Focused Force

[Yogibear]

If there are no mirror matches and your preferred time of day differs from that of your opponent, a good player will give you at most two turns in a day cycle to attack him (i can further elaborate on that if you wish). That is not much time for killing units on good terrain and in formations, maybe even rotating.

Could you elaborate? I think I understand the idea of not letting the enemy attack you when you are weak, but I'd love some explanation as to how exactly one achieves that goal reliably.

Alright, here we go.

There are a couple of assumptions, i meant one already: Your preferred time of day differs from that of your opponent.
Another one is, that you play on a standard map where there is some space between "your" villages and that of your opponent (like on Blitz for example).

So lets say you are loyalists and you fight northerners. During the day you attack. At the same time, you move the fight to your opponents villages, occupying quite some terrain. Now dusk is coming. You retreat, just so that your opponent can not reach you (or only one unit from bad terrain which wouldn't gain him anything). So dusk essentially carries the fight from your opponents terrain to yours, without much fighting actually happening.

At first night you retreat further. However now there is a limit because by any chance you wouldn't want to give up your villages and the enemy is about to reach them. So you retreat just a little bit and try to build up a good defensive front line. This is the turn, the first real attack takes place. This and the next turn are the ones you need to survive. Healing (from villages), better terrain and the possibility to rotate in fresh units for wounded ones should make it possible.

Then dawn is approaching. You are about equal to northerners now (considering the strength of the factions). However, if northerners continue to attack now it would automatically mean that they will have to fight at day the next turn (from bad terrain mostly). A good player would never want that to happen because he knows he will have to pay very very badly if that happens.
It is actually one of those pitfalls that happen to a lot of people (including me, sometimes): To just stay that one turn and kill that one or two wounded units. And almost always you will learn that you stayed one turn too long .

So in the end, each faction has two turns of defending, one turn of pushing / retreating (without much fighting going on) and two turns of attacking. This holds true for loyal / chaotic matchups as well as neutral / chaotic and neutral / loyal, even if the differences are not so big here.