You’ve got 100k scouts headed your way. What do you do? Open gates or closed gates? What will the losses be? This is a step by step guide starting with basic defenses to basic bombs and progressing to advanced strategy to counter a guy who really knows his scout strategies.
Phase 1: Basic Bomb
There are 100k scouts coming and you have the choice to open or close your gates. The first thing you need to know is the purpose of scout bombs..to kill your archers. This can only happen if your gates are open. When scouts attack by themselves with no other accompanying units, they are immune to traps/abatis/trebuchets. The 5k range setting that traps/abs normally provide is ignored and scouts are within range of all your units in the first round. Then among all the available choices, they will attack your archers and completely ignore any layering units present.
If both players have high techs, you will likely lose 16k archers per 100k scout bomb that hits you. With closed gates, you will lose only around 1k AT (usually less). Sure archers can be replaced faster than ATs, but they are much more expensive.
CLOSE YOUR GATES
Phase 2: Bomb + Real Attacks
Good players relying on scout bombing for damage don’t want you to close your gates. In order to keep your gates open, they will send real attacks such as archer rainbows at you to land within seconds of incoming scout bombs. If your gates remain closed, the rainbow will land, ravage your wall defenses, and you will be plundered.
To defend against the rainbow, you have to open your gates. This means you will be hit by the rainbow as well as the scout bombs. Many players will check to see if you opened your gates and end up recalling their rainbow attack. So basically the rainbow was a feint to ensure the bomb lands home. They will repeat this tactic until the bombs have diminished your archers enough so that they feel losses are acceptable..and then they won’t be recalling the real attacks.
To defend against this, you have to understand what makes scouts target your archers and ignore all other units. The answer is: troop value. In general, attacking units will prioritize their attack against the defending troop type with the combined highest attack. The simple way of calculating attack power is to multiply the unit’s base attack (as found in the description of that unit in the barracks) by the number of units. So say you have 100 archers and 100 swordsmen.
Value would be:
Archers: base attack=120, # of archers=100………120 x 100 = 12000 value
Swords: base attack=100, # of swords=100……….100 x 100 = 10000 value
Archers have a higher value than swordsmen do here, so an oncoming scout bomb would head straight for your archers. However, what if you had 120 swordsmen and 100 archers?
Archer value: 12000
Swords value: 12000
Since both units have equal values, the scouts will target the closest lowest rank of the two units: swords. (Workers have rank 1, Warriors, rank 2, Scouts rank 3, ….) You just successfully deflected scouts from your archers. [ The actual attack power is based on the attack modifiers of the defending troops, including technology, hero attack, and the war horn. After these are multiplied together with the unit base attack, the value is rounded down (5.99 becomes 5) and then multiplied by the unit count. This rounding step makes the equation "non linear". If your troop ratios are exact, there's a chance that the archers will be targeted with one hero defending, but not targeted with another hero defending. [When in doubt, add 10% to the ratio. ]
So in order to defend against a player who uses scout bombs in combination with real attacks, the first thing to look at is his timing. How much time is there between the scout bombs and the real attack? If there is a large enough window, you can keep your gates closed during the bombs and only open to repel the real attacks.
However, if the attacker is good at timing his attacks, all these waves will likely hit in a window of only 1 to a couple seconds. This gives you no time to play peek-a-boo with your gates. This is where the troop values come into play. If you have units more valuable than your archers, they will be hit by the scout bomb instead.
Ratios to look for are 3 to 1 warriors, 0.8 to 1 pikes, and 1.2 to 1 swordsmen. Hands down the fastest/cheapest unit to make is the warrior. Warriors also have lower food consumption compared to pikes and swords so I’m recommending warriors for this. With a 3 to 1 ratio, that means with 100k archers in your city, you would need 240k warriors in order to deflect a scout bomb to them.
A little bit of loss expectation for you (assuming attacker has full techs and you have 9/10 for yours:
Scout bomb led by 200 att hero: lose about 22k warriors (vs about 17k archers)
Scout bomb led by 300 att hero: lose about 28k warriors (vs about 22k archers)
Though keep in mind, if you have exactly the 3 to 1 ratio, your warriors will only deflect the first bomb since the losses incurred will drop their value below the archers’ value. So you need to have 3 to 1 ratio…and then I’ll be conservative and say an extra 25k warriors for every bomb you want to deflect before training more warriors. If you have a high attack hero, warriors are very quick to retrain, but if someone throws six 100k bombs at you at one time, it would be hard to maintain your 3 to 1 ratio unless you had a surplus of warriors to cover it.
OPEN GATES AND KEEP 3 WARRIORS FOR EACH ARCHER IN YOUR CITY (plus 25k warriors per bomb you expect your attacker to hit with)
Phase 3: Offensive Defense
Using scout bombs is a risky tactic if one doesn’t know how to use it properly. For maximum damage, it’s better to send a high attack hero to lead the bomb. The problem is that all scout bombs are technically ‘defeats’ according to the game and there is a potential to lose the attack hero if the city’s Feasting Hall has open slots.
To counter this, advanced bombers will often send waves of 1 scout at you. Leading these 1 scout waves are some random low attack heroes probably recruited from the inn only minutes ago. These 1 scout waves are used to fill any empty FH slots you might have with these crappy heroes. This allows the bomber to use his real attack heroes with his 100k bombs without fearing their capture.
To defend against this, you need to check the timing of his attacks. If you are online and the incoming scout waves have a couple seconds separating them, then you will have time to release any captured heroes from your FH and open those slots up again. Losing a high level attack hero on a scout bomb is going to ruin that guy’s day. So when you see some waves of 1 scout incoming, you know the guy is throwing up a screen to cover a very high level hero on one of his 100k waves. If you see a large enough window to dismiss captured heroes in between waves, then I’d recommend sending your excess heroes from your defending city to free up FH slots. This will allow you to possibly net one or more of his good heroes.
To calculate what your own scout bombs will hit, or to gain a good idea of what may be vulnerable in your cities to scout bombs, use this linke Scout Bomb Calculator
