Military Exploits and Rank

Military Rank

The 3rd icon on the top left is the symbol of a crown. When you click on it, you see a page with 2 tabs : Military and Nobility. On the Military tab, the 10 military ranks are listed. The 'Required exploit' column list the exploit you need to get a required rank. When you have enough exploits, you can come to this page and click on the 'Raise' button at the upper right.
There is also a column for 'Consumed exploit everyday'. You can ignore this column, this feature has been disabled, and no exploits are consumed daily, regardless of your military rank.
The 'Extra effect' column lists the bonus for acquiring a specific rank. It is cumulative, except the improvement in attack and defense. Example : My current rank of 'General' gives me the following bonus :

• The capacity of the shelter increases by 100
• Improve the spies by 1 lv
• Add 1 line in infantry recruiting list
• Reduce the recruit time of infantry by 50%
• Improve all armies' defense and attack by 10%
• Add 1 line in cavalry recruiting list

Note that the improvement to defense and attack is 10%, and not cumulative of 10% + 5% + 2%.
The best of all these effect is naturally this improvement. This improvement applies to all battles that you initiate or a defense on any of your cities (regardless of whether the heroes are yours or aided).


Military Exploits

So, how do you get military exploits? You do so by completing quests. When you click on the 'Quest' button on the top row, you will see a Military Rank tab on the left. There, you should always see these 8 quests :

• Devil Soldier Badge
• Devil Union Supply
• Devil Union Armor
• Devil Union Weapon
  
• Devil Siege Weapon
• Devil Officer Badge
• Devil Spoils
• A lot of Devil Officer Badge

These quests allow you to trade in these items for exploit points :

• Devil Badges
• Devil Supplies
• Devil Armor
• Devil Weapons
• Siege Weapons
• Officer Badges

You can find these items from chests, or you can trade arena points for these items. To trade arena points for these items, your hero has to be at least level 20. Enter the Arena and hit the 'Exchange for' button. That will bring up the 'Exchange in Arena' page. Depending on your hero's level, you will see several tabs. In tab 'II', you will find the 6 items listed above (page 2 and 3). A Devil Badge cost 3 arena points. 50 of those cost 150 arena points and can be traded in for 50 exploit points. So the 'exchange rate', if you will, is 3 arena points to 1 exploit points. This is consistent regardless of which item or quest you decide to use.

I encourage you to use arena points to raise your military rank, since the effects actually get better as your rank improve. The last rank of 'General Marshal' gets a whopping 25% improvement to attack and defense. However, you also want to save some arena points to trade for armor, so that you can do better in arena, and therefore get more arena points faster. I suggest that you use arena points from your lowest level hero, but save the points from your highest level hero. I am saving arena points from my level 79 hero, so that when he gets to level 80, he can trade for the Brutish set, for both himself, as well as my other level 75 hero.