Conquest

Conquering is one of the processed by which you can take over another city (the other method being Revolt. This is considered the best way to get a new city in Grepolis (the only other method being Colonizing.
If you wish to see which worlds use the Conquest method then please see the World Information page.

Conquering

Prerequisites

Before you are actually going to conquer anything, you need the following things:

• Conquest researched
• A Colony ship and all it entails
• At least one land unit
• At least one transport boat(regular or fast)
• At least one Bireme, Trireme, or Light Ship
• Sufficient culture points to have another city*

Without these you can not expect to conquer a city, and it is suggested that you have an excess of resources beyond the bare necessities.
*- If you have one city slot and send 3 Colony Ships to conquer cities, the first 2 Colony Ships will fail and the last one will begin a siege- If you have 2 slots then only the first CS would fail, the other 2 will start sieges. It does not matter the order the CS were sent but the order they land.

Choosing a City

Requirements

You must consider many things when picking a city to conquer.

• Size- Never conquer a city under 1500 points. You could colonize (that gives you a 750 point city) but really, there will always be better alternatives.
• Alliance- Do you have an alliance? If not, get one! If you have no alliance, you will find it hard to take cities of players who are in an alliance as they will have access to quite a bit of support (if they are in a decent alliance). If you are in an alliance, you could also ask other members to help you.
• Location- You want the city that you are going to conquer to be within 3-4 hours of your city by LS/Bireme. This will help with defence. It is no good sending your CS 48 hours away as you just won't be able to defend it. Some would say that it is a bad idea to conquer a city on the same island as your current one. There are pros and cons, namely that you won't be able to farm as effectively, however the defence benefits are great.

Some examples:

• You are just starting out, you are a 3k player with no alliance
  • City belongs to a 20k player who is in a decent alliance.
  • Probably best not to go for it. Even if they are terrible at playing, their army will simply outnumber your's and you will find it very hard to do. Given your size, it is probably best to A) Join an alliance ASAP- not that the best alliances are not always the biggest! and B) conquer the city of a similarly sized player or ideally a Ghost Town.
• You are a 3k player with a very good alliance.
  • City belongs to a 30k player who is in a bad alliance.
  • Go for it! They may be much larger then you, but they are on their own. Wait, try to figure out when they are offline and strike then. Get your alliance mates to clear his city for you, tell them the time that your CS is due to land (to the second) and get them to support you afterwards.

What I am trying to illustrate with the above examples is that it doesn't really matter about your size. What really matters is your alliance. I am also assuming that you are a complete novice... If you have been playing grepolis for a while and know what you are doing then the size of your opponent shouldn't really matter. Just join a good alliance, build up and plan carefully. Knowing your target's offline times is invaluable. I joined Pella 6 months after it started. However I joined a great alliance, small but active, and now I am moving up the ranks with 4 cities. All it takes is some co-ordination. It also helps if morale is active as it means that the bigger players can't attack back without getting destroyed.

For your first city, as a new player, you want a city that will not cause too much of a fuss, but is large enough for it to have been worth it to conquer. Remember, there is no way to abandon a city, so once you have a city, you are stuck with it until it is conquered by someone else. What i mean by this is, make sure you don't take a city that has been reserved by an ally and try not to start too many wars!

Examples

I will use three examples of a city to conquer and I will point out the best option:

Example cities

1. City 1:
   • Abandoned city
   • 2,500 points
   • one island over from you
2. City 2:
   • Owned by a 100,000 point player
   • You are currently 20,000 points
   • The other player's alliance is twice your alliance's size
   • 10,000-point city
   • You can not seem to get a spy through
   • Same island as you
3. City 3:
   • A one-city player
   • No alliance
   • 10,000-point city
   • your spy reports say no troops
   • 2 islands over from you

Example city evaluations

Here is my assessment of each of those cities:

1. City 1:
   • mediocre city, would make a good second city if there are not any better alternatives
2. City 2:
   • Probably the worst possible combination of attributes in a conquerable city, do not conquer a city like this
3. City 3:
   • The perfect city to conquer, you should go for this option if it is ever available.

Preparations to conquer

Before you actually conquer a city, there are many things you will have to do. These include making sure that you are allowed to take the city, that the city is cleared, etc.

Clearing a city

Before conquering a city, you will need to clear it, or kill all of the troops occupying the city. In order to do this, you must go about this process:

1. spy on the city to find out how much resistance you will meet
2. attack the city with appropriate forces to destroy all of the troops in the city

After this, you just need to make sure that the city stays cleared of troops.

Claiming a city

Make sure to 'Reserve' the city so that an alliance mate doesn't take your target!

Building a Colony Ship

You must build a colony ship to conquer a city, this might take some time because you need to collect up 10000 of each resource and then wait around 12 hours to build it, so make sure you have built it before continuing onwards.

The conquering process

Now we come to the exciting part, the victim is cleared, you have your Colony Ship ready and you want to do the actual conquering. Here is the order of events:

1. Send an few attacks which are meant to make sure that all the troops of the city are cleared
2. time a C-Ship to land a few minutes after the clearing attacks, this might mean sending the C-Ship before you even send off the clearing attacks
3. Time a lot of support waves of defensive troops to arrive right after your C-SHip lands
4. 24 hours after the C-Ship lands, the city is yours, supposing that you were able to prevent it from being taken from you.

Timing attacks

You want to keep your attacks as close together as possible.
Example:

• Final clearing attack lands at 00:00:01 (1 second past midnight)
• Colony ship lands at 00:00:02
• Supporting waves land at 00:00:03

That would be your ideal situation. It is best not to have them arriving in the same second as you do not always know which one will land first! Also note that getting timings down to those gaps takes a lot of practice, don't worry if you don't do it first time! or even in the first 100 times that you conquer. It is just something to aim for.

During the conquer

There will be a 24 hour period after your C-Ship successfully lands that you will be vulnerable to attack. If an attack on the city manages to kill either all of your land or all of your navy, then your Colony Ship will be destroyed, the conquer broken, and your remaining troops will come home.

After you have conquered

Once you have conquered, there will be a multitude of things to do to settle in

Researches

Sometimes the city you conquered will have researched some things that you consider worthless. In order to fix this however, you must use up a culture point so be very careful about resetting researches.

God

If the conquered city has a temple and it was worshiping a god, then it will keep this god. You should try to use a different god in the new city then you are using elsewhere, you do this in order to make sure you have as many god powers available as possible.

Neighbors

Try to get to know your neighbors and your island of your new city, it may be useful in the future.

For the defender

Note: If you have any buildings, units or researches queued and a colony ship lands in your city, all of these things will be cancelled.

As a defender in the conquer process, you have a couple of options. #You only have one city and #You have multiple cities

Detecting the conquer attack

You will know that a conquer attack is coming by one of a few methods:

• You note that the attack is taking far longer then most
• when you click on the attack, there is a picture of a C-Ship, not a regular boat
• there are multiple waves of support surrounding one attack.
  • I.e. You see that there are loads of attacks arriving from your enemy, however they have also sent support. The last attack before the support arrives will probably (unless they have messed up their timings!) be the Colony Ship.

Preparing for the attack

If you are significantly smaller then your attacker, your best chance is to take out the C-Ship only, but not any of the other attacks. You can do this by any of the following methods:

• Ask a friend to send you support to arrive just before the C-Ship lands, and ask for them to send attacks right after the C-Ship lands
• Send out your defending troops to attack a 175 point city far enough away that your defensive troops will arrive right before the C-Ship, but do not send defensive troops to any city that might have troops of its own
• Send out your offensive troops to arrive right after the C-Ship lands, they will assault the C-Ship
• If you have any Fire Ships, then keep them at your city to destroy the clearing attacks. They will not be able to harm C-Ships or transport boats, so if you send them out with your defensive or offensive troops, then they will end up assisting the conqueror

If the conqueror is your size

If you are sure you can take on all of the conqueror's troops, and the conqueror only has one city, then you can leave your defensive troops in your city and get more BP.

Summary: Essentially, you just don't want the Colony Ship to land in your city. You can either try and take on all of their attacks or you could just dodge all of the clearing attacks and try to 'Snipe' the CS- This involves bringing in land/naval units that will arrive within a few seconds of the CS. However, you could also let the CS land and try to snipe it with Light Ships- I.e. try to land LS within a second or two of the CS landing. If you have more then 1 city, you can do all of this yourself. If you don't, then you will have to get your alliance to help.

Additional points

Conquest can be quite confusing! However, once you have got your head around it, it is great fun.
Essentially, your ideal situation would be for your opponent's colony ship to not make it into your city. As soon as you think you know which attack is the colony ship, request support. Try and stop it.
If you don't think you will be able to stop it, or just as a plan B, also have your alliance mates attack your city. You want their attacks to land within a few seconds of the colony ship landing. This will mean that you are limiting the amount of support that your opponent will be able to get into the city.