the bar as much as when we were below 50%.

Fort repair units make things really hard because you lose 1 "influence point" every time they win. However, I didn't realize that the fort repair mobs are easily soloable. On the other hand that requires having 4-6 people to kill the mobs...

Twice in a row we managed to kill 4 out of the 6 fort repair mobs but the fort didn't get repaired much. Since the fort was still hurt the fort repair unit was being dispatched repeatedly to fix it which of course meant the influence went down more than it should have. If I had to do it again, I would just either make sure that we could kill all 6 mobs or just let them win so as to minimize the loss of influence. This also leads me to think that hurting the fortifications is detrimental when you are trying to take over an area since after X damage the fort repair unit will be called and you will likely lose influence. Of course no one is gonna stop whacking at the fort 'cause it gives exp and otherwise there is not much else to do.

[huckster]

Maybe the point is to spam http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Se...zure_I_(Bastok) in order to kill all support for the controlled region? No point in bringing the defences down if they're keep getting boosted again and again. Cut the supplies chains.

[Zhero]

Whats crazy, that I dont like the way people respond to campaign on Fairy, all they care about xp and they dont play the game properlly

[Not Kuno]

Whats crazy, that I dont like the way people respond to campaign on Fairy, all they care about xp and they dont play the game properlly

It's the same on bahamut. It sucks pretty bad but what can you do. :/

[Atlasion]

Very interesting and insightful. What does reducing a zones fortification to 0 do then?

[Gwynplaine]

FYI the more campaign I do the more complex little exceptions I see which make me doubt a lot of what I posted, so take all of that with some salt. Hopefully SE will wise up and implement that NPC they talked about to explain things better.

Very interesting and insightful. What does reducing a zones fortification to 0 do then?

I don't know from experience but over and update ago some people had posted that the fort would regain all of it's HP, however the maximum HP level was 1 less.