For many battles in the regular game of haven against haven the attacker has the advantage of knowing the defenders forces. One would thing that it is best to just overwhelm the defender by sending the kitchen sink - nothing could be further from the truth. If you have to lose troops in a battle the minimum total loss occurs when you send just enough to win and no more.

Consider a defense force of 200K you want to defeat - obviously the raiding techniques using the immortal method won't work because you don't have enough kinds of different troops. Thus you must send in large quantities of attackers. Using the win/loss calculator we can estimate % losses for various size attack forces against this defender. Here are the results:

Note that the lost offense force is minimum when the attack just barely wins. Both attacker and defender lose half of their forces or 100,000 of troop forces When the attacker sends more his percentage loss goes down but the total amount of troop losses GOES UP. At double the defenders force the attacker losses 120,000 forces instead of only 100,000 at the minimum. By the way the defender looses exactly the same total force as the attacker even though his percentage goes up. Taking the attacker force to infinity results in the defender losing all of the 200,000 defenders and the attacker losing 200,000 of attack force. So the next time you feel bad because the attacker sent everything at you remember he lost the same total amount as you.

PS: I know that there are many small battles where this doesn't hold true, my defenders have been completely wiped out and the attacker hardly lost anything. This has to do with the you can't lose half of a troop issue and the attacker forces being in the immortal zone Once your defensive forces are in the 50K plus range the half a troop/immortal thing usually stops being an issue.