10 Strategy tips
10.1 Basic strategy
When I play Liquid War, I always try to surround my opponents, and it usually works.
By the way, the computer has no strategy at all, he is a poor player, and if you get beaten by him, it means you have to improve yourself a lot!
But still, the computer doesn't do one thing which I've seen many beginners doing: he never keeps his cursor motionless right in the middle of his own fighters, for this is the best way to loose.
10.2 More strategy
Here are some more tips, kindly submitted by Jan Samohýl.
They were written for Liquid War 5
but most of them still appply.
- Try to cut your opponent off walls and surround him completely with your troops; when trying to penetrate his forces inside a tunnel, keep your troops at the wall (and force them ocassionaly to attack off the wall). I think this is a biggest weakness of the computer AI, that it doesn't know this.
- When luring your troops to outflank an enemy, always move your cursor through the enemy, not the other way around.
- To penetrate very narrow tunnels, stand back for a while and let some enemy troops come from the tunnel to you. Then surround them, destroy, repeat.
- I have observed that with more than 2 players (6), the game difficulty depends on the map in the following way: If the playing field is completely empty, without any holes (topologically equivalent to full circle), the game is the easiest, because you can just go through the middle to outflank your opponent. If there is a single large obstacle (ie. playfield is topologically equivalent to ring (the area between two nested circles)), the game is the most difficult, because you have to choose one direction for the attack, and cannot simply defend the other direction. For other maps, it seems to really depend on their similarity to one of these two extreme situations (and army size, of course, because it changes the relative size of obstacles). Also, if you would later add another cursor, this property would probably disappear (maybe then games with n+1 obstacles would be the hardest ones with n cursors).
- If you want a particularly challenging computer game (at least for some maps), use several players, max out attack, min out defense, max out base health (opposite would be harder, but game then changes to the large cloud of black troops, so you don't see anything) and give winner an advantage.