Author: zax77 and various data from experience chats and forum talk.
Rule of Thumb: Never attack a country if they have a chance to landgrab or retaliate back on you (not applicable to early stages of a game). Never attack a country more than 3 times. Dimishing returns kick in severely right after the 3rd attack. Never get more than what you can defend for. When you're landfat, you're bound to be attacked. Gaining land then losing them is not much of a growth.
First off, all landgrabing methods are NOT equal.
There are three types of landgrabbing:
Bottom Feeding,
Top Feeding,
PSing.
The difference between Top Feeding and PSing is you do lots of SS's, they're just on big targets. PSing you do maybe one SS, and then around 2 PS's.
Bottom Feeding is based on a few key principles.
#1 - When you have a lot of troops or tanks, you lose less readiness per jets sent. So if you had 500k jets, and 500k tanks, you would lose more readiness sending 500k jets, then if you had 500k jets and 1M tanks.
#2 - You use your allies jets up more. Say you have 1M jets, and your 3 allies have 500k jets each, for a total of 1.5M jets. Only 1/4 of the 1.5M jets are available to you. Or 375k jets. So if you sent 375k out of your 1M jets, you would double your offence. If you sent all 1M, you'd only * by 1.375.
#3 - Targets are smaller, and therefore less retaliation.
The closer to the top your are, the less effective bottom feeding is.
Any strat besides techer can bottom feed, but it is normally cashers who should do it. This is because they climb up from the bottom, and need lots of defence from the ind's on the top. So they go turret heavy. A lot of indys bottom feed. They're dumb.
To find targets :
Do a search with a two digit integer. As the game progresses you'll want smaller
and smaller and smaller targets. It'll start out with you hitting people like
1/2 your NW, and drop down to 1/4 as the game goes on. Estimate how much
military you'll need to send. Usually about 1/2 -2/3 of your jets, assuming you
are 1/4 offence, 3/4 defence.
Top Feeding :
The principles of top feeding are.
#1 - It is the best way to gain land, because the larger a target you're hitting
the more % of his land you get.
#2 - Being a huge indy on top you can afford to get jet heavy, and still have enough turrets to stop almost anyone. Especially good if you have great def allies.
#3 - You'll get into war more often. War CAN be avoided if you send a nice retaliation msg tho. Not a stupid one like "just a lg". Tell them to go to http://go.to/earthlibrary, to learn how to play like you.
Basically, you'll be doing this when you're #1, and it's about 1/2 way through the game. At that stage yours scoreslist difference is large enough that you can see targets half your size (you being #1 and all). So you look at the bottom of your scoreslist, find a fat target, spy on him, and attack. Make sure you have good offensive allies, and really good def allies.
PSing :
This is the best attack for landgrabbing countries larger than you. Not only do
you get more land from a PS, but you also get a 150% attack bonus on your
attacking units. You should always end your day of attacks with at least one PS
to get the most out of your attacks. This form of attack is especially good
against strong defense/landfat countries.
There are other forms of PS attacks. One style involves making 5 PS per day (you can only do 5 PS attacks per day at the most). This is a good style of attack if you ever pulled it off, works great in 1A/1B since it has a vast amount of low defense countries which is ideal for this form of attacks. This is just another form of bottom-feeding, but you must be able to find all your targets for the day b4 launching your first PS since you have to pre-calculate your units to send out for each attack. Not recommended for beginners.
The purpose of this method is to search for random countries to landgrab, hopefully landfat ones. There are several methods to searching all using the Country Name (Substring) box: entering words, letter(s), and numbers. I prefer using numbers. You can start by putting in 10 and moving up 11,12,etc this will give you about 24 random countries.
Write down the ones you want to attack! Then check thier news for the last 24 hours. Dont grab anyone who has been attacked over twice in 24 hours. Also some people like to do 25 whole searches and get the best targets they can from all that information. Or you could be lazy like me and just write down people that you might like to grab and check their news, grab em, and search again.
This method works most effectively near the first 7 days of the game. Basically this provides a conservative estimation of your targets' defense based on their NW and their land. This method assumes that the targets are at 100% defense. Here is the formula:
Amount of turrets = [Total NW - (Land * 80)] / 0.55
Reasoning: Total NW is made of mostly land/military/buildings. Assuming all his land is built on, and buildings are worth 35NW and lands are worth 45NW, if I subtract the land/building's NW from his total NW, that leaves the NW for his military. Since turrets have a NW of 0.55, therefore the final amount is the amount of estimated turrets the target has.
General Rule: Never attack a country who has been attacked for 3 times or more (this applies to failed or successful attacks for SS, PS, AB, GS, or BR). The 3rd attack usually yields 10% less than the 2nd one, and the 4th attack usually yields 50% less than the 2nd attack.
I will divide this section into two parts: Spying and No-Spying
Predictions without using Spies:
Some people are just paranoid to see their country being spied on. Therefore when they see that someone has attempted to spy on their country in their daily news they will be really pissed.(I am one of them J). Hence if there is some way to avoid spying on your landgrab targets and still be able to estimate their defense then it will be good.
After you have taken down names of people that you will attack, the first thing you should do is to check their news. Do a 72 hours check of them (I will explain why in the next paragraph). There are ways to tell how much defense a country has from their news: if they're a very aggressive person, then chances are that they're probably going very offensive, possibly over 50% of their military are offensive units (jets). This is just an estimation. The best thing is of course to spy on the country and actually see how much military they have. After your first speculation, the next thing to do is to check the victims that they have attacked: if they're relatively small countries compared to his own size, then it is very likely that the country is bottom-feeding (see bottom-feeding above), which means that it's very likely that he has heavy defense and little offensive units. You should think twice b4 attacking these countries (big military loss on both sides and a possible failure on your attack if u proceed to attack).
Why do we want to do 72 hours check on our "targets"?? Two reasons: you want to identify their landgrab "style" as well as their history of being landgrabbed. As you already know, a country will face the law of diminishing returns when it is being repeatedly attacked, whether success or failed. Therefore if you see a country which has been attacked numerous times already, you would not want to attack them because it will yield very little return of acreage even if you succeed. For their landgrab styles, basically the more they attack, the less defense they tend to have. This is not true for bottom-feeders though. Therefore if you find a country who has absolutely no news for the past 72 hours, it's better to do a spy op on them to see what they have inside b4 blindly attacking them. Chances are that other people have spied on them b4 as well and found that the no-news dude has heavy defense inside so no attacks were made.
Using Spies:
Well this is rather simple. All you have to do is to check the news of your landgrab "targets" and see if they have been attacked. Follow the "general rule" and "rule of thumb", and spy on your targets. If you can get thru then go ahead and attack.
Finding landfarms from news:
In addition to simply finding landfat countries from the news, they are often nearly pure offensive countries out there who attacks relentlessly for land. Here are the characteristics of such countries:
1. They attack top 30 countries and get lots of acres per grab, perhaps only
4 attacks per day.
2. They attack countries in the mid-range and get a mediocre acreage per grab,
but they do a lot of attacks (7-9 attacks per day).
3. They suddenly attack a top 10 country on one PS, and that country was never
been penetrated before.
4. Two top 20 countries attacking each other, and both can penetrate each other.
This shows that either one or both have not enough defense.
Try to watch for these characteristics and you will be able to find landfarms easier in your games.
This is dedicated to ELITES only. Beginners can read it as a reference but do not try it unless you're very familiar with the game.
I'm sure that not all elites know this advanced technique of landgrabbing. Even though you think it would not make much difference, it really does make a huge difference, especially at the beginning of a game.
The idea is to ONLY landgrab those that has a similar building structure as yourself. If you are a indy, landgrab only pure indy countries. This way you can save the money for rebuilding the acres. This technique may require a bit of spying, but it is well worth it. This can be easily done in standard since you can see the government type of the countries and you can predict what strategy they use. Try not to landgrab ANYONE ELSE unless they're extremely landfat and it will yield LOTS of acres. This technique distinguishes the good players from the BEST ELITE players. Give it a try.