Defense of Tao

Defense of Tao is a Cross-server PVP feature. Game mechanics are the same as Contest of Tao: one of your servants fights against all of the opponents servants. But as it is an Alliance feature, there are some twists.

## Requirements

This feature is available to Alliances that reach Level 5.

The fights involves servants for 8 or 12 defenders. Hence it requires the Alliance to have at least 8 or 12 players with at least 10 servants to take part in respectively first and second fight of the week.

## Timeline

There are two fights during the week. The first involves 8 defenders and lasts 2 days (Tuesday + Wednesday).The second involves 12 defenders and lasts 3 days (Friday + Saturday + Sunday).

In between is a preparation phase where Spirit Jades can be spent to boost your servants' abilities.

* Monday: Registering for the fight (alliance leader)
* Tuesday R+10: First fight starts
* Wednesday R+22: First fight ends
* Thursday: Registering fot the fight
* Friday R+10: Second fight starts
* Sunday R+22: Second fight ends

## Game mechanics

### Matching

Your alliance will fight against another Alliance from any server. Which means that in the beginning you have a lot of chance to be matched with a much older alliance that will either totally crush you or won't be inactive at all, providing an easy win without many points. However one or two active members might be enough to totally outclass your whole alliance.

### Defenders

The players with the higher total Servants Prestige will be automatically chosen as defenders. They are the targets, anyone can see their total Prestige, and they are ordered in the interface from strongest to weakest.

### Attackers

The whole Alliance can attack, you don't need to be a defender.

### Rules

* You can attack 4 times a day
* You can't attack the same player twice
* You can't use the same Servant twice (for the whole fight, not only for the day)

This means that during the duration of the fight you will use 8-12 different servants and will attack each one of the defenders a single time.

## Fight

The fight itself works like the Contest of Tao:

* Select one Servant to fight an opponent
* Your Servant will have to fight all of the opponent's servants
* You can choose among 3 random Servants to attack each round
* Between rounds you can purchased upgrades for your Servant
* There is however no bonus chest every three fights

One difference though is that the Jades used for upgrades are specific for the fight and not kept between. Meaning you start with 10 jades on the first day of the fight, and there is no point in not spending all your jades before the end of the last day. Next fight you will be back to 10 Jades.

You can also use Spirit Jades to reuse a Servant. This will allow you to reuse your strongest Servant for a second fight. However, only once per servant for a given fight, and this will not allow you to attack the same opponent twice, so you're only replacing one of your free attacks by one with a stronger Servant.

## Counting points

Each fight you can gain 250 points if you defeat all of the opponent's servants. Points awarded are based on the number of Servants. So if the defender has 10 Servants, each will be worth 25 points, but if they have 50, they will be only worth 5 points each.

Stronger Servants are not worth more, the goal is to defeat as many Servants as possible.

This means the maximum score is 2000 per day for each member.

## Rewards

There are rewards for the winning and losing Alliances, as well as individual rewards according to points ranking.

### Winning Alliance

* 100 x Opponent's level in Alliance Experience

### Losing Alliance

* 20 x Opponent's level in Alliance Experience

### Winning Alliance members

* 1 Talent Pill
* 3 Treasure Tokens
* 50 x Opponent's level in Alliance Coins

### Losing Alliance members

* 1 Talent Pill Piece
* 1 Treasure Token
* 10 x Opponent's level in Alliance Coins

### Every player

* 5% of individual score in Alliance Coins

## Attack strategy

* Unless you're very lucky, for a long time, your opponents will be much stronger. You can send your stronger Servants against the weakest defenders to grab a few points and accept that you'll get 0 points on the others.
* Sharing info between Alliance members on the opponent's weaknesses can be critical
* Strongest players can test defenses and indicate to the weaker players whether the defenders are accessible.
* If a defender has one or two very strong Servants but the rest are not leveled at all, even weaker player can make points against them
* In the long run, you should have at least 12 servants that are leveled enough to be able to score in this.
* Try to have 3 Jades available for every Servant to buy the first attack boost
* Use all your Jades before the end

## Defense strategy

* Like Contest of Tao, having only one strong Servant and then low level ones will make you an easy target. However, here there is no bonus for defeating all the Servants, so the difference between "all your servants are defeated" and "all your servants but one are defeated" is very small.
* Having most of your Servants leveled will help defend against weaker attackers. Not everybody has 8-12 strong attackers, so some of those attacks will be weak and can be stopped by chipping away a little on each round.
* Having enough strong Servants to have a chance to force the attacker to fight one of your top Servants early is the only defense against stronger attackers.