Five Tactics to Dominate RvR

Realm versus Realm (RvR) events are one of the most popular event types in Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire, but they can be chaotic and frustrating if you don’t have a plan of action.  In this article we are going to give you the five most important tactics to dominate RvR events on points, both for your Realm and your guild.

 

Minimize Fights In Your Home Realm

 

This is the most important tip from a point maximization standpoint. At the current time, you get 5 points for every point of power destroyed or hospitalized in the other realm and one point for every point of point in your own. That means in any fight in your home realm versus invaders, you have to do five times the power damage to them that they do to you to stay ahead on points.

 

This is almost always (99.9% of the time) a losing battle, except for empires with excellent gear, excellent research and a whole lot of troops. And even then, what’s point positive against a t3 account may be very point-negative against a t4 account. For this reason, you should minimize fights in your home realm.

 

One possible exception to this rule is a trap account capable of eating a hero march from a strong empire. If you can capture a hero early in RvR, you will put a serious dent in that player’s ability to earn points for the rest of the event, assuming that you can use random ports or other evasion to hold on to the hero without being rallied.

 

There are potentially edge cases where you can remain point-positive, but even in those three edge cases, you will still get more points if you can go to the other realm and fight there. Minimize the fighting in your own realm to increase overall points.

 

One last note on this to clear up confusion: you will get points for your guild even if you are technically at a “loss”, which means that if are attacked and lose 150k power but kill 90k power worth of troops, your guild still gets the 90k points. If getting prizes for your guild is your main concern and you don’t care about your realm’s points, then heavily-defensive empires and trap accounts can still score those at home, but it isn’t good for winning RvR as a whole or for trying to be the #1 guild.

 

Slow Down Attackers

Any defensive strategies you DO implement as a guild or a realm should be geared towards wasting attacker time, given that the RvR ports only last an hour.

 

Aside from trap accounts that can capture heroes, other tactics can include blockading or harassing at the crystal, or things like leaving a few juicy un-bubbled accounts in the middle of a large hive that intentionally bubble when attackers have marches on the way. Anything you can think of to waste attacker time and resources will be helpful in keeping ahead on points. This is especially true in the first few hours of the event, which is when most players will use their RvR ports.

 

Focus on Attacking Empires and Tiles

Crystal-holding points may look like a lot, but in actual practice they pale in comparison to the amount that you can get from attacking empires and tiles in the other realm.

Let’s break down the possible points from holding a crystal. There are 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour period, which is the length of RvR.  That means you can score a maximum of 34,560,000 points from the opposing crystal and a mere 864,000 points from defending your own crystal even if you held them for every second of the 24-hour event.

 

Meanwhile, a single hive of unshielded t2 empires can easily net you 20-40 million points. Two t3 accounts with 5 million power worth of t3 each are worth 50 million together if you can catch them offline and rally them down.

 

And tiles are basically free points. A gathering force of just 10k t2 siege is worth 130k points if you can eat the entire march. 5k t1 cavalry? 50k points. These add up fast, and no matter how good a job the defenders do purging tiles before the event, there’s always somebody on tiles.

 

The point is, you can lose the crystal and still win on points in RvR. The main benefit to holding one or both crystals is to keep titles away from the enemy and utilize titles for yourself. The points you get from a crystal are a bonus, and the REAL points come from sacking empires.

 

Focus your attackers’ precious time on hunting empires to burn, and don’t try to hard to hold on to either crystal if you want to win.

 

Coordinate Rally Members

Targets that require a rally are more likely to be unshielded during the event than ones that aren’t. The top guilds on the opposing Realm may or may not do a sweep beforehand of people on tiles or weak hives to prevent point loss, but if they do they are unlikely to bother with very powerful accounts native to their realm (both because of the resources and ports required to do so and because they have to live with these people the rest of the month).

 

But at 5-to-1 points, it can be worthwhile for you to rally these t2 and t3 behemoths as long as you have the rally participants and don’t lose a hero doing so.

 

For that reason, you will want a rally team and you will want that rally team to port at the same time as each other so that you can all participate in the rallies. Get your strongest players to commit to a time when they will be on; you’re stronger together than apart and you will want to take advantage of unshielded accounts that you can score huge points off of.

 

Likewise, you should work on getting your Realm’s strongest players to cooperate for the event, regardless of Guild affiliation in the past. You’ll all score more points if you work together.

 

Form a Scout Team

Because time is at a premium in RvR, you also ideally want your attackers to have targets before they activate ports. For this reason, a scout team hunting for good targets can be an invaluable tool. You can use an in-game chat room for this so that coords are clickable in the chat, although be careful to name the chatroom something weird and also create new ones between RvRs to minimize spies.

 

Make sure to give the scouts descriptions of ideal targets that you know you can take, including power levels: t2 in the 2-3 mil range make good t3 rally targets or t4 solos, 5-8 mil power can make good t4 targets. Large clumps of tile gatherers make good targets for anybody.

 

This is also a great role for weaker accounts that will be shielded during the event; anyone can act as a Scout by viewing the other Realm and looking for empires or hives to target. There is absolutely no power requirement, just a good eye and a willingness to help.

 

Pro-Tip: Tell the scouts to look for accounts with captive heroes; these are easier to spot when scanning the map and usually indicate the presence of troops to kill. You’ll want to skip the low-power accounts, of course.

 

Bonus Tactic: Ask The Other Realm For Help

This may sound counter-intuitive, but when you get to the other Realm, try dropping into Realm chat and being friendly. Tell everyone you’re honored to be in their Realm and you hope they’re doing well, and that even if you have to burn it all down it’s nothing personal.

 

Then ask if there’s anybody in particular that they don’t like whom they’d like you to zero while you’re there.

 

Almost every Realm has some bullies, or just players that have caused drama. Usually there are people who can and will send you coords of their least-favorite people if you ask nice. And even if everyone remains loyal to their realm, you’ll at least leave a favorable impression after you’ve left.

 

Update: Multirealm RvR

With the addition of the new Ardyn’s Assault event type, the Realms have seen their first multi-realm RvR. Additionally, the time length has been shortened from 24 hours to a much shorter 4.

 

Even with these changes, all of the strategy advice in this article still applies. But the shorter time puts an even heavier focus on empires and tiles given both the wider array of possible targets (since you are fighting four realms, not one) and the crystal points just not being worth as much over four hours. It also makes your scout team much, much more valuable given that there are now four maps to search. And it makes rallies much more important sources of points, especially with new changes like the Mercenaries and overall power increases across the Realms.

 

That being the case, choose your scout leaders carefully and make sure that they know exactly what you are looking for in terms of empire stregnth, size, gear, etc. Using a special in-game chat that they can drop coordinates into here is absolutely key to striking quickly and taking out as many targets as possible. And make sure you have a total count of your rally capability before you start.

 

Checklist for Dominating RvR

http://ffane.tips/

 

1. Try not to fight in your own realm
2. Slow down attackers instead and waste their time
3. Focus on empires and tiles in the other realm
4. Coordinate your rally teams
5. Form a Scout Team
6. Ask the other Realm to send you coords of realm jerks

 

Update: We have a new article on RvR tactics, discussing the pros and cons of purging your realm before the event. You can find that here.