Overpop Mitigation

This is part of the Utopia WIKI Player written guides.

THIS PAGE is a guide aimed to cover Overpop Mitigation. It comprises of tips and tricks written by other players, for regular utopians. Please be civil in your discussions if you disagree with a point made on the page.

Introduction

Mitigating overpop is a mechanic that really privileges activity and it is not expected in most kd?s that you do these things when being chained. If you do nothing else but mass LL before troops get home so as to be able to send out easily this is still better than nothing. However, lots of wars are won or lost by how successful chains are, and these things make chains fail. One of the most significant differences between top-tier kd?s and standard war kd?s is their commitment to overpop control and maintaining a strong ?small? group of provs.

Mitigating overpop as you go down in a chain is good for lots of reasons: 1) if you have enough land coming in with armies you end up losing nothing and the chain is completely useless, 2) without losing defense you are able to maintain higher def, often preventing multi-taps which can also decrease chain success. 3) At the bottom of a chain defense is, perhaps counterintuitively, often more valuable than offense.

The basics are still the same as you do in most kd's: have lots of acres incoming, army-in army-out, release to dragon if you have to before sending out. Here are a few formulas and tricks though.

Maintaining Army

Maintaining your army through overpop depends on one fundamental formula:

Military desertion formula: ((((total pop-(peasants*.1))/maxpop)-1)/5) * (soldiers + specs + elites + thieves)

Note: You only desert if maxpop*1.15 is less than totalpop-(peasants*.1). So if you have 10k total pop and 9k maxpop, you're not deserting.

You lose up to 10% of your peasants/tick when you are overpop, and they leave prior to desertions.

If this number is equal to the amount of soldiers you have, you only lose soldiers for the tick. This is why pers/race bonuses that return dead troops as soldiers are are so valuable when lots of people use IRC, because you use the soldier pool to prevent casualty losses. A good kd will use the soldiers generated to try to bounce provs and feed others. A great kd will use the soldiers to make it as if the prov was never chained in the first place.

Land Lust Farm

Besides microing tickly loss this way (either by releasing thieves into soldiers to leave, being aided, etc.) another strategy to alleviate the destruction of chains is to setup Land Lust (LL) targets, either via AW or out of control growth. These target should not be targeted by attacks and will serve exclusively as LL farms for chained provs. The only spell not affected by -damage mods in race is LL damage, so regardless of what kind of attacker you are, if you are likely to be chained you should try to maintain 60 mana at all times. That's a lot of LL, and the target will always be very large, and have no wpa. When your land is about to come in, LL to where you would need to be once acres come in + are built and then go use your great new mwpa for fb.

Fireballs From Friends

It may seem a strange concept, but if you want to save your army at the expense of your pesantry and you have KD mates with superior WPA, you can always ask them to fireball you a few times to lower your overpopulation issues.

WPA in the Abyss

When you are chained, depending on your starting wizzies and how deep the chain is, wpa can make up a significant proportion of your max PPA. As such there is some(although heavily weighted) debate over whether you should keep the wizzies or release the wizzies.

Pros to Keeping:

    -If you keep the WPA, you wind up with high WPA provs capable of FBing potentially otherwise unoppable provs in the other kingdom
    -If you release the WPA, you LL less in subsequent waves. 
    -WPA is hard to generate. If you release it one war you are likely to have horrible WPA in the subsequent wars.

Cons to Keeping:

    -If you keep the WPA, you wind up with a lot of lost potential military and your chained provs potentially fall behind
    -If you release the WPA, you can be intra-kd fireballed to release peasants, but it usually is better to release the WPA (several ticks) prior to army coming home, as you release WPA into peasants that you then need to lose to solve overpop.

�