Beginner's mistakes and how to avoid them

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    • Beginner's mistakes and how to avoid them

      Below is some nuggets of insight that I gathered after several games. Feels free to add your own as well.

      Just to make this abundantly clear: The list below are what you should NOT do. The comment below each item is explanation and details on what you should do.
      1. Build outpost and/or Local Industries in every provinces:
        Ah, the first thing most of us do as a new player and have no idea of the mechanics of the game. This is also a signal of whether someone's a newbie or not.
        Local Industry only boost the resources of a province, not the manpower nor the money generated from that province. Resource means: supplies, electronics, components, fuel and rare materials. If a province doesn't have any resource generation, building local industries on them is a huge waste because your gain is effectively zero.
        Outpost is only useful if you have troops stationed there and is waiting for an invasion. An empty province with an outpost would do nothing against invader and once the invader took over the province, the outpost will go poof. Outpost usually take 1h30 to build the first level and it doesn't have to finish building to give you the benefit. The effect of outpost would slowly increase proportionally to its HP. With that in mind, Outpost would be more suitable to build if you're reacting against an invasion. Start building as they approach a province that you have troops stationed. Also it's only worth building outpost when you're facing a lot of troops, not when you're facing 1 or 2 infantries.
        War and economics go hands-in-hands and CoN is no exception. Resources spent on outpost & local industries that are not doing anything would eat into the available resources to build up your army and nation's strength.
      2. Build army bases / unnecessary buildings in every cities (except for Arms Industries):
        Same idea as #1 but more refined. Each city can only produce one unit at a time and the building cost will increase for each higher building level. So to optimize your resource use, you should specialize your cities into producing a certain type of troops instead of trying to be a jack of all trade. The common distribution is to have 2 cities with army bases to produce walking troops, 2 with airport to produce flying troops, 1 with naval base to produce swimming troops. If you have more cities or your country is land-locked, the distribution can be changed based on your preference. This is my personal preference but the building that can be spammed (lvl 1 only) to all cities at the beginning is Recruiting Office so you can spam National Guard. National Guard only need Recruiting office and later on its building effect will still help with other type of troops. After that, Arm Industries can and need to be built on all Homeland cities.
      3. Neglect upgrading Arm Industries in your Homeland Cities:
        Your Homeland cities are the economics engine for your nation. A country with no arm industry and a country with lvl 5 arm industry on each city would have a difference in resource generation at around 10k-15k resources per day. Unless you're worried about getting invaded, you should prioritize getting your arm industries to level 5 ASAP (except for cities with fuel generation, I find that a level 1 Arm industry is enough for it. If you find yourself lacking fuel, maybe you're focusing on too much unnecessary buildings or you're going full naval with tons of Cruisers late game)
      4. Build Arm Industries in Occupied cities:
        Occupied cities production is 25% that of Homeland cities, plus when you first take them over their morale is 25% which drastically reduce resource production. Arm industries only increase this by 10% per level. Not worth the resources.
      5. Don't sell off buildings in Occupied cities:
        Did you know that you can demolish building to sell them for 10% resource back? Also, did you see those lvl 1 army bases in the Occupied cities that you have no use for? Well, sell them off! Exception would be airbases with 4 HP or more or a cities with a bunch of valuable buildings that you plan to annex in the future.
      6. Don't stack your troops (which means you SHOULD stack your troop):
        Stacking troops before attacking or defending is crucial in CoN. Basically if you have a 5-infantry stack vs. 1-infantry stack, your army will attack with 5 units of power while your opponent can only respond with 1 and vice versa. So you deal 5 units of damage while the opponent deal 1 unit of damage. Meanwhile, if you attack using 5x 1-infantry stack separately, your army will attack the opponent 5 times with 1 unit of power and your opponent also respond with 5 times with 1 unit of power. So you deals 5 units of damage and your opponent also deal 5 units of damage. See the difference? In extreme cases where your stack is overwhelming enough, you can completely wipeout the opponent and only lose a minimal amount of HP (25% the damage of 1 unit)
        Note: This is an oversimplification of combat, I know. I'm just focusing on the benefit of stacking. For other combat mechanics there'll be other points below.
      7. Don't mix your troops (which means you SHOULD mix your troop, with exception in point 8):
        Mixing troops helps spread out the damage. Some people refer to this as loss mitigation and should be done in majority of cases.
        If you have a 5-motorized-infantry stack, each unit constitutes 20% the HP of the stack. So if your stack lose 20% the HP during combat (let's assume losing 15 HP), it'll get down to a 4-inf stack. The kicker here is that not only did you lose one unit, the damage of the stack is also reduced to that of a 4-inf stack.
        If you have a 4-moto inf + 1 national guard stack, the 15 HP loss will be spread between the 4-moto inf and the 1 national guard.
        What if you merge multiple injured unit and resulted in a 5-inf stack with 20% HP? well, when the next combat comes, the stack would get reduced to a 1-inf stack immediately before the combat begins. So you'd better get them home to heal up first before engaging them in another combat.
      8. Mix troops that are not compatible (very important for navy and air force):
        This is a little bit more advanced. But when mixing troops, take note of the individual troop's speed. The speed of the stack is based on the speed of the slowest unit. That's why advanced players rarely stack corvette, which moves slow in highsea and fast in coastal water, with other ships as the stack will become a turtle and risk getting hit-and-run by opponents. They also don't mix heavies like bomber with normal plane like Strike Fighters because the result of the stack is the worse of both world: the turtle speed of the bomber with the awful range of the strike fighters. Imagine mixing bombers with helicopters, now that's a marriage in hell.
      9. Leave your homeland cities empty:
        Unless the homeland city is in the smack dead middle of your territories or near the border with your coalition-mate or you're very confident that the cities won't get invaded anytime soon, you should leave at least one inf to defend against surprise invasion. Additionally, when you attack someone, they can do the same to you. So leaving all your troops away without any resistance is foolish. There have been wayyy too many cases where I get attacked by a newbie who drag all his armies away from his cities. I just group my troops up for defense and rush one national guard around to take over his cities. Never been easier.
      10. Leave your newly occupied cities empty:
        When newly occupied, the city will have 25% morale with 50% insurgency rate. You should leave at least one or, optimally, 2 moto inf stack or 1 moto inf 1 national guard stack in the city to keep potential insurgent at bay while reducing the insurgency rate of said city. Armored troop like Tank or Tank Destroyer would drastically reduce the insurgency rate as well. The exception is if the troop is low in HP, it's better to have them retreat back to base to heal up than have them standing guard and get defeated when insurgent spawn. When the morale reach 34% or more, it's safe to move your troops away for another job.

      The post was edited 5 times, last by vynical ().

      1. Play exclusively on mobile:
        Multiple features of CoN are not accurate on mobile such as radar range, attack range, eyesight. Some of these can mean life-or-death in naval and sky battles. Stacking and moving troops is also a pain. When you try getting your troops to the center of a city/province, about 40% of the time you'd miss and have the troops just slightly off. Basically if you want to go hard, you go PC.
        Note: mobile does have one advantage over PC: looking up players' other stats (K/D, percentage of play on mobile & PC). I use mobile to scout out my neighbors, if I see a neighbor who plays 100% on mobile, well, that's my first target.
      2. Use "Attack" instead of "Patrol" for airplane (with the exception being using ASF to attack ground unit or using planes to attack cities directly to destroy buildings)
        Without diving too deep into the mechanics of Anti Air, piercing bubble and all that, the advantages of using patrol are many:
        1 - You can attack multiple target that you can see instead of just one. If the patrol range cover multiple radar signatures/targets, the plane will attack all of them, provided that their patrol feature cover that type of enemy. Air Superiority Fighters (ASF) only fight flying enemies and doesn't attack walking and swimming ones, for example. If you stack ASF and SF together, they will engage all type of targets.
        2 - You can save time, reach further targets and minimize the duration you stay within an AA bubble. If there's only one target on your radar, pun intended, instead of having to wait for the plane to go all the way to the target, just have the target touch tip with your patrol circle. This also mean a longer reach than your normal flight range.
        3 - You won't trigger the AA bubble of nearby anti-air, only AA point-defense of your target. This is a little advanced, you can find a more detailed explanation of how AA works in CoN discord or just ask Teburu for it.
        What advantage does "Attack" have over "Patrol"? just one: Once the identified target is dead, the plane will go home and rest, which helps when you send them out for the kill and go to sleep IRL because you deserve that beauty sleep sweet prince. Otherwise, Patrol would means the plane will go back to that patrolling area again, and having a patrolling plane while you're AFK and having the opponent bring their Anti-Air solutions closer is never a good idea. And I do mean identified target, if you target a city knowing that it has a target but haven't seen the radar signature or the target itself, the plane will continue to attack the city over and over even if the target is dead.
      3. Spam one type of troops (most likely inf or tanks)
        If you only have army bases in your country, it's a huge red flag that you're either taken over by a bot or just spamming infantry, which is an easy picking for flying troops and pew pew troops. Observe your neighbor and from what they're building, you can guess what troops they're deploying with near certainty. A player need to balance their troop type, having lose air superiority or naval superiority might not mean your complete defeat but it'd mean that you can never be the victor in that game. For your first few game, try using different troops, get your feet wet and you can gradually learn which type counters which.
      4. Annex too early:
        There's a reason annexing costs a lot. It's when you have more resources than you can produce units. Annexed cities mainly help you to mobilize more troops. The increase resource production is similar to occupying another city, at the cost of, well, a lot. So normally people only start annexing when they are mobilizing in all their cities but still have extra resource to spare.
      5. Build Armored Units as the main force:
        Armored unit is for busy people who logs into CoN once or twice a day so they build some tanks, have them roll around taking up lands from bots, hoping that they won't get steamrolled by another more active player. For further explanation on why they sucks, this thread seems to have a decent amount of good answers
      6. Heal Armored Units in cities / build several low level Hospital in your cities:
        What's a better signal of a newbie than several lvl 2 army bases? Several lvl 2 army bases + low level hospitals all around. Although I'm strongly against using tanks, if you're already using them, there's one better way to heal up your tanks: put them out to transport ships and park them in coastal area. Your 50 HP main battle tank will become a 12 HP transport ship and it'll heal up 2HP per day in coastal area. When convert back to a tank we're talking 8HP regeneration per day, way better than a city with max hospital. The risk is having your enemies send a corvette or some SF to shoot down your healing transport ships but most of the time it's worth it. Early on the 2HP healing is also a good trick to heal up newly-mobilized National Guards as well when your cities have no hospitals around.

      The post was edited 4 times, last by vynical ().

      1. Build army bases / unnecessary buildings in every cities (except for Arms Industries):
      I read this quickly and agree with most of your points excluding some not picking, except this one. Expansion is more important early on to acquire more resources than building industries. When opponents have less/weaker starting units and they waste resources on infrastructure, you should be spamming combat recon vehicles then infantry at all your homeland to expand initially (excluding island nations) as you can keep 100% production for several days. First 48/72hrs of expansion will give you a substantial lead before they can counter with anything stronger and as your morale improves from those cities captured, so do your resources.

      You also have a ground force already working to gain more territory and cities when you do decide to work on industries.

      Bar that, good job.
      ''Miseris succurrere disco''
    • Gen Vader wrote:

      1. Build army bases / unnecessary buildings in every cities (except for Arms Industries):
      I read this quickly and agree with most of your points excluding some not picking, except this one. Expansion is more important early on to acquire more resources than building industries. When opponents have less/weaker starting units and they waste resources on infrastructure, you should be spamming combat recon vehicles then infantry at all your homeland to expand initially (excluding island nations) as you can keep 100% production for several days. First 48/72hrs of expansion will give you a substantial lead before they can counter with anything stronger and as your morale improves from those cities captured, so do your resources.

      You also have a ground force already working to gain more territory and cities when you do decide to work on industries.

      Bar that, good job.
      Appreciate your feedback. I'm not against your idea that quick expansion is better than building up Arm Industries. However, your method is very much dependent on your strategy and playstyle (early recon/inf rush). Early recon rush is a very valid and strong early strat but it's not the end-all-be-all, shall we say. When writing the points above I had removed several points that were strategy/playstyle-dependent to make it general enough for beginner to optimize their resource use first then settle in their own respective playstyles later on. Personally I'd never research moto inf nor recon until much, much later (around day 15+) when I have plenty of rare mat to waste. Spamming and mixing National Guard with the early game-provided troops while saving up for day-3 SFs have been working well for me in most of my games. The resources saved from the lvl.1 army bases spam is enough for one corvette and one SF which is, imo, much more valuable early game.
    • Expansion was what i was getting at. I was just using inf/recon as an example that's very new player friendly, doesn't require them to be to as active as new players aren't usually as invested in the game and more efficient for long term success than what was suggested as building industries initially while others expand will put them on the backfoot and set them up to fail later on. You're right though, it's not the only strat nor the best for more experienced players as they'll know what they're wanting to achieve and have the experience and forethought to know what their goals are and plan moving forward.
      ''Miseris succurrere disco''
    • vynical wrote:

      3. Spam one type of troops (most likely inf or tanks)
      If you only have army bases in your country, it's a huge red flag that you're either taken over by a bot or just spamming infantry, which is an easy picking for flying troops and pew pew troops. Observe your neighbor and from what they're building, you can guess what troops they're deploying with near certainty. A player need to balance their troop type, having lose air superiority or naval superiority might not mean your complete defeat but it'd mean that you can never be the victor in that game. For your first few game, try using different troops, get your feet wet and you can gradually learn which type counters which.
      haha I see new shits do this all the time... espec with low level infs and CRVs
      Україна
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      "The future is not written" - Anna Jija
    • lol it not mistake first ... (im basic not .. )

      secondary that do profy player too .. try understant that reason why is hapens is two

      1) coaly for may be 80 % public player measn nothing first object is own so they capture teritory for own it and dont care how and why you unhappy with this

      2)almost zero comunication in coaly .. if you dont like it say it may be it works





      3)many games i do it some FOR MANY REASON .. BECOSE I SEE THAT PLAYER play bad .. so count that he gone anyway ... ( so reeason is capture me make procit me and finaly it happens taht player be my enemy so .. )

      next is tu motivate tham to play if they be half active and dont undestant that when coaly player is lazy it finaly weak me becose he is part of my team ...

      but mostly at me i dontž care who go whjere if team realy want work together lost care about who have income point make focus win and after 50 victiory you be in my phase to not care about fuck pint ..









      most if you want say something at this point mostly nebies and medium player make mistake rush to capture enemy land when somebody start war with him or when see it he is be beaten so be easy prey ... but this player suffer two weaknes havent visibility or time manage to not make acciedentaly war .. or dont know how work insurgent area city and some unit in combat and how it may provoke simply war just becose somebody left shipú at insurgent city and somebody else send unit conqer both not interest make war but it hapens .. and finaly both just look like bull on gates what is hapens and mostly start realy fight
    • Andilek7319 wrote:

      hlavne u sebe doma na zahradce ..

      smal info for anobody who want make : info or FAq ...

      your thread is FUCK LONG nobody from newbies dont read it .. if you want make it realy short witjhout explanation all in all reason just say what and why not how .. after may be some newbies put his time to read it
      you need to FUCK UP or I will report you for personal attacks on me, and several other forum members.
      Україна
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      "The future is not written" - Anna Jija
    • Anna Jija wrote:

      they can be easy attacked by SFs and ACVs
      ACV requires army base 2 (construction 1 day) then mobilize ACV (another day) which in that time you can build a CRV in every city, twice.

      Stacked together even within 24hrs has enough defence rating to take out 2 ASF in that time frame too.

      I was just using that as an example though. The point is expansion (however you decide to do it) is worth more than just sitting idle constructing industries, especially to start with.
      ''Miseris succurrere disco''
    • Gen Vader wrote:

      ACV requires army base 2 (construction 1 day) then mobilize ACV (another day) which in that time you can build a CRV in every city, twice.
      Stacked together even within 24hrs has enough defence rating to take out 2 ASF in that time frame too.
      you do you, i just don't think it's worth the resources
      Україна
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      "The future is not written" - Anna Jija
    • Anna Jija wrote:

      Gen Vader wrote:

      ACV requires army base 2 (construction 1 day) then mobilize ACV (another day) which in that time you can build a CRV in every city, twice.Stacked together even within 24hrs has enough defence rating to take out 2 ASF in that time frame too.
      you do you, i just don't think it's worth the resources
      and that isa what is diference between give advice beginers ,newbies veteran



      mostly try undewrstant your own gameply is not advice .. it your experience and depence mostly on your gameplay and tiem taht you have it ..

      taht is simply mostl public game my first asasult team mis what game give me on start .. it ios risky yet it is .. it is risky not produce any unit till you have posibility recruit striker yes it is .. it is posible have 10 city or 210 city on day 2 or 4 yes it is .. if it is posible be wipeed in this way .. sure it is ..


      BUT IT DEPENCE ON YOU and your neigbours IT NOT advice for beginers..



      advice in simply is something that make for this type player to not make mistake taht is katastrofall for his army or economy ... not about how win game but how not lost game on day 3 ... ( if negbours not becoeme U.I.. )
    • Anna Jija wrote:

      Andilek7319 wrote:

      hlavne u sebe doma na zahradce ..

      smal info for anobody who want make : info or FAq ...

      your thread is FUCK LONG nobody from newbies dont read it .. if you want make it realy short witjhout explanation all in all reason just say what and why not how .. after may be some newbies put his time to read it
      you need to FUCK UP or I will report you for personal attacks on me, and several other forum members.
      pleas call some army of hope .. and dont uset adhesive word ... teach yourself patience wait 2 3 years .. and after use it .. ok like me ..
    • Andilek7319 wrote:

      and that isa what is diference between give advice beginers ,newbies veteran



      mostly try undewrstant your own gameply is not advice .. it your experience and depence mostly on your gameplay and tiem taht you have it ..

      taht is simply mostl public game my first asasult team mis what game give me on start .. it ios risky yet it is .. it is risky not produce any unit till you have posibility recruit striker yes it is .. it is posible have 10 city or 210 city on day 2 or 4 yes it is .. if it is posible be wipeed in this way .. sure it is ..


      BUT IT DEPENCE ON YOU and your neigbours IT NOT advice for beginers..



      advice in simply is something that make for this type player to not make mistake taht is katastrofall for his army or economy ... not about how win game but how not lost game on day 3 ... ( if negbours not becoeme U.I.. )
      I have no idea who that's directed at but i'll try reply to what i can make out.

      Expansion will earn you more resources than building industries in the majority of cases. Not only do you have to wait several weeks for the return on your investment but it's also time you're not researching and building as many units to defend or expand meaning others will have much stronger forces than you. You don't need to expand immediately on day one and lose, but it shouldn't be left for well over a week or two just working on infrastructure for your economy. Telling someone to work on industries without expanding is setting them up to fail, so if they're just going to get wiped out in 2 weeks against a much stronger opponent following this method then you might as well not waste their time and get it over with by day 3 anyway. Obviously there's other things to consider like your starting nation, the nations and experience of players around you ect..

      We're talking about public games as this is a new players guide and their first game wouldn't and shouldn't be an alliance challenge.
      ''Miseris succurrere disco''

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Gen Vader ().

    • so you measn diference between work on economy or army but that is strategy for medium for beginers it is about make basioc infratsruture and produce first unit mmostly if you not spend for main expansion infrastructure you show that you be weak in future if you not spend for army you be weak on start but that isnt about give advice what not make to not make mistake

      sure if you not spend for lvl 1 you are mostly wrong becose it become money strugle , that many player dont know that in hand is go market like directly in 10 or 30 minutes after game start i have mostly money on zero becose invest for market but that isnt be way how advice beginer he need survivve and from look is good if he start simply oin basic infrastruture in whole point and produce unit taht is problem if you like just make armory base .. that is in mostly case not be goood way for beginers .. that playerr not be on start probably atacker .. so he not need big army for invade he need compact army for defend and work on point to not strugle in next some day that come .. but it about gameplay not do for beginers