Page 6: Armies & Crops

Personally I think starting off with cats and inf is a good way to start off.  This lets you take oasis easily, then you can start to farm forts with your cats and the inf let you bring back resources.  Plus they're ok to hunt with.  Now you can keep enough resources coming in to focus on upgrading all your towns to the max for a while.

But as you start to finish upgrading your towns, you'll need to start finding other ways to gain prestige. Now it's time to get more serious. This is when you should start building a nice large cavalry army (10k +) and once you have enough for oasis (See Page 2), get rid of your catapults. Just send them to a level 10 fort and let them die. You won't lose any prestige. The cav army is strong and fast, and will still allow you to farm forts and gain oasis.  You can start moving your oasis now farther and farther away (15 to 30 minutes, not closer!) with less time, and this gives you more safety from enemies!  The bigger you get, the more important that is. 

The cav army is very fast and if you continue to focus on upgrading your SPEED to max first as recommended, this lets you widen the circle you roam in. You can now farm inactive towns for resources and take no loss. This is smarter than forts but you can still use those too as needed, just not as much. You will still lose some cavs to oasis and other attacks but the benefits gained make this very worthwhile! Plus as you keep building new cav in your towns to replace them with, this also helps you keep building prestige for building troops, without gaining extra mouths more than you can feed. 

Do not worry about living in the negative crop. This is where you will begin to encounter it now.  All you really have to do is come by to farm once or twice a day.  Or use other techniques for feeding like the "secret warehouse" (store stuff on market from that town to cancel and consume later) or buy it. You can easily calculate how long your current warehouse level will sustain your town.  Just divide the amount by how much you're in the negative to find out the hours.

Aren has 339,802 crop in warehouse.  Aren is at -33984 crops. Therefore Aren has 9.9 hours of food left.

See? Now that's not so bad, is it!  Get some oasis to lower the amount in the negative. Keep them refreshed. Check in daily, because after 24 hours when oasis drops, the negative will increase and lower your warehouse faster. If you can't play much then send part of your troops to your subs where each town may divide the load for you.

If you have to be gone for a long time, then remember troops only hunt for 10 days before coming home. So you can leave them hunting if crop is not negative for that long. If you'll be gone longer then just send them to a fort to die until you return. No prestige lost that way. If they come out of hunt in 10 days or some starve out, someone will kill them and take your prestige!

ARMIES

There are several different ways to build armies. It's pointless and misleading to say one unit is stronger than others, as different setup and army make up will have very different outcomes. Here are a few...it'll be setup, recommended stats with the highest first, recommended skills, benefit, downfall...

CAT/INF -speed/fortune-hidden/break cranny. Powerful with good raids and frequent double attacks. will have long wait times for attacks, bringing a need for either hidden attack or warping

Archers- archers NEED attack. You can sacrifice speed if you are good enough with archers. Attack/speed- break cranny/hidden. Can hit cats before hit first if speed is decent, can also potentially hit turrets on turn one if backed by cavs. Need commanding. Effective use requires timing skills or they'll get slaughtered every time.

Cav- speed/defense. Healing/break cranny. Are extremely fast, strong, and hard to kill. Will undoubtedly take damage if defender is there and has a brain, thus lowering prestige you can get. There's also a trick where cavs can't hit retreating cats.

Cav/cat- either defense/attack or speed/defense. Hidden and/or healing. Can use cats with the boosted power to kill their cav and use cav to go after their cat while taking minimal losses due to high defense an healing. Slow to attack with cats, powerful, but costly and slow.

Archer/cav- (can easily add infantry) either attack with split defense/speed, or speed and attack, or speed and split attack/defense. Fortune can be added for a subtraction of attack or speed. Can easily take out cats and turrets, quite quickly. Most people don't know how to handle archers and blindly go forward or hold. Their weakness is cav on forward with high defense, high level turrets which change the field length, and cats moving only once forward (depends on field length).

Cav/archer (main force being cav this time)- speed/defense. Healing/break cranny or hidden. The archers this time are solely for clearing turrets and the annoying one troop blockers. Will increase attack time.

The strongest setup for cats against any other units other than cats themselves is put all points into attack and fortune.

Unit Advantages

• Infantry-
A) They yield the most prestige to build.
B) Very Cheap
C) Sizable overload (good for raids)
D) Great for meatshielding against a cav rush or massive infantry force
E) Trap Baiter (It's good to feed traps with)

•Cavalry-
A) Highest overload (Amazing raiding)
B) Highest Speed (For battles and hunting)

•Archers-
A) Ranged
That's about all I can say good about archers. They're weak, and they must be used in massive numbers to provide real benefit.

•Catapults-
A) High Range
B) Most powerful unit
C) Good against all leveled towers (depending on range tech level)
D) Great for defending with

Downside: slowest, most expensive to build. 

ARMIES 

People like to ask what the best setup to build is... each one has a big advantage and disadvantage:
-Cats are powerful, but slow. They have a 50% disadvantage against cavalry. -Archers are fast and cheap with range, but aren't powerful and are very frail.  If an archer oversteps a catapult or turret's range advantage on them (where the archer can now hit them), the archer will attack first. This makes them HIGHLY useful against turrets, in large numbers of course. Turrets aren't going to be highly used in pvp except by paying customers.
-Cavs have tons of stats: highest health, highest defense, highest speed, second highest attack. However, if ranged units can delay your movement enough to move forward a few, they can retreat right before impact and the cavs won't be able to hit them until the back row because of their horrible range.
-Infantry are used for hunting, blocking for ranged, and running into traps.

Even though traps do speed damage, cavalry are worth 4pp while infantry only 1, so you'll lose double the prestige using cav to knock out traps. Against lower levels, this will soak up a ton of your prestige gain. The lower their level, the more likely you should bring infantry for traps. If they're a higher level and you're not sure if they're offline, cavs are better if you're using cav army. If you're using a cat army, use infantry only for traps.

Party's advice: Start off with an army of cats and cavs.  You can also use a little inf as meatshield if you need them.  Cavs are very fast and strong.  Cats plus cavs make the perfect army.

Ever been curious what somebody like Oredi has?  40k cats, 40k cavs, 40k inf, plus some archers. Sometimes maybe more cavs.  Now that would be one heck of an army!

FEEDING TROOPS

You can see how much each troop type costs to feed by clicking on Barracks and click Train to look at any troop type's stats.  Crop consumption for Infantry is 1, for example. When you press the top right corner of screen you can see each town's Resource availability. The current crop output rate is shown here. If your town is at 1000, then you could put 1000 inf in this town without going into negative. However if you build 2000 inf then you will be at -1000 crop consumption.  Your options are to either keep adding crop to your warehouse or find another way.

Other ways include max out your Crop tech, or claim crop oasis.

Just remember that each oasis degrades one level per day after claimed, so you must reclaim a new one each day to maintain your output rate.
You can also use coins to enhance your crop output either temporarily or permanently. The short enhance is more powerful, and costs less. The permanent one is more expensive and if the sub is stolen, the value is lost. So it's up to you which option works best. I prefer only to permanent enhance my main; this way no one can ever take back money I spent.

If you run out of surplus crops in your town your troops will die! If you want to keep surplus food on hand, in case you can't get to your oasis in time before the warehouse becomes 0, you can put it on the market for maximum price, then fill your town warehouse back up. Now you have surplus crop that can't be stolen if someone attacks you. You can go to the market whenever you're running low and cancel the trade to put it back in the town you marketed it out from. Hint - use a number code system on the amount of crop to know which town you sell from (like end in 100 for town 1, 200 for 2, etc)

Please note it takes up people resource to put stuff on the market so don't max yourself out if you need the people resource to do other tasks right away. :)

Also please note you are limited to 10 listings in the market total at any time so keep this in mind when using the "secret warehouse."

WHAT'S NEXT?

After you outgrow the cavalry army, it's time to change things up a bit.  Here are some options you can think about.

Balance Blocker: Uses massive amounts of catapults, making it almost impossible to kill. And the other units are simply sheilding, allowing a cavalry to jump to the front line when a catapult is in danger, deflects the blast from the catapult to the Cavalry. Same goes for infantry and archers. Employ small amounts, 20-100 of each type, and a massive amount of catapults for this strategy.

Comrade Unity: Employs almost equal amounts of all units, leaving room for growth and development. Having 1,000 of all four types throws stats out the window, and you can rely on simple in battle tactics.

Only recommended for those who are very skilled with command...

The Juggernaut: employs MASSIVE amounts of each type. Making it simply a larger version of COMRADE UNITY. however, since it's in larger numbers it throws the need for command out the window, and you can rely on both tactics and sheer numbers. I Highly recomend this strategy.

Speed Demon: Using only cavalry in excess of 25,000. You don't need to command, only send them to battle. If you have high enough numbers to outlast the barrage of enemy catapult and archer fire, then the many that survive at the end will easily overtake the enemy forces.

Studded Shield and Longsword: Uses a massive amount of catapults, and a slightly lesser amount of cavalry. Cavalry will most likely die but in larger amounts they take alot of the enemy with them, especialy when using them as a blocker. And then whatever left is easy prey for your catapults.

Demolition Man: large amounts of catapults for enemy troops as well as turrets. And infantry for enemy traps and useful as blockers. This Battle strategy is custom built for raiding, and removing city defenses with minimal loss.