NotSerfs

I'm just opening this up as a place to discuss ways and means to help lower level players level up, thus increasing the overall power level of our alliance.

There are 3 main bottle necks on the road to power that I see and experience as a habitual reincarnater:
1. Information: This is one we actually do a good job with in the forums, the rookery and soon-to-be Facebook.  We have good resources and places where people can learn the finer points from our own experiences.
2. Silver: This is what leveling up comes down to at the lowest levels.  Getting the buildings upgraded increases your level, command points and power.  But these cost silver.  Getting that inflow is crucial through the first 70 levels or so.  More silver also buys more sworn swords which means more power and the ability to get your own stuff in adventures, AvA and adventures and challenges. 
3. Time on challenges, quests and adventures: Reincarnating means trying to burn through book one and if you're trying to get all the fealty houses it's beneficial to do this as fast as possible.  There are times where having another sword swinging through a challenge can be a great help.

#1 and #3 are places where alliance help has been critical to getting me through faster.  Challenges used to be an enormous time sink as I might have a SS committed for an entire day trying to hack and slash my way through to some relatively good gear.  But nowadays, I have several go-to high level folks that have no problems joining my challenges and within just a couple of hours my sword is free and I have the good loot.  so far its been the biggest tangible boon provided by being an alliance member.

#2 is perhaps where we have yet to truly tap in, and where the greatest potential is for growth.  Experiementation has led to some nice discoveries:
When someone barters me from a higher level, we both get silver.  However the one "attacking" sacrifices their SS for relatively small rewards.  But the smaller guy benefits by both the silver AND the seals they get from a successful defense. if you haven't gotten your obsidian dagger yet, this would be a great way for the upper level person to do it.  Perhaps FB or the forums is a good place to match people questing for the dagger with people needing the silver.

this is just opening the dicussion with a few of my thoughts but there are probably other good ideas waiting to be shared!

I suspect they might have changed it since the wiki was written.  Basically, the smart thing for them to do would be to default that talent point on level 13 thus making it very clear and very simple.  But they don't.  Perhaps one day I might wake up to find all of my fealty buildings locked, but I sincerely doubt it enough that I'm going to continue to pick the talent I want to make permanent as I think is in the spirit of the game. 

when you reach level 13, all of your prior buildings unlock automatically but you have to manually spend one talent to unlock your current fealty building. 

And since we are discussing talents, my current strategy is to only spend that single one until I get to level 65.  You don't HAVE to spend them when you get them.  Then I have 64 talent points to pour into the different attack/defend aspects or into the fealty house if they have something good.  It takes at least that long to decide what most of your soldiers are going to be good at or what you need them to be good at.  First couple incarnations I was a harrassing machine and the last one I put a lot more into fight and sabotage.  People who have spare talents have more options.

You want a guide for crafting?
Or how anbout the best place to find resources and loot on an adventure?
Or how to build a good defense on fight or swindle or steal?

It's all right here:
http://www.editgrid.com/user/saltiresfan/GOTA

Best chart EVER for building, finding and using stuff.  It's color coded and everything!  You can download and highlight to your hearts content.

Enjoy!

ok, i really do not understand the percentage and so on study..i am preparing now for reincarnation..what would you prefer (for example) to make pernament and why -legendary broadsword of fish (8,5,5 and 10%bribe A, 5% Fight A) or dangerous Hefty broadsword wtih just 30 points for Battle...thanks

I wrote a bit on it in the reincarnation thread, but the short answer is the +30 Hefty broad sword.  The bribe attack is not worth so much, although 10% is a really good amount.  If it was 10% for battle or fight attacks the decision would be more difficult.  When you reincarnate and put that hefty sword in the hands of a peerless you are keeping, you'll slice through challenges and get more cool stuff much faster and easier.

Wow - we have a young, but growing crew.

Currently working through my 3rd incarnation - lvl 62
Battle 162 (Fight 56/30, Harrass 42/16, Aid 18/16)
Trade 166 (Barter 40/14, Bribe 16/14, Swindle 30/28)
Intrigue 77 (spy 16/14, Steal 17/15, Sabotage 16/14)

Currently Stark
Formerly Greyjoy, Tyrell
Trying pick the pace up in advancing, but also trying to decide when to to try for Lannister or Baratheon or Targyreon

This is an interesting comparison with some interesting results Manza.  While percentage is a winner, it isn't by as much as I would have thought considering the level and power of your keep.  I would have guessed the differences to be a lot more.  Especially in the case of your first pair, this seems to suggest that specializing doesn't offer a clear enough advantage compared to going with a general approach.  The one who is trained more towards general battle lends her stats to all three fight attacks, while the second guy is specializing in fight attack only.  Clearly, more research is needed, especially on the defense side of things.  I'm also interested in comparing results after a SS is wounded, if the advantage becomes more marked.  With your keep stats, I'm guessing that you don't suffer wounds nearly as often!

An experiment with percentages vs player plus stats

After our camps were repeatedly decimated and sworn swords (SS’s) all but murdered the last round, I set out to see if I could figure out how to better garrison defenders at our camps. For me, I have always based the power level of my SS’s on the +level of their stats and weaponry paying little attention to the percentages which tend to be very small numbers.  Why go to the considerable trouble and expense of crafting a metal shield that takes a hand slot and only delivers a +1 for battle when I could have a long sword that delivers +3 for far cheaper and more quickly?  The metal shield delivers 4% to battle when defending, which adds nothing when adventuring which is what my SS’s spend most of their time doing, or attacking in PtP play.
Beyond the obvious trade-offs when training for percent vs broad stats is what happens when a SS is wounded in battle.  Every time a SS is wounded, they suffer a deduction on their broader stats, causing a decrease in their effectiveness.  Subsequent wounds and defeats cause more deductions, resulting in a downward cascade that makes the SS much easier to kill on subsequent attacks.  However, there is no corresponding deduction on the percentages that I can see.

 My hypothesis is that training and equipping SS’s based upon percentage instead of raw plus stats and having specialized SS’s garrisoned would be more effective especially in the camps we tend to build up to higher levels.  Could a lower level SS with higher percentages of defensive stats more effectively defend against SS’s with higher stats?  A second question I had was what if the SS was trained almost exclusively in increasing their specialty percent; would they still be able to fight equally well despite any number of wounds?

METHOD
I first wanted to see the effect of percentages vs broad level power.  So I sent a SS named Eli out on a simple quest to the Neck to prevent the Mudders Poaching, the first adventure:
Initial ss (Eli) = rare +2 battle (no equipment or seals or boons)
House level 111
House battle stat +277
Talent +24% to fight when attacking
Talent +14% when attacking or defending
Mudders poaching Battle +6

ADVENTURE 1: +277 + 2 + 64% = 458
The first thing I discovered is that it was impossible to continue an adventure once the ss advanced a level without training them first.  This made Eli’s stats go from +2 to +4, which made the next adventure thus:
ADVENTURE 2: 277 + 4 +  64% = 461
I then decided I wanted Eli to specialize in skirmish defense so sent her on one more adventure, only this time with my skirmish/harrass stats which are 2% higher than my fight stats:

ADVENTURE 3: 277+4+66% = 467
Already, there was some interesting things to note.  Increasing Eli’s power by +2 from +2 to + 4 yields a gain of 3 points on her total attack points.  Increasing her percentage by 2% increased her from 461 to 467 for a gain of 6 points toward her attacks or twice as much. 
At this point, Eli has reached the next level, and I made her a skirmisher, increasing her 1% in harass attacks and defenses and sent her back to the Neck to harass.
ADVENTURE 4: +277+4 + 67% = 470
Adding a single percentage yielded 3 additional attack points to Eli’s total.  So I added a Militia unit to Eli, giving her a +1 for a total battle stat of +5.  I sent her back to the Neck to harass one more time.
ADVENTURE 5: +277 + 5 + 67% = 471
Next, I decided to send Eli to the Frost Fangs to Swindle in a battle she was likely to lose (+209 + 24% = 260 vs 294) and sure enough she lost, getting one wound and she suffered a deduction of 1 point.  However she kept her percentage.  So I sent her back to the Neck for another skirmish:
ADVENTURE 6:  +277 + 4 + 67% = 470

 
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
When a player is first starting out, or just after reincarnating, their total number of points is low, and so it makes sense to train SS’s on the basis of their raw power rather than with percentages, since the gain is mathematically small.  However as they advance and gain more total stats, the percentages become more important.  In the above example, I was able to increase Eli’s power by 3 for each percentage increase.  So even though a metal shield only has a +1 stat, a 4% defense means it equates to a gain of +12 against attacks, making it far superior to the long sword.
Adventure 6 answered the second part of my question.  Eli was able to fight at nearly full strength, even with one wound.  The loss of strength was negligible whereas if I had added another fight point instead of a skirmish point, her strength would have been reduced in larger proportion.
This has some important ramifications in PtP defenses, AvA battles and garrisoning.  The camps we build typically carry a great number of points (500+), especially in later phases when attacks are more consistent.  This means that both attackers and defenders with higher percentages will fare much better than those that rely on the simple stats alone.  And this makes the extra time, expense and bother of crafting well worth the effort especially for higher level players.  In PtP play, the boons come into their own when a player has stats above 200.  Adding seals to rare and better equipment further empowers them. 

This has totally changed the way I equip and train my SS’s, paying more attention to the percentages than the other stats.  By training my SS’s exclusively in their specialty, I can make a very cheap and low-level SS almost equivalent in power to a more expensive peerless SS just by training differently.  I can now begin trading out equipment to reflect this new focus, which it is not a coincidence comes from the higher level and more expensive buildings.