The BEST event in Dark War Survival!

– Yes, Black Gold Battlefield even beats State Of Supremacy for the sheer fun factor! It’s a great way to learn your battle limits, practise tactics and understand some key battle strategies.

BGB Event Summary

Black Gold Battlefield (BGB) happens every two weeks in two time slots on a Sunday for two teams. Each team has 20 starters and 10 substitutes. There are key timed objectives to score points, but take note of the scoring of these objectives (buildings). The buildings are oil refineries (6), Oil Barrels, Hospitals (2), Military Bases (2) and the rare earth factory – it drops rare earth alloy at 15m and 25m. If you can get 1 of these home, it’s probably going to win the event for you.

BEFORE Entering the Battlefield

You need to check a few things before you enter the Battlefield, as once you enter the event you can no longer access the “inside of your tower”. This means changing the gate crew or swapping troop factions is prohibited.

Checklist

All troops healed from Hospital - Troops in ER is fine; no troops will be going there during the event.

Check heroes and formations. Best crews for F1 and F2.

Check your Troop split - Everything to F1 faction, then swap in 1.5x troops for F2. (Reservist Camp) This tactic maximises your defence but still gives F2 capable of counters.

Team & Target Planning

However, organising teams and working out objectives used to be a real pain – but now we have the Z-war BGB planner to help make this a simple process.

• Allocating players to Team A or B
• Allocate Starters and Reserves
• Plan Objective Teams
• Reports – to Discord and In-game email

The Black Gold Battlefield Planner tools work with your existing roster. Just duplicate the in-game team list, get the 30 allocated first, then flip out the reserves and start allocating to the event objectives. You can pick how many refineries to go after, 1-6, then allocate players to hold (if you wish) or move out to seize the tactical advantages from the hospitals and military bases. These are always good battles until the event decider triggers. If you don’t know yet, the golden balls – or, more correctly, the Rare Earth Alloy objectives – score massive points and usually decide the event outcome. This is why it’s vital to get your teams organised and deployed. Planning and Communication!

You will need to add your roster of players to utilise the BGB planner tool (and most other things on the Z_War app!

If this is your first time using the Z-War tool, be sure to start by importing your team roster; either use AI to scan your screenshots or you can use the Z-War OCR tool. There’s a full guide here - Import Alliance Player Roster ​

Strategy Objectives

• Refineries & Oil Barrels (initial capture 4000 + 1200/m)
• Hospitals (Healing buff: +50% Healing Speed) (initial capture: 10,000 + 3000/m)
• Military Bases (Attack buff: +20% dmg) (initial capture: 10,000 + 3000/m)
• Rare Earth Factory (60,000/100,00)

Your strategy needs to focus on initial capture for refineries and maybe some low-power players holding those close to your home base. You can see that taking and holding at least 1 military base and 1 hospital will both earn more points but also give you key battle advantages.

The hospital & military base give 2.5x more capture and per-minute points than refineries. This advantage should be exploited to maximise your points haul. Start with 6 teams to fight for the refineries and then fall back to 3 or 4 teams. One each for the hospital and military base, possibly one or two more to go fight for the others, depending on how strong your team is vs your opponent’s.

Any battlefield plan needs to be flexible, and your players need to be adaptive to the changing situation. This is why it’s important to have the QRF – Quick Reaction Force, free-roaming players (your strongest) – to jump to trouble spots.

Tactics

It’s best to plan how to defend any objective. Unless you’re a whale, all your power is in your F1; if you’re holding an objective building with it, your base is exposed. You should appoint holders and defenders. Defenders just put their F3 or F4 into Rein the building, and F1 & F2 to fight attackers or Rein the “holder bases”. It may need everyone to fight strong attackers or call in your QRF guys. If you know how to fight, this isn’t news to you, but many players need guidance and help to understand these tactics.

Substitutes

If you can get this organised, it’s a useful option. I emphasise getting it organised, as even seasoned vets get this wrong. The key here is to have those who haven’t got the speedups or resources to heal on the fly go all in and then exit. Why? You can exit the battlefield, which auto-heals your troops for free. Caveat: you cannot re-enter the field of play for 10m. So as I mentioned, if you can organise this and your subs show up… you can blitz the opponent early on and help deplete their troops.

Let’s be honest, this level of coordination is hard to achieve without a couple of players not on the field, but watching the game to help post into AC; it usually ends up a flat-out brawl!

Adding Your Roster

Just to remind you, the Z-War tool needs a player roster to set out your crews and objectives. This link uses OCR to read your screenshots (15); just be aware it’s not perfect, but it will give you a great starting point. You can also use a Google Sheets import directly if you have one. Go into the Z-War app, go to Roster - Sheets - Paste your link.

​OCR Screenshot Reader​

Black Gold Battlefield Team Planner

There are various ways to access, create and edit the teams and objectives in the BGB event planner, but when we first enter the option, we get the interactive map view – but first, allocate the players into their A and B teams. This is quick to do from your existing roster – not added yet? Best, head over to the getting started post…

Choose Players and add to their respective teams, theres also an mini objective dash so you can scan through for players you’ve missed or might want to reallocate.

This option allows you to do both teams at once; just add the players from the in-game register (if only we had an API to link into!). We will allocate who’s a reserve and starter later. Just get the 30 players added to each team. Then click Team A, and obviously later duplicate this process for Team B.

You should note that you will need to make sure that you have a max of 20 starters; the counter goes red until you allocate sufficient reserves. Do this for both teams.

Black Gold Battlefield Objectives

Now that you have your teams allocated, this is where your strategy comes into play: allocating your players to objectives, initially the refineries, to get those first capture rewards with a quick start. Spread your power players and supporting players evenly to optimise their collective strength.

The key here is to plan to capture and hold at least one hospital and one military base for their event buffs (faster, cheaper healing and attack buffs). Moving away from the refineries ensures you can take and hold one of each, then have a plan to deny the enemy theirs – they will be planning to do the same to you!

The Crews option brings up the Objectives list and the crews you are going to allocate. This helps you spread the power players and support players across key strategic objectives to both get those first captures, hold bonuses, and obviously, get the healing and battle buffs.

Objective Timeline

• Refineries & Oil Collection
• Hospitals & Military Bases
• Golden Ball - Rare Earth

Communication

Get this out to your teams; communication is essential. There are built-in reporting options, and there will be a Discord bot to post directly into your Discord server. (Go to the Discord apps shop and search Dark War.) For now, it’s a copy-and-paste option;

​Web View of Team Listing for Non-Discord Users​

This tool makes planning a BGB event for both teams about a 20-30 minute project from start to finish. Even less with a bit of practice or if the bulk of the players remain the same. Don’t forget to grab the Disord Bots for events, especially the Black Gold Battlefield bot.

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Summary

Create your crews from the selected players.

Make sure participants know the pre-event checklist to ensure they enter with the strongest setup.

Grab as many Refineries at the start for an early points haul.

Plan to take, hold and defend the Military Bases and Hospitals; they give you buffs, more points and deny the opponent - IF - you can hold them.

Select the strongest players to go after the Rare Earth Alloy and, before that, help out where needed. (Free Roam/ QRF). It’s important to have a secondary wave of players for this to help defend towers, attack trucks, etc. You don’t have to get the “Golden Ball” home, just stop the other team from doing so. It obviously denies them the points haul. You CAN win without it, IF you get the other tactics right.

Communicate the plan and timeline to your teams via in-game email, Discord, and web page (if you use the Z-war app).

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And finally… accept that nothing ever goes to plan, “stercus accidit”, as the Romans used to say. You can’t win them all, but you can have fun and be a pain in the … for your opponents.

Enjoy!