Storm Islands

Storm islands is unlike the other new worlds (ice,fire,sands) because the duration of this world is one month approx. at the end of which a flood washes away the entire map. So, beginning of every month the map is reset and you can choose whether to enter and compete or not.

Now you may be thinking why bother because anyway all your work will be washed up at the end of the month and you have to start fresh again. What makes the storm islands an interesting proposition is the prizes that you stand to gain by doing well there.

Now there are two strategies that can be applied in storm. One is the individual strategy and the other is the alliance strategy. In the individual strategy you enter storm and work with the aim of collecting aquamarine and buying valuable equipments, tools and troops with it. In the group strategy the alliance plays as a team and  aim to collect as many cargo points as possible and win prizes for the alliance and its members.

In both individual and group strategy the primary aim is to collect collect aqua by doing quests, attacking forts, attacking players or by capturing aqua resource islands. Now most servers have unwritten rules about attacking players and resource islands. attacking either one of these could land you in a war or worse you could get thrown out of your alliance in order to avoid war and mass attacks.

Doing quests will give you aqua but in order to get sufficient aqua to buy equipment or build enough cargo ships you require much more aqua than the quests provide.

Attacking forts also give you aqua but the troop and tool expended to get the required aqua from forts wont be in proportion.

So that leaves us with Aqua resource islands. The best way to collect aqua is by capturing islands. The small aqua island give you 11500 aqua and the large one give you 52000 aqua.

The only difference between the individual strategy and the group one is the way the aqua is used. In the individual strategy all collected aqua is saved up and used to buy some really cool equipments from Luna's camp south of you castle in Storm. In the group strategy the aqua is used to build cargo ships and the alliance with the most cargo at the end of the month wins the "Storm Lord" title. Also if your alliance makes enough cargo you could win gold and rubies for the alliance, strong unique equipments for all members of the alliance and the top 5 alliances get an excellent deco for all members.

Building cargo ships

As I mentioned earlier building enough cargo points can get you and your alliance some really cool prizes. In order for this to be possible every member of the alliance tries to make maximum possible cargo points and it all adds up to the alliances total.

Aquamarine requirement for cargo ships

While reading this section I suggest you do it with a cargo points target in mind for example "to make 5000 cargo points".

When you have your target in mind you will know how much aqua you need to collect in order to make the target cargo points and also how many aqua islans you need to capture in order to collect the required aqua.

This table below contains information about each level of cargo ships, how much aqua you need to build and upgrade them and the amount of cargo points you get for each level. So once you know your target aqua points you can plan in advance as to how many islands you may need to capture to meet the aqua requirement. I have assumed for the calculations that the number of cargo ships built to be a maximum of 61, which will leave enough space to keep the bare minimum necessay buildings. Please refer to the section on "Building strategy"  later in this page for further information on this.

Cargo Ship lvl (a)	Aqua Req. for upgrade (b)	Number of ships (c)	Cargo points per ship (d)	Cargo increase per ship from previous lvl (e)	Total cargo points (f)	Aqua req. to build 61 ships (g)	Cumulative cargo points (h)	Small islands required (11,500) (i)	Large islands required (52,000) (j)
Lvl 1	150	61	50	50	3050	9150	3050	0.8	0.17
Lvl 2	490	61	100	50	3050	29890	6100	2.6	0.57
Lvl 3	950	61	150	50	3050	57950	9150	5.04	1.11
Lvl 4	1900	61	250	100	6100	115900	15250	10.08	2.23
Lvl 5	4500	61	400	150	9150	247500	24400	21.52	4.76
Lvl 6	16000	61	750	350	21350	976000	45750	84.87	18.77
Lvl 7	32000	61	1400	650	39650	1952000	85400	169.74	37.54
Lvl 8	58000	61	2500	1100	67100	3538000	152500	307.65	68.04
Lvl 9	81000	61	3500	1000	61000	4941000	213500	429.65	95.02
Lvl10	---	61	4250	750	45750	---	259250	---	---
Total	--	61	--	--	259250		--	1013.95	228.21

This table is only a short cut to provide some information , if you have specific targets in mind you can see how to use the table to calculate number of cargo ships and aqua required. once you know how much aqua you require then you will know how many islands you need to capture.

Cargo points Calculations:-

If your target is 5000 cargo pts.

 then you will need   61 lvl 1 ships x 50 cargo pts  [from colume (e)]  = 3050 cargo

                        (plus) 39 lvl 2 ships x 50 cargo pts [from colume (e)]  = 1950 cargo

                                                                       

                                                                                                      Total = 5000 cargo

So you need to build 61 lvl 1 ships and upgrade 39 of those to lvl 2 in order to reach your target.

Aqua calculation :-

To upgrade 61 ships to lvl 1 costs -- 61 ships x 150 [from golumn(b)] = 9150 

To upgrade 39 ships to lvl 2 costs -- 39 ships x 490 [from golumn(b)] = 19110

                                                                                                       Total = 28260 aqua required

So this aqua requirement can be met by either capturing 3 small islands or one large island.

Now that you know how to plan ahead you can allocate your time, troops and resources accordingly.


When checking for how many island you need to capture on the table always round up (eg:- 0.8 means 1 island and 21.52 means 23 islands). Now that you have an idea as to how many islands  you need to capture, it is just a matter of going ahead and putting it into action. It helps to plan ahead so that once you have reached your limit, you can choose to help other members of you alliance by capturing islands for them or you could also use the excess aqua to purchase additional troops,tool or equipments.

Building Strategy

Have look at the image below to see how i have come up with the total number of cargo ships to be 61. Now mind you in this setup the bare necessities have been left over after deleting all other buildings. More cargo ships acn be built at the cost of deleting these building too but i prefer to keep this setup atleast up till the last couple of days and more over with this setup you can get a maximum of over 250k+ cargo points and I doubt that this will prove insufficient :))

Now here is a list of the buildings to be in your castle

• Keep
• Storage
• Siege Work Shop
• Barracks
• Flour Mill
• Farms x 4
• Deco (default)
• CARGO SHIPS - In all the remaining space

Deleting all other building is necessay to make space for building more cargo ships. As I have said earlier, the main aim in the group strategy is to ensure maximum possible cargo points and creating space for more ships will allow you to do just that.

I would also suggest that those with a relatively low target cargo score of 2500 or 3000 cargo points should expand the castle fully and build lvl 1 cargo ships as this requires lesser aqua than upgrading ships to achieve your target. For example to reach a target of 2500 using just one ship and upgrading you can used the above table to calculate that you will need _____ aqua, where as if you build all lvl 1 ships you will need only 7500 aqua which can be easily achived using only just one small aqua island. 

Tip - You get a storage lvl 1 by default that can hold only 6300 resources. But this limit does not apply to aqua, stone or wood that you bring back from captured islands. your castle can hold unlimited stone, wood and aqua as long as you get them by capturing islands. Also note that resources sent from other worlds and those got from attacking forts are bound by the storage limit. So collecting resources and aqua from islands is better than attacking forts for them.

Capturing Islands

Attacking in storm requires atleast one "Strong Ranged Commander" (at least +70) along with strong ranged troops (at least Veteran crossbow) and lots of mantlets and ladders. Melee soldiers have no role to play in storm islands. This attack strategy of using only ranged has proved to be very effctive and almost anyone who knows to play islands well will confirm this for you. 

The attack formation for capturing small and large islands are the same. Only one wave is sufficient using this attack strategy.

R-R-R ( full ranged with 7 siege towers and 20 iron mantlets)

Non ruby players can use the same attack formation with 10 ladders and rest wood mantlets in two full waves.

This is assuming you have a good ranged commander and gems that give boosts to courtyard attack strength.

If however you do not have a sufficiently strong commander or use non ruby tools then you can send two or three full ranged waves with tools just to be sure of victory.

Resource Requirements

Taking part in storm islands is a relatively expensive affair. apart from the enrty requirement, it costs a lot of resources to build up your castle and tools in islands. Coins usage will also be high if you attack agressively and troops loss will also be quiet significant as the natives guarding islands and forts are strong and come packing lots of tools. So it would be wise to plan ahead if you plan to enter storm and stock up some extra resources and coins. 

There are two ways of managing resource requirements for storm, you could send all required resources from you castles in green and else where or you can capture stone and wood islands to meet this requirement. If you have a high cargo target, then it makes more sense to send resources from other worlds and let your troops concetrate on aqua islands so you can capture more of these. If your cargo targt is relatively low then you can use your troops to take a few resource islands to give a boost to your resource production.

Taking Islands from alliance members

When playing as a group the big ruby players have an advantage over the others because the can upgrade the harbour to lvl 2 which allows them to capture islands really fast. So it makes sense for them to complete capturing islands before other alliance players get to them and then sharing them with their own members. A lot of times when non ruby players try to capture aqua islands their attacks bounce because some one else has reached there first. To avoid this and to ensure all member have enough aqua to build ships this strategy can be used.

To take aqua island from own alliance member:-

1. Collect 32 cheap soldiers

2.  leave alliance

3. Send attack on the island

4. Comeback into island

5. 5 minutes before attack reaches you leave alliance again

6. once capture success then come back in alliance
7. Leave one soldier in the captured island and send the rest back to your storm castle

8. After 6/18 hours your soldier will return with 11.5k/52k aqua.

The strong players who capture the islands in the first place leave only 1 soldier in the island to make sure that capture attacks by own alliance members dont fail. As you know you cannot attack or capture islands from your own alliance member, so that is why you need to be out of the alliance when the capture attack is initiated and also be out of the alliance when the attack is about to reach the island. If you are not out of the alliance when capture reaches then the attack will bounce and the whole process must be started all over again. So take care and keep alert about timings.

If you by mistake try to remove all soldiers after capturing the island, GGE give you a warning that the island will go out or your control if you do so. Inspite of that if you remove all troops from the island then the natives take over the island again. If ever a war from other worlds spills over to storm and another enemy player is trying to take your island then surrendering your islands to the native would be a good strategy to make the attacker lose a lot of soldiers.

Please also check the Tips from Yves Page. He has give some useful tips for this map from his experiences.