Tweet Tips and Tricks Thread 3 replies Wutangrza a Posts: 5 Admins :d



Battle Mechanics While Attacking



The single most important thing I think our members need to understand is how battles work in this game; it is a war game after all. In this game, defenders have a tremendous advantage over attackers because attackers can only send a comparably tiny number of troops compared to defenders who can guard with millions. It's entirely possible for a F2P player to become invincible to marches, even vs players at Gutter's power level. Look at Kiki, she captured Gank's hero, and Gank is one of the strongest players on our realm, and she's spent very very little. I'm going to explain how she did that.



The first thing to know is that in this game, lowest defense stat dies first.

There are a few exceptions which I'll talk about later, but for the most part just know that T1 defense dies before T2 defense which dies before T3 defense, and so on. If two troops share the same defense level, they will die along side of each other, so for example if you send a march with T3 soldiers and airships, you can expect to lose some of your airships since both possess a T3 defense stat. If on the other hand you sent a march of T2 soldiers along with the airships, all of your T2 attackers would have to die before a single airship fell. The only exceptions to this rule are walls and guardians. Guardians will always die first on defense, and walls count as having a defense level minus one. So here's the order things die in on defense:



Guardians -> level 1 walls -> level 2 walls and T1 defense stat troops -> level 3 walls and T2 defense stat troops -> etc.



This means that if someone has T3 walls, you will not be able to kill a single one of them until all of their T1 troops are dead, and as such sending siege would be useless unless they had very few T1 defenders. If you are someone with no guardian mercs, you can take huge advantage of these mechanics by acquiring an ambush boost from the flan monsters. These allow you to increase your max wall capacity tremendously, and the extra capacity isn't removed when the boost expires, so what you would do is build T3 walls, and a huge T1 meatshield in front of them. Since T1 troops die before T3 walls, your 35k+ T3 walls which have advantages vs all troop types will never die. Note, if you go for this strategy though, you will still burn since you'll lose a lot of T1, but if you throw a large enough army behind the T3 walls and T1 meat shield, you will become prohibitively expensive to attack, even for players with mercs. If you have 300k T1, 35k T3 walls, and over 1m T2/T3 troops, you will kill mercs and only lose T1.



As an attacker, you can take advantage of these mechanics to protect your more powerful troops from dying.



Let's look at an example of this













In this example, I was able to single solo march burn someone with nearly 350k troops and traps, many being T3 with embassy defender buffs, and I lost zero samurai doing it. How was this possible? Well, first off, I had a Halloween boost that increased my march capacity by 17k. This is one of the strongest boosts possible on offense because it cuts down on the defender army size advantage tremendously. Had I only sent 34k troops, I probably would have lost vs 350k troops, even though my troops on average are much much stronger, but by sending the proper attack I was able to burn this player, free an ally's hero, and claim an 80m gold bounty, all while not losing a single samurai.



It's difficult to provide an exact formula for attack composition, but let's at least talk about why I sent what I did. First off, I knew this player didn't have T3 walls, which meant that their T2 walls were able to be destroyed no matter what kind of troops they had (since they didn't have guardians). Knowing this, I knew that I wanted to send some siege because killing walls when you can is tremendously important since they have an advantage vs all troop types. I estimated that around 7-8k T3 siege when accompanied by a sufficiently strong army would be enough. After that, I knew I wanted to send as many samurai as possible, but I wanted to try my hardest to lose zero of them. I would much rather send two marches than lose a single samurai, so I estimated about a 1:6 ratio on T3:samurai given my opponent's troops. The goal here was to throw as much troop power as possible while losing no samurai, and as you can see it worked out quite well.



Battle Mechanics While Defending



This section will be much shorter than the above section. All I have to say here is build as large an army as possible. Your biggest strength while on defense is that you can have 5m troops and the attacker is only ever going to be able to send 30-50k or so on a march. Even T1 and T2 can be formidable on defense in large enough numbers (though if you stack only T1 you will burn when attacked, but at least you won't lose your hero and the attacker will take massive losses). I would strongly, strongly, recommend building at least 500k-1m troops as quickly as possible as a higher priority than buildings, no matter what your cit level is.



As an example, Kiki is pretty much free to play. She has zero mercs, but what she does have is several million troops and ambush boosted walls. She, as a free to play player, was able to capture Gank's hero on defense when gank set a massively expensive army full of mercs--and you can do this too. Just build a huge army. T3 is preferable, but even T2 is useful for the security of your empire. Become strong, then build up buildings later with peace of mind that no one can take from you.



And if you still don't believe me, check this out (sorry again, but I really wanted to prove my point :lol: )













Seriously. Just build a huge army. If you don't have guardians you probably will burn, but you'll still easily win the battle of economy if you have a large army, even if they're low quality.



Gearing



In this game, different sets provide different strengths. There are sets specializing in research, in attack, in defense, and in monster farming. I'm going to ignore new sets since they're pretty damn hard to get mats for, and just focus on arbiter and below.



Monster Farming Gear

Streak per attack is the best stat here. Get as much of it as you can and fill in the remaining pieces with whatever you can craft. A high level beastmaster's claws and high level hunter's chest will be amazing here. In my monster farm set when I crit, I one shot level 1 monsters with no boosts. It's really worth it to make a decent monster farm set. Lastly, there are actually monster gems that provide monster march speed and crit, so make sure to socket these into your monster gear.



Fighting Gear

So common knowledge is that sentinel is best on defense and arbiter is best on offense, but it's a bit more complicated than that. On defense, sure, pure sentinel is pretty good, but on offense, pure arbiter probably isn't the best setup surprisingly, this is because who wins and loses a battle (in terms of burning or not) is based on comparing the troops lost on each side. If you send full arbiter, your troops will do a ton of damage, but they will be flimsy. Additionally, when crafting gear, some mats are significantly harder to get than others, so it's way easier to craft 3x blue arbiter and 3x blue sentinel than it is to craft 6x blue of a single type, since things like meteories/chrome bits/etc are hard to come by. So what do I recommend?



I recommend arbiter weapon, arbiter helm, arbiter chest, and arbiter boots, for accessories, I recommend 2x sentinel aegis and 1x arbiter call or really any other piece you can afford to craft (even 3x sentinel aegis is great, the item is super powerful). If you're low on mats, just remember that quality matters a ton. I used my legendary Hunter's chest for a while for attacking just because it was better than my T2 arbiter chest.



For gems, I tend to prefer armor/hp and then an even balance of troop attack gems.



Economical Gear

A blue inquisitor's cowl will save you a lot of money. Make one before going deep into hero and econ research. Other than that, I would focus on making a quality combat set and a quality monster farm set before I bothered with chief inquis, but chief inquis would be my third set crafted.



Crafting

I hear lots of people say things like, "I'm done crafting till I can do golden." And then I inspect them and they have grey items on. Let me explain why this is a huge mistake.



A golden item requires full T6 mats. A single T6 mat is equivalent to 1024 T1 items.



A blue item requires full T4 mats. A single T4 mat is equivalent to 64 T1 mats.



If you stop to make blue items before golden, you're going to have tremendously stronger gear than if you sat at grey items, and you really aren't delaying your gold gear by all that much. Just don't waste a T6 mat on a non golden item (at least not the rare pieces like chrome bits/meteorites/etc, things like carbon steel and bronze are easy to get T6 of). If you didn't know, you can choose which items you want to use in each craft (you don't have to use the highest tier item you possess if you don't want to. After clicking craft, just click on the items it shows you and you can replace any component with a different tiered item of the same component).



Making a blue item is only "wasting" 6.25% of the total items required to craft a golden item and the power gained from all blue versus all grey is huge. Make at least blue gear before you worry about "full golden sentinel" or some other distant pipe dream. It's worth it.



I want to spend money, what should I get?



God, I wish someone would have provided me with this info before I started buying packs... So first off, rss production is 100% useless. It's garbage, never spend on it. From an ability to project force perspective and a securing your empire perspective, merc pit is far far far better than any other building.



At T2 merc pit you can build frost guardians. If you have 10-40k frost guardians and 1m troops behind it with walls you will capture the hero of nearly anyone who attacks you. If you have 40k frost and 2-3m troops behind it, you will capture gutter's hero if he attacks you. It's that good.



You also unluck samurai warrior at T2 merc pit (I think), which are T5 warrior equivalent that gain 900% attack, 800% HP, and 1600% armor when they fight anyone with a higher cit than you, attack or defense. Like, holy shit, these things are so amazing. If you have one march of samurai available you will crush anyone under 1m power, just remember to cover them with weaker troops so you don't ever lose them. They'll be fine on defense since they will die last.



T3 merc pit unlocks samurai mage and T4 unlocks samurai cavalry along with airships, currently the only reason to unlock T5 pit is for mech, which is strong as hell, but again, if you are asking for the single best purchase? Unlock T2 monster pit, build some frost, build some samurai, you'll dominate.



Once you've unlocked at least T4 merc pit, I would recommend going for T1 monster farm. The chocobo gives 88% troop attack with hero which is pretty damn good. Do not bother with mythic forge or oracle's temple. They're good, but if you're reading this guide they're not really useful for you yet.



If I could do it all over, this would be my purchase preference in order:



T2 merc pit Hero level 50 (you can get this without paying though, it'll just take a while--it gives +5000 march size, which is as good as 5 cit levels) T3 merc pit T4 merc pit T1 monster farm Permanent reduction on every rss type for building and building time reduction Research reduction costs Anything else

Something to note, pack value is based off the age of the realm as well as the level of your citadel, so I wouldn't completely ignore research, but just know that if you are going to buy packs, building your cit up first will raise their value. Finally, be on the lookout for flash deals. These are packs which offer like 4.5x the amount of gold/rss/speedups as normal packs. They only last 15 minutes, and I'd still go for a merc pit of at least level 2 before I bought one, but if you are just looking for gold/rss/speedups, hold off until you see one of these.



In general though, I feel like people are way too focused on "progress" and raising their cit level. Higher cit is good, but if you are cit 20 with 1m+ troops you are doing great. If you're cit 29 with 100k troops you are free loot. BUILD AN ARMY FIRST!



TL;DR:



Build a huge army. If you don't have at least 1m troops, stop whatever you're doing and use the next few events worth of gold to build a reasonably sized army. This will protect your hero and make people not want to even bother attacking you in the first place since there are so many easy targets around. When attacking, understand combat mechanics so you can win battles efficiently. Be smart enough to recognize empires you won't win vs, and don't be afraid to ask for help with attack compositions. For combat gear, arbiter weapon + left side arbiter + 2x sentinel aegis + 1x anything (arbiter's call is decent, hell even 3x sentinel aegis is strong--having a huge armor multiplier will win you battles because your troops won't die) is a great start. Make at least blue gear before you worry about golden. You're only "wasting" 6.25% of the total mats required to make a golden item when you stop to make blue first. It's absolutely worth it to get at least full blue before you worry about golden gear. For monster farm gear, build a legendary hunter chest and as high quality a beastmaster weapon as you can. Streak per attack is super super super powerful. If you're going to pay money, get a level 2 merc pit first. Do your adventurer research. It's so cheap and easy and provides gigantic boosts. Take advantage of the ambush boost + T3 walls + T1 troops trick. It's one of the largest boosts to survivability a weaker player can use. With little effort you can make yourself too expensive to justify marching on.

Well, I hope you found this compilation of info useful. Feel free to add your own tips and tricks to this thread. Let's learn and get stronger as a guild together! I wanted to make a long thread that's almost like a wiki which will contain most of the knowledge I've picked up here and there over the course of playing this game. I'm a firm believer that while this game is absolutely pay to win, knowledge of the game and its mechanics will still offer huge competitive edges to our players. Free to play players will have the knowledge on how to fight off and defend more powerful players, and our power players will have the knowledge to make economical trades when attacking. As an example, I've yet to lose a single samurai. Ever. A batch of 10k samurai takes USD and 70 days of training time, so it's a pretty huge deal to not waste them. I've also never lost a defense, but that's mostly because I wasn't too proud to bubble when I was first getting startedThe single most important thing I think our members need to understand is how battles work in this game; it is a war game after all. In this game, defenders have a tremendous advantage over attackers because attackers can only send a comparably tiny number of troops compared to defenders who can guard with millions. It's entirely possible for a F2P player to become invincible to marches, even vs players at Gutter's power level. Look at Kiki, she captured Gank's hero, and Gank is one of the strongest players on our realm, and she's spent very very little. I'm going to explain how she did that.There are a few exceptions which I'll talk about later, but for the most part just know that T1 defense dies before T2 defense which dies before T3 defense, and so on. If two troops share the same defense level, they will die along side of each other, so for example if you send a march with T3 soldiers and airships, you can expect to lose some of your airships since both possess a T3 defense stat. If on the other hand you sent a march of T2 soldiers along with the airships, all of your T2 attackers would have to die before a single airship fell. The only exceptions to this rule are walls and guardians. Guardians will always die first on defense, and walls count as having a defense level minus one. So here's the order things die in on defense:Guardians -> level 1 walls -> level 2 walls and T1 defense stat troops -> level 3 walls and T2 defense stat troops -> etc.This means that if someone has T3 walls, you will not be able to kill a single one of them until all of their T1 troops are dead, and as such sending siege would be useless unless they had very few T1 defenders. If you are someone with no guardian mercs, you can take huge advantage of these mechanics by acquiring an ambush boost from the flan monsters. These allow you to increase your max wall capacity tremendously, and the extra capacity isn't removed when the boost expires, so what you would do is build T3 walls, and a huge T1 meatshield in front of them. Since T1 troops die before T3 walls, your 35k+ T3 walls which have advantages vs all troop types will never die. Note, if you go for this strategy though, you will still burn since you'll lose a lot of T1, but if you throw a large enough army behind the T3 walls and T1 meat shield, you will become prohibitively expensive to attack, even for players with mercs. If you have 300k T1, 35k T3 walls, and over 1m T2/T3 troops, you will kill mercs and only lose T1.As an attacker, you can take advantage of these mechanics to protect your more powerful troops from dying.In this example, I was able to single solo march burn someone with nearly 350k troops and traps, many being T3 with embassy defender buffs, and I lost zero samurai doing it. How was this possible? Well, first off, I had a Halloween boost that increased my march capacity by 17k. This is one of the strongest boosts possible on offense because it cuts down on the defender army size advantage tremendously. Had I only sent 34k troops, I probably would have lost vs 350k troops, even though my troops on average are much much stronger, but by sending the proper attack I was able to burn this player, free an ally's hero, and claim an 80m gold bounty, all while not losing a single samurai.It's difficult to provide an exact formula for attack composition, but let's at least talk about why I sent what I did. First off, I knew this player didn't have T3 walls, which meant that their T2 walls were able to be destroyed no matter what kind of troops they had (since they didn't have guardians). Knowing this, I knew that I wanted to send some siege because killing walls when you can is tremendously important since they have an advantage vs all troop types. I estimated that around 7-8k T3 siege when accompanied by a sufficiently strong army would be enough. After that, I knew I wanted to send as many samurai as possible, but I wanted to try my hardest to lose zero of them. I would much rather send two marches than lose a single samurai, so I estimated about a 1:6 ratio on T3:samurai given my opponent's troops. The goal here was to throw as much troop power as possible while losing no samurai, and as you can see it worked out quite well.This section will be much shorter than the above section. All I have to say here is build as large an army as possible. Your biggest strength while on defense is that you can have 5m troops and the attacker is only ever going to be able to send 30-50k or so on a march. Even T1 and T2 can be formidable on defense in large enough numbers (though if you stack only T1 you will burn when attacked, but at least you won't lose your hero and the attacker will take massive losses).As an example, Kiki is pretty much free to play. She has zero mercs, but what she does have is several million troops and ambush boosted walls. She, as a free to play player, was able to capture Gank's hero on defense when gank set a massively expensive army full of mercs--and you can do this too. Just build a huge army. T3 is preferable, but even T2 is useful for the security of your empire. Become strong, then build up buildings later with peace of mind that no one can take from you.And if you still don't believe me, check this out (sorry again, but I really wanted to prove my pointSeriously. Just build a huge army. If you don't have guardians you probably will burn, but you'll still easily win the battle of economy if you have a large army, even if they're low quality.In this game, different sets provide different strengths. There are sets specializing in research, in attack, in defense, and in monster farming. I'm going to ignore new sets since they're pretty damn hard to get mats for, and just focus on arbiter and below.Streak per attack is the best stat here. Get as much of it as you can and fill in the remaining pieces with whatever you can craft. A high level beastmaster's claws and high level hunter's chest will be amazing here. In my monster farm set when I crit, I one shot level 1 monsters with no boosts. It's really worth it to make a decent monster farm set. Lastly, there are actually monster gems that provide monster march speed and crit, so make sure to socket these into your monster gear.So common knowledge is that sentinel is best on defense and arbiter is best on offense, but it's a bit more complicated than that. On defense, sure, pure sentinel is pretty good, but on offense, pure arbiter probably isn't the best setup surprisingly, this is because who wins and loses a battle (in terms of burning or not) is based on comparing the troops lost on each side. If you send full arbiter, your troops will do a ton of damage, but they will be flimsy. Additionally, when crafting gear, some mats are significantly harder to get than others, so it's way easier to craft 3x blue arbiter and 3x blue sentinel than it is to craft 6x blue of a single type, since things like meteories/chrome bits/etc are hard to come by. So what do I recommend?I recommend arbiter weapon, arbiter helm, arbiter chest, and arbiter boots, for accessories, I recommend 2x sentinel aegis and 1x arbiter call or really any other piece you can afford to craft (even 3x sentinel aegis is great, the item is super powerful). If you're low on mats, just remember that quality matters a ton. I used my legendary Hunter's chest for a while for attacking just because it was better than my T2 arbiter chest.For gems, I tend to prefer armor/hp and then an even balance of troop attack gems.A blue inquisitor's cowl will save you a lot of money. Make one before going deep into hero and econ research. Other than that, I would focus on making a quality combat set and a quality monster farm set before I bothered with chief inquis, but chief inquis would be my third set crafted.I hear lots of people say things like, "I'm done crafting till I can do golden." And then I inspect them and they have grey items on. Let me explain why this is a huge mistake.A golden item requires full T6 mats. A single T6 mat is equivalent to 1024 T1 items.A blue item requires full T4 mats. A single T4 mat is equivalent to 64 T1 mats.If you stop to make blue items before golden, you're going to have tremendously stronger gear than if you sat at grey items, and you really aren't delaying your gold gear by all that much. Just don't waste a T6 mat on a non golden item (at least not the rare pieces like chrome bits/meteorites/etc, things like carbon steel and bronze are easy to get T6 of). If you didn't know, you can choose which items you want to use in each craft (you don't have to use the highest tier item you possess if you don't want to. After clicking craft, just click on the items it shows you and you can replace any component with a different tiered item of the same component).Making a blue item is only "wasting" 6.25% of the total items required to craft a golden item and the power gained from all blue versus all grey is huge. Make at least blue gear before you worry about "full golden sentinel" or some other distant pipe dream. It's worth it.God, I wish someone would have provided me with this info before I started buying packs... So first off, rss production is 100% useless. It's garbage, never spend on it. From an ability to project force perspective and a securing your empire perspective, merc pit is far far far better than any other building.At T2 merc pit you can build frost guardians. If you have 10-40k frost guardians and 1m troops behind it with walls you will capture the hero of nearly anyone who attacks you. If you have 40k frost and 2-3m troops behind it, you will capture gutter's hero if he attacks you. It's that good.You also unluck samurai warrior at T2 merc pit (I think),Like, holy shit, these things are so amazing. If you have one march of samurai available you will crush anyone under 1m power, just remember to cover them with weaker troops so you don't ever lose them. They'll be fine on defense since they will die last.T3 merc pit unlocks samurai mage and T4 unlocks samurai cavalry along with airships, currently the only reason to unlock T5 pit is for mech, which is strong as hell, but again, if you are asking for the single best purchase? Unlock T2 monster pit, build some frost, build some samurai, you'll dominate.Once you've unlocked at least T4 merc pit, I would recommend going for T1 monster farm. The chocobo gives 88% troop attack with hero which is pretty damn good.Something to note, pack value is based off the age of the realm as well as the level of your citadel, so I wouldn't completely ignore research, but just know that if you are going to buy packs, building your cit up first will raise their value. Finally, be on the lookout for flash deals. These are packs which offer like 4.5x the amount of gold/rss/speedups as normal packs. They only last 15 minutes, and I'd still go for a merc pit of at least level 2 before I bought one, but if you are just looking for gold/rss/speedups, hold off until you see one of these.In general though, I feel like people are way too focused on "progress" and raising their cit level. Higher cit is good, but if you are cit 20 with 1m+ troops you are doing great. If you're cit 29 with 100k troops you are free loot. BUILD AN ARMY FIRST!Well, I hope you found this compilation of info useful. Feel free to add your own tips and tricks to this thread. Let's learn and get stronger as a guild together! Posted Jan 29, 18 · OP · Last edited Feb 2, 18 SirBenson Posts: 1 Untagged users How fuffin long did it take you to write this bro?!? Nice one. 👍 Posted Jan 29, 18 Wutangrza a Posts: 5 Admins Wanna challenge me in typeracer sometime? I'm terribly slow on my phone but like 125 wpm or so on a keyboard! Posted Jan 29, 18 · OP CharlesDar Posts: 1 Untagged users Hello,



This post was very helpful, especially the war mechanics part. However, you stated that one should have 500k to 1 million troops no matter what citadel you are. I am citadel 11 and I have an upkeep at about 28k (clearly not enough to support 1 million troops). How would you suggest I be able to maintain a million troops while still making enough food to upgrade buildings?



Thanks Posted Feb 13, 18 Quick navigation ------------------------------------------------------------------ Community General Discussion Gaming ------------------------------------------------------------------ Website News & Announcements Site Suggestions