[PLAYER GUIDE] Troops, recruitment, and battles (Updated on 2022/9/22)

This guide is based on the author's personal experience and is only relevant to the current game’s content.

Military focus and research:

Apart from the researches who boost your battle power and help you unlock the higher tiers of soldiers, there are a lot of researches that won't really help you much (either because they are not really useful in battle or designed for endgame players).

1. The “not so useful in battle” researches:

The Production tree will not affect your battle stats in any way, so you can ignore it for now (unless you are at a stage where you have to push a specific research to advance in the military tree). 

The City Defense and Advanced Defense trees boost your fortifications, but at the moment those are really ineffective. So it is better to focus on other trees. 

2.The “endgame” researches:

The Iron Defense, Great City Military and Strangely-Garbed Army trees are all late game oriented and if you will not tank rallies or contest great cities as a rally leader you will not need the first two trees. Reason for this is that the Iron Defense Tree is designed for players who want to be able to defend rallies by other players on their cities. On top of that the researches need an extra ressource apart from the standard ressources which makes it hard to advance in this tree as a new player.

The Great City Military (as the name suggests) is designed to contest great cities during castle sieges. While this can be useful later on in the game you should start working on unlocking higher tiers of troops and more stats before going for this.

The Strangely-Garbed Army tree gives you access to Tier 5 troops. It once again needs an extra ressource (similar to Iron Defense) to perform the researches. This special ressource is really hard to get and of course it does not make sense to go for T5 before going for the other 4 tiers first.

There are researches which do help you in battle but do not need to get rushed immediately. These are Formations, Commandership and Advanced Military.

The Formations tree is the tree with the highest priority among the three. It gives you the ability to change the formations your troops use when you attack or defend. This is really important, but if you are reinforcing other players over fighting on your own or leading rallies then this is not too important for the start of the game. It does make sense to unlock a few formations to not get countered by some enemy player over and over, but it does not make sense to go beyond the column where you research the infantry-spear formation since those researches become really expensive.

The Commandership tree got some extra stats at the end, but can get ignored early on since there are more important things to focus on.

The Advanced Military tree reduces the cost of new troops you recruit and gives you the ability to unlock new marches which is really strong. But of course unlocking those troops before you reduce their recruitment cost is a given. So this tree is a solid choice after you finished the more important researches.

We move on to the important researches:

The Expedition&Pacification tree enables you to kill rebel leaders of higher levels by boosting your damage against them and giving you more motivation. Since alliance chests are the main source of income for speedups and provide a lot of resources on top, being able to kill a lot of high level rebel leaders might enable you to join a bigger alliance and grow faster. So this tree is very important.

The Military tree will help you unlock T4, while Advanced Military will reduce the costs to recruit new troops as well as giving you access to other handy things (like an additional march).

Unlocking more marches will enable you to hide your soldiers if you want to fight, so getting those after you unlocked T4 and are able to kill rebel leaders efficiently is a good idea.

The refinement tree gives you the ability to gain bonus stats for combat. Refinement is the best way for low budget players to gain stats and you should grind expedition beyond to get as many gems to upgrade your refinement as you can.

Unlocking T3/T4 should be your highest priority. 

Regarding what troop types to build: Since you will often send your soldiers to join a stronger players rally you should look for what the rally leaders in your alliance need. If everyone loves bows, then build bows.

If everyone loves Cavalry, then build Cavalry and so on. If there isn't a prefered troop type then building a mix of Infantry/Spear/Cavalry should make the most sense, since you will be able to support most rally leaders this way.

Troop recruitment:

Having T4 soldiers and using them in alliance based events has become the standard for a lot of alliances. Players who did not unlock T4 yet will use T3 instead. 

This means that you should unlock T3/T4 as fast as possible and analyze how many soldiers you need. Producing too many soldiers is a mistake many players do and if

you forget to bubble or a strong player rallies you and you can not empty out you will most likely lose a lot of troops. 

So producing just enough soldiers for your needs and holding on to the training speedups and ressources to reproduce troops in times of need is the smartest thing to do. A good rule of thumb is that you can empty out your castle with a 50% scroll and in a decent amount of time (faster players can send out more marches and hide more soldiers in a short amount of time). So you have to find your sweet spot here. But you should at least have enough troops to bring the maximum amount of troops to events. Take a look at your army size and deployment limit and try stuff out.

So produce soldiers until the amount meets your needs and hold on to your speedups and ressources to rebuild afterwards.

Battles:

There are a few things you can do to minimize troop loss:

1)Use your shelter to hide your troops and your lord when you're away. In your shelter your troops and your lord will be protected. So if all of your troops fit into your shelter you won’t lose any troops even when being attacked (you will still lose resources though, if you can’t hide them all). There is even a shortcut for the shelter.

2)When engaging in combat with other players make your alliance members set up 8 hour rallies on rebelcamps and open up all troop types. This way everyone can send their soldiers to an alliance members rally where they won't be attackable by the enemy. Keep in mind that those rallies will get canceled once rebel camps respawn and your troops will get returned!

3)Use a truce in the shrine of the seven to protect your army and resources. You can also use it to avoid an ongoing attack on your Castle if you don't have fervor. You can ask a friend to be your protector. He or she will be able to protect you if you’re away or busy and start truces for you. You can find the truce button in the Sept of the Seven.

4)Make sure to upgrade your hospitals. Healing troops is much cheaper than producing new ones, so take advantage of this.

5)Use reinforcement or garrison on players, who have a long time truce going or are so strong that they cannot be targeted by people on the server.This way you will manage to keep your army and if you garrison somebody, then you can put your own lord into that safe place also. To reinforce someone go to the world map, click on a friendly player and click the reinforcement button.

6)Never take out more resource items, then you need to improve for next building/research. Otherwise you can get attacked and lose those resources.

7)If you can not afford bubbles or you are getting attacked a lot then only having a troop count that fits into your hospital can be a solution, too.