Leadership For Beginners

DeletedUser

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Leadership for Beginners


Contents

- Recruiting
- Leadership Structure
- Bonding
- Activity
- Diplomacy
- War
- Respect
- Identity


Before I begin, I wish to highlight comments from two big-name leaders from .net (their success can be debated, however their views are still valid).

Don't lead, its not worth the time and effort and it'll just piss you off - Pervis
leading sucks - Mattcurr

These two leaders have led tribes who have had very successful tribes in the past, and some not so successful. The point is there and it is something you need to seriously think about before you even consider becoming a leader. Do you REALLY want to devote your time, effort and sanity in to leading a tribe, where everything that goes wrong in the tribe will likely blamed on you? If you don't, stop reading here as leading is not for you.



Recruiting.

When recruiting, you need to focus on ISA. This stands for Intelligence, Skill, Activity. Of the 3, activity and intelligence should prioritize above skill. Skill can be picked up through useful guides, and experience. You can't force people to be active or intelligent, and so you should be careful when recruiting as such.

The best thing to do, is contact those of whom you would like to have in a tribe with you. Explain your (true) ingame ability, your (true) leadership ability, provide twstats links where possible to help you out. get talking to them, and get to know them. A good tribe should start with a good, communicative base of members. If they are immature, that isn't necessarily a problem. So long as you are friendly to them and they are intelligent enough to learn how to play, and can write in reasonably good english, they are still good members to have. If you don't understand why, then you haven't got the intelligence required for becoming a decent, successful leader.

Don't recruit everybody who asks to join purely to bolster members. Use TribalWarsMap and TwStats to do strategic recruiting and look at where your local tribes are. Try to avoid recruiting players who are so close to your members that they disrupt each other's farming, and also bear in mind that if you recruit players too far away, they can't be helpful supporting your members or you supporting them when in need, and as such could struggle unless they are quite skilled players. Recruitment is a continuous process throughout the time you run the tribe. If you see an opportunity to get a couple of members (through a war target, soloing players or from small local tribes), it is generally worth pursuing. You can always feel them out and get to know them before deciding whether or not recruit them!

Leadership Structure.

This is the hardest thing to get right. If you are very active, you can try to do everything yourself. Recruitment. Diplomacy. War planning. Internal management. However, I would recommend that you don't do this. Other than a select few leaders, most won't take on the whole leadership on their own, as it is too time consuming and you can easily lose the fun of the game.

I would recommend the following. Always handle recruitment yourself. This is the least time consuming, and you then stay fully in the loop with what is going on. If there is a friendly, clever person in the tribe who is trustable, they can quite easily be turned in to a good diplomat. The key here is a good relation between tribes, and advance planning between you and your diplomat. Keep them 100% in the loop of your intentions regarding recruitment and tribe policies, and where you intend to head the tribe. The diplomat should be given relatively a free reign once they know where the tribe is heading in the future - don't try to involve yourself too much in the diplomacy of the tribe, as it can disrupt the diplomat's work and even ruin it. Just keep them updating you and send friendly messages to tribe leaders around you for good relations.

I would also recommend that you have somebody who can be listed as the person to contact in case of a problem with another member internally, or a noble claim dispute or some other internal affair. Usually anybody can do this sort of role, without much experience. They just need to be unbiased and diplomatic when talking to the people involved.

With regards to leadership style, this depends solely on your style as a player. You may prefer to be a dictator (this is what I do - it works well for me). You may prefer a council. Bear in mind the following: the larger a council, the longer the time for decisions to be made. However, people do not always like a dictatorship until they see it working well. I've lost control of a tribe I lead quite recently due to one person wanting power and not being given it, and managing to split the tribe because of it. I salvaged the situation and we took out the majority of the deserters, but it did a lot more internal damage than I would have liked.

Bonding.

Every tribe needs its members to bond. Make a fun internal forum, perhaps make an IRC/skype room. Keep in constant contact with all your members (if you are friendly to them you can keep their loyalty without any problem, and so spies are much less likely to be in your fold). Just be a nice person to them all - even if you are telling them off, don't be harsh or rude, or angry. It is better to be diplomatic and explain the reasons for why you are telling them not to do something again, or that they have to take a certain punishment for their actions, than to be aggressive about it.

Activity.

Activity is crucial in any tribe. Low activity means easy targets for your enemies.
I would recommend early on dismissing members who go inactive. Once people begin to get past 4-5 villages in the tribe, I would recommend keeping people who have been offline for 3 or more days, scouting them out and nobling them whilst they are still in the tribe. This way the villages stay under control of the tribe, and you aren't likely to lose the villages to other tribes unless it is during a war. There is no right way to keep people active in a tribe. Getting them to enjoy themselves is a good method, though it doesn't always work. Keeping your forum neat and tidy is also sensible as some older players prefer to easily find the useful information. Having the tribe sitting each other as a regular occurrence is also a good idea. Trying to keep all accounts active is one of the hardest things leadership ever have to do, from my experience.

Diplomacy.

This is entirely down to each leadership, their styles and the situation of their area and their world, so I will keep this short.

Be polite and friendly, and honest, to all leaders. Regardless of whether you do or don't want diplomacy with them. Try to get a good relationship with each leader of tribes you see lasting any length of time, and keep it that way. Don't give away too much information on your tribe, although you also shouldn't lie.

Alliances: 1-2 alliances are valuable. More can be risky in case your allies turn on each other. You should be 100% honest with your allies and open about your diplomacy to them (share who you have NAPs with, allies with etc).

NAPs: These can be used for 2-3 reasons. The 1st reason is to build a foundation of trust for a future alliance. The second is to avoid a war with the tribe until the right moment for you (sometimes this is more of a temporary-alliance, if you are warring another tribe together). The third is to use as a meat-shield so that another tribe which is a potential threat to you can't get help.

War.

Again, not too much to say.
Read guides. Post them in guide sections in your tribe's forums. Have a tactic planned in advance. Plan ahead. Use allies where possible. Recruit a couple of their members if you think it could benefit you. Landing times are valuable if you are hitting a single player heavily, or a large area heavily. Hiding attacks in between fakes is also smart.

Cat-waves are also very useful, but are not used enough generally to have a good impact.

Just see what your tribe appears to be best at. Co-ordination is a key, as is sharing noble claims - if you undernoble, you should mail the nearest player and suggest they send a noble to quickly cap the village. Teamwork on this scale is what wins a war.

Respect.

Treat everybody with respect, and you get respected for it. Be careful on External forums. Unless you wish to be like me and provoke wars/manipulate to cause conflicts, don't troll on the externals. Post very carefully, and only when you have to. Avoid spamming where possible. Depends on your character as a leader really. I have seen a good duke flame everybody on the forum and be majorly arrogant, purely to get all local tribes trying to attack his tribe.

Identity.

Be proud of your tribe and its identity. Get a nice COA to match your chosen tag and name. Make sure the tag and name are connected where possible.

You should then spend a good amount of time (sometimes 3-4 hours) crafting a decent profile. It could be 1-2 lines. It *should* have a name in bb-codes of who to contact. Recruitment and Diplomacy are "no-no"s in my opinion. Even putting up who to speak to about that isn't really a good idea, as having 1 account filter everything is the easiest way to keep on top of running a tribe, in my experience. Avoid ASCII swords, or any of those "Cna uoY RaeD HTiS?" copy-pastes.

Just try to make your tribe look professional - you will get respect for it.


That's pretty much everything I have to say. Just develop the style that you find suits you best, and see what happens. That really is the best advise I can give you.
 
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DeletedUser

Guest
Simply excellent Googly. ;)

(Check BH's leadership guide that I posted. I´m gonna remove joshxtreme99's guide)
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Last edited by Googly; Today at 12:29. Reason: Title wasn't purple :O

lulz :D
 

DeletedUser

Guest
I personally don't like Bloodhood's guide due to too much text and block writing. I can't focus long enough to read any of the important sections to give an opinion on it.

Thanks for the comment though.

Posters like you in here in this american forum are very good.

Keep posting!

Maybe soon we can get our own library, independent from .net.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Okay, okay no need to go psycho on me. To be honest, a fair few greatly respected players have commented on the guides accuracy. If it wasn't any good why is it featured on the dutch guide library and also the .net guide library.
If my guide was so bad why put this?

I have taken a few minor points from joshxtreme99's guide on the topic.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
To be honest your guide say pretty much what I said but put really bluntly and not that well explained. A few things that you disagreed on in my guide you have just changed and jammed them into your guide. Overall, it is a good guide (mainly because it is essentially my guide just cut short).
The main thing that caught my eye was the format. What was up with that? It was like someone vomited a load of fonts on the page. :p
 

DeletedUser

Guest
*bored face*

Most of what I have said is THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE of your guide.
It is nothing like your guide in any way, apart from me using the "respect" and "identity" headings, as far as I can see.

It is a good guide because all the incorrect comments in your guide are not in it, and it is in no way a definitive "do this, do that" which your guide is, and which makes it such an awful guide.

EVERY leader has different qualities, which means they cannot follow just one definitive guide that tells them what to do. Most of yours has a load of bullshit in it, and so almost your entire guide wasn't used in the slightest for this guide.

You are clearly an attention-seeking troll. You are proving this by not even bothering to read the content in the slightest. You need to learn to play the game, get some ACTUAL experience, and stop trying to troll me because your guide is so flawed that it forced me to write one so that there would be one on this forum that isn't full of horse-crap.

Format is done in a way I like. It's spoilered to make it easy for people to read, without having a huge eyeful of text to read through at once.

I would ask that you stay off this thread, and I will have a moderator hopefully clean this up. Move along.

This is quite obviously a desperate cry for attention. There is no need to swear. I have read your guide, I have played the game for 4 years. I have experience, do not even question that my friend.
I bid you a good evening/morning depending where you are.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
I've read both guides and they are independent of one another. A few points crossed and I am sure that some ideas will be coherent, but you are trying to argue that innovation is the same as plagiarism which is obviously not the case. Also lets remember this is a game and you aren't getting paid for your guide, and the point of writing a guide is for those more experienced to help the less experienced. With that being said, if he used your guide as a base, and wrote an alternative view to it, you are just furthermore helping less experienced players and should be encouraged anyways.

So, kiss and make up.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Don't lead, its not worth the time and effort and it'll just piss you off - Pervis

leading sucks - Mattcurr

Only parts worth reading. :p
 

DeletedUser329

Guest
Don't lead, its not worth the time and effort and it'll just piss you off - Pervis

leading sucks - Mattcurr

Only parts worth reading. :p



Everyone knows the secret behind their great leadership is me .

<3
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Everyone knows the secret behind their great leadership is me .

<3



If you mean the reason behind every leaders aneurysm and rage quits than yes. Name the last tribe you didnt aggravate the duke to the point of having to pull you to the side and talking to you individually about your behavior :p
 

DeletedUser

Guest
On a serious note. You dont learn to lead by reading a book, going to a class or reading a guide. You learn it from experience and to a certain point from natural ability of commanding the attention of a room.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
@ matt and pervis

if shes that bad why do you always have her in your tribes?
 

DeletedUser

Guest
On a serious note. You dont learn to lead by reading a book, going to a class or reading a guide. You learn it from experience and to a certain point from natural ability of commanding the attention of a room.
True, but a guide (and to a greater extent conversing with proven leaders), will teach you some of the basics, and how to present yourself.
This is most certainly true.
Indeed, lisa is almost as detrimental as me :)
@ matt and pervis

if shes that bad why do you always have her in your tribes?

She is a female, quite obviously :p

Also, having led rank one tribes on both w54 and 55, leading is the most time consuming job there is.
 
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