This guide is based on the author's personal experience and is only relevant to the current game’s content.
So, you are ready for your first fight for your kingdom’s Castles or in simple words Castle Siege!!! There are some steps to ensure you are going to have the best outcome or at least have the most amount of fun trying.
Step 1. Battle plans
Make sure you talk with your alliance friends on what is your goal of this castle siege, are you going for Kings Landing or are you going to take every castle available in the Map? Communication is key in every aspect of the game and Castle siege is no different.
Step 2. Prepare your Castle
2.1 Hospitals
There are a total of 16 slots in your castle for Hospitals. The best you can do is to fill all the slots with hospitals, having a big hospital capacity will save you from unnecessary dead troops because you simply didn’t have enough hospital capacity. In addition, each max hospital is going to give you an additional 5% total health for your troops. Getting a hospital to max level is going to set you back 26.5 million Grain, 53 million wood, 33 million stone and 20 million iron. The time needed is strictly tied to your building speed.
2.2 Castle Exterior/Marching animation
The game currently has a great selection of castle exterior every single one of them has different active and passive stats there is no best castle exterior every castle exterior suits a specific army style you got. The best you can do is to boost your primary line of troops but you can also use a castle exterior that boosts your total stats which counts towards any troop type you might have. An honorable mention in the castle exterior topic is the Honor Special castle exterior.
Marching animations are like castle exteriors try to use a marching animation that suits your style since the game has a plethora of marching animations to choose from, I’m sure you can find your personal favorite or the ones that suits your play style best.
2.3 Troops
In order to be able to fight obviously you are going to need troops, again troops are each player’s choice but you should try to balance the troops you got in order to be able to counter the enemy formations. Now days an average army size is about 800k troops so make sure you got at least 1 full march size available, if you feel you want to tank some enemy attacks make sure you got a higher number of troops in your castle, they don’t have to be the highest tier of troops available but sometimes it's quantity over quality having more troops than your hospital capacity will result to dead troops if your wounded fill your hospital.
Step 3. Lord related adjustments
3.1 Talents
Every commander has a talent tree. Make sure you reset your tree before you break your truce. Focus on your primary troop attack stats and after that go for second line attack, also going for army health and defense is also really helpful in the survivability of your troops. Below is an example of infantry-cavalry formation talents.
3.2 Commander Equipment and Badges
I know how much you love your Maester Set or your Builder set but it's time to leave that in the closet and wear your nice shiny armor and weapon. Again, each player is going to have different needs in terms of commander Equipment but a good rule of thumb is to always focus on your first line attack and survivability. Champion Set is an early armor set for players but as you play you are going to unlock more armor sets like the Frost Set or the Sunspear Set. Royal Kings guard Set is now one of the most universal sets you can get so if you have it better use it!!! Don’t forget that when equipping your armor set to also add your badges for the fight to come badges is a great way to increase your troops attack, defense and health stat.
3.3 Refinement Upgrades
Last but definitely not least we got the refinement adjustments. I know that you like your training speed or your research speed but now nobody has time to read books during war time, so my suggestion is to start rerolling your daily refinement to a more war-oriented set-up. What I suggest is to get army size, front line attack, frontline health and lastly depending on your situation you can go for frontline defense or even second line attack. The combinations are almost endless so better try to find out what suits you best. Below you are going to see a basic Infantry oriented refinement setup.
Step 4. Activate Every Available Buff
On activate Buff topic there are a lot of options starting with the first one it is fervor you are going to activate no matter what you do when you are going to do any PvP action. Fervor doesn’t allow you to truce up for the duration it has but also during fervor you are going to have some increased stats. Fervor stats are strictly connected to your research level, nobility rank, castle exterior and much more.
Next up we got the Military preparation Buffs which consist of Total army attack, Total army defense or the immediate Curfew buff. In my opinion the last one is the most powerful in the list because info is a very important aspect of the game and by depriving that advantage from the enemy is a great power boost. Total army attack is the second most useful buff and you can use it when you are going to attack other people otherwise stick to immediate Curfew buff.
The last buff you should always use is the Army size buff. The said buff comes to 4 different forms. 20%, 50 % , 75% and 100% army size increase. You can get the first 2 from the diamond shop and the other 2 are available in alliance events (Elite trials, Ultimate Conquest) and black diamond shop. All 4 buffs last for a maximum of 4 hours and you have to use another one after they expire.
TIP: Army size only increases your base army size and not your total size. You can check your army size in the Military grounds.
Step 5. Consumables
Here there is not much to discuss but in order to be effective in every PvP scenario there are some consumables that will help you in different situations these consumables are the marching speed boots and castle transfers. Marching boots are going to increase the speed of your marching army which is much needed to attack fast or join a friendly rally.
Castle transfers come in 2 types: random castle transfer and precise castle transfer. The name is pretty much self-explanatory. You use random castle transfers to randomly teleport your castle in the Westeros map (it can transfer next to your enemies, be careful) and if you want to pick a location you want to transfer you will have to use a precise castle transfer. You can buy both in diamond or alliance shop.
Step 6. Have fun!!!
Maybe the most important Step of this guide is to have fun. After All this is a war game, sometimes you win sometimes you lose but we must always have fun. Even at defeat there is something to learn on how you can do it better next time. Nobody is perfect and practice makes us better. As Ned Stark Once said:
“We find our true friends on the battlefield”
Go out there and have fun!!!