Strategy

Builds
A build is a infrastructure plan or starting strategy. It typically involves a list of what buildings to build and units to draft in order to position your nation in a strategic position for mid to late game play. Different players typically utilizes different builds to begin a round. There is no one single build that trumps all other build as each strategy has its pros and cons.

Planning your build at the start of a round is typically extremely important. Reign is a game that progresses with real time, players that tend to begin with a strong build will usually end up at a better position to win a round compared to those with a poor build. Below are some examples of builds used by players who have previously been able to medal. These are not the only builds nor are they they best build in the game. However, they have proven to be successful with many older players such as Sanket, smallville, and Kill_Red all of whom has been placed in the top 3 in previous rounds of Reign.

Morale/Culture Build
This build focuses on gaining an edge in culture to gain advantages such as stronger defense via morale and cheaper land for easier expansion. This build typically has a player building a lot of towns.


 * Pros: High culture, cheap land, less units required on defense.


 * Cons: Less income at the beginning of a round.

City Build
The strategy focuses on the value of a city's land efficiency. It gives a lot more money then town, but does not give culture.


 * Pros: High income/land ratio


 * Cons: High cost to building cities, slower expansion, no culture gain

Town Build
Perhaps the most common strategy. This build focuses on the cheap price of Towns to build up quickly and efficiently with culture gain.


 * Pros: Cheap cost on towns, average income, culture gain


 * Cons: Requires deconstruction of towns in the later stages of the round in order to build cities.

Playing Strategies
Reign has countless possible strategies that people use. Strategies work differently depending on situations. These are two prominent strategies that are widely used in Reign.

Turtle
A Turtle nation tend to gather defensive units and takes advantage of a nation's morale as well as the defense efficiency ratings to boost their defense levels. They tend to be peaceful nations that expand by developing real estate and growing steadily. Due to the lower cost and faster building speed of defensive units compared to offensive, this is a strategy many new players tend to develop.

A Turtle nation should always make sure to pay attention to their defense and cultural advisers. By keeping your defense at average or above average and maintaining a happy nation, a turtle nation is able to progress throughout an entire round without being attacked.

Warmonger
A Warmonger styled nation often wars for most of their land. Warmonger nations tends to be aggressive and attacks often to gain the advantage of gaining fast land gains. This strategy is mostly advised for more experienced players as new players who do not understand the balance of different units as well as how the attacking system works will be demolished. This playing style is suited for players who wants high risk and high returns from their investment. Most players who are able to win a round must understand some forms of warmongering because as time progresses and a player amass more land, the cost of each land becomes exponentially higher.

War Tactics
Warring in R3 contains many elements. First off anyone who wishes to learn how to pick a war and attack other countries should study the defense page extremely carefully and learn to use the Defense Calculator. The defense formula is one of the most important elements towards warring and the understanding of the formula can bring a person great success at warring. A person should also make sure to look over the units and procedures on attacking before planning and making attacks.

Julian Defenders
A Julian Defender typically uses a large amount of Julian Tanks to build up Defense Efficiency then surround the Julian tanks with other units. Julian Tanks in this case will often dictate 60-80% of a person's total defense. The advantage to using this spread lies in the speed and cheap cost in which Julians are able to be produced. Against a person with this spread, normally Anti-Heavy Armor units are desired for attacking such as the Brute, Sparrow and Warthog will work best.

Air Defenders
Air Defenders is the opposite of a Julian Defender. Air Defenders relies on the special bonuses Air units receive and place roughly 60-90% of all their units in air. While the raw defensive power of these nations is lower than a Julian Defender, attacking them requires either Sickles, Guardians or Specter

Air Defenders are weak towards nations attacking with Sickles, Guardians and Specter as those units are built much faster and are much better value for their cost when confronting nations with a heavy Air Spread.

Specialty Defenders
Better players may often employ a specialty defense that can not be encompassed by the previous two sections. A prominent example is a defense spread made popular by the alliance Faithless. This spread utilizes Warthogs, normally an offensive unit, to defend a nation. The advantage of this is that the defender nation can utilize a much stronger retribution bonus if he is attacked with the use of morale and the sheer number of warthogs that the person has. Attacking specialty spreads should always be taken with more caution as sometimes an easy break may actually turn out to be a trap set by the defenders.

Tips to Attacking
Attacking is not something a person does on the whim. Occasionally players get lucky and are able to Vulture land at the right time. Most of the time an attack must be planned ahead of time and evaluated to make sure that the best units is being used. Often alliances may perform raids against a single nation. Unless the single nation is defended well, there is a high chance that the nation will be destroyed.

Attackers should also be wary of the following things, more info can be found on the Attacking page.


 * Unit bonuses of individual specialty units.


 * Retribution bonus to the person you are about to attack calculated based on morale.

Vulture
Vulturing is a strategy in which a nation waits until other nations have sufficiently broken down another nation's defense before attacking. This strategy allows a vulture nation to save valuable units while gaining lesser amounts of land. It is a popular strategy used by turtle nations. Alliance Raids also deploy this strategy as a way to save resources.

Raid
Raiding is done by alliances when multiple nations begins to attack a single nation for maximum land gain. Raids may be done by one or more alliances or even many solo nations conspiring together. Successful Raids can reduce a nation who was in the top ten all the way back down to 19 land.

Miscellaneous
Many strategies within Reign is considered controversial and blurs the line between Glitch Abuse and creative strategy. Below are some controversial strategies sometimes used in the game. Misuse of these strategies may result in a nation being Locked or Banned due to violations of the Game Rules.

Cache Rob
See: Cache Rob.

Scorching
Scorching is a strategy in which a nation completely sells off all of its assets and transfer all of its resource and units to another nation at the cost of their own. It is normally done as an endgame tactic between alliance members. The effectiveness of scorching can be debated as while it does make another nation stronger, the nation being "scorched" will be completely defenseless and is free land to everyone who is able to attack him. However, you can now instantly delete your account making this strategy widely used.


 * Sharing land with an ally or any other nation with this strategy is considered against the Game Rules

Low Land Money Nation
A nation must be 30 land or higher in order to export resources or units to another nation. However, at 30 land you are out of range of most Warmongers allowing them to provide a "Lord" nation with an endless supply of income.