Transcription
[music] >> Hello men and gentle ladies and welcome back to surviving the whiteout where today we are once again talking about bear trap in the fourth part of this little bear trap mini-series. And in this one I want to talk about how the bear trap should ideally work in practice because in theory it's fairly simple. Everyone starts a rally, people join the rallies and you do as much damage as possible.
But in reality if everyone starts rallies at the same time it just turns into complete chaos. Rallies don't fill up properly, people miss the chance to join certain rallies and overall your damage just isn't optimized. So what I want to do is walk through how we run bear trap here in XXI and more importantly why it works so well for us.
Now first let's talk about positions because positions are incredibly [music] important when trying to run a bear trap efficiently. And the front row should be for players who have the strongest rallies. But and this is incredibly important for me personally, it also needs to be players who are active. Because if you have someone who has an incredibly strong rally in the front row of the bear trap but they don't always contribute to the alliance much, they're not always at bear trap, then for me that place would be much more deserving going to somebody else. So for us the front row is our strongest and most active rally starters.
Now the second row is the next strongest and the next active. So still strong players, still people with strong rallies, just slightly lower than those on the front row. And then the third row follows the same rules, slightly weaker rallies than the previous two rows but still people who can start rallies. Depends on how active your bear trap is, you may only have people on the front two rows that are the ones that take part. But if you are lucky enough to be in a very active alliance where you have many [music] many people to start rallies then the third row is for the people who are next strongest.
And the reason for this isn't just about rewarding the strongest players for being the strongest, it's not just giving them the front row just because they deserve it, it's about making the entire trap easier to coordinate. And here's why. Because as soon as the trap opens, as soon as the bear trap is active, everyone in row one begins their rallies immediately. And then everyone will rush in and try to join those rallies as quickly as possible. So those rallies will be filled within 10 seconds of those rallies starting.
And then a minute later, so a minute after bear trap has been triggered, everyone in row two starts their rallies. Now those row two rallies won't immediately fill and sometimes they won't fill until right before they're about to leave and that's absolutely fine, that's how we intentionally play it here. Because what we do is we wait for our troops to return from the row one rallies and then we immediately send them to the row two rallies. I'm really struggling to say row one rallies.
So what we effectively do is cycle through the rallies that we join. So we join all the rallies for row one, then we join the rallies for row two, then we'll join rallies from row three and then once they're back we'll rejoin the rallies from row one that have now been [music] started for a second time. And that means that our six joining marches, if you have six joining marches, once they've hit in those row one rallies and they've returned to your city you can immediately send them to a rally that is about 30 to 40 seconds away from leaving. And this just massively increases the amount of damage people do and also the amount of rallies that people can join.
Because in the first six or seven minutes in the bear trap rather than just hitting it with your own rally and six joining rallies, you've actually been able to take part in 13 rallies. So your scores in those first few minutes are way higher than they would be if you hadn't have staggered those rallies. And since we've started doing this our scores have honestly massively improved. We're joining more rallies every single trap and naturally we're getting far more points than we did before.
Now if you're still a strong player and you still have a decent rally and you're not in row one and you're not in row two, then you can still start your rally but we would ask that people do it 60 to 90 seconds after row two. So typically our bear trap has been starting at 19 UTC, it's been time change now so we're all confused. But row one will start at 19:00 UTC, row two will start at 19:01 UTC and row three will then usually start at 19:02 UTC, sometimes 19:02 and 30 seconds.
Now this only works if a few rules are followed and following these rules is key to having it work as effectively as we have it running in this alliance. And rule one is simple, it's just joining the next rally to leave. So when your march comes back you just join the next rally that's about to leave. You don't go looking for the best rally, you don't go scouring through the list. You just join that next rally that's going to leave. And most of the time by doing this you'll still end up getting into some of the top rallies, at least we do in the way that we do in our alliance and I'll touch on some more of those reasons in a bit. But by joining from the top and joining those first rallies to leave, you still manage to get your troops back quick enough in order to join those stronger rallies as well. So you're not technically missing out on anything, you're just able to join more rallies. So instead of you joining the strongest rally and having your troops sat there for four and a half minutes waiting for that rally to hit, instead you can join sometimes even two rallies between that time and then still get into that rally anyway.
Now rule two can often come across as a bit harsh and it has upset some people before but honestly the reasons aren't for what people think and it's that not everyone should be starting a rally. So in our alliance we ask some of the weaker players to not start their rallies and it's not to punish them, it's not as an insult, it's because it's going to benefit the whole alliance but it's also probably going to benefit them as well. Because instead of all the other players joining a weaker rally, they're able to prioritize those troops in joining the next rally which hopefully will be another stronger one. And the more damage that a rally does, the more points those joiners are going to get. And those players with weaker rallies, rather than using their marksmen in their own rallies and not scoring particularly well, instead they can use those marksmen in the higher scoring rallies which is just going to boost their score.
Now we do make one exception and that's that anyone can start a rally in the last six to seven minutes. So as long as their rally is going to hit before the end of the trap anyone can start a rally. That's just to make sure that everyone can join as many rallies as possible in those final few minutes of the trap.
And rule three for us is troop limits. Now this was a controversial one at first and I'll be honest when I was first asked to do it, I didn't like it. I fought back against it. I was in the R4 chat and I was saying this just isn't right, we shouldn't be doing this, it's pointless. And I've been proven wrong. Because I thought why would sending fewer troops to each rally increase people's scores? But it honestly does when it's done correctly. When it's done alongside those other two rules, it really does boost everyone's overall score.
So we're currently in gen six and some of us have a fairly big sized rally capacity, it may be smaller than yours if you are in a later state. But we currently have a troop limit of 105,000 per rally. And the reason we do this is fairly simple. It just allows more people to get into those strongest rallies. So instead of six or seven players instantly filling that stronger rally with their full marches, instead we can get 15 players into it. Now sure your damage per hit is going to be slightly lower by having a lower troop limit than sending your full march, of course it is going to bring that score slightly down, but it almost guarantees you that you're going to be getting into the stronger rallies every single time. You may not get into all of them but by having 15 people in each of those rallies you've got a greater chance of being one of those 15. So sure sending a full march to that rally might score you 300 million points but if you can join three rallies in that time and even still join that rally and get 150 million points instead, you're probably going to end up with more points.
Now an important thing to note is when you start your own rally that troop limits do not matter. They only matter when you're joining a rally. So when you call your own rally, we can go to B1 I've got on the top there which is my rally. That's my full march. So I've got a 10 10 80 ratio there. I've tried 5 5 90. Didn't really bring me much better results. So I'm still going for a 10 10 80 there. And then everyone else who joins my rally will join with >> [music] >> 105,000 troops. You can see all of my joiners I've got all of the right joiners in the slots but with the same amount of troops every single time all the way up to number seven where I don't have any heroes cuz I don't have an appropriate joiner to use.
Now using this system does sometimes mean that the whales in the alliance will score slightly less but everyone else will score more. And honestly we're really lucky in our alliance. We've been in alliances before where the whales haven't been too thrilled by this and have got upset and even left the alliance. So when we joined XXI and presented this idea and said that we'd seen great benefits from it in our previous alliance but the whales will score less, the biggest whale in our alliance Kerza just said if it helps everyone then that's what we're going to do. So we are incredibly lucky to have people in our alliance that don't care about their personal achievements. They just want to make sure that the whole team does well. So what a man.
So that's it. That is how we run our bear trap. And since we've adopted this strategy, honestly people's scores have gone through the roof. The whole event is much less stressful because it's no longer about fastest finger first. People like getting angry when they're not getting into the strongest rallies. Everyone is getting a fair chance. We still have some people doing some cherry picking and if you are in XXI and you're still doing that, stop. Please stop. But as long as people respect those rules and they don't go hunting for the biggest rallies, that they stick to the right troop ratios, that they start their rallies at the same time, it just becomes a more enjoyable event. People are less stressed, people are less worried about not getting into certain rallies and it just becomes a fun little team game.
So I definitely recommend people giving this a try. So stagger your rally starts, join the next rally to leave and focus on getting in as many rallies as possible. So let me know in the comments how your alliance runs bear trap. Is it slightly different to this? Do you do something that you think we should be trying in our alliance? If you do have something different then please do let me know below. And if you are going to give this a try, honestly let me know how it goes. And if people are actually interested in seeing how our trap works and seeing a live bear trap then please do let me know and I'll happily record one to show you exactly how it works in our alliance. But thank you for watching as always and I will see you in the next video. Peace. >> [music]