War strategy is an extremely subjective thing in Politics and War, your actions in a war eventually depend on a whole lot of factors that you cannot possibly predict beforehand and most of the time you will be relying on the Milcom department in your alliance for specific instructions.

However, there are certain things that are found to be common in the most common circumstances like:

• Circumstance i - Raiding
  • When you are raiding your priority would be to gain maximum profits at minimum costs and to achieve that you need to prepare even before you declare your wars. The first thing you should do is to change your war policy to Pirate which gives you 40% more loot and then make sure you have max barracks and factories in all your cities.
  • Finding a good target is relatively easier in lower tiers where there is no lack of targets. 
    • There are discord bots that can assist with this task but for new players it is better to learn what makes a good target than straight up get a list of ‘good targets’ sorted by an algorithm. 
    • If you choose to find one manually, you can do an intel-gathering spy operation and get the exact numbers of resources a nation is holding, if that is not an option, you should look for any recent defeats and what they lost in that defeat and the type of war it was, in most cases that gives you a good idea. 
    • In general, you are looking for someone who is not very active, has fewer military units than you, has high infra, and is preferably on Turtle or Guardian war policy.
  • All wars you declare with intent to raid should always be raid type so you get 100% of the potential loot.
  • Since ground attack is the only attack type that gets you immediate cash loot with every attack, you should generally be doing mostly ground attacks, in cases where the enemy has no cash but has high amount of resources or you are competing to get the first beige (victory)  you can also go 5 naval attacks and 3 ground attacks to finish the war slightly sooner, get the highest loot and get your slot freed for another raid. In any other case where it is not feasible to win by all grounds or naval and grounds, you should try to achieve victory by any means possible.
• Circumstance ii - Dealing Damage: 
  • There are a number of ways to maximize enemy damage and the most straightforward way is to burn their infrastructure as it not only directly costs them to rebuild, they also lose some revenue until the lost infrastructure is rebuilt. One other way is to kill military units but if you are fighting someone you will be killing units in order to win anyway so that is a given.
  • In order to deal maximum damage you should be declaring attrition type wars. Different attack types destroy different amounts of infrastructure but an airstrike on anything other than infrastructure deals the least damage while naval attack with max number of ships for city count does more damage than any other unit apart from nukes, that have the unique quality of dealing the same amount of infrastructure damage from any city count. Nukes are also a good choice when you simply don’t have enough units to launch successful attacks and that can be a very common occurrence.
    Ground attacks are somewhere in the middle as they destroy more infrastructure than airstrikes (not targeting infra) but less than navals attacks.
  • Unlike raid wars, you will often need to overlook your own losses in units or fuel costs and just hit as hard as you can with what you have, i.e. going with the unit that you have the most of and using 100% of it, sometimes even losing wars just to deal some damage.
  • There will be common cases when the enemy will not have enough infrastructure to destroy and in those cases you should not bother choosing attrition as your war type, the most damage you can deal in such a case is killing as many units as you are able to and stealing as much of their resources as you can.
• Circumstance iii
  • Coordination:
    • If you are part of an alliance in this game, sooner or later you will find yourself in a large-scale alliance war. Alliances generally have a department called MilCom for alliance-wide war strategy and coordination and they will guide you through your specific role in the war. This is an attempt to give you a general idea of how things usually work, you should always prioritize commands from your MilCom over this.
  • Offensive: 
    • If you are starting a war, chances are you will start with what we call a ‘blitz’ which basically means declaring a large number of wars on an enemy coalition within a very short period of time, generally right before the server ‘daychange’ at UTC-0.
    • You should have your targets assigned by your MilCom beforehand and some first-day instructions, it is best to neutralize potential threats first i.e. active people with max aircraft. Once you have dealt with planes you can move to ground and finally to navy, if needed.
    • If your alliance/coalition intends to fight for multiple rounds, you will need to practice beige discipline too, which means intentionally not winning a war or even taking a loss if required, not giving enemy beige time and allowing them to rebuild.
  • Defensive: 
    • It is very rare for alliances to be able to make a full recovery from a blitz and launch a successful counter-attack but it is not impossible, although it does require insane coordination and a swift response. 
    • If you have been blitzed, you should try to launch your counterattacks as soon as you are able to while you still have units, down-declare (declaring on someone with score lower than you) on active combatants, rebuild lost planes and then dogfight, if things are perfectly in your favour there is a very small chance this will give you a fighting chance. 
    • Another ancient strategy is to declare on rogue pirates and get them to beige you and then use that beige time to rebuild military units and launch a counterattack, though this may not work if the enemy has a good tiering advantage over you and you may again end up losing all units.
    • When there is no hope for turning the tide of war you will be relying on ‘guerilla tactics’ in attempts to make the war as costly as possible for your enemy. This is done by finding weak targets in the enemy coalition and doing coordinated hits or going solo on enemies with very high infrastructure and dropping nukes and missiles.

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