Ogres: Some Understanding Helps

Overview

This guide is about ogres: their strengths and their weaknesses and the way they see the world

What This Guide Is About

Ogres are, somewhat, unjustly disliked. Oh sure, they smash down walls and knock down towers and throw their weight around, but they aren’t evil. And they aren’t stupid, they do have some smarts to them. And they certainly know how to dress well and stand out in a crowd.

Ogres might have a somewhat different social background than you or I, but I’m certain that some understanding will help bridge those differences.

In this guide we’re going to try to get into the mind of an ogre and better understand them. We’ll cover four main topics:

• Ogres Hate Blocks
• Ogres Aren’t Choosy
• Ogres Keep it Simple
• Ogres Don’t Want to Leave

The take home point of this guide is that ogres can be understood and with a few adjustments to our city, ogres can be suitably accommodated.

<**> New Warfare Update has changed the behavior of the ogres. (!!) Scroll to the LAST SECTION to read what’s changed and how to protect your city.

Ogres Despise Walls

Somewhere in the upbringing of young ogres, they were taught to despise blocks and walls. Maybe they were walled up inside pens as infants, raised like hogs until they were strong enough to break through the blocks. Maybe, instead, they were given only wood and stone block toys as children or made to recite poems about blocks, or taught in ogre school (there would only be a first grade, no more) that blocks were ‘symbols of oppressive, tyrannical governmental systems’. Somehow, I doubt that last one.

Regardless, ogres hate blocks and they despise walls made of blocks. This is their obsession and their undoing.

Let’s look at how they react to wood and stone walls.

Recall that wooden walls can only be stacked 3 blocks high.

An ogre destroys a wooden block in one hit, every time. When smashed by an ogre, it disintigrates into small blocks rather than boards and splinters, but that’s of little matter. It looks cool.

• Calculating the eminent destruction of a section of wooden wall is simple math: number of wooden blocks = number of hits by an ogre

  

• It makes no difference if the wooden wall is 1-block high & 3-blocks wide or 3-blocks tall and 1-block wide: 3 hits go through it. 1 hit destroys 1 block.
• A wooden wall will hold its integrity until the last hit. It receives 1 count of damage for each hit, so a 3-block high wooden wall will still stand intact with 2 hits of damage. With 3 hits it falls.

This may shock you, but a 3-block high stone wall can only withstand one more ogre bashing than a 3-block high wooden wall can. That’s the truth. There is a one hit difference.

Like wooden walls, a stone wall holds its integrity until the final hit.

The advantages of stone walls over wooden walls, in terms of slowing down a ogre, are:

• A stone wall can be much higher than 3 blocks. A high wall takes lots of hits before it falls.

  

• A base stone block takes 2 hits to destroy. A base stone block is a block which touches the ground; the first, bottom course of a wall.
• The formula to calculate the number of hits needed to destroy a section of stone wall is a linear algebraic equation:
  X + Y = Number of Hits; where X is total number of block and Y is number of base blocks, as shown below.
  

• Ogres can’t do algebra, not even simple math. Math is another thing they despise. They can’t figure out that wood is weaker than stone, so they don’t know to always attack a wooden section over a stone section of wall.
• Lastly, but importantly, after destroying the block or wall section, ogres then USUALLY turn to destroy the NEXT block beside them. They usually do not move down the wall to find another section. They usually destroy TWO sections side-beside of each other.

Ogres so hate stone and wood blocks that they’ll travel from who knows where to destroy the blocks around your city. They’re the original blockbusters. To their credit, they aren’t choosy. They love to destroy all blocks with equal eagerness.

Ogres Aren’t Choosy

Did you hear about the ogre who wanted to dig under a castle wall?
He became so confused, he didn’t do anything.
Know why?
The Vikings showed him two different kinds of shovels and told him to take his pick.

=================================================

Obsession has a way of narrowing your choices; especially an obsession to smash any block of any kind.

In the previous section we learned that ogres can’t tell a wood wall from a stone wall; they don’t know the difference, or they don’t care. They aren’t choosy.

Whichever section of wall they encounter first will be the one they attack.

That said, the game’s AI does detect the weakest side of your city and will target that side for attack.

Ogres aren’t choosy:

• Ogres don’t care if they attack a tower or a section of wall: it is all the same to them. (90% of the time this is true. Sometimes you will see a ogre, with a slightly higher wattage of intelligence, search for a tower to tear it down.)
• They’re not choosy about whether the wall is tall or short, wide or thin. They’ll bash the first block they come upon.
• They’re not concerned about how long it takes to bash down a section of wall. They’ll stay at one spot until all the block at that spot are destroyed – whether it be 1 block or a tower 10 blocks high.
• When attacking a section of wall which is 2-blocks wide, they don’t, as a rule, bash through the entire wall. They sometimes stop after destroying the outer wall and leave the inner wall untouched to attack somewhere else.
• They’re not choosy about whether the tower they are attacking is tall or short.
• They’re not choosy about whether a tower is part of the wall or standing out by itself: first come, first served, or knocked down in an ogre’s case.
• They’re even not choosy about whether or not there are archers or ballista in a tower. The first tower they attack is always the first one in their path, not the most strategic one.
• They don’t seem to care about staying out of the range of archers or ballista, or even finding a spot to shield themselves. They seem indifferent to the damage being inflicted on them.

• Along a different line, ogres aren’t choosy about the ground they must cover to reach a block. They will wade through a forest (I love watching that) with equal determination as they do walking across open ground. They won’t hesitate to wade shallow water as well.
• Peasant, soldier, whomever are all equally ignored by ogres. With that one eye, they seem to not notice the people around them.

The ONLY thing which ogres are choosy about is finding a block to destroy. They prefer to tear down walls and not buildings. They couldn’t care less about farms or foresters or much of anything else besides blocks and walls.

Obsessed ogres aren’t picky.

Ogres KISS

An ogre is the poster child of keep it simple stupid (KISS).

An ogre couldn’t make a plan let alone follow a plan, if its life depended on it. Wait a minute… its life does depend on it. That’s why they are easy to confuse.

Ogres do have some smarts to them:

• They recognize a moat for what it is: nothing. Ogres walk can through a moat with ease, almost as swiftly (do ogres ever move swiftly?) as they do on grass.
• They recognize gates and usually bypass them to bash a block instead. They will destroy a gate, but rarely do. They must somewhere in their dimly lit minds have a liking for gates, or maybe the mechanism of the grate bewitches them. Who knows? Either way, they tend to leave gates alone.

  (In the image to the right, the ogre chose the block tower, despite it being the strongest point, over the stone or wooden gates; when the towers were placed on the end, the ogre again chose a tower over the gates.)

• They know that all water isn’t the same, to stay out of deep water and wade only in shallow water. They have a healthy respect for water.

  

• They know to use a bridge.
• In the same vein, they know that if a castle’s wall abuts the coastline that they must disembark from their ships in shallow water, otherwise they prefer disembarking on dry land.
• But most important (to them), they know what a block looks like and they hate ’em.

And that’s about it for their smarts.

It almost goes without saying that ogres are fairly stupid, dim witted – which costs them.

• They can’t figure out soft spots in defenses.
• They can’t tell whether a tower is armed or not.
• They can’t tell the difference between a wall block and decoy block (What’s a decoy block? Read the summary.)
• They don’t know how to shield themselves, how to minimize the wounds they are receiving.
• They don’t know to how to gang up with other ogres and concentrate an attack on one section of wall – they don’t even know what that means.

That’s enough about their denseness. It isn’t my intent to degrade ogres, just point out their mistakes in battle.

To Be or Not To Be

Ogres wouldn’t make good stage actors. They’d never know their lines, they’d miss their cues, they wouldn’t face the audience (the remaining few who hadn’t yet fled in terror), and every show would end up with the place in shambles.

But they are very dramatic. Ever notice their over-pronounced posture as they ready up for a block busting blow? Their exaggerated pause after a hit as pieces of blocks fly everywhere, settling around them? Their staged swagger? Their unbroken silence which screams out? Oh, these guys are drama dogs.

And they stay to the final curtain, to their last breath, to the block too far. Even their death is a performance: a hesitation, a tottering and then a full collapse. It almost makes you want to applause, almost.

Staying ‘on mission’, as some would call it, takes a unswerving dedication. And ogres have that dedication. I’ll give them that.

Viking warriors often abandon an attack, return to their ship and sail away. Dragons begin to fly away once their wounds become worrisome. Not ogres. They will stay around to bash every block they can find – and die doing it.

(I have to correct myself here: I have seen an ogre, just a few times, stop its block bashing, get on its boat and sail away. I’m thinking that this ogre isn’t acting cowardly but the light bulb went out in its brain and it forgot why it was there.)

For most ogres, they ain’t going home. Why?

When death is a better choice than returning home the only, obvious answer is that home is worse than death! Think of it. The ogres chosen for an attack are the fortunate ones, the favored ones. They’re released from the Hades they call home and for a few brief moments are in the Heaven of busting blocks. They die with pleasure in their hearts, peace on their faces and sore fists.

Sadly, their desire for death is almost too easy to be granted. I’ll tell you how in the next section, as I summarize all of this.

A Summary of it All

Let’s summarize. This’ll put the salient points in front of us from which we will quickly see the picture of how to easily kill ogres.

• Ogres will destroy any block they come across, wood or stone, with equal eagerness.
• Base stone blocks take 2 hits to be destroyed. Base stone blocks are the strongest blocks in the game.
• An ogre’s point of attack on a castle is usually random.
• An ogre’s point of attack on a castle isn’t based on strong or weak spots, although the game AI will target the weakest side of your fortifications.
• Multiple ogres attacking a castle are unorganized. They don’t concentrated on a section of wall; they follow each other like cows in a pasture.
• Towers with archers or ballista aren’t usually specifically targeted by ogres over empty towers.
• Towers attached to walls aren’t specifically targeted over towers standing by themselves.
• An ogre will bash a section of wall until it all falls down; they will stay fixed at a spot until all block(s) at the spot are destroyed.
• Once a spot is cleared of block(s), an ogre will usually bash down the NEXT section of wall or move to the next closest block.
• An ogre is seemingly oblivious to its wounds and will continue bashing blocks until it dies.

Based on what we now understand about ogres, and their behavior in battle, here’s a recommended strategy to deal with and dispatch ogres. I have found this to be very effective in slowing them long enough to kill them.

• Build a 2-block wide STONE wall as the main fortification. The outward wall should be 2 blocks high. The inside wall at least 4 blocks high. Place an extra block on the outer wall in front of every tower and the 3-sides of every corner.
• Place archer towers so they well overlap in range with each other; not just touch in range but deeply overlap into the other’s range. 100% overlap is best. Place ballista towers with the same deep overlap. See my notes about towers in the next section.
• A ballista hits moving ogres much better than arrows do – and inflicts much more damage. Two hits from ballista removes one quarter of a ogre’s health.
• An ogre stopped to bash a block is a sitting duck to arrows and ballista. The longer you can stall an ogre from reaching the main fortification, the more damage you will inflict on it.

  

• Build an archer tower and a ballista tower outside the main fortifications; an isolated early defense outpost so to speak. The two towers would be a block apart and overlap in archer range with the castle. Wrap this tower with base stones all around it. Place several such paired towers at key spots all around the castle.
• Around the isolated towers, place decoy base STONE blocks to attract the ogres’ attention. Decoy blocks sit randomly in a circle around the isolated tower so that the archers in the tower can inflict significant damage as the ogres bust up the decoy stones. The ogres may then move to destroy the isolated tower but will receive punishing damage from the castle walls as they do so.
• Scatter decoy stones 3-5 spaces in front of the castle wall. This will cause ogres to expose themselves to extreme damage as they bust up the decoys. By the time an ogre reaches the wall, it will be almost dead.
• Should an ogre reach the castle wall, don’t panic. The 2 base stones and the wall stones will keep the ogre stationary long enough to kill it.

Notes About Towers

I added this section later when I realized that this information helps to know how to inflict maximum damage on ogres.

Ballista can kill an ogre in less than half the time of an archer tower, everything else held equal, regardless of skill levels.

Ballista have almost twice the range as archers, hitting ogres long before an arrow can.

But, archers can assault a stationary ogre with showers of arrows in the time it takes for a ballista to reload.

Which is best, archers or ballista?

The answer is that both are, when used together. I recommend building dual archer and ballista towers on castle walls. Their combo is deadly on an ogre.

The table to the right shows the radius (1/2 range) of an archer tower and a balista tower. This is as far as an arrow will fly from the tower. The distance is the number of cells, or squares of land, on a game map.

Notice from the table:

• The range increases as the tower gets higher.
• The range of a ballista is almost always double that
  of an archer tower.
• The maximum ranges are reached when a tower is
  9 blocks high. There is no advantage to going higher than
  9 blocks on a tower.

>> For archers, a tower height of 8 blocks is about best (7 is OK). Adding more height to an archer tower does little to add range.

>> For a ballista, a tower height of 8 is also about best. This height gives ample range and plenty for overlapping with archers.

I haven’t tested if accuracy changes as tower height changes, but suspect it does not. Obviously, the longer an ogre is within range, the more damage you inflict on it.

To calculate how far apart to place towers to achieve 100% overlap in range, again use the little table above. The range per tower height is the distance between towers to have 100% overlap.

Ogres of Old and of New

This guide was written for Kingdoms and Castles, Infrastructures II Version 114r6s. This version of Kingdoms and Castles has now been recently replaced by the updated Warfare Version 115r10s.

In the Warfare Version, the game developers have changed the behavior of ogres, greatly so. They have given ogres more smarts. They have created “Ogres of New”.

In the Warfare Version, Ogres of New:

• Arrive in pairs. Boats carry two ogres instead of one.
• Head straight for the closest gate and bash it down. This is the greatest change in their behavior. Ogres of New are not distracted by decoy blocks nor by isolated towers like the Ogres of Old were. An Ogre of New will hone in on a gate and destroy it creating a hole through your fortifications for the Vikings to enter your city.
• Will follow the Viking bandits through your city to the Treasury and bash down any gate or wall surrounding the Treasury(ies).
• Knock down houses, wells, taverns and other buildings. Ogres of Old used to not bother buildings, now the Ogres of New destroy them.

What to do? Here are some ideas on how to thwart the Ogres of New.

• First, you now know the game plan of the Ogres of New: bash down the gates. Use this info to your advantage.
• Build double gates (even triple) with 3-4 blocks on top of each gate. It takes 1 hit from an ogre to destroy a gate and 1 hit to destroy a block. Slow down the Ogres of New at the gate to allow your archers and ballistas time to kill them.
• Cluster ballistas around each gate; one on each side of a gate, two in towers in front of the gate, two in towers behind the gate (in the city). Add a couple of archer towers and archer teams, but know that ballistas inflict the most damage the quickest on ogres.
• Encircle the city Treasuries with high walls, double gates and archer / ballista towers. This is where the Vikings and ogres are heading. Turn their lusts into their loss.
• Build several ballista towers inside your city, particularly near the city Treasuries.
• Ready archer teams a year before a Viking attack. Disband them after the attack.

One other idea: superstructures.

I build a triad of towers outside the city, 4-5 cells from the water’s edge, each tower 10 blocks high, each capped with a ballista. An archer tower sits in front, on a fourth tower, about 6 blocks high. (See the picture below.)

• This 3-ballista superstructure begins to inflict heavy damage on an ogre as soon as it steps on land. (It shreds dragons before they reach the city.)
• Superstructures with an overlapping range will stop an advancing ogre in 7 cells or less.