How to Call Incoming

 Why to call incoming attacks

When fighting the Deads or the Interview or the Company or anyone else you are at war with in Grepolis, it helps to be able to call incoming attacks out to your team. Not necessarily every little attack, but at least the more strategically significant ones, like incoming colony ships.

Since sieges can get very very stacked in Conquest, especially when you are playing against larger more powerful teams, the best time to prevent a city from being conquered is often before the colony ship lands. In order to do this, you need to snipe or otherwise stop the colony ship from landing. This can save your team from having to choose between trying to attack a heavily stacked siege or just giving up your city as lost.

Frontsniping is when you land biremes or other defensive units before the colony ship, but after the last clearing wave, in order to prevent the colony ship from landing that way. Backsniping in is when you land fliers, light ships, or other offensive units after the colony ship, but before the first support, and kill the colony ship that way. Backsniping is only possible in Conquest worlds, not Revolt worlds, so in Revolt worlds, all snipes are frontsnipes.

This guide is mostly focused on Conquest, but calling incoming on a Revolt world is a similar process. If you can call incoming attacks, you may be able to prevent your city from being revolted, thus preventing your team from needing to stack you through 12 or more hours of Red Revolt time. Alternatively, if you are already revolted, and have inadequate defenses, calling incoming could potentially allow you and your team to snipe incoming colony ships, just as in Conquest.

If you have a city with a level 25 wall and tower and a good number of defensive land units, then calling incoming catapults on troop transports can be worthwhile if you need some extra biremes temporarily to sink the troop transports.

Please note that many of the incoming attacks I am using for this guide are consensual fake attacks, since I wanted to be able to relax and take screenshots and stuff for this guide without the pressure of dealing with real attacks. At the time I started writing this, Kingjoe11 and I were not actually engaged in any hostilities against each other, and he only attacked me to help me write this guide. However, at a later date, we did in fact end up on opposing teams and attack each other for real.
 

Preparing to call incoming attacks 

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt. 1: Set your computer/browser time to server time

Make sure your computer/browser time is the same as server time. If you are on 131 Elis with me, server time is the same as New York Time. I do not know if it is the same with all Grepolis servers, so if you aren't sure, ask one of your alliances' leaders.  If your computer/browser time is set incorrectly, many of the tools in this guide will give incorrect landing times for incoming attacks.

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt. 2: Install Approved Scripts

Long before you have a colony ship or other strategically important attack incoming, you should do some preparatory work, particularly in any cities on islands shared with enemies, or even islands next door to those shared with enemies.

To start with, if you use the browser version of the game, then I strongly recommend downloading and installing the following 3 approved scripts. If you are using the mobile version of the game, then, if your phone supports it, then I strongly recommend downloading and installing either Firefox for Android or Firefox for iPhone, and then downloading and installing the following 3 approved scripts. Prior to installing the scripts, you will need to install Tampermonkey, which is available for Chrome/Brave, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Opera. Depending on your browser, you may also need to enable developer mode for your extensions. Having these scripts will make the game easier for both you and your team. In order of priority, I recommend:

1. Grepolis Report Converter Revolution Tools (GRCRTools)
2. GrepoData Indexer
3. Dio Tools
   

 You can check the Grepolis Wiki Approved Scripts page to see a list of all approved scripts for Grepolis. 

Grepolis Report Converter Revolution Tools is the most important, because it includes a) the best browser-based alarm available, in my opinion, to help you respond to incoming attacks at times when you are soft-AFK but not hard AFK, b) tools to make it much easier to share information about incoming attacks with your team, and c) a city search feature that even lets you see CS travel times to other people, like teammates who may be struggling to figure out CS travel times to their cities.

GrepoData indexer can help you a) upload valuable intelligence information to your team and b) use the intelligence information updated by you and your team to make educated guesses about what each incoming attack (or incoming support) is likely to be. It's not totally reliable, since people can always change their cities' builds, but very often, past data on city builds tells you what current attacks and supports are likely to be.

Dio Tools has a feature to make a mail list of everyone on an island, which is useful when an enemy is trying to move in on a full blue/green island. If you use that feature on an island that already has enemies, be sure to delete the enemies from the mail list in generates. It also has a lot of functionality that makes day to day management of your cities easier, including moving resources between your cities at proper ratios for building certain types of units, seeing which cities you need to rebuild your armies and navies in at a glance, etc etc. In short, it helps you with a lot of the preparatory work you need to do between incoming attacks. It has some overlap with GRCRTools functionality, including its own attack alarm, but the GRCRTools attack alarm is more customizable and therefore better. Features that are incompatible with GRCRTools can be disabled.

In my opinion, the only good reason not to use approved scripts to assist you in playing Grepolis is if there is a technical reason why you literally can't, e.g. if you are playing on a mobile device that does not support Firefox for Android or any other browser that supports Tampermonkey. If you are having technical difficulties with installation, please reach out to either myself (if we are on the same team, or if I'm at least not full war against whichever team you are on -- if I am only partial war against your team, I may still help) or to one of your team's leaders. Or maybe if you are just on a super casual team that doesn't care. Like, I realize that I mass mailed this to some very casual alliances, including gold farming alliances. But if your team cares, and you have the technical capability, you should install GRCRTools and other important approved scripts.

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt. 3: Alarm use

Another preparatory step is: use alarms. I realize you may not be able to respond 24/7. Many people can't respond while at work or school. Many people value their sleep more than their cities, and don't respond at night. Pretty much everyone is vulnerable to having real life emergencies come up. That's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that alarms will help you when you are only soft-AFK, i.e. when when you are able to respond to attacks as long as you get a notification of them. An example might be when you are tabbed out of the game, or not at your computer but nearby, responding to e-mails or reading an e-book or working from home or whatever, but are willing to return to the game if necessary to defend against incoming attacks. Alarms help in these scenarios. Several options for alarms include: the mobile alarm (great for people out of their homes a lot), push notifications, and alarms that are included with approved scripts such as Grepolis Report Converter Revolution Tools (GRCRTools). (As for when you are hard AFK, you are vulnerable and may lose your city if you have a CS launched at you during that period, though some exceptions apply.)

The GRCRTools script is my preferred alarm. I used to use the DIO Tools alarm, but the DIO Tools alarm is not customizable. The GRCRTools one is. I currently have my alarm set to make relaxing whale noises, so that when it wakes me up or grabs my attention away from other activities, I do not feel stressed out by obnoxious noises and am able to make decisions more calmly and clearly than I could if I used a more annoying alarm. (Disclaimer: Using a relaxing alarm sound still won't counter the effects of sleep deprivation.) GRCRTools also a very useful script for calling incoming even if you do not use its alarm function, as discussed elsewhere in this blog post.

You can see my alarm customization settings here:

A downside to the GRCRTools alarm is that GRCRTools can only be installed in the browser version of the game, not the mobile app, so many people who are out and about for much of the day prefer to use the mobile app. They aren't mutually exclusive, so you could use the mobile alarm while out and about, and GRCRTools while at home. It is still possible to use GRCRTools on many mobile browsers from within a mobile browser such as Firefox for Android, however, the mobile app may provide better integrations with your mobile device's notification options.

Note that the GRCRTools alarm can fail you if your browser discards/suspends the tab Grepolis is in,  or if the game updates and you do not refresh it. And possibly under other circumstances as well. Two Chrome/Brave browser extensions that I use to mitigate the risk of alarm failure are DoNotDiscard and AutoRefreshPlus (use the latter when going soft AFK overnight in case there is a game update).  On Firefox, you need to make sure you have Autoplay enabled for the Grepolis website. Two Firefox extensions I use to mitigate the risk of alarm failure are Auto Tab Discard (use the "Always Keep Tabs for this Site" option to whitelist Grepolis) and Tab Reloader (page auto refresh) (use the latter when going soft AFK overnight in case there is a game update). I have also noticed that the risk of alarm failure seems to be lower on Debian Linux with a properly configured Firefox browser, than on a Windows computer with any browser.

Push notifications are another alarm option. It requires no script, it's just an integration between the game settings, your browser, and your operating system (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux, or BSD). This tends to be a very quiet alarm, so I would not trust it to wake me up if I were asleep, but if you value your sleep more than your cities, you might consider this a feature rather than a drawback. You can also use push notifications to receive notice of things like incoming mails, not just incoming attacks.

To use push notifications, just configure your in-game settings, set your browser to give the game permissions to send notifications, and configure your operating system to properly display the notifications in the manner of your choosing. There's a lot of potential points of failure here, so I'd recommend testing it, perhaps by checking "troop training" completed temporarily and then queuing a few fast to train troops to see if it actually works.

I almost never use the mobile app, only on rare occasions when I am unable to use the browser version of the game, so I cannot provide instructions on how to use its alarm feature, but the mobile app alarm is very popular among people who are out and about a lot and still wish to be able to respond to alarms.

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt. 4: Check Colony Ship travel times 

Another step is in preparing for incoming attacks is: familiarize yourself with Colony Ship (CS) travel times to/from nearby enemy cities to your frontline cities, so you have an idea of what to expect if they launch a Colony Ship attack at you. You should consider any city on an island shared with an enemy to be frontline, and even cities on neighboring  islands are still close enough to the frontlines that you should check CS travel times. Note that all travel times are approximate, since there are a number of speed boosts your enemies can potentially use. The speed boosts can in some cases increase the speed of an incoming colony ship by well over 100%, though I don't see that done often.

GRCRTools makes this really easy, but I'll show you how to do it both with and without GRCRTools. Note that part of what makes GRCRTools different from other methods, is that you can use it to check CS travel times to any city in the game, not only cities you personally control. This makes it very helpful for helping teammates who don't know how to check CS travel times to their cities.

If you have GRCRTools, go to the info screen for the city you are concerned about.

In the upper right hand corner of that screen, find and click the little blue radar icon that looks like this only smaller.

 

The city search screen should pop up. From there, just fill in your search parameters. In this example, I'm searching for unboosted CS travel times to enemy cities 2 hours away or less. You can see one of our enemies has a CS travel time of approximately 12 minutes 30 seconds to Pisa, even without any speed boosts. GRCRTools' city search feature will also let you see the results with various speed boosting options (but not sirens, which can theoretically halve CS travel times all by themselves, if someone has 50 of them, which is rare but not unheard of), as well as check for other types of travel times besides colony ships, such as light ship travel times, bireme travel times, etc.

 

GRCRTools is the only way I know of to check CS travel times to other peoples' cities, but if you just want to check CS travel times to your own city, there are other ways. Note that GRCRTool's city search does seem to give slightly different travel time estimations than other methods, so I suspect it is not 100% accurate, but it still comes out very close.

Another way to check CS travel times is to select the frontline city (or other city) you are worried about, and go to the screen for launching an attack at an enemy. This does not require any scripts, and presumably should work even on the mobile app, although of course mobile app users have a different interface. In this example, I am checking the CS travel time between Milano, the city I have selected, and Pirate Lookout, which I have selected as a potential attack target. Note that I can still enter a colony ship in the attack screen, even if I don't have any colony ships in the city, and it will estimate travel time accordingly. There's also a small button, just to the right of the "Plan" button, which will bring up the travel time simulator.

You can also use the travel times simulator. See the bottom of the attack screen shown above, to the right of the "Attack" and "Plan" buttons.

 This button, but smaller:

And here's an example of what the travel times simulator looks like. Note that it will let you test the effect of various speed boosts, with the notable exception of sirens.

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt. 5: Buy or farm enough gold to get the administrator advisor

If you buy or farm enough gold to get the administrator advisor, you'll get access to the command overview, which makes calling incoming much easier. To farm gold, check your marketplace periodically to see if you can sell resources in exchange for gold. 100 gold gets you an administrator for 2 weeks.

You can call incoming even without an administrator, but it is harder, especially if you are under attack in multiple cities at the same time. I have a friend who was successful at defending without the administrator for as long as our enemies only attacked one or two of his cities at a time. Then one day, he got op'ed, and our enemies attacked nearly all his cities at once. He lost many cities that day.

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt. 6: Keep favor for important Gods full or nearly full

Unless you are building a mythical army, try to keep favor for the following Gods full or nearly full. Do not spend down all your favor for these Gods on unimportant spells if you have one or more frontline cities.

Artemis - for Purification

Poseidon - for Sea Storm

Athena - for Wisdom and City Protection

Aphrodite - for Narcissism 

Zeus - for Zeus' Rage

Hera - for Desire

It's also a good idea to wait until the very end of the day to accept your daily reward, in case you need more favor.

In a coordinated team, you will likely have a city on a Heracles island that your teammates can use to feed you additional favor as needed. The basic concept is to all build a bunch of sword and/or archer cities on the island and attack each other as needed to generate at least the 50 battlepoints necessary to trigger Heracle's special ability, which grants favor of the Gods, with every hit. One player will need to drop alliance temporarily, to avoid the BP penalty for attacking a member of your alliance or one you are pacted with, or, in some cases, one player may be in a different, unpacted alliance. Even on a less coordinated team, some of your teammates may still be willing to let you favor farm some of their cities by attacking them with mythical units that have temple looting. 

Preparing to call incoming attacks Pt 7: Practice!

Since calling incoming attacks when against an enemy, particularly a highly skilled enemy, can be a stressful way to learn, consider practicing against your teammates first. Pick a backline area where your enemies are unlikely to attack, split into at least two alliances that share forum tabs (to keep communications open in case you come under real attack) but aren't pacted with each other (so you get full BP), and try launching mini-clearing waves, CS'es, and mini-supports at each other. Any CS'es that land can be pulled when the practice games are over. 

Look at what people do in basketball or football or soccer pretty much any team sport. Is the only time they are practicing getting their balls in the hoop (or whatever) or preventing others from getting balls in the hoop when they are up against opposing teams in official games? Or do they practice against each other first, when they don't have official opponents to fight against? (A clue: it's often called scrimmage.)

How to Call Incoming Attacks

Calling incoming attacks using the Command Overview

The easiest ways to call incoming attacks involve the Command Overview, which requires the Administrator. I realize that not everyone has the Administrator, so I will also go over alternative methods as well. Please note that I almost never play on mobile, so mobile users may find my guide of limited use, especially if they are not able to install Firefox for Android or another browser on their phone. Hopefully someone else can post a different version of this guide for mobile users.

In order to find the Command Overview on a desktop/laptop browser, you want to hover your mouse over this icon, found towards the upper left hand corner of your screen. It will be quite a bit smaller than it appears on this blog.

A menu that looks like this will pop up. Click on Commands.

Then something that looks like this should pop up. Note that my command overview might look a little different from yours because I am running several approved scripts.



In order to share your command overview in-game in this manner, first take the screenshot, then upload the screenshot to Discord or any website that allows image sharing, then add the image URL inside the proper BB code tags.

There are easier and less time consuming ways. The easiest way to call incoming attacks from the command overview is to just copy-paste the Command Overview in plain text format like so.

Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:02:14(Arrival today at 16:51:09)Check intel >
Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:05:01(Arrival today at 16:53:56)Check intel >
Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:05:04(Arrival today at 16:53:59)Check intel >
Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:05:08(Arrival today at 16:54:03)

Be sure to also tell your team your wall level and the God worshiped in the city. And say which one you think is the CS, which is discussed in further detail elsewhere in this blog post.

This isn't the prettiest method, but it's quick and the time you save can give your team more time to react to the incoming attacks. This used to be my favorite method before becoming comfortable with using scripts. It's still the go-to method I recommend for people who already have incoming and do not have Grepolis Report Converter Revolution tools installed, particularly if travel times are short enough that they don't really have time to take a screenshot and upload it somewhere. One downside to this method is there is information loss, e.g. the icons that show which incoming movements are attacks and which are supports are not shown using this method. Also, it has no clickable links for your team to be able to easily find the cities that are attacking or supporting. To compensate, you may need to add notes to it, e.g. "Supports start here", "This one is the CS",  etc.

A third method involves using the approved script Grepolis Report Converter Revolution Tools. This is the best method.

Since I have this script installed, you can see in my screenshot that at the bottom of my Command Overview, there is a little pink Octopus button that says "Convert". If I click that and follow the instructions that come up, then I can post this.

This is what the BB-code for posting the above in-game looks like:

[url=https://www.grcrt.net/repview.php?rep=8bff7b497a5a0f48271d328423a5ba08]Mobile version[/url]

[quote][b][size=9]Command overview[/size] (1/1)[/b]
[table][*][img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/ui/c/attack.png[/img][|][font=monospace][town]3688[/town] ([player]Kingjoe11[/player]) [img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/img/out.png[/img] [town]1843[/town] ([player]Capois La Mort[/player])
(Arrival today at 16:51:09)[/font][|][|]
[/*][*][img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/ui/c/attack.png[/img][|][font=monospace][town]3688[/town] ([player]Kingjoe11[/player]) [img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/img/out.png[/img] [town]1843[/town] ([player]Capois La Mort[/player])
(Arrival today at 16:53:56)[/font][|][|]
[/*][*][img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/ui/c/attack.png[/img][|][font=monospace][town]3688[/town] ([player]Kingjoe11[/player]) [img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/img/out.png[/img] [town]1843[/town] ([player]Capois La Mort[/player])
(Arrival today at 16:53:59)[/font][|][|]
[/*][*][img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/ui/c/attack.png[/img][|][font=monospace][town]3688[/town] ([player]Kingjoe11[/player]) [img]https://cdn.grcrt.net/img/out.png[/img] [town]1843[/town] ([player]Capois La Mort[/player])
(Arrival today at 16:54:03)[/font][|][|]
[/*][*][img]https://www.grcrt.net/static/35.png[/img][|][img]https://www.grcrt.net/static/380.png[/img][|][img]https://www.grcrt.net/static/25.png[/img][|][img]https://www.grcrt.net/static/265.png[/img][/*][/table][center][url=https://www.grcrt.net/]Grepolis Report Converter Revolution Tools[/url] - ver. 5.4.4 created by Potusek & Anpu[/center][/quote]

Once you have GRCRTools installed, this doesn't take a whole lot longer than copy-pasting the command overview in plain text format, but is a lot prettier, and includes clickable links for the convenience of your team, and makes it clear which incoming troop movements are attacks and which are supports. This is the preferred method, unless there is some reason you are unable to install GRCRTools, e.g. if you only play using the mobile app, and your mobile device does not support Firefox for Android or another browser compatible with Tampermonkey. 

Two actual examples, redacted

A successful attempt at both stacking and sniping

Redacting this, since it's an example from an ongoing war, our enemies will almost certainly find this blog, and I don't want to draw heat on participants from my team in this stacking/sniping effort. In this example, the enemy CS arrived at 13:14:26 server time. There are two supports locked two the CS, meaning they arrive the same second as the CS, but in the correct order. Commands arriving on the same second land in the order they are launched, so the two supports had to be launched after the CS was launched. However, there was a snipe window of 3 seconds between the last clearing wave at 13:14:23 and the enemy CS at 13:14:26. My team was able to get 3 supports to land in this snipe window, 1 second before the enemy CS, at 13:14:25. Also, since there were only 3 clearing waves, and we  had a decent number of players/cities participating, we were also able to just stack the city and kill all the naval clearing waves. Technically, one or the other would have prevented the CS from landing, but it sometimes works out this way that people who are unsuccessful at timing just try to stack in case the snipe doesn't work out, and people who want to try sniping keep trying to do so in case the stacking effort doesn't work out.

Without GRCRTools, it would have been much more difficult to provide the information needed to the team to prevent Brahkeye's CS from landing.

A locked CS and an unsuccessful attempt at sniping 

[This example will be filled out later, after I have adequately redacted the screenshots.]

If you don't have an administrator

If you don't have an administrator, that's okay, no worries, you can still call incoming, it's just a little more work. You may become overwhelmed if are under attack in many cities at the same time, but hopefully, by the time that becomes an issue, you'll have been able to sell enough resources on the market to get gold that you'll have an administrator.

Instead of the command overview, you want to find this instead. It will also be in the upper left hand area of your screen.



Notice that at this point it's not showing arrival times, just remaining travel times. To get arrival times, we're going to have to click on each attack separately. If you are under attack in multiple cities as once, please note that this must be done separately for each city where you are under attack. Without an administrator, you don't get one unified overview where you can see incoming attacks to all your cities at the same time. Fortunately, the more cities you have, the easier it should be to sell some resources to get gold for an administrator.

If playing without the administrator, I would just copy-paste the arrival times and list them like so. Yes, you could screenshot them all like I did for this guide, but that's really excessively time consuming, when what your team needs is just this info, plus your assessment of which if any is the colony ship. In this particular example, there are no supports landing, but when there are, you will want to list those out as well.

Attack arrival times:
today at 16:51:09
today at 16:53:56
today at 16:53:59
today at 16:54:03

 Be sure to specify your wall level and God, as well as which one you think is the Colony ship (as discussed elsewhere in this guide).

Identifying the colony ship (or ships)

The command overview doesn't actually label the incoming colony ship for you. You have to figure out which one is the colony ship based on timing and/or the Wisdom spell. And since you likely don't have enough favor to Wisdom every attack, you want to at least make an educated guess based on timing before using Wisdom. Hopefully, if you checked CS travel times to your city in advance, you already know how to do this, but let's review.

If you are online or answer your alarm shortly after the attack is launched, then generally, the best way to identify the colony ship (or colony ships) is based on travel time.

To do so, make sure you have the city that is being attacked selected. In the example we are using, Milano is being attacked. Then, from Milano, I go to the screen for attacking Pirate Lookout, the city that is attacking me. Then, even though I don't actually have any colony ships in my city, and have in fact dodged all of my units out of my city, I enter into the attack screen that I wish to attack with 1 colony ship. It will then show me how long it would take a colony ship to reach Pirate Lookout, if I had one. Note that you should consider this time approximate, since certain technologies, the lighthouse building, sirens, and certain other game mechanics can modify the colony ship travel time. 50 sirens alone can double the speed of a colony ship, plus that can be combined with other speed boosts. Colony ships escorted by 50 sirens are not common, but they aren't unheard of either, especially when playing against a team that golds heavily during or after an event that drops siren tokens.

In this example, we have an approximate CS travel time of ~10:10:49. So, if I am online when the attack starts coming towards me (or get online quickly enough), I can assume it to be a colony ship if the travel time is somewhere close to that amount of time. If you've been AFK for awhile and come back to incoming attacks, then identifying the colony ship (or colony ships) can be harder.

You can also use the travel times simulator. See the bottom of the attack screen shown above, to the right of the "Attack" and "Plan" buttons.

 This button, but smaller:

And here's an example of what the travel times simulator looks like. Note that it will let you test the effect of various speed boosts, with the notable exception of sirens.

An alternative way to identify a colony ship is using the Wisdom spell to take a look at the incoming attack. However, if you have a lot of incoming attacks, this can be prohibitively expensive in terms of favor, so, in general, the preferred method is to identify or at least attempt to identify the incoming colony sip based on travel times. You might want to use Wisdom to confirm your suspicion, and/or to find out the size of the naval escort. Note that if your enemy went over the Sea Storm limit, you may be able to kill their CS with Sea Storm.

Additionally, in Conquest at least, a colony ship will often be preceded by clearing waves and followed by supports, so, for people who aren't good at identifying colony ships based on timing, and who don't have enough favor for Wisdom, it's common to assume that the last attack before enemy supports arrive is the CS. Be careful with this method, though, a) because clearing waves and supports can theoretically be launched hours in advance of the CS scheduled to land in between them, and b) sometimes, enemies may seek to confuse you by sending multiple Colony ships. They may even send fake attacks after one of those colony ships in the hopes you won't notice.

Another highly situational method is to ask an ally to land a looker CS on you. This only works in Conquest, not in revolt. The friendly looker CS then gets access to the live feed. The looker CS does not need to use wisdom or timing to identify incoming colony ships, because incoming colony ships have a different icon than other incoming attacks and supports. This method is sometimes used to protect a city of an ally who is going hard AFK, and let their team know in advance that they are going hard AFK.

Whenever possible, information about which attack wave is the colony ship (or colony ships) should be posted along with the command overview or the list of landing times. Now, KingJoe actually only launched consensual fake attacks at me, but for the sake of this guide, let us pretend that the final attack wave was a colony ship. If I did not have GRCRTools, then I might post something like this:

Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:02:14(Arrival today at 16:51:09)Check intel >
Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:05:01(Arrival today at 16:53:56)Check intel >
Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:05:04(Arrival today at 16:53:59)Check intel >
Pirate LookOut (Kingjoe11)  Milano (Capois La Mort)
02:05:08(Arrival today at 16:54:03)

16:54:03 is the CS.

Wall: 0 God: Aphrodite
 

The basics of colony ship sniping

So if you look at our pretend example, we are pretending that 16:54:03 is the colony ship, and the other three are all clearing waves. Were this actually the case, we would want to sneak support in there to land on or after 16:53:59, but before 16:54:03. We would call this a 4 second sniping window, since we have four possible seconds to land a support to snipe the CS. In Conquest, this is called frontsniping, to distinguish it from backsniping. In Revolt, all sniping is frontsniping, so it's just called sniping.

If we were to land the support before the clearing waves, then we'd really be stacking, not sniping, and stacking requires a bigger army than sniping does.

Biremes are popular for Colony ship (CS) sniping, because they can kill the colony ship and have good defensive stats. So can triremes, though because triremes are a hybrid unit, their defensive stats aren't as good as biremes. Fireships can't kill colony ships; they are basically only useful for killing incoming light ships. Worse, fireships also have bad initiative, so by the time they kill any light ships, your biremes will already be dead. Light ships can theoretically be used to defend against an incoming colony ship, and I've seen it done when there was nothing else that could make it in time, but your battlepoint ratio will be really bad because light ships have terrible defensive stats. Defensive land units (DLUs) can make the colony ship turn around and go back home without landing, but they can't kill the CS.

Backsniping, which only works in Conquest, not Revolt, is when you try to kill an enemy CS after it lands. When backsniping, the goal is to land your attack after the enemy CS lands, but before the first support, assuming there is such a gap, known as the backsniping window. Sometimes teams will hedge their bets by attempting both a frontsnipe and a backsnipe, but to avoid friendly fire, they might call out "naval frontsnipe, flier backsnipe" or something like that, because fliers or offensive land units won't kill any biremes or triremes sent by your team to attempt the frontsnipe. Flier backsnipes are generally only recommended if the city you are trying to save has 0 walls or very low walls, which is why, unless you have a long term support city with high walls and many defensive land units inside (to prevent a CS from being able to land to begin with, at least without costly clearing waves), it is generally recommended to keep walls at 0-2 in the Conquest game mode. This is one reason why you should always provide wall level when calling incoming: so your team knows whether they can safely attempt flier backsnipes, or if a DLU (defensive land unit) frontsnipe might make more sense instead.

If we review one of our real examples from above, the 13:14:26 attack was the CS, and the last clearing wave before that was at 13:14:23, meaning there was a 3 second frontsnipe window. If we knew exactly what each attack was, there might also be separate frontsnipe windows for naval and DLU frontsnipes. It turns out the the clearing wave from  45 Bloomington was 228 light ships accompanied by Zuretha, and the clearing wave from 45 East Lansing was 117 griffons accompanied by Deimos. If we'd known that while the attacks were still incoming, we could have said there was a 3 second naval frontsnipe window, but a 4-second DLU frontsnipe window. In any case, when dealing with sniping windows of less than 30 seconds, don't be surprised if your team asks you to switch God to Aphrodite, since that will allow your team to more easily time supports with the help of sirens.

This is why it's very important to have the installed script GrepoData indexer if you have frontline cities anywhere. Win or lose, the information you gather about your enemies from their attempts to siege your cities can help your teammates make good decisions in the future, and intel gathered by you and your allies in the past can help you make good decisions now if under you are currently under attack by an incoming CS. If for whatever reason you are unable to install GrepoData indexer, please at least post your battle reports in your teams' forums, so that a member of your team can index them.

You can also see that Brahkeye had two supports landing the same second as the CS, meaning there wasn't a backsnipe window. When either clearing waves or supports land the same second as the CS, this is called locking. If you wanted to try to backsnipe this in spite of the lack of a backsnipe window, you might, depending on how travel times worked out, be able to launch your backsnipe after the enemy CS is launched, but before they send their supports. Commands landing the same second will land in the order launched. However, by the time they show up on the command overview, that means the enemy supports have already been launched, so it's too late. You could, if you have enough firepower, aim to send multiple backsnipes landing the same second as the CS.

The support from 45 Madison turned out to be 208 biremes, and the support from 44 Boulder turned out to be 900 swordsmen, 930 archers, and 900 hoplites. Since both of these landed the same second as the CS, there really was no backsnipe window, for either naval or flier attacks. However, landing a backsnipe the same second as the CS (but after both the CS and the two supports), if that method were attempted, would still be better than trying to attack a heavily stacked siege later on.

To be continued

This blog post will probably generate questions, and there likely some things I glossed over without going into sufficient detail, so this blog post will be updated at some point to improve it.