Winning by losing (in General)

This is for anyone with an eye on top spot; if you want to play with the big boys then you'd probably better read this.

At the top of the game right now sits PM. There's always someone in that spot and they almost always have an encyclopedia like knowledge for the game, they're top dog and its part of the job description.
They are always going to be much smarter than the average person. In other words, there's a pretty good chance that at any given time whoever owns the top character is smarter than you.
Rise through the ranks by not missing a single BA if you'd like. Study the statistics of every item and every skill in the game, concoct all the tactics you'd like but if you try to fight someone more intelligent than you who in this case will also have at least adequate experience, you will lose. It's that simple.
I'm smarter than you; I think I'm smarter than pretty much everyone else too. But were I to rise through the ranks and take on PM, I'd lose.

If you want to prove just how sharp your wits are by taking on the top characters, great. But part of beating these guys is in knowing that they've got you beat before the fight even begins.

Look at any one of the past top players who has stayed top dog for more than a week and it paints a pretty clear picture of what you're up against.
They have a better knowledge of the game than you.
They have more experience at top ten fighting than you.
They have more NW/EXP than you.
They've already spent time meticulously planning out exactly how they're going to fight off people just like you.

They can outwit you, they have more muscle than you and they will be ready for you.

So, now that we have established that you will lose.
Let's talk about how you will win by losing.

Don't fight them.
If you get caught up in a struggle for power they will come out on top, so just ignore them.

How was it so eloquently put when I heard it last? "Four minion teams already have all of their cards laid out on the table".

They've maxed out their power to go about their petty struggles for the top spot. Don't do this.
Show the same dedication to burning your BA as they do, use the cheapest, most effective single minion strategy you can that includes the use of an RoE from 1MPR to 3,000,000MPR.
The troublesome part of this is that the only way for it to be advantageous is for you to hire new minions, and that means making the same mistake everyone else has made.
Find the balance that will allow you some time up top, but note that sooner or later someone will overcome you.

MPR is the key to this game. NW is fool's gold.
EC will nullify any weapon. Evasion will do the same.

The only strategy that I'd consider a favourite to beat the top character is one that doesn't even bother to fight for it.

Well put! To really beat the top dawg =P, you can't just grow up and beat them. The last time PM fell from the top spot, only a week or so, was because he got annoyed and sold a bunch of his stuff, insta'd his #1 tat down a little, and sold his almost undefeated character. That's about the only way to get around this, and just to show how much you're up against, he reclaimed that #1 spot only a week or two later...

Well Sut is actually in the top spot MPR wise with a very low NW team.

He only gets beaten on a regular basis by myself and Oxcha.

End Of Days occasionally beats him.

However as a 1 or 2 minion team he would indeed lose to more.

Moral of the story: Use 1, 2 or 3 minions near the top at your own risk. However, it is very possible to get to the top with a very low NW team.

But as a single minion you give up so much power ability. The inability to use a tattoo and body armor/cloak/MgS on that single minion is a large hit to your potential power.

I would say a 2 minion team at least is needed. But MrC has very very valid points.

If you're looking to beat a single person, that's childsplay. Make a strategy that can topple PM's character *and* not lose to the other strategies in the top10, and then you'll have legitimately earned the #1 spot. And I assure you good friend, you will not be achieving that without some hefty NW. PM is at the top because he knows the game, he has the mpr, and he has the NW. You will not topple that throne without at *least* matching him on all 3 fronts. No easy feat indeed.

Th00p,

It was about 4 months later when I bought Koy and it took me about 1more month to get it where it is now.

Hmm. I think the top spot is down to the size of bank balance. The more NW you have, the more likely you are to get the top spot. Although brains do play a part, NW is the final factor. I got some pretty good ideas on how to take the throne... but I can't. Why? I don't have the money to, its expensive.

Saying that, I don't have the commitment. The top 10 are very consistent and play the game often, I do not catch every BA a day, and I don't buy BA either.. I'm not gonna get in the top 10 any time soon!

You can nearly knock having top MPR out of that equation if you've got enough NW. EoD proves that, with his MPR of ~2/3 sutty's and Dr. Pop's.

Yes, but in the long run? Costs to upgrade increase exponentially, minion growth is constant.

There will certainly be a time when it will be impossible for NW to overcome MPR.

Right now we are seeing it.
With more MPR, more powerful spells that grow almost linearlly.

But most item growth is exponential. At first relatively cheap but at a certain point, prohibitively expensive, even for USD spenders.

The only non exponential growth item in cb aside from the tattoo (more later on this) is the x on a weapon. However as you need Str to do damage also, it cannot compete with direct DD spells linear growth.

And those with a higher MPR get a higher tattoo to use (most of the time). Which is more power to the higher MPR team for the NW to overcome.

Really? As time passes and MPR increases, NW increases as well. The X increases as well as the STR...they are more than capable of keeping up with the Direct Damage spell, especially with the increased Exp. cost per stat point.

'Sides, item growth doesn't have to increase beyond a certain point, because for the vast majority, it is increasing a stat such as DX or STR by a percentage - its overall effect increases as the MPR increases and time passes, allowing it to keep up with the DD spell as well.

Hey,

Call me crazy, but I disagree with MrC on almost every point.

1) The people in the top ten are indeed smart, and do indeed have encyclopaedic knowledge of the game, and most of them have indeed spent a lot of USD to buy NW (or a lot of game time to get CBD to buy NW).

But, it _does not_ follow that they are unbeatable. To get where he got, PM had to beat somebody. Eventually, somebody will come up with a strat that will make his seem juvenile.

I mean, you say at the start "You will never beat the top player" but at the end you pretty much say "If you are ever the top player, eventually you will get beaten." I agree with the second statement, because it contradicts the first.

2) Do not fight them.

What? You're kidding me!? Let's say that I'm a bright cookie and I build a strat that can beat all the top 20 players except for the top... 5, say. My MPR is roughly the same as the top 5, but my strat is slightly worse. Of course I _need_ to fight them, to see where their strat is better than mine, and to modify it. CB is all about the big feedback loop.

3) Four minion teams already have all of their cards laid out on the table.

Right. Cough. What you mean to say is that you can't use USD to buy more minions if you have a 4 minion team. I don't envy how much money Mikel will have to spend when he finally decides to buy his support cast. Buying minions and buying equipment is fundamentally the same: you are using money to gain an edge over other opponents. All you are really saying is "invest wisely, at the right time, rather than early when it places you at a disadvantage". OK, fine, I agree; but it may be that that wise investment _is_ to have four minions at some stage in the game where your growth depends on it.

4) Next, you state that MPR owns up NW.

Nope, this isn't true either. Sure, it isn't _completely_ one sided, but take The End Of Days. An MPR of 3/5 that of Koy and Hubbell, yet is probably considered in the top 6 or 7 teams, due to his NW. Or, take Koy. If you think that Koy is where it is because of MPR, you'd only be partly right. The best strat consists of two parts: experience trained into minions, and equipment (read NW) to make that training effective.

Heck, just look at Hubbell and Oxcha.

5) Finally, you talk about winning by losing.

I assume by this you mean "accepting the fact that you can't beat opponent such and such, and changing your fightlist so that you only fight opponents you can beat, thereby earning experience".
Sure, you will progress beyond the other players in terms of experience (assuming that you can fight more battles than them). And, eventually, since your growth rate is greater than theirs, at some stage you will be able to beat them (lets say when you reach 6mil MPR and they are at 3mil MPR).

But to tell you the truth, if a character had 5 million MPR and lost to an opponent who had 3 million MPR and who never lost to _any_ opponent, it is obvious that the top character is _not_ the one with the higher MPR.

----------------------

Maybe I'm missing your point, but the idea behind carnage blender is to build the best strategy that you can, and to have a fight list that gives you the best rewards possible so that you can grow as quickly as possible - and by grow I am not merely talking about experience and money, I'm actually talking about "How good your team is". And in my opinion, that rating of "How good your team is" is more complex than merely "MPR + NW = Value" because this is generally not the case.

Well, sorry for the long rant, but this post annoyed me.

Cheers,
muon.

I am only up here because of my USD spending - my strat sucks and I will never beat PM as I dont have the MPR and will never have. I only spend USD as I hold down a fairly taxing job and cannot spend the time that many of you spend to I supplement it by the 'occasional' ( ;-) ) purchase of cb$.
I am pants at this game but enjoy it immensely except for the occasional 'overpowered' threads (seekers, elbows etc.), and other threads attacking individuals.

Muon,

1) My intention was to make clear that to take on someone who's in such a good position to fight back is going to be tough if not impossible. I do think it's possible that someone could beat PM, Sut, Freed and everyone else in the top ten with a conventional strategy, but I think there are only maybe a handful of CBers capable of that, PM, Sut and Freed take up half of that handful, and the rest don't seem interested in top spot so I don't think it likely and I think that the majority of people reading this wouldn't stand a chance.

The best are at the top because they're the best, your average Joe wont be able to beat them.
I can see how my choice of words could have been misleading though. Sorry.

2) I wasn't talking about _everyone_ being best off not fighting them, I Was talking about _most_ people being best off not fighting them. Even if we sit here today and come up with a strategy to beat half of them (and I'm sure we could) it wouldn't make much difference because they'd adjust, the reason I don't want to advise people to take them on unless you're at a significant advantage (due to MPR) is because the people who have proven themselves capable of adjusting to such challenges are more likely to succeed than someone rising through the ranks.

3) Single minions can be effective up to 1mil MPR, that is just what I have tested and I see no reason why they can't be effective after that.
There is also a reason I advised people to go for the cheapest single minion strategy they could (i.e. when possible single FB mage) and this is to minimise the USD needed to buy those minions.
I don't agree with your comparison between investing in NW and minions, but that's a discussion for another thread.

4) EC and Evasion is all that is needed to take on that kind of NW.

Hang on. Let's forget this whole debate. I wont convince most people of it so I wont try. Instead let's look at it this way. Assume someone invests as much USD as the guys in the top ten and fights in the conventional manner against them, if this is someone fresh out of their NUB, do you really figure them to be the favourite?

Now, let them invest the same USD, and get MPR on their side. My recommended strategy does not remove the ability to drop USD into the game.

5) If you had 6mil MPR and a handful of opponents at 3mil MPR, you shouldn't be losing to anyone.

Regarding your final point, I'd never say that MPR+NW=Value.
That's simply not true.
You'd need a sound strategy to work with after you hire all four minions, this I can't advise anyone on because I know that the guys in the top ten would adapt. It's the ability to re-adjust your own strategy more effectively than they did their own that will put you ahead. There is much more to it than the sum of your MPR and NW.

The best you can do is ensure that you've got some kind of advantage over them before you try to beat them.

The only point I really disagree with you on is the usefulness of MPR Vs NW and yet I don't concede any of my orinial post being inaccurate. Go figure.

As with most things in life, disagreements arise from lack of understanding of the other person's points.

My apologies; with your added explanation, I see what you're saying. And you are right, of course, but I still think that a new player should have something to aim for; and the ability to be able to beat, say, the top 4 characters, is a goal worth aiming for in the CB world, in my opinion ;-)

even a low mpr team can win from PM if they got USD, if they have USD they can keep upgrading there weapons and armor to a point thats its almost impossible to upgrade it some more but by then they will win even from PM, so good strat isnt worth much now with USD buyers so the top dogs are only strong bzcause they use USD

If you had enough USD you could just Blacksmith a SoD up to 1-2 Billlion NW and then just get ammo and increase that and with a single minion you would beat everyone.

no it won't, jon will nerf the SoD so hard if anyone makes a really big sod

I think Henk's post shows exactly why CB is so addictive, and why the top 5 are there.
There will always be rocks for PMs particular scissors - but at Change Time, it is the first to react appropriately that are going to accelerate fastest.
That is something that NW or MPR just don't cover - the experience to change something correctly when needed - and is something that Jon should be congratulated for a lot more than he is