I don’t want to expand myself endlessly on such a complex and multi-faced theme, but I think we could find out a lot of useful tips on the best strategists in the history of the world. For this first part I am going to focus my attention in these ones:

Miyamoto Musashi

The basic idea I want to remark from this awesome sword master is the idea recorded on his “Book of Five Rings”

Everything in this book goes around the tactician, commander if you may. As the creator of the strategy, Musashi compares him to a carpenter. All crafter that wants to success on his profession, must know perfectly well his own tools. The more he knows the tools, the more valuable pieces will come out of his workhouse.

If you pretend to lead a team, or a full alliance, you have to know the roles of every single class present on the battlefield. The more you know them, the better you will be able to direct them. Even more, they are not only classes, but people. Each individual will act on his own personal experiences and knowledge on his class. Know them well, and you will have half of the battle won. This is why not everyone is cut to be a leader, knowledge of your class makes you a good warrior, knowledge of every single detail of every single class of every single person makes you a good leader.

Musashi applies 5 circles in the battlefield, but in our case 4 would be applicable. I guess you imagine which ones them would be. Healing, Tanking, Dps, and Leading. And yes, I apply leading as a class apart from the events on the battle itself. The director/s of the fight should be focusing on the whole battle, and not on the bloody ranger that is nuking them.

Vom Kriege

The most interesting idea coming from this Prussian general is the idea of “Fog of War”

I guess most of you are familiar with this term, but we tend to forget that in MMOs we do have a fog of war too. The idea is pretty simple, you don’t see them, they don’t see you. We lived that situation today in the inner abyss. Our enemies stayed at a certain distance from us, letting us relax before gathering together and attacking us. Many times they succeeded just because we didn’t spot them on time, killing one or two people in the back. We have to understand this fog. As I see it, there are 4 levels of fog in the game.

1. Visual distance. Basically visual contact, and remember we think on 3D now.

2. Map distance. Hard to organise anything based on the minimap or the general map, due to the lack of altitude. If you are going to base a tactical decision on a minimap warning, be sure to check the altitude 2 or 3 times before. Would not be the first time that you find yourself alone when you are supposed to be surrounded by allies, that are actually 300 meters bellow you. Every position reference should be accompanied by at least an altitude message.

3. Radar distance. The ones of you familiar with enemy radar, know that this is a very useful warning. But the only problem is that you don’t have a clear direction of where the enemy is coming from. But it’s a good heads-up. Some of you know as well that each time that the game engine loads an attackable pc, it lags for a fraction of a second, this occurs even before the radar ping.

4. Awareness distance.  This is the tricky one. The one which gives you the advantage in combat. There are blind spots in your awareness in-game. The most clear of them is behind you. You don’t see, don’t detect enemies behind you till they are backstabbing you. But the most efficient one, is actually up. You cannot see enemies just on top of you, you cannot direct the camera to see them, you cannot target them without struggling with the camera. An attack from the top of a group can give the automatic advantage to a smaller group. And this is the place you want to be if you are a ranged DPS.

Sun Tzu

The idea of Adaptation is the one I want to mark on this Chinese general. Every single combat you will face will be different. If you root yourself on the patterns of the fights you will lose eventually. No one has a definite battle plan to win all the skirmishes. That’s why there is a whole sea of strategy books. The more you try to find patterns for all the possibilities that you will find, the more you will be close to the failure. Is just a matter of time that someone, somewhere will think a way of breaking that patterns. If you are the one to break it, you will win.

The ones that played Warhammer will remember this situations. Endless warbands roaming a map conquering all, objectives, forts, then fortresses, then cities. It was that way till someone found out how to conquer forts in small groups. Breaking the pattern and making the warbands turn around, re-conquer everything and look desperately for the small sneaky group that was pissing them off.

Patterns are boring, monotone. If you let the groups rot in stabilised patterns they will turn lazy. Everybody remembers the follow/afk issue on destruction during our days on WAR. Keep a fluid strategy, be imaginative, try new ways of surprising the enemy, of making yourself strong in other situations, and the battle will be a challenge everyday. And the people will love every single day in the battlefield. Sun Tzu used the water as an example of this. Water is the most powerful element in the world, yet is fluid, it changes, it adapts to a bottle and runs free in the oceans, it transforms the mountains and turns the fire in mud. Be like the water, and you will succeed.

Andrew Wiggins (Ender)

I know this one is a science fiction character, but his creator (Orson Scott Card) made a great work on making him one of the most brilliant strategists in space 3D battles.

The idea is very simple. The 3D space is a complex concept for us humans. We are not used to think in 3 dimensions, because we live trapped by the gravity of a planet. For us up and down are secondary troubles. Fighting on a real 3D scenario makes your basic knowledge of strategy useless for a start. You can keep thinking like you normally do and fail or you can adapt the properties of this scenario on your advantage.

We are starting to see what kind of situations you can find. The first and most important is the confusion. When a large group of members start flying around, there is a sense of chaos, like something is not where it should be. This leads to panic. The floor is a good position for defence and a good point of start, but staying on ground will turn you into a prey, like a pack of rabbits for a falcon. In order to avoid the confusion of the group flight, train is necessary.

Machiavelli’s book, “The Art of War” it’s a long extend and boring compendium of dialogs about the management of an army, but we can take a small part of it to point out an important concept in battle. The division of large groups of combatants in smaller, more useful phalanxes. 

Large groups moving are devastating in combat, but difficult to command. Splitting the action between smaller self-sufficient groups, makes it easier to react and adapt to the battle. In our case it would be necessary that the groups inside an alliance had a certain degree of self control and management. This implies too a new concept inside the warband, there wouldn’t be only 1 leader commanding, but a group of them under the lead of the main director. If you are going to lead an attack, its comfortable to know that each decision you take is going to be filtered by at least 4 thinking minds. Let’s make an example of this. If you want to direct a rear attack on a pack of enemies, you can order one of your squads to flank them, if that squad is directed by someone you trust, you’ll just need one order and the squad will act independently. You would loose a precious time explaining the whole movement to the 6 warriors.

For this end, you need people that are used to play together on each squad. So placing them together during all the battle and adjusting properly the groups before starting is crucial. This squads need to act as one, and control their positions in battle. Is useless to be in a great group, if the members are splitted all over the map.

Today we will be adding two additional servers.  We will be adding a new French server named Arbolu and a new English server named Kalil.  As we continue to grow and add more servers we realize that switching from a queued server isn’t an easy decision.  In order to incentivize play on these 2 servers, as well as the recently opened German server Lephar, we will be offering 10 consumable experience potions that boost your experience by 20% for one hour.  These will be available through the survey system to one character per account on these servers and only for this weekend!


And now for a bit of the history of the names…


Arbolu is keeper of the Genesis Spring in Heiron, and a divine tree who leads a village where humans and Elim live in harmony.


Kalil was a great Prophet said to have written a book detailing the futures of both the Asmodian and Elyos peoples, followers of this book have become known as Disciples of Kalil.


Thanks!
Brian Knox - Xaen

Once I ding 25 I got this little kick in me (with a little doubth) that I could finely get to abyss and finely get to PVP. But before I could do that I needed to prove myself worthy by runing 100miles (Aion Style) from one NPC to another and listening to a dull (but rather interesting) story about Abyss...
After all the talk and a Marathon behind my feet, I entered Abyss...

I dont know how I can describe the feeling I had, but I saw the light of Aion at that point. It was so big, so well made and just amazing! The scale of the Abyss is just insane, Just to look on the Core level of Abyss made me feel so small... But basicle what I am trying to say, the 1st impresion was just "forfeeled" to the max...

So there I was stending, little Old lady in the middle of no where trying to figure out what to do and how to act in the big mans world. It dident take  long time before I found myself a sourc friend, who has been flying around in Abyss for a while and had more exp then me.
The Soc named "Ellene" told me that we should go to the Elyos side and find some fights. That sounded not hard, since Abyss cant be That big (still having doubte about the scaling at this point).
So we took of, me following "Ellene" in a hope of geting my PvP virginiti "forfeeled". After "10-15" min flying we finely reached our destination, outside Elyos Fortress we started fighting Elyos who were grinding mobs for EXP and Abyss points. We killed a cupple before we vanished into the sky, a basic guerrilla tactic. But then Old Lady got to excitet. I saw a fleeing Elyos and thought that would be nice kill to add to my killing spree. It dident take me long time before I found out that flying is not unlimited and fell to my doom. ( I should have realy read what those NPC's said on the quest to Abyss).

After I resurected "Ellene" went offline and I joined a group of "Leet" rangers from guild "TEAR". Who had full abyss gear, and were already 30. It dident take long time before us 3 rangers started to dominate no mater what we came across of (Both mobs and Elyos).

The time was closing 5 am, most Elyose went to but our groupd of 3 rangers + 1 new Healer was roming Abyss like Kings, killing 1 and 1 Elyose who where desperetly trying to gather Abyss points for there Gear. (Not proud of 4v1, but good way to explore). When time reached 6am I found out that I should join Ogly and go to bed, witht the thought of what a fantastic day this was :)

Some pictures coming up in Gallery, so check out :)

The classic example of the difference is "All your base are belong to us." was translated. Whereas the localized/westernized version might end up, "I'm in your base killin' your dudes!" When people can't tell it was translated through the experience, then it was localized.

I have been working closely with Nergal and Lhel to make this an awesome experience for  all of your. With this site I have tried to learn a lot from your old site and with that making your new site so much better. The frontpage is a good example of that, where the old frontpage was very good at displaying all the resent stuff happening on the forum all the other parts of the site suffered. For example you had no way of telling wether someone had posted a comment on one of the images you uploaded. But now every time something gets updated on the site it will reflect that on the frontpage in the updates box. Another thing I added to the frontpage is the feature box, from here the Administrators of the site will be abel to post very interesting stuff that have happened, wether that be their grandmothers birthday or that you just owned everybody in Aion or whatever :).

Overall there is way to many changes to describe, since the entire site have been recoded and I tbh have no idea. But you should overall notice improvements EVERYWHERE.

All I can do now is wishing you all the best of luck in your new game, and I hope that you will keep on going for years to come, Xaxian Signing out.