Dux's SCARY PARRY

[Several years back I wrote up this style spotlight for the community in the BP Gazette which Acheron so generously edited and wrote every week for nearly a year. I felt I outta update it so, I will have updates in brackets throughout the old article]

STYLE SPOTLIGHT– A PARRYIN’ WE WILL GO – By Dux Mortalitas, edited by The Gazetteer
For a long time I was under the impression that Parry was a useless style. Although I knew that Stalker has used it somewhat successfully against many managers it just never seemed to work very well against my warriors. As a result I dismissed it entirely as a style.

Recently, it occurred to me how I might be able to optimize warriors around the Parry style so that they could keep pace with my usual expectations of 60+% win/loss.

The main problem I have found with Parry as a style is that it reduces the damage that your warriors inflict. On the flip-side, though, it also reduces the damage that you receive.

Based on these precepts I took a large number of my younger warriors and configured them up around my new Parry concepts:

Idea 1 - Run parry with Pole-arms and train Charge skill – The idea here is to increase damage dealing to offset the deficiencies of Parry as a strategy.
Result: Boriel, 31-14-2 with Parry.
Idea 2 - Run powerful, heavily armored warriors that can rely on their armor and the many resulting partial deflections from Parry to greatly reduce damage received while still being able to lay in a heavy hit due to weapon choice and high strength.
Result: Pitt Lord A, 27-5-0 with Parry.
Idea 3 - Huge warriors that can just absorb a ton of punishment even with moderate to light armor and who can definitely lay down a big hit through sheer brutal size and strength.
Result: Pitt Lord B, 16-7-2 with a combination of Parry and CS

Other findings:
Wielding a shield in a warrior’s off-hand greatly assists the parry style (no surprise there) and having a weapon that does some real damage is vital. However, if you have an intelligent warrior like Boriel who can train parry and dodge up pretty quickly you can do very well without the shield.

Both Parry and Dodge skills are highly utilized with the Parry style and Feint skills assist a great deal as you climb the ranks.

Parry doesn't fair nearly as well in the advanced ranks as it does below 100 fights in general [I have since proven this statement false, as many of my successful advanced warriors utilize PARRY to great effect]. The main reason for this, in my experience, is that the offensive styles that get heavy use among the advanced set also tend to thrash Parry [Actually parry tends to be pretty neutral to most of the top styles, so you can milk it to beat them if you have a warrior very well suited for PARRY].

The real disadvantage to Parry is that setting a warrior up and training him to effectively run Parry can weaken the warrior’s ability to run any offensive styles. Once your warrior goes down the Parry route, he loses some amount of flexibility to use other styles well. That said, a warrior that is trained well for Parry might use some other defensive styles very well. Unfortunately, those other defensive styles often lose to the same offensive styles that Parry is deficient against [I have found this not necessarily true with well tailored parriers].

Overall:
My record with Parry has been running slightly above my 63% average. Additionally, my Parry warriors have taken far fewer perms and I have yet to suffer a death to one. That said, my warriors have claimed several kills using Parry.

All in all I think Parry is a great style to use below 100 fights. Parry warriors win, stay alive and avoid permanent injuries. My experience above 100 Fights suggests that Parry will continue to keep warriors alive and protect them from crippling injuries, but they will tend to lose a lot more. So the question for 100+ warriors is do you fight to live or do you fight to win [Refining my Parriers has shown that 100 Parriers can be very successful]...

It should also be noted that by no means does a warrior need to “major” in Parry. It can be used to great effect as a change-up style, to take advantage of key situations in a fight, such as when a warrior is near death or when his opponent is likely to be using styles that are weak against Parry.

Conclusion:
I have been using Parry very intensively for the better part of this last year (just shy of 50 turns now), and since that time I have seen some other managers picking up on the idea. I hope everyone gives it a fair shake, so that we can see more variety in our fights and simultaneously up the level of play in our fair city-state.

The publication of this article basically concludes my mass experiment with Parry. I will of course keep are few warriors running it for further refinement and longer-term experimentation, while some will be forced to use Parry until I can train them towards options. In time, expect to see new toys employed in my fights!

Good luck to you all in your experimentation!