War Guide

War Guide

This guide is meant as an overall introduction to the war system and the general tactics for warfare. The best tactics depend on too many things to cover in one guide, including your specific nation setup, your opponents’ specific nation setup, and your chances of victory as an alliance. This guide is NOT meant to be a guide to tech raiding, as the strategy there is entirely different, and therefore the tactics for fighting are as well.

Preparation

The most important thing in warfare in CyberNations is preparation. Being active and organized, as well as having an appropriate warchest, are the most important things that will determine the outcome of the war. If you’re large enough to be buying tech on a regular basis, your minimum warchest should be 50x your daily bill payment. As for activity and organization, that depends solely on you as the player and the alliance.

Fighting an Offensive War

So you’ve gotten attack orders from your alliance, and now you need to know what to do. If you’ve got an adequate warchest, things are much simpler from here.
1. Switch to DEFCON 1, threat level SEVERE, and government type Communist.
2. Swap out your improvements. Remove improvements (like churches) that provide no military or bill paying support. Purchase guerilla camps and naval academies.
3. Declare war on your targets. (DO NOT buy soldiers, tanks, or other military before this step. This may cause your NS to move out of range of your target, and this can have more negative effects than just embarrassment).
4. Buy max soldiers and tanks, as well as the Cruise missiles you’ll need for the day’s attacks (2 per nation you’re at war with).
5. Spy attack your opponent to change their defcon away from defcon 1. If your opponent is already at a defcon other than 1, use your spy attacks for other things, preferably destroy nukes or kill spies, depending on your opponents’ strength.
6. If you have the appropriate naval vessels, set them for battle support. If you don’t have the naval vessels, skip this step (or buy some).
7. Drop a nuclear missile (if you have nukes, and if the war rules allow for it. Many times it is more diplomatic to not use nukes if you think it could hurt you in post-war negotiations). Also, this step is interchangeable with the next step depending on the circumstances. Also, nuking an opponent is only possible 24 hours after declaring war.
8. Naval battle. See above regarding timing. Nuke first if your opponent has a lot of ships that are vulnerable to nuclear attacks.
9. 2 cruise missile attacks.
10. 2 air raids. Send only 2 bombers, and the rest fighters.
11. 2 ground attacks. The type of attack you should use depends on your battle odds. If your odds are under 40%, use cautious attack. If they are between 40-70%, use planned attack. If they are above 70%, use aggressive attack.
12. Pay bills. NEVER EVER EVER collect taxes while at war, unless you are at 20 days inactive and are about to get deleted. Or, if you’re about to run out of money, you can switch to DEFCON 5 and Threat Level Low right before update, collect taxes, and then immediately after update switch back to DEFCON 1 and Threat Level Severe.

Fighting a Defensive War
Fighting a defensive war is distinctly harder than fighting an offensive one. For starters, there is the element of surprise. You are unlikely to be at DEFCON 1 and threat level SEVERE when the war starts, and there is a high chance you will be knocked into anarchy by their first attacks if you weren’t prepared ahead of time. Your attackers will also probably be at the maximum strength range for attacking you, something that makes everything a lot harder. Here’s what to do if you still have a chance in your wars.
Follow the above guide for offensive wars, skipping step 2. If at any point you think you are getting beat down too hard to stand a chance, read on.

Turtling
Turtling is a technique used in wars that you are losing heavily, and need to save as much as your infra and tech as you can whilst still damaging your opponents. Here’s the step by step process.
1. Decom all your soldiers and tanks, and if that’s impossible, deploy them all. Don’t buy any more soldiers and tanks for the rest of this process.
2. Keep your DEFCON at 1 and your threat level at SEVERE, as always.
3. Send a nuke.
4. Send two cruise missiles.
5. Send 2 air raids.
6. Sit tight, and hope that you survive.
The idea behind turtling is that you can still damage your opponent without taking all the damage from ground attacks because they can’t attack you if your chance of winning is too low.