Defenses: Should I build them?
K, so Poet gave a fine example of how leading alliances dont spend res on def.Time and again we have heard to the elite players that buying def is akin to throwing your res down the toilet.Live and die by the FS they say!...and sadly, to a point, they are correct.And yet these players all have an advantage that the basic n00b most assuredly does not.They play in active alliances where the following may occur.Lets consider AOM and AON.Everyones favorite player siv launches on the biggest tool in the universe lrntofsnoob (I only pick on noob as I know that noob can take it and simply doesnt care enough about this game).Despite the fact that noob is tiny compared to siv, noob notifies hess, ring and elchino. These three players then launch on sivs return time forcing either a premature recall before hit or destroying his fleet in retaliation for killing noobs small fleet.Of course Siv then sends Kinnick(baroness) and major to crash el chino and ring on their returns (completely ignoring hess as he is not important anyway…j/k hess!) and the cycle continues, welcome to high lvl fleeting tactics in GE.Where am I going with this?Do you have big friends or even a few medium ones to reliably call upon everytime you get attacked?I am betting the answer is no, so you are left with two logical conclusions that basically add up to the same thing: Have nothing on your planet worth crashing therefore making the attack unprofitable or have so much def on the planet that the costs make grabbing whatever is behind it unprofitable (same end result as class 1).Heres the scary part…when you think you have part 2 covered and then Hess throws 750 nukes at you in the middle of the night and cleans you out.This was a hard lesson for me and I now fleet save IN ADDITION to building mass def.So why build def at all?This comes back to my basic point…while I do have medium and even large friends in GE, I really hate having my overnight res snagged and I am damn sure not turning off my mines like some players do (half of something is still better than all of nothing).So I have a seemingly insane amount of def on my planets.I also have some of the highest mine levels and I never get attacked unless I provoke lightbringers or AOM…Its just not worth it!In the end, this is a perma verse now and so everything that my def costs will be returned to me in spades as my mine levels continue to increase, but the number of raids against my planets remains 0.So, net thought becomes, unless you have friends that can act as a barrier for you, you have to rely on yourself and that means making yourself look very unappetizing!
