CYE Multiplayer Guide

Overview

This Crush Your Enemies Multiplayer Guide covers:-General Strategy-Map Specific Strategy-Macro-Micro-Unit Types

Introduction

Welcome enemy-crushers and seekers of audible female-lamentation!

First and foremost, the highest priority item:
Pressing the main menu button before the battle has ended will download a virus that will turn your beer non-alcoholic and your children into vegetarians. Mastering the skill of not pressing this button is the first step to CRUSHING YOUR ENEMIES!

Items

We’ll begin the general strategy section with items. If you don’t know what the items do and when to use them, you will lose every time to a person that does. There are five items offered in multiplayer:

We’ll cover the hut (2nd blue item) first, because it’s the most important. This recruits more men, like the simpleton hut, but does so much faster. In every map, you should start by deploying a hut on your highest stack (ideally 30+ men). Then, you should deploy your 2nd hut. The hut will train 30 men to 50, so if you have more than that, make sure you move some off the hut as it recruits to get full recruitment value. This recruitment boost has more value than nearly every other strategic option on the map. Start each game with it until you know better.

Now let’s return to the first blue item, the inflatable. It has several unique uses, making it much more versatile than it first appears.
1) Destroying an enemy building –

If placed on an empty enemy building, it will slowly capture the square for you, disabling the building. While you are still learning the strategy for multiplayer, start the match by deploying one inflatable on an enemy building, far from their units. You will likely waste some of their time dealing with it or disable a building they might need later.

2) Capturing an enemy square –

This helps you path through their territory without having to capture, or slows their reinforcing troops. Use it on a chokepoint to buy time.

3) Stop archers from pinning down your troops. Drop the inflatable just as your troops enter enemy archer range, and it should buy you enough time to conquer the square and move on top of the archers.

4) Stop a hut from recruiting. This loses effectiveness the larger the enemy stack is. I would say only do this if the stack is below 25 and they are recruiting from a hut.

5) Stop an army from engaging your archers/tower, or stop a tower from firing at your army. This should give you enough time to launch the 4 volleys from your archers and back up.

The third blue item is the berserker potion. It increases attack power in combat, so use it when you have high troop counts, even if it would be a winning battle anyway. While you’re just getting used to using items, you should use this on your first two battles with more than 15 troops in them.

The first red item is the smoke bomb. You can place this only on your territory. I’ll add more on this when I discover its affect in battle.

The third red item is the landmine.

You can place this on a square you own (not neutral or swamp!) and, after 3 seconds, it becomes an active mine. This can be triggered by a single unit of either team. Above the AI tests it with a 15 stack, and every adjacent stack loses 14 units. This is useful for rooting an enemy out of a defensive position, like a tower, or to scare them away temporarily. Because they can trigger the mine, they’re likely to move their troops away and detonate it as soon as they get the chance. So you have to act quickly with this item. Towers can shoot down the trigger unit if it’s a small enough stack.

Ideally, each time you end a multiplayer game, you’ve used all 6 of your starting items. Worry first about getting used to using them, then work on finding the best time and place to use them.

Macro & Micro

Macro
In the Macro section I’m going to talk about unit allocation and overall objectives, based on whether you perceive yourself to be winning or losing.

Recruitment: Your goal in recruitment is just to make sure you’re outpacing your enemy, without sacrificing position on the map. Your goal should be removing 10 simpletons from the hut each time the stack reaches 48. Lower that if you’re not confident with your micro. When you see them remove a large stack from their hut, do the same but keep 5-10 more men back than they did.

Army Composition: This is highly dependent on each level, which I’ll go through in the level guides. Some advice works on all levels though. If your enemy produces lots of archers, make about 75% of their archer total into shieldbearers.

If you want to supplement your armies with wizards (and you should!) the optimal combinations are 20 less wizards than archers, and 10 less wizards than any melee unit. For example, an army of 40 archers and 20 wizards is stronger than 30 archers/30 wizards or 50 archers/10 wizards.

Micro
In the Micro section I’m going to talk about making the most of your troops in an individual stack, keeping them alive in a losing situation and pressing forward in a winning one.

Archer micro is extremely important because of the lock down nature of ranged combat. You want to try to keep your archers out of melee and prevent their archers from locking your stacks down. Here is a basic grid showing how to protect your archers and advance on enemy archers.

(Consider the top row 1 and the left column 1, so that the archers stand on coordinate (2,2))

If an enemy melee stack steps on (3,3), your archers will lock them down. A typical counter to this for your enemy would be to split his stack, moving half to (2,3) first, having the archers lock them down, then moving the other half to (3,3). Then that half can melee the archers, stopping the archer fire and allowing the original half to join them.

In general, you want to prevent your archers from ever entering melee. There are a few nice ways to do this. First, you can prevent their split-stack-melee-engage by moving 10 of your archers to (3,3). They will start locking down enemy troops and if they get engaged, they will be fired upon by the backup 30 archers. Disadvantages include losing those 10 troops in the melee fight, and your advance into enemy territory will be slow because you’re taking squares using only 10 troops.

Second, you can react to their spilt-engage. Once you see the first half committing to a move to (2,3), move your archers up to (1,2). If you’re fast enough, you’ll lock down half their army without fear of engagement by the other half.

Third, you can take a small melee stack to engage their group that intends to melee you. It’s similar to the first option but without the advantage of getting potshots at their armies deeper in their territory. This is also a very nice option when defending a tower.

Units

Here we’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each unit, and their ideal uses.

Simpletons
These guys are your meat loaf and pig lard. Use them vs. archers, wizards, and scouts. Their advantage is that they can fight straight from the recruitment hut without getting to a building. Don’t feel like you need to always upgrade these to another unit. They really only suffer vs. warriors.

Archers
These guys have a lot of strategic depth to them, most of which I’ll cover in the micro section. They’ll get the most bang for their buck shooting wizards/scouts, and be worst off shooting shieldbearers. Only fire at shieldbearers if you have overwhelming odds or no other choice. Favor these guys on open maps where you can kite easily.

Shieldbearers
These are ideal for taking on enemy towers or archer stacks. In most cases, they’re giving more than they’re taking when they are getting arrows rained down on them. Also remember they have the same melee strength as simpletons, so send them in against wizards and scouts. Like simpletons, they really only suffer vs. warriors.

Warriors
These win any melee fight, so if you’re on a map with few chokepoints and few towers, you’ll want a lot of these. If you need to take an area covered by archers or a tower, send a sacrificial shieldbearer or simpleton stack to absorb fire while your warriors make it into melee range.

Wizards
These guys really help you with large battles, because they can increase the strength of a unit stack beyond it’s potential of 50. There are a few things to remember with wizards:
1) Don’t let them get in melee if you can avoid it. Keep them a line behind your other troops, ideally in your territory.
2) Wizard bonuses are additive. 20 wizards makes a melee stack twice as strong, 40 wizards makes it 3 times as strong (not 4 times).
3) For melee units, bring 10 less wizards than the fighters.
4) For archers, bring 20 less wizards than the archers.

Scouts
These guys have improved movement speed, making it very easy to move them to another building quickly to convert them into something useful. If you have good micro and reaction time, you can get some use out of these guys.
1) Take them to harvest neutral trees. They should make good progress before a stronger force can engage them.
2) Rush enemy buildings. Specifically, whichever ones it looks like they don’t plan on using soon. Just destroy it and leave. Remember not to rebuild it because you will convert the scouts, and they won’t escape enemy territory quickly.
3) Rush into melee with archers. Make sure they aren’t the ones drawing fire, because they will melt to archer fire.

Maps

Mirror Mirror

This map is the most basic multiplayer map, and this strategy has won me many games on it.
1) Immediately drop a hut on your 20 stack. When that ends (34 stack), drop your 2nd hut. Move 4-5 of those guys down to your recruitment hut as a backup plan. If they do the same, drop 1 or even 2 inflatables on their hut to slow them down.
2) Watch their movement. If they do anything besides what you did, rejoice in your victory. If they move toward their recruitment hut in the corner, drop one inflatable on the hut when they arrive, and one inflatable on the square between your forward tower and their defensive tower.
3) Transform your 50 stack into warriors and capture their defensive tower. If they have less than 40 simpletons, just go kill them and finish the game. But, people usually panic at this point and split their stack to make some warriors. Just take a larger group of units from your warrior stack to engage them. Don’t forget the berserker potion!

Raining Blood

Here things get a bit trickier. Archers are the best units here but positioning is tricky.
1) Immediately drop a hut on your 20 stack. When that ends (34 stack), drop your 2nd hut. Transfer these guys to the recruitment hut and remove 10 each time the stack hits around 48.
2) 1st and 2nd groups of 10 go to archers, and try to hold ground on the middle column, top and bottom. 3rd group of 10 can start to take the middle hut and put a clock on the enemy.
3) If ever they mobilize a larger stack, do the same, keeping about 5 more simpletons on the hut than they did. If they move warriors into the swamp, cycle small archer groups to keep them pinned on the square. If they move a large archer group, you can bring archers and melee against it simultaneously.
4) Hold the 2nd hut until you have enough of an army to charge their side, even if you’ll suffer greater losses.

I’ll add these maps as I have time:

[Hard As Iron]

[(Don’t Let ‘Em) Grind Ya Down]

[Temple Of Love]

[Kill With Power]

[Back At The Funny Farm]

[Unleash The Beast]

[I’m Gonna Be Your God]