One of the more effective methods of building your empire up in Gold, Resources and Hero experience is Ballista Spamming. Technically its not spamming due to the travel time to your targets. But, I consider it spamming due to the extreme effectiveness if used correctly and with a little planning.

NOTE:
This is an ongoing post. I will update it as I learn more myself about the method and fine tune it more. Your technoliges can also change these numbers so its better to err on the upside when using the ballistas on any level for the first time.

Whats Required:
Ballistas and Transports. (transports are optional but it would be crazy to not carry back all that loot.)

The Method:
Can’t much easier. Send Ballistas and Transports with a decent attack hero at a NPC city.

Npc Ballista Spam

These Numbers are from my experience using a attack hero with over 100 attack and may be adjusted more to the downside or upside as more of my alliance members report in on smaller sizes being successful. I will fill in lvl 9 and 10 when i get enough Ballistas. Hero Level is very important, if you hero has low attack adjust these number up about 50%

• Lvl 1 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 30 Ballista
• Lvl 2 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 50 Ballista
• Lvl 3 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 150 Ballista
• Lvl 4 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 300 Ballista
• Lvl 5 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 600 Ballista
• Lvl 6 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 900 Ballista
• Lvl 7 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 2500 Ballista
• Lvl 8 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 3500 Ballista
• Lvl 9 NPC BARB CITY  - Requires approx 9600 Ballista (My attack hero was 156 attack)
• Lvl 10 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx

Pre planning a long term Ballista siege of multiple NPC citiesIf you plan your strategy out effectively in advance you can have multiple npc very close and easy to spam.

• Plan your capture of and abandon some lvl 7, 8, 9, or lvl 10 Player cities very close to you.

Player cities converted to NPC Barbarian cities

• until you have a large ballista army you can continuously hit lvl 1, 2, 3 NPC for small rewards. those are easy to capture from other players and can be abandoned right away as they have no value to you anyway.
• Seeing you are on a long term siege of these cities, why not use the flow of experience the hits will generate to level up your mayors faster. Once you know your ballistas can beat the NPC no problem (any easy way to tell is by how many rounds it takes to wipe them out. If its under 40 you should be o.k. sending in a low attack mayor.) attach a mayor to them for tonnes of experience and lots of levels you can then apply to intelligence and politics.
• Don’t forget to level up your attack heroes while sieging NPC cities, and when you go after a new level of NPC city, use them not your mayor until your low in rounds reuired to beat that npc with your attack warrior. Myself I like to use my attack hero to hit the higher level NPC, and the level below that I send my mayor while waiting for the higher level to regnerate new resources.

The following article is a little heads up, with bell throttling everyone here in canada for -2- usage becaus eit uses to much bandwidth, expect to be soon throttled for Youtube, Break.com, Liveleak, etc……….
After that bw has been throttled expect Newsgroups and ftp, the last safe frontiers to be throttled.

————————————————————————————-

The most consistent rationale for ISPs to throttle p2p applications or charge by the byte is that a small minority of users drain a vastly disproportionate amount of bandwidth, like the planet-raping aliens in Independence Day. Om Malik pulls a few of these numbers out of Arbor Networks’ CTO, who develops all the traffic management tools your ISP probably uses, so while there’s a conflict of interest (portents of internet doom sell more stuff) they have the data. Ten percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth, a super-leeching 0.5 percent swallow 40 percent of bandwidth, and the rest like your mom, 80 percent, sip less than 10 percent. But p2p isn’t the culprit.

No, p2p is no longer the single biggest traffic whore, responsible for only 20 percent of total traffic. It’s streaming video, like YouTube and Hulu, which is now 50 percent of total traffic. During peak congestion—the times when Comcast will slow you down for hitting the pipe too hard—70 percent of it is http.

Read Full Article At Source

Did you ever stop to wonder how an apparent 5% of the users who use up an apparent 33% of the available internal network bandwidth didn’t apparently pay enough for their usage to justify Bell upgrading its network?

Did you ever stop to wonder how it came to be that Bell’s internal network congestion problem was so critical it didn’t need to inform wholesalers, instead deciding to throttle them?

Did you ever stop to wonder how LITTLE Bell must be making on the network (both wholesale and Sympatico retail) to justify Bell spokesman Mirko Bibic’s comment that, “Bandwidth just doesn’t fall from the sky”?

I have.

Below are general costs (Re. 1, 2, & 3) of one wholesaler, TekSavvy, neatly compiled and then broken down to reflect what Bell is making both retail and wholesale.

Table 1: TekSavvy GAS (Gateway Access) Deliver Costs. ISPs pay the following to Bell to deliver a DSL connection (NOT internet costs, but internal network costs paid to Bell)
…….
Read Complete Article at Source

Last month Azureus published a plugin through which users can help distinguishing the good from the bad ISPs, and today we have a preview of some early findings. A massive 1,000,000 hours of data from over 8000 users has been collected over the past few weeks. The preliminary results again confirm that Comcast continues to use TCP-resets to manage BitTorrent traffic on their network, but they are not alone.

See stats and Full article at source

Subject: Application requesting certain orders directing Bell Canada to
cease and desist from “throttling” its wholesale ADSL Access
Services

Cables Box – Funny videos are here

What a ingenious idea!!!