Strong Anti-Alpha Tribe strategies.

[Bramboxc123]

OP is work in progress and will be updated with Edits. Its planned to be in 3 parts. My background and tje kind of tribe I ran. My methods and strategy to boost your power and maximize the time you spend gaming. And then tactics. The methods and strategy I'll try to break down to tricks of basing. Resource harvesring. The tactics I'll try to break down to exploiting base weaknesses. And remaining undetected.

This thread is combining a lot of my previous and now tested ideas that are about ready to go live. I'm reassembling my once feared alpha tribe killer.

Im big anti-alpha tribes. I feel in general they ruin the game. I like to see many smaller equal sized tribes having many interactions. Not one giant patron and many clients begging for mercy.

Ironically when I started ARK a few years ago and was very noob I spent weeks building a base that got wiped by an anti-alpha strategy. A brief discussion with what was going on sucked me into a server war that led me to having fought a year long series of battles against a chinese alpha on that one server.

Eventually taking over the tribe that wiped my tribe, building my own tribe. And defeating our Chinese enemies.

My tribe wandered after that  we could take down tribes but could never focus enough or farm enough to hold a server. We were all ADD and hungry for war.

My guys would start fights just to have fights.

And I liked it.

We'd steal everything from a base and be ready to leave. Then murder all their passive dinos just to murder them.

So naturally we eventually wandered from server to server before you could transfer characters. My team built a methodology for hitting high 70+ in hours of moving to a new server.

Again we could keep small. Damage a lot. But couldn't hold a server for many reasons. Mostly because even though we could farm 15000 ingots in a single flight of a quetz....it was NEVER enough to keep alpha in all out war.

And it was consuming ALL our time to try and upkeep that.

So with the story done. Here is my up-to-date revisions to total war.

I ran out of time to manage a tribe. Or to farm. I quit for many months. So I have recently started playing again and first thing I've done is how do i reduce overhead to bare bare bones. So I can maximize weapons and play time. Minimize farm time. With all that said. Here's the basics.

1) Tribe alliances. I have been playing solo recently so am unaware if this has changed or not. But tribe alliances can be a useful way to compartmentalize your tribe. If everyone is in one tribe. When your killers kill something your tribe is hated.

If your killers and pvpers are in a different tribe but allied to you then no one is the wiser.

If this is publicly known then just dont ally at all and share between secret caches.

Have a farm tribe seems ordinary pvp. Allied to your war tribe feeding them. Your farm tribe appears very small and weak with small metal bases few dinos. But thru methods I worked out can still harvest as if you had dinos.

2) Secret base locations. There is no way in ark to hide. Bases render before anything else and camera tricks make it more obvious. But there ARE hidden locations that can prevent this entirely. Most are in the ocean or in caves.

2a) General construction guidelines. You can hide storage in foundations. You can build walls up to 3 thick (3 layers of walls on a single wall) so you can have a very small very dense metal base that looks "noob" but actually would take CONSIDERABLE resources to break into.  You can place false doors on double or 3x thick walls. So they waste c4 go blow that door only to find a wall. If you expect this base to be attacked by Alpha. Then you can design it with purely the intent to do nothing but waste resources.

3) Because a hidden base is going to be of limited use your use of dinos will be limited. And you want to limit this big waste of time anyway. Why spend hours taming when you can spend hours fighting? Most dinos are useless for pvp flyers were only good ones all others can easily be kited or trapped or killed. A guy with c4 slapped to him and a grenade will blow up that nice expensive rex or Giga you wanted to eat him with. Large bear traps for Gigas then pike and c4 or rocket to death etc.

4) how to gather resources? Number one problem is moving massive amounts of weight from mountain tops. Ive worked this problem out 90% of the way. Needs in flight testing. Basically the method is harvest nodes. Throw boxes of weight at nodes. Rinse and repeat until mountainis harvested. Then shuffle your dropped items to the cliff where youve prepared a method for falling off the cliff. I prefer foundation and ceiling dead man's fall trap for this.

Drop your overburdened self from the trap by breaking a ceiling.

Launch a parachute.

Float to raft of base to deliver payload.

5) Now that you can solo on foot be a quetz youre ready to farm like never before. This with NO overhead means thousands of more rockets. Just think of how many rockets you could have made with all those dumb walls and auto turrets you have. Is your base 12x12? As high as a behemo? Then you could have made approximately 4166 rockets with that wasted metal to protect your time expensive tames from people like me.

Who can waste your turrets with high level shields and with a cannon. More on that later.

6) XP boosting. Because you can harvest a lot of mats but cant build squat till at least lvl 70s. The fastest method I could work out on a weekday was using explorer notes with tons of hide building rafts. Solo this seems to generate about 5,000 xp an hour. If you have a team. Do it together and get the xp tribe boost of each other's raft building while you cut down a forest together.

I dont need to quantify it exactly. But 5,000 an hour is rather great until you are over lvl 80.

Of course server transfers minimize the need for this anymore. But whatever.

One last level grind for me I suppose.

[Bramboxc123]

Im going to put the tactics section here.  I used to infect people for fun. I could hunt a person. Launch myself off a cliff. Disease them and run away without them ever getting my name. 

These skills apply to sniping. Hiding. Spying/recon. Trapping. Everything. If you want to be ninja you need grappling, parachute. Get good at using both to escape your enemies.

[jpcab]

Very cool

[Bramboxc123]

1 hour ago, jpcab said:

Very cool

Ahh cave base guy! Ironically this strat does call for a cave base but in an entirely diffent way partly because of what we discussed in your thread about cannons heh.

On that note. The spot I've picked MIGHT be impervious to cannons. Because of how the blind spots work. Meaning they cant place one in line of sight because you can pillar around corners protected by autos so they can't build a defalade.

Interested? 

[jpcab]

yes of course...i m still there and each day growing strong..i have already pillars ...but inside i have not any defense outside yet

[ZxDawbyxZ]

Nice read! The ability to travel servers really has changed this but its still nice to be able to do this.

[Crows]

Some nice ideas and insight here. I'd like to think that there are people/persons who're capable of taking out an alpha tribe legitimately. There's just too many abusive ways from duping items/explosives/dinos, undermapping/exploiting, or unfair/unintended use of game mechanics, etc. 

[Bramboxc123]

20 hours ago, jpcab said:

yes of course...i m still there and each day growing strong..i have already pillars ...but inside i have not any defense outside yet

Staying secret is best. Once a siege starts you'll probably lose ?

[jpcab]

i m thinking in talking and maybe to reach an agreement

[Sup3riorArs3nal]

That metal harvesting technique sounds obnoxiously slow. Furthermore, parachutes are obnoxious to precision aim over great distance and if you botch your landing you've got to haul all that metal much further fighting wild creatures.

[Drinkinthepink]

You sound like arks version of a tv-commercial salesman... you have no idea what you are talking about,.. you said you lead a tribe that developed strategies to wipe out alpha after alpha, server after server... Then said you literally said you've been gone for months, which makes precious expertise useless anyway...

but theeeen you said farming metal by hand and throwing it all from node to node as you farm an entire mountain (which is absurd...) and to follow that up, you want to parachute from a deadmans fall while massively overburdened to a raft that's a pinprick in the distance... looooool you lost all credibility with that farming method. It wasn't until I read the farming part that I realized you are the same multiaccounter that's been trying to tell people this is amazing for farming.

are you even aware that you can only strap 1 c4 at a time now? Have you even played ark in 2017?

im just waiting for you to say...

"but wait!!! There's more!!!"

 

 

edit: I would have never bothered to post at you if you didn't post 4 separate threads  spamming the forum with this new greatest farming method

[CTMalum]

This thread should be re-named, at best, to "Strategies to Maybe Annoy Alpha Tribes".  You really won't be able to do much damage to a true Alpha using any of these strategies.  You may be able to kill a couple of dinos if you are waiting for them and catch them off guard.  Maybe you could break into a small outpost somewhere.  You're absolutely joking yourself if you think you can hit a main base like this.  Let me go through all of your points and explain to you why they don't work.

 

1) Alpha tribes will be able to figure out that this alliance is a thing after a while.  Even if they can't prove communication between the two, they will know that someone will have to be floating you resources.  If the server doesn't give up the traitor, then the Alpha breaks down doors and finds out for themselves.  My tribe can farm rockets and C4 forever.  I'm not really bothered by how many it takes to open up all of your false doors and hidden walls.  This assumes you're even allowed to build on the server.  Every tribe on my server is approved by us for building and is owned by one of my tribe members.  I'm sure many people will see this as abuse.  People on our server see it as security.  They know that they are safe from each other, and they know we won't come and knock down their doors for no reason.  They also know that they have protection if a large tribe invades.  If they do take some damage from an invading tribe, we will help them rebuild.  It works out for everyone, but I can understand why some people wouldn't like it.

 

2) If you have a surface level base and you're messing with a true Alpha, it will get destroyed.  If you have a truly hidden base (cave, either on ground or underwater), it makes the burden on you so much higher and gives the Alpha plenty of strategic options.  If I find you in an above ground cave, I'm going to surround the entrance with turrets so you can't take any materials in or out.  Once I know that the gas has run out, I'll come in and clear it out.

 

3) You make rockets, C4, and grenades sound like nukes.  Alphas have good tames.  Their tames are going to have a lot of health.  It's very unlikely you're going to be able to kill them fast enough.  Without tames yourself, you're going to find it impossible to break into an Alpha main base. 

 

4) This sounds like fantasy to me.  I've never heard of someone successfully farming like this, and an Alpha tribe that has pegged you as a nuisance won't just sit back and let you do this. 

 

5) Once again, without a large farming infrastructure, you're not going to be able to do what you think you're going to do.  Let's say you actually are successful in farming that large amount of metal.  A whole industrial forge worth.  You're going to have to hide that industrial forge, then you're going to have to wait for that metal to cook.  Before then, you're going to have to use regular forges, and you're going to have to have a lot of them if you don't want it to take forever.