What sets the order of attack, what a unit goes for, and why the cheapest win is the one worth aiming at.
LeadershipDetermines the number of guardsmen, specialists and siege engines that your hero or captains can take on a march.
DominanceDetermines the number of trained monsters available for a march.
AuthorityDetermines the number of mercenaries available for a march.
StrengthHow much damage a unit deals. The base figure, before any bonus is reckoned on top.
HealthHow much damage it survives before it dies, on that same base.
The three march stats belong to the march and not to anything inside it. What sets them is whoever leads it (hero and captains) so the same troops fit or do not fit depending only on who is taking them.
The two combat stats belong to the troop, and every unit of a kind carries the same pair: a Swordsman II has the strength and health of a Swordsman II wherever it marches and whoever leads it. Both rise with the tier, which is why a smaller stack of a higher tier can out-hit a bigger stack of a lower one.
A fight has two phases, and what decides who swings and when is initiative. The higher it is, the sooner a stack acts, and the order it sets holds for the whole fight.
Monster citadels and other players’ cities have them.
Siege engines carry an initiative bonus while a siege is on, so they act before anything else on the field. Walls sit at 11 and every other troop at 10, which makes the order:
It lasts until the walls are down. After that the bonus has nothing left to apply to and the fight moves on.
An army with no walls — an epic monster, for one — is fought in this phase alone.
Every troop here sits at initiative 10, on both sides, so nothing has an edge at the top and which army swings first is chance.
From there it is a list of turns: one stack against one stack, every stack still standing acting once before the order comes round again. It ends when one army has nothing left.
Within one initiative, strength sets the order of attack: the strongest stacks swing first.
A stack’s strength is the troop’s strength plus your strength bonuses, multiplied by how many troops are in it. Counters play no part — a stack does not swing earlier for being good against what it faces.
So the order is yours to set when you fill the stacks: a big stack of a weak troop swings before a small stack of a strong one.
A stack does not go for what it counters. It goes for whatever it can do the most damage to, and picks it like this:
Against an epic this stops being a subtlety. Its stacks are enormous, so whatever it hits it kills, and it goes for whichever of yours carries the most health.
The health is the consequence, though, not the rule: where a counter is worth more than the difference in health, the counter decides — citadel monsters that counter siege engines go for the catapults and leave the fuller stack alone. Which is why a citadel or an epic is fought by arranging strengths rather than by bringing the right classes: you aim your stacks by sizing them.
Send stacks of similar health.
The aim of an attack is not always the biggest number: it is spending the least to get the most. Even health across the stacks is what pushes the average damage per point of Leadership, Authority and Dominance as high as it will go.
And that is what you are really spending — the Silver and Dragon Coins that trained the troops, and the Gold and Sacred Potions that bring them back. A stack that dies for nothing is paid for twice.
Against an epic monster, health buys you nothing. Everything you send dies, so nothing a health bonus could have saved gets saved.
What that leaves is strength, which decides how much of the epic you take down before your army is gone — and that is what the fight pays on.
Health earns its keep elsewhere: player against player, common and rare monsters, and citadels.
Which is why health still decides how a march is built even when it buys no survival. Health sets the order your stacks die in, and that order is what the stacking calculator exists for. Ordering the deaths and surviving them are two different things.
Battle Report against Tinman Squad →The stacking calculator →Which gems are worth the slot →
Some of what comes at a stack never lands. It is a monster thing, and it is researched: the Monsters Boost tree carries a «Chance to Block a Strike» for each of the four races, ten levels each, paid in Conquest Points.
What the journal reports is what got through, not what was thrown. Both the total and the counter bonus inside it come down by the same share, so the figures stay consistent with each other and the blocked amount is the rest.
A tenth of everything that dies is gone for good. The Temple brings the rest back; that tenth it cannot.
It applies to an attack on an epic monster, and to nearly everything else besides. The exception is an event that says otherwise in so many words, and those say it plainly.
The tenth is taken off the dead, not off what you sent, and what comes back is the whole number below. Lose twenty monsters and eighteen come back. Lose twenty-one and eighteen come back — the same eighteen — so the twenty-first was spent for nothing.
That is worth knowing wherever the troops are dear, and monsters are the dearest of all: they train like everything else but ask for Dragon Coins on top of the Silver, and the coins are the part that is hard to come by. Sizing a monster stack in whole tens costs nothing and wastes nothing, while every monster above a round ten buys back none of itself. The stacking calculator will do that trimming for you.
Guardsmen, specialists and engineer corps come out of the Barracks and are paid for in Silver. When they die, write them off and train them again. Gold and Sacred Potions are not for these.
Mercenaries and monsters are the other way round, and there the Temple is always worth it. A monster trains in the Barracks like the rest, but it wants Dragon Coins on top of its Silver, and coins are far harder to come by than Silver. A mercenary cannot be trained at all. Spend the Gold and the Sacred Potions on those two and on nothing else.
Enemy monsters go for whichever of your stacks carries the most health.
They go for whatever they can do the most damage to, and against an epic that usually works out to be the same stack — the epic kills anything it touches, so the fullest stack is the biggest score. It stops being the same the moment a counter bonus outweighs the difference: citadel monsters that counter siege engines will turn on the catapults instead. When two of your stacks would take the same damage, the one that hits back hardest is the one attacked.
Every bonus is locked in the moment the march sets off.
Only the ones that are not timed. Talent points and research are fixed at departure. Anything running on a clock — a strength, Valor or Experience boost, a premium mode like Archaeology — is read at the instant of the fight or the dig, not during the march. So they can be switched on after the army has left, or while it is sitting as a reinforcement, and they still count as long as they are still running when the blow lands.