Intelligence from continent rankings

By Ajcatt

It's important to know what your opponent has for offense and defense, but it's even more important to know how much offense and defense they don't have, and this can be very difficult to learn. If you scout a city and see it has 10,000 troops, how do you know there aren't 60,000 more hiding somewhere else? Troops that are moving (other than on the way to attack you or an ally) are totally hidden, so there is a limit to what you can learn with scouting.

In the rankings, you can look up the ranking of people on a specific continent by how much offensive or defensive troop strength they have. This will show you the exact ranking of you and all your alliance members along with their troop strengths. It will also show you the the troop strengths of all the other players, but not which player goes with which figure: the player will be shown as "anonymous." But don't let that fool you, this is not really as anonymous as it sounds. If you know you are about to kill a bunch of troops of a particular player, check out the rankings before and after your attack and you should be able to tell which player's troop strength dropped. This will tell you how much total offense or defense they have left on the continent.

Attempting the most powerful goals - capturing or crushing a castle - are costly. The attacks are so slow, the opponent will most likely have plenty of time to arrange defenses. But if you know their total defenses are limited by using this technique, you can plan exactly how much force you will need to throw at them to make the attack successful.

Of course, you can never be 100% certain whose troops you are killing when you attack, because players can support each other. However, you can be totally certain when you kill troops by defending. If you know your opponent likes to sometimes attack with defensive troops, you can use the opportunity to discover their personal defensive troop level with absolute certainty.