Expanding to my previous response to Eagler re differences between morning and evening:
Today's numbers at 8:45am CST are a slight anomaly with both knits and rooks having a few more players than usual (with more tower sitters, too.)
You will always see me point out that morning locusts swarm one side at a time, all-in. The bish are currently swarming rooks who only have 3 of those 11 in flight (tower sitters, I'm one at times) dealing with guess how many of those 17 bish in flight? These odds are actually par for the course. It's futile to defend and even just trying to get an offense is difficult when bish can and will resupply a base before your bombers even land. They even swarm bases so fast (bases were almost even when I logged in at 7am) that it's difficult to hit their launch bases (vh/ords/troops) to try and slow them down.
These players are not doing anything the game doesn't allow, but morning dynamics are no longer influenced by game designed limitations/counters.
This screenshot will show how the morning dynamics basically encourage, to find any sense of fun, knits and rooks going at each other while the swarm does it's thing.
As the day progresses, numbers will start to balance and fluctuate for the evening as knit/rook players log and and start helping take back the bases the morning bish took. As knit/rooks take their bases back, they keep going because, hey they need 20% of bish bases to win. Same for rooks as they take bish bases. Sometimes a map gets reset in prime time, usually by knits or rooks. In the past, failure to reset in prime time would often set up the overnight knits to take the relatively fewer bases left on each side. (Ask 99Capera about Tropic Thunder.
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This used to leave a clean/new-ish map in the mornings, which brings us to the whole point of this thread: morning play sets the tone for the day.
And morning play is having a spillover effect. (see the text buffer on the screenshot.)
This is also why abusing the .rpt fucntion is so BS - when numbers are low it prevents me from being able to coordinate with those few rooks (or knits if I play with them.)
(EDIT) Here's a screenshot 30 mins after the one above. Knits took that Rook base in the screenshot. Strategic choice (look at base %) or tactical (grab fun where you can)?
You're kind of speaking to an entirely different situation. I suggest you pop in around 8-9AM cst and see what it's like. Morning play is what creates your difficulty in finding the kind of fights you look for since knits and rooks are busy re-taking ("ganging") back the bases the morning bish locust horde takes with overwhelming numbers in times of low numbers where there is simply not enough to counter this which results in the appearance of knits and rooks picking on each during these morning times as they can't/don't want to simply feed and validate the horde.
I generally ignore fighting vs bish in mornings - they're no fun at all. These are the manbabies who abuse the .rpt as I call them out on it.