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

A general overview: The Conquest method of conquering a city differs from the Revolt method in many ways. The most important thing that you should note is that you do not take the city as soon as your CS lands. In a speed 1 world, you must hold the siege for 24 hours before it is yours. Please read this page for more information.

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!

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.

Claiming a city

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

Clearing a city

Before conquering a city, you will need to clear it (kill all of the troops occupying the city). In order to do this, you should follow these steps:

1. Spy on the city to find out how much resistance you will meet.
   1. You can either send a large spy to avoid the owner of the city knowing that you are going to attack or you could send many smaller 1k spies. This floods the player with reports (which annoys them) and also will hopefully empty their cave which will make it easier to spy in the future.
2. Attack the city with appropriate forces to destroy all of the troops in the city
   1. If necessary, ask your alliances mates for help.

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. Spy the city again just to be sure that you can handle and support that may have arrived.
2. Send an few attacks which are meant to make sure that all the troops of the city are cleared
3. Time a C-Ship to land a few seconds after the clearing attacks, this might mean sending the C-Ship before you even send off the clearing attacks.
4. Time a lot of support waves of defensive troops to arrive right after your CS lands

• Again, it is a good idea to talk to your alliance mates. Get them to help both in the clearing and in the support.

A note from Tom: This is one way to do it. Really, it all depends on your opponent. If they are inactive, you don't have to worry about nailing the timings or about them getting support. Do send support to land after the CS though, someone may be farming it and may accidentally break your siege! You could also do it all in one. Spy the city a few days before hand to see what units are in it. Get your alliance mates to attack, send your CS and attacks and clear and land the CS all at once (or at least, within a few minutes at most). This way, you are not allowing the other player days to get support into the city which should make it easier. If it is a small player in a small alliance, it doesn't really matter. However, if you are attacking a big player in a good alliance, the element of surprise could be what clinches it for 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

Assuming that you successfully land your Colony Ship in the enemy city, you then move onto the second part of conquering a city. A 24 hours timer now starts, if your CS is still in the city after that time, the city is yours. This is why it is important that you send support right after the CS. Some people let you land your CS only to destroy it straight after it lands. So, you want your alliance mates to attack the city before your CS lands and to support it after your CS lands.

• The 24 hour window is in a speed 1 world. It gets shorter as the speed of the world goes up.

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.

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.