Possible to attack with less than 20% losses?

I'm just starting out, trying to take out my 4th sector, and I'm trying to work out if it's possible to have a big enough army to take out a bandit camp with less than 20% losses. But I haven't managed to get any combat preview result other than "acceptable losses, you'll lose between 20% and 50% of your units" - I certainly don't consider 50% acceptable for a start!
If not, then is there some guideline as to how many units I should attack with to minimize the absolute number lost? E.g. if I send in 200 and I'll definitely lose 40 (20%), I'd rather send in just 100 and possibly lose 30 (30%).
And if you do always suffer at least 20% losses, does that mean at least 20% of your units should be cheapest type (recruits - they seem to the ones that get sacrificed first)?
TIA

BTW I tried out 150 units against a bandit camp with 70 units.
I lost 26 recruits and 7 bowmen, so that's basically just over 20%.
Not great but at least recruits are cheap. But the combat preview had suggested I might lose between 20% and 50% even with only 100 of my own units, so I wonder how many I might have lost if I'd attacked with just that.

Don't suppose there's a way to "save" game state and restore/undo to it?

Combat preview is an indication, if you want more exact numbers, use a 3rd party sim(ulator).
For instance: Battle Sim

And no, you cannot save prior to a battle and retry. What's done is done :)

Suggest you take a look at https://settlersonlinewiki.eu/en/island/conquer-island/

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

I'm just starting out, trying to take out my 4th sector, and I'm trying to work out if it's possible to have a big enough army to take out a bandit camp with less than 20% losses.

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Combat mechanics works the way that outside of very specific situations you wont be able to finish a fight without losses. Numbers advantage doesnt affect it much. Instead you should focus on utilizing the types of units to minimize the cost of loses, not the numbers.

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But I haven't managed to get any combat preview result other than "acceptable losses, you'll lose between 20% and 50% of your units"

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See above, combat preview is for the most part useless in this game because information about percentage of losses is irrelevant, its real cost of units lost that matters. Recruits are couple times cheaper to lose than other frontline units, so even if you were to lose more of them then say soldiers its still better outcome for you.

I strongly suggest you dont reinvent the wheel 10 years into the games existance and try using specific unit combinations from guides.

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Originally Posted by DorotheusII

Suggest you take a look at https://settlersonlinewiki.eu/en/island/conquer-island/

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Wow had no idea that was available, thanks.

BTW I did finally see a message "Complete victory, you will lose 20% of your troops at most" from a combat preview, but that was for a camp with only 10 units (vs 100 of mine).
I have to say my previous attack (on a bandit leader) didn't go so well, victorious but basically lost everything except the bowmen. Not convinced of the value of certain unit types so far, particularly cavalry.

There is a \help\ tab ingame. Use it to get help ingame.
There will be people online who can easily explain to you what certain troops benefits are ot otherwise give useful info and/or links to usefull websites.

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Originally Posted by DorotheusII

Suggest you take a look at https://settlersonlinewiki.eu/en/island/conquer-island/

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check out all of this site. its loaded with great stuff and almost all correct! I've been playing since day 1 and still use wiki all the time. there are other sites mainly to do with battle guides, but imo wiki is definitely the best for beginners and idiots like me :)

Yeah I've been using it, but I'm determined not to lose so many units. Sending in 200 recruits to certain death just seems bananas (and then takes forever to wait for them to re-populate, even with various buffs etc.). But you need something like 200 elite soldiers to give you a decent chance of victory against some camps and I'm not sure it's possible to get enough XP to level up to the point that's feasible.
I assume it's not possible to have two generals attack the same camp at once?
Honestly though the biggest problem is the building license limit, and I gather you can't increase that without defeating more bandit leaders (unless you can find 1500 magic beanstalks...?)

I suggest that you find a guild to join if you are not already in one as they can help you with a lot of things including resources to help you move up the levels, best thing I ever did was join a guild as I would not have stayed with the the game. Find a good battle sim and use it to redo all your battle guides and don't forget to review as you acquire more gens and access to new troops.
In the lower levels it is a slow grind as you build your capabilities so slow and steady is the best approach, after all you are learning how the game works.

You can send multiple generals to a camp. Anything killed stays dead, health regens to full though so this won't work for killing bosses.

If you get the first aid skill on a general then you can chip away at some camps by sending a single unit to kill one enemy unit and the first aid skill will save that one unit. It takes a very long time since you have to wait for the general to recover, but it is very efficient since you don't lose any units at all (as long as that one unit can actually kill another enemy unit). It does come in handy if you are having to wait for units to be produced and your generals would otherwise be sat idle.

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

(unless you can find 1500 magic beanstalks...?)

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They come cheap as beans are cheap and production is easy and plentifull with PFB/Lovetree combo

best post a trade yourself in trade office to buy em and hope for a few fair players to pick em up

1500 beanstalks was a big ask yrs ago, but any decent guild will help u with that nowadays. as i remember once u get past the tutorial its a very slow grind until u get to do adventures then the brakes are off again, so stick with it. in no time at all u'll be laughing at how easy it would be for u to clear ur island over again.

level up ur barracks as high as u can. u wont need a guild for this, just offer 1 fish for whatever resources u need and put a post in trade channel. some1 will buy it

its actually (probably accidentally) a great learning curve. U'll learn to manage ur island very efficiently at this stage and then move on to bigger and better battles :)

The game quickly becomes boring if a high level player ends up doing everything for you though.

i wasn't suggesting they "do it for you"

on the open market, prices for stalks are in the easy reachable levels for mid level players so the non gem licenses are easy to get

As a matter of fact, with the exelsior quests giving gems, it is easy enough to get the 625 gems for 10 licenses as well

The challenges are different from when the game was launched but all very much in reach on your own power

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Originally Posted by Kotugo

You can send multiple generals to a camp.

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Misleading since its not what OP was asking about.

You cant send multiple generals to a camp in any way they will support each other, only one will fight at the time.

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But you need something like 200 elite soldiers to give you a decent chance of victory against some camps

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You dont, you just have to choose right units. RIght now your mindset is you couldnt open a can of beans with a hammer, so youre looking for a bigger hammer instead of a can opener.

Provide the details of the fight you find hard and I can explain all of it to you

Finally took out Wild Mary this morning, and interestingly enough that was one case where I used quite a different combo to what was suggested in the guides, based on what units I still had left and what the combat sim suggested. I went with 30R, 60S and 110LB, which resulted in fewer losses than what the guide suggestions hinted at and I was basically able to train them up in the time it took the general to recover. But the number of units sacrificed along the way in total was still extraordinarily high, and if it weren't for the ability to churn out settlers quickly with the provision house (retired bandits and/or travelling families), it would have taken weeks longer to produce all the units necessary! (even with the Sip from the Kettle buff, population growth is painfully slow - it should be exponential!)
At some point I'll move onto the adventures and other colonies, but I'm hoping I can level up enough (still only 32) to be able to train up decent enough units to avoid future suicide missions.

Ooh, didn't think of that. I did actually buy a second general and never used it in the end!

"just offer 1 fish for whatever resources u need and put a post in trade channel. some1 will buy it" - I noticed a few offers like that, I assumed it was to complete some quest that required selling x of something (I generally ignored such quests, didn't seem worth the reward!). Then I worried it was something that was meant for someone else...but I took them up anyway! (to clarify, these were trade offers where the "cost" was 1 fish, in exchange for 100s or even 1000s of some useful resource. But yeah, I'd noticed the opposite sort too, again had assumed it was part of some private arrangement...)

"You dont, you just have to choose right units" - I meant in one go with minimal "number" losses (vs "value loss" - and obviously value loss matters more if you're just treating it as a game, but not so much if you're actually thinking of your settlers as real people!). According to the combat sim to win against Wild Mary and her hounds not even 200 mounted marksman will help, but 200 besiegers will - at an eyewatering value loss (over 20 times anything I've ever experienced so far). But is it even possible to get up to the level you could own 200 besiegers without conquering your whole island?

Well, usually in a case like that, the best tactic is to use 1 or 2 sacrificial attacks to clear out a lot of the other troops in the camp and send in the big guns against the depleted camp, protected by the "tanking" troops

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

"You dont, you just have to choose right units" - I meant in one go with minimal "number" losses (vs "value loss" - and obviously value loss matters more if you're just treating it as a game, but not so much if you're actually thinking of your settlers as real people!). According to the combat sim to win against Wild Mary and her hounds not even 200 mounted marksman will help, but 200 besiegers will - at an eyewatering value loss (over 20 times anything I've ever experienced so far). But is it even possible to get up to the level you could own 200 besiegers without conquering your whole island?

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It is not about wild mary herself, it is the hounds that cause the issue. To clear each hound uses 1 cavalry, that is why you suicide 199 cavalry before killing her.

You can clear hounds using recruits normally though, so I assume wild mary has some other effect on recruits such that they become useless...either way you can't do it in a single go.

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

You can clear hounds using recruits normally though, so I assume wild mary has some other effect on recruits such that they become useless...either way you can't do it in a single go.

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Every unit in game has a set priority upon which its attacked.
Bosses usually have it higher than normal units, meaning that regular units wont even touch enemy units until the boss is dead.

What is a problem with that fight is that normally youd just use some frontline units and alot of backline with high damage (like crossbows) to do huge damage to the boss, but hounds are attacking weakest units, meaning they would decimate any number of bowmen/ crossbowmen you have, and do it before they could even attack.

So the right approach here (and the lesson you should learn from that fight) is that you look for what earlier I referred to as can opener, which is a suicide attack of cavalry to kill the weakest (in this case hounds), leaving the boss alone, to be later defeated by a combination of melee and high damage ranged units.

This is literally the first case you would encounter where you have to lose the mentality of not losing your units, because in almost every adventure youll see later youd find camps where its almost necessary to eliminate part of the threat to simplify the fight, rather than headbutt the camp with the most expensive army you can produce.

And the reason I mentioned army value previously is that this game is severly imbalanced when it comes to cost of resources and time to produce units vs the actual unit strength (which you wont see until you actually understand the combat system) which makes 'better' units not actually better in plenty of situations, when they still remain 10 times more expensive, take 10 times longer to produce, and you certainly dont lose 10x fewer of them to offset that.

Unfortunately its the game where in some cases sending 3 thousands of recruits to certain death is the most optimal strategy, and you dont gain anything from trying to work around that.

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

"just offer 1 fish for whatever resources u need and put a post in trade channel. some1 will buy it" - I noticed a few offers like that, I assumed it was to complete some quest that required selling x of something (I generally ignored such quests, didn't seem worth the reward!). Then I worried it was something that was meant for someone else...but I took them up anyway! (to clarify, these were trade offers where the "cost" was 1 fish, in exchange for 100s or even 1000s of some useful resource. But yeah, I'd noticed the opposite sort too, again had assumed it was part of some private arrangement...)

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100 bronze swords or 1000 wheat or 1500 pinewood planks for 1 fish means the seller is doing a quest which rewards 50 gems.

"you dont gain anything from trying to work around that."...except for the fact you can take pride in sacrificing the fewest number of digital lives! But seriously, there are adventures where you need to send 3000+ recruits? How is that even possible within the 2 hour limit, given the number of transfers it would require (each taking 30 minutes...)?
I'm not even that fussed about adventures just yet actually, I'm trying to work out if I can get my resource management to a point I only need to log in once a day for 30 minutes or so to keep everything running smoothly (but nowhere that yet...the inability to queue up sufficient operations is the main problem). It's a decent little game but chewing up way too much time! It's not even clear how paying real $ for gems etc. would help much (I'd pay real $ for a better client though that didn't freeze up, randomly disconnect and stop refreshing properly all the time...)

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

"you dont gain anything from trying to work around that."...except for the fact you can take pride in sacrificing the fewest number of digital lives! But seriously, there are adventures where you need to send 3000+ recruits? How is that even possible within the 2 hour limit, given the number of transfers it would require (each taking 30 minutes...)?

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Colonies have short time limit, harder adentures usually have a time limit around 8-14 days. Also content is completely static so knowing what you'll fight you can prepare the entire army you will need before even starting the adventure, and finish the entire thing in less than 2 hours usually.

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Originally Posted by Usermaatre

"you dont gain anything from trying to work around that."...except for the fact you can take pride in sacrificing the fewest number of digital lives! But seriously, there are adventures where you need to send 3000+ recruits? How is that even possible within the 2 hour limit, given the number of transfers it would require (each taking 30 minutes...)?
I'm not even that fussed about adventures just yet actually, I'm trying to work out if I can get my resource management to a point I only need to log in once a day for 30 minutes or so to keep everything running smoothly (but nowhere that yet...the inability to queue up sufficient operations is the main problem). It's a decent little game but chewing up way too much time! It's not even clear how paying real $ for gems etc. would help much (I'd pay real $ for a better client though that didn't freeze up, randomly disconnect and stop refreshing properly all the time...)

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Only generals from the tavern need 30 minutes, a majority of generals from the merchant (event tab) only need 15 minutes or less, You can buy some outside of events but they will cost gems then, not event currency. The bighearted general from the valentines event which starts Monday holds 2000 troops and can be skilled up to hold 3000, this general is just a transport general unable to fight. The event also has the Observatory building which as supplied reduces travel time to adventures for your generals by 25%, you can also obtain 50% and 75% recipes for this building.

There are many different generals in game from either the event tab or black market tab of merchant, all are better than the generals from the tavern in one way or another particularly when skilled up the right way to suit your playstyle. Once you have built up your stable of generals you will be able to tackle some adventures with troop gains not losses or run other adventures in 10 minutes.

Ah ok, thanks, sounds all too complicated TBH!

It's really not.

Actually was able to get 1300 magic beanstalks in exchange for valentine's flowers (which I made a packet out of in general, wasn't planning to participate in the event), only to find out you can't use them in the market until you're level 43! So I used 650 gems, more than half of what I had...but now I'm stuck, no real way I can grow my economy any further without acquiring more building licenses (upgrading beyond level 3 is way too slow and expensive) - I assume you can get those on adventures? I'd happily buy them with coins if I could...

Hmm, so I finished an adventure (despite a bug with the wrong general being sent back to the home island nearly robbing me of enough time). The combat sim was completely wrong for the losses on the boss, I lost far more than was suggested. And the rewards were...not impressive. Really all I want is building licenses at this point. Happy to pay good money with coins if someone can tell me how!

If you are a high enough level run the short letter quests from the Excelsior, each completed short letter chain rewards you 50 gems.

Until you are of a high enough level to buy licences with stalks the only way to obtain licences is to pay gems or wait for a event which lets you buy licences with event currency.

Start looking to replace your residences and built Noble residences with Noble residences from trade, Nobles from trade do not need a licence so you free up one licence for every one you replace.

Hmm, I have 6 strange idols quests in my star menu...the thought of doing that again 6 times just for less half of what I need for another 10 building licenses isn't too appealing! But I do have some buildings I'll probably never use for a while, guess I'll just have to destroy them for now.