Defense planning

1 The board you are filling#

Most boards have eight zones in three rows:

• Front: left and right.
• Middle: left, center and right.
• Back: left, center and right.

Each zone holds two squads, so a standard board has 16 slots. Larger wars use boards of 24, 32 or 40 slots. One player can place up to 16 squads. A squad is five balls, fought in seat order. The attacker sees seats 1 and 2 before attacking and finds out seats 3 to 5 only when the fight reveals them.

Zones open row by row. Nobody can hit a middle zone until a front zone has fallen or was left empty, and the back opens the same way.

2 Fill every slot#

The first rule of setup is the simplest. Each squad you place earns your side 40 war points, and each slot you leave empty pays the other side 65, automatically. One empty slot is a 105-point swing before anyone has attacked.

A worked example. Your alliance leaves three slots empty. The other side collects 3 × 65 = 195 points, and you miss 3 × 40 = 120. The gap is 315 points, more than two front zone clears are worth (120 each).

Wars bear this out. In the first weeks of team duels, the side that placed more squads won about four wars in five, and that held even between sides that made about as many attacks. War power at matchmaking, by contrast, predicted the winner no better than a coin toss.

For a short while there was an argument for leaving the back row empty. In the war week labeled Oct 8, an empty zone that fell paid no zone bonus, so an empty back zone gave away less than a filled one that was cleared for 360. From the week labeled Oct 15 an empty zone pays its bonus when it falls, and that advantage is gone. Fill the board.

3 Splitting balls between defense and attack#

Each ball attacks at most once per war, and a ball placed on defense never attacks. Defense and attack draw on the same roster, so every strong ball on defense is a strong attacker you have given up.

The results from team-duel wars point one way:

• Almost nothing holds. Only a small share of squads survived a whole war unbeaten. The question on defense is how many attacks a squad costs the other side, not whether it stands.
• Strong balls score on attack. Sides that kept most of their 20 strongest balls for attacking tended to win more often than sides that put most of them on defense. The points they gave up barely changed; the points they scored fell sharply.
• Weak balls are worth placing. A squad of your weakest balls will probably fall, but it still earns 40 and keeps the other side from collecting 65 for the empty slot.

The game sets a scale for this. Top alliances field defenders around 9,000 CP holding Shadowscript-class items, and a 6,000 CP ball will not KO two of them alone. If all your 9,000 CP balls are sitting in squads, nothing on your side can break their best squads.

A good split for most alliances: fill the board with the balls that would score least on attack, and keep the strongest for attack day. Then make sure those strong balls actually attack. In the early team-duel weeks, a typical side left about a fifth of its 20 strongest balls unused.

4 Where strong squads go#

If you do build a strong squad, put it in front. Alliances already do this, and the numbers agree:

• A strong squad in front took about half an attack more to wipe than a squad of the same strength in the back.
• The front zone is worth 120 to whoever clears it. The back zone is worth 360, so a squad that falls in the back gives away far more.
• The attackers who reach the back row are usually the other side's strongest, which makes a back squad's job harder.

What decides whether a squad holds is its strength against the attackers it meets, not its row. A squad weaker than the other side's average attacker tends to fall to the first attack. Squads about half again as strong as the average attacker were the only ones that held with any regularity, and the ones that fell took about four attacks and around 18 balls to break.

That makes concentration the stronger play. One squad far above the other side's average costs them many attacks. Five squads that are each slightly above average cost a couple of attacks apiece and give up their zones anyway.

5 Seat order#

Defenders are fought in seat order, and HP carries over, so seat 5 meets an attacking team that seats 1 to 4 have already worn down. Later seats survive slightly more often for that reason.

Beyond that, seat order matters little. Where a squad's strongest ball sat made no clear difference to how many attacks the squad took to wipe. Most alliances put their best ball in seat 1, which is fine. The one thing seats 1 and 2 do decide is what the attacker sees before committing, since the other three seats stay hidden until the fight reaches them.

6 Items on defense#

In a war duel, items count only through their two numbers. The item's attack powers the defender's Weapon move, and its defense adds to the ball's Protection. Bonus effects never apply in war duels, so a raid item with a strong effect and small numbers is a poor choice for a defender. A high-defense item such as the Glorious Shield, at 20,000 defense, is the other extreme.

Glorious ShieldShadowscript Brush

Equip items before the roster lock. An item put on after Friday 00:00 UTC does nothing for that week's war.

7 A setup checklist#

• Every slot filled, starting with the front.
• Your strongest squad in front, as strong as you can make one squad.
• The rest of the board filled with balls that would score little on attack.
• The alliance's strongest balls kept back, with a plan for every one of them to attack on Saturday.
• Items equipped before the lock.

8 On polbielytics#

The war scoreboard shows every war of the week, and each alliance's page shows its war record.

See also Alliance wars, War scoring and the war ladder and The war week clock.

9 See also#

• Alliance wars
• Alliances
• One-hit wars (before October 10, 2026)
• Roster lock
• The War Shop and the Glorious Set
• The war week clock
• War attacks and team duels
• War Council