You Have Been Revolted

The title of this post reflects a player's worst nightmare when playing in a revolt world. The following is a step by step guide in case your city is being put into revolt. It will help you to do everything you can to keep your city. The start is to call for help. It also explains why information is key for other players to know what they should send your way.

The first order of the day is: Don't panic! You have 12 hours to get in help.

So your city has just been put into revolt.... 

What do I do now? 

The first thing to do is relax. Grepolis is a game which favors the defender. From the time of the revolt being started the city is still guaranteed yours for the next 12 hours.

Take the time to fill out a support template using BBCode (if necessary, one post for each city) and post in the appropriate alliance forum. Do not mark your post as important; everyone's post is important when they have a city in revolt. If you have more than one tab to publish in, copy and paste your work before you create your post. If you want to be sure it looks right first, create the post and then edit it to copy it.

What information is required, and why is it important? 

It is important that the title of your post includes the ocean number. "help i'm being attacked" as a thread title is a certain way to ensure you will not get any help from me and most others. The ocean number helps your teammates prioritize where they can help most effectively, but spells can be cast with immediate effect irrespective of distance!

On the subject of spells - NEVER cast city protection (a spell from god Athena) on an ally's city, unless specifically requested. This is an offensive spell, which can best be used to stop a player's allies from supporting him with positive spells.

The reason for using BBCode is to make it as easy as possible for your teammates to support you by just clicking on the link provided. If you give them direct links to the important information, they are more likely to help you than if you make them do the work of finding out what you're referring to.

The posting of correct and full times is especially critical. It can make the difference between brute force defense, intelligent defense, and no defense at all. Brute force defense is simply that - you fill the city with so many defensive units, that NOTHING will get through. Unfortunately, no one usually is in a position to do this. Intelligent defense uses the defensive forces available as efficiently as possible. No defense at all happens when your time data is wrong.

All times must be posted in server time in the format hh:mm:ss. That is how the armed forces show their times: hours:minutes:seconds. Midnight would be 24:00:00. I will explain as to why the seconds are important further down. Server time is determined by the alliance you are playing in. The alliance will tell you if it uses UTC (London), UTC +1 (Amsterdam) or any other available option. Using the exact time preference of the alliance is important as different cities might switch to daylight saving time on different calendar dates. (Server time can be set under "Settings", "Timezone" in the menu on the left of your screen. But you knew that anyway, and did it ages ago, didn't you?)

The city in revolt 

The attacked city

Answer the question: Where do you need support sent to? = Enter your city name in BBCode.
BBCode helps Grepolis players taking shortcuts to help you.

The attacking player(s) and alliance(s)
If you have been revolted by a player with one 5000 point city and no alliance, who has just lost 800 troops to revolt you, it is very unlikely that he will be in a position to attempt to take your city any time soon. It is more likely that a real threat is coming from larger players, with more resources, and backing from an alliance. We need to know who we are dealing with. Players with offensive units might choose to attack that player rather than send support into your city; this is also a form of defense.

Which god does your city worship?
Mythical units can only support cities worshiping the same god as their city of origin. That includes divine envoys; they may look the same, but they are allergic to wrong god smell. Any support sent that has mythical units from the wrong god mixed in will turn back home entirely including all normal units.

What hero at which level do you have in the city?

Certain heroes have bonus features that increase the effectiveness of one kind of unit or another. It will influence the choice of the supporting player in what units to send to be most effective. A hero like Leonidas and at a high level bring in more support than Jason at level 1.

Incoming attacks?
Do you have incoming attacks at the time of posting? If so, have you identified a colony ship among them?
List all incoming attacks with their arrival times including seconds (hh:mm:ss) and clearly mark the colony ship if you were able to identify it.
Update this information regularly if the situation changes.
Without this information it is not possible for your allies to mount an intelligent defense.

Details please!

Buildings: Information on the level of the city wall and if there is a tower in place are essential as they add hugely to defense values of all units.

Academy: Information if the following researches have been made in that city: Phalanx, battering ram, and divine selection, are also essential. Many Grepolis players base the type of support on this information. Advisers: Having a commander makes up for a lower wall for example.

Note that all the city details and the hero influence all units in the city on land and to sea.

Once you have completed and posted the template, post the battle reports leading up to the revolt directly below it. NEVER forget to post the revolt report.

OK, I've done the paperwork, what now?

If you have incoming attacks in the blue revolt period, you will have to decide what to do. If you have maximal walls and a tower, you will want to protect these walls to make life for the attacking land units as hard as you can when red revolt starts. If on the other hand your walls have been razed, you will want to conserve your troops for the all important colony ship attack. You either dodge each attack or you might be able to park them in a friendly strong city that is not being attacked.

How do I spot a colony ship? 

Colony ships are the slowest moving sea unit in the game (slow transport and Hydra are nearly three times faster). If you have an incoming attack then click on the originating city and choose attack. Click on colony ship as the attacking unit and enter a 1 in the box (even when you have no colony ship in your city), and check the travel time.
If this time corresponds to the time of the incoming attack - bingo, we have a colony ship. If unsure, repeat with 1 slow transport. If the latter is faster than what is coming to you, bingo again.
Travelling times may vary depending on cartography research (+10% speed) and lighthouse (+15% speed), even so they are pretty hard to miss.

So I've spotted my incoming colony ship, how does that help me? 

An experienced attacker will not send just one attack with a colony ship, a couple of lightships and a handful of troops to take your city. He will send waves of attacks to clear the way for his important and expensive colony ship. Assuming that we have limited defenses available we do not want to waste them on these, we want to kill his colony ship.

Having found the colony ship, you don't stop looking. Clever players often send two or even three attacks with a colony ship. Don't get tripped up by that old trick.

So how do I go about getting ready for phase two of the revolt? 

Any attacks arriving in the first 12 hours of a revolt are designed to kill off any new defenses you may have built or recruited yourself, brought in from your other cities, or received as support from allies. They cannot take your city! With catapults, they can do nasty things to your city wall. If you have maximal walls and tower, it is worth protecting them with lots of troops because you have a high defense bonus and might be able to kill everything thrown at you and keep your walls up for later.

We use excess support, where available, to face these attacks and collect battle points from them. Otherwise, if not available, we want to treat them as normal farming attacks: dodge them, gain as many battle points as possible from them, and give them as little as possible in return, both in battle points and resources.

So when do I defend? 

After 12 hours of  blue revolt, phase 2 starts called red revolt (RR) - the attacking player now has 12 hours to land his CS in your city, otherwise the revolt ends, and the city remains yours. This is the period within which we need to defend.

How does the revolt work from the attacker's point of view? 

The experienced attacker will try to ensure that his colony ship gets through by clearing the way for his main but not necessarily last attack - the one containing his colony ship.

He will send lightship attacks first to clear your harbor of sea defenses. After this he will send his ground troops with smaller light ship escorts to attack your defending ground troops. The third wave is his colony ship escorted by lightships and ground troops, which he hopes will land easily as he has already destroyed your defenses. Don't get fooled; he can send attacks after his colony ship attack. He can even send several colony ship attacks. If a colony ship lands, the attack coming later will be harmless. He therefore runs  no risk sending them.

OK, you've got me scared now, how can we beat that? 

The weakness in the attacker's plan is the so-called anti-timer. Ideally, the attacker would like his (numerous) ground attacks to all hit your city 1 second before his colony ship, with his (numerous) lightship attacks hitting 1 second before them. That would not be possible to defend against except by brute force defense.

The anti-timer counters this by adding a random element to the timing of unit movements. The travel time of every attack or support units movement is subject to a +/- of several seconds. That means that if I launch an attack to hit a target at 12:00:00 it could get there several seconds earlier or later.

This makes the above scenario of - sea units attack - 1 second gap - land troops attack - 1 second gap - colony ship lands - almost impossible to achieve and is why intelligent defense is possible. Butt support suffers the same problem of timing, don't forget that.

Our goal is to get enough defenses into the city between the last conventional attack and the landing of the colony ship to kill his colony ship, and save the city.