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The High Art of Ninja


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Everyone loves a ninjameditate2ds.gif . . . well except possibly for the recipient. What makes a ninja so special is A) negligible deuterium costs, B) you can use ships that are normally too slow, C) you can quickly gather far more debris than from a "conventional" hit, and D) you can use your defenses as well and thus take on a larger fleet.

 

There are essentially three pieces to a successful ninja. First, the setup -- someone has to attack you. Second, the execution -- making sure they continue to attack you and that you get the right ships to the battle and the wrong ships away from the battle. Third, the clean-up -- no point in doing a ninja just to take a huge loss, unless you have some ulterior motive.

 

If you can, it is almost always easiest to ninja on a moon. This is especially true if the attacker can phalanx your planet. A decent attacker, with anything approaching a suspicious mind, cannot be ninjaed on a planet that can be phalanxed, short of some amazing preparation.

 

-- The Setup --

Often, this is the really difficult part. Not just getting someone to attack you, but getting someone to attack you with a fleet you can take, at a time that is convenient for you. There are a few ways of going about this. First, you can simply leave a "bait" fleet around and hope for the best. Second, you can goad someone into attacking you. Third, you can just get lucky.

 

1. The Bait Fleet - If people probe you with some regularity, leaving a bait fleet can be the easiest and most effective method for getting someone to attack you. If someone probes you regularly around a specific time, even better. Composing a bait fleet is an art form. It should look like a real fleet, it should be significantly bigger than a straight 20% hit, and it should be of an appropriate size that the attacker will send a fleet that is big enough to be worthwhile, but not too big that you can't take it. If you have a specific attacker in mind, find out their fleet size and tech levels. If they have any posted HoFs, look at the fleet they sent and the fleet they hit. In theory, if you can roughly match a fleet they attacked in the past, you can probably get them to attack you with a roughly equivalent attacking fleet.

 

Run speedsim or draco-sim to figure out how their fleet would fare against your bait fleet, and how your entire fleet would fare against various combinations of their fleet. If the attacker can't make a profit from your fleet, it is unlikely that they will attack you. If the attacker will need to send too large a fleet for you to ninja, then you don't really want them to attack you anyway.

 

A good bait fleet can be some cruisers, a lot of cargos, and a ton of resources; or a small, balanced fleet with a few of everything; or a ton of recyclers and res; or a poorly-balanced fleet, with a lot of cruisers (to disuade a lot of LF) and not a lot of heavy ships (battleships, bombers, and destroyers).

 

One good tactic if a potential attacker probes you regularly, is to send a quick note "online" each time they probe you when you are online. Then, put out your bait fleet, prepare your ninja fleet, and when they probe, send nothing. They will likely see a break in the pattern and a chance to take you out.

 

2. The Goading - Sometimes you have to take the bull by the horns and shake a little. If you want someone to attack you, especially a higher-ranked player, it is often best to attack them first. Find a colony that you can make a bit of profit from and hit it. Maybe hit a few. It is usually best to make profitable hits, as it is a little less suspicious.

 

An example of this is my ninja of mitash. In that case he was a mega-turtle (see Nish's hit on him after he rebuilt) and SoS was after his fleet. I thought that perhaps I could remove his fleet without a massive IPM campaign. So I probed all of his planets, got his tech levels and fleet composition. When he was offline, I hit a small fleet on one of his colonies and grabbed the debris and res. I used a fairly small portion of my whole fleet and left it on my moon. When he came online, he probed my moon and attacked with his whole fleet, minus recs and RIP.

 

3. Luck - Occasionally you just get lucky and someone sends a HoFable fleet at your without you having to plan it. That is when life is good.

 

When I was planning a ninja, I would often leave a bait fleet on a moon and have the remainder of my fleet doing one-hour, one-way harvest mission to my local DF. That would give me sufficient time to recall before an attacker's fleet arrived. I would write down fleet size and resources before sending my fleet off and I would carry a couple thousand units of deuterium. If someone attacked, I would recall, then time my recs and ninja fleet as described below.

 

-- The Execution --

Now that you have an attacking fleet, speed-sim or draco-sim to determine with what you want to hit it. Assume that you will not be able to move your bait fleet, or whatever is currently on the target planet/moon, and also any other ships the attacker has probed since attacking. You now have three tasks. You need to get your ninja-fleet to the target. You need to get your recs to the DF. You need to get any portion of your bait fleet that you do not want in the fight away from the target. In addition, you need to do all of this without letting the attacker know that you are online.

 

1. Avoiding Notice - If an attacker senses that you are online, s/he will probably call off the attack. In order to ninja a wary attacker, you have to pay attention to a lot of details. Write down the resource levels and fleet that the attacker saw when the attacker probed you. Make sure that these stay the same until the last safety probe. The real key tends to be deuterium on the target planet/moon. If you can plan in advance, have a recycler carrying some deuterium on a harvest mission to a local DF when the attacker first probes. Otherwise, you may need to sneak small amounts from your planet in order to offset any used in hiding your ninja fleet/recs.

 

Be very careful not to do anything from any planet that would cause activity to show in the Galaxy view. In addition, do not scan outside of your own galaxy in galaxy view, as that uses 10 deuterium per solar system scanned. Do not use your phalanx, as that uses 5,000 deuterium. If you have not turned off the online/offline notification on the oGame forums, do not log onto the forums and do not post to the forums.

 

Any time you hide your fleets from probes, calculate the amount of deuterium it will take and subtract that from the excess you brought to the target and that difference is the amount you need to bring with the fleet you are hiding.

 

2. Getting the ninja fleet to the target - If you have a jumpgate [JG] on your moon, you can JG your fleet to the target. If the attacking fleet is set to arrive in more than one hour, you can send the recs and ninja fleet separately. Otherwise, it is better to jump your entire fleet in time for your ninja fleet to get from the target to the local DF and back before the attacker's fleet arrives. It is preferable to arrive in time to make a couple of attampts to go from target to DF in case you mistime the first one. In the alternative, you can simply jump your ninja fleet 3-4 seconds before the attacking fleet arrives. However, this will prevent you from sending recyclers early or moving any ships from the target.

 

If you don't have a JG, send your fleet from another planet to arrive 3-4 seconds before the attacking fleet. Once you have your ninja fleet on the target, or if your fleet was already on the target but you did a short FS to avoid the attacker's probe, then calculate how long it will take to get to the local DF and back. If there is a visible DF around your planet, launch your fleet so that it will return from the DF at the exact same time as the attacker's fleet will arrive. Verify on the overview screen that both fleet are arriving at the planet at the same time. Then, two seconds before your fleet arrives at the DF, recall the ninja fleet. The ninja fleet will return 4 seconds before the attacking fleet and the DF will not disappear and warn the attacker of your presence.

 

If there is no visible DF around the target, you can launch the ninja fleet to return from the DF 3-4 seconds before the attacker arrives. You may also wish to do this if the attack is scheduled to arrive soon after the 03:00 a.m. reset. In that case, you would not log on until after the hit, but you would schedule your ninja fleet to arrive right before the attacker's. Therefore, you won't alert the attacker to the fact that you are online. If possible, have a friend send probes on an attack mission to your moon right after your fleet grabs the DF around the target in order to recreate the DF and not alert the attacker. It is preferable that you create a DF of the same size as the one there prior to your fleet grabbing it.

 

3. Removing the bait fleet - Approximately one minute before the attack arrives, you should know when, and if, the attacker's safety probes arrive. A good safety probe will arrive 5-6 seconds before the attack. It takes approximately 2-3 seconds for a report to show up and that gives the attacker a couple of seconds to get to the fleet screen and recall. If you do not need to JG your ninja fleet in those last few seconds, then select all of the ships you wish to remove from the battle and get them set to send. As soon as the last safety probe arrives, send them or JG them. If you need to do something else in those last few seconds, you will have to resign yourself to having your entire bait fleet in the battle.

 

-- The Clean Up --

When to send your recs, and how many you send is going to depend a great deal on the size of the DF and the amount of time it will take the attacker's recs to arrive. If the attacker pings, waits for an hour, pings again, and then launches, then it is a good bet that the attacker's recs are on the way to arrive at about the same time as the attacking fleet. In that case, you want as many recs as you will need to recover the worst-case SIM to arrive in the first second after the battle. If the attacker pinged and then immediately attacked, then you probably have time to recover 4-5 loads of debris before the attacker's recs arrive.

 

If there was no DF around the target planet and the attacker sent a single attack probe to create a DF, then it is a good bet that that is when the attacker sent recs. If you have the attacker's tech levels, you can calculate the amount of time it will take the attacker's recs to arrive and plan your own debris-recovery strategy accordingly.

 

If you do not have enough recyclers to cover the entire DF, then you want to send the recs from the target at 100% to arrive 1 second after the attack. That way, they will return as soon after the hit as possible and you will be able to resend them until the DF is gone.

 

-- Getting Evil--

If your attacker is sending most of his/her fleet, and your fleet that remains after the attack will be sufficient to take out the attacker's fleet that remains after the attack, you can do a little more damage. You should be able to guess approximately when the attacker sent recyclers. Either it will be when the attack fleet was sent, or when the attacker first pinged/attack-probed the target. After the attack, get the attacker's tech levels -- if you don't already have them. Do not grab the entire DF, leave enough that it is worth the attacker's while to grab the remainder. Calculate the approximate time that the attacker's recs will arrive at the DF. Go to galaxy view and refresh every 5 seconds. When the DF disappears, record the time. Add to that time the amount of time it takes the defender's recs to get from the attacking planet to the target.

 

If your engine tech levels are the same or lower, immediately launch sufficient recs to recover the DF from hitting the attacker's recs. If your techs are higher, determine how much faster your recs are and send them when appropriate to arrive 2-3 seconds after the fleet you are about to send. Send your attacking fleet to arrive 1-2 seconds after the time you calculated from the disappearance of the DF.

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  • 6 months later...

Ike: I hope you don't mind me posting a small addendum/review to your wonderful ninja guide.

 

Great guide on how to do a ninja! I wish I could have read this a while ago, it would have given me assurance that what I was doing was correct/incorrect. ^^

 

I remember some of your great ninjas, in fact you were the one who inspiried me to complete my 2 Ninja HoF's in uni 9 (Although I already had some others from different unis)

 

I think you included almost everything that I could think of in here (including return hitting the recs I've always wanted to do that, but most the people I've ninja'd have always had a big enough fleet to ninja me back if I launched my full fleet at the recs.) I suppose you could add that Death Stars (RIP's) Can do quite a bit of damage without dying for a ninja attack. Especially with a foddered defense. As you can see in this one, just two RIP's and a foddered defense did well against 300 battlecruisers. HoF Link. Also, in this one I used a "don't post your first ninja until you make another tactic". I made my second one less then 24 hours later then my first (including some other HoF in other uni ^^) It is good to make people think you are a n00b. They will never expect you know the art of the ninja. As soon as you post one HoF, it will be much harder to pull off another one because they will see it in the HoF board and be wary before they attack you again. I got probed regularly before that, but after the ninjas the probes died down to nothing. (Except occasional friendly probe from Nishz0r :4rofl: )

 

And remember, if you don't understand any of this, don't hesitate to ask the master of the ninja, Ike! :drinks:

 

...Yes Ike, you do deserve some credit for writing one of the best ogame guides there is.

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