Sunday, October 17, 2010

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.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Power of Weapons

I've compared the effectiveness of various armor, but I used the term 'value'. Value is a little misleading, since I did not consider the cost, nor if an item is Bind on Equip (BoE). Since I am now comparing weapon, I'll use the term 'power' to compare them. And no, this is not the same as work done or energy converted in physics .. just a random noun I choose to use, but you'll get the meaning. :)

Weapons typically increase attack, and that attack value is applicable to both military and contest. Non-black armor also increases attribute. Each attribute increase is worth 3 points in attack (if that attribute is STR). But otherwise, the value of it is similar. So for a given item, the power is [attack] + [sum of attributes] * 3. 2 of the items below however have additional stats that increase only contest attributes. For those, I'll list first the military power and then the contest power.

Hope the chart helps you decide when you should equip a higher level item, even though the color is of a lower grade.

Item : Color Power
Level Bind on Equip?
Practice : Black 16 1 N
Practice : Green 21 1 N
Practice : Blue 32 1 N
Wood : Black 40 10 N
Practice : Purple 52 1 N
Wood : Green 54 10 N
Iron : Black 64 20 N
Wood : Blue 80 10 N
Iron : Green 87 20 N
Steel : Black 88 30 N
Wood : Purple 106 10 N
Great : Black 112 35 N
Steel : Green 120 30 N
Iron : Blue 125 20 N
Mercenary : Black 136 40 N
Black Iron 141 / 202 30 N
Great : Green 153 35 N
Guard : Black 160 45 N
Steel : Blue 173 30 Y
Royal : Black 184 50 N
Mercenary : Green 186 40 Y
Wisdom 186 / 221 40 N
Guard : Green 219 45 Y
Great : Blue 221 35 Y
Cupid 226 1 N
Royal : Green 252 50 Y
Mercenary : Blue 269 40 Y
Shackle : Green 285 55 Y
Guard : Blue 317 45 Y
Mercenary : Purple 361 40 Y
Royal : Blue 365 50 Y
Guard : Purple 412 45 Y
Knight : Purple 481 50 Y
Cult Pike : Purple 589 60 Y
Glowing 595 45 N
Trident : Purple 655 65 Y
Lionheart : Purple 709 70 Y

Friday, October 1, 2010

Faster troop production

As you may have noticed, it is actually cheaper to recruit a level 1 soldier, and then train him to level 8 (or your desired level). It takes less resource. It may seem like it takes more time, but since you recruit AND train at the same time, the total production once you have a pipeline going is actually faster.

Level Recruiting Training to level 8
1 8:38 14:56
2 9:38 13:21
3 10:38 11:46
4 11:50 9:50
5 13:22 7:24
6 14:48 5:07
7 16:35 2:17
8 18:01

Take a look at the chart above (your mileage may vary), that is for one of my cities for mounted crossbowman (Cav4). It takes 8:38 to recruit a level 1, and then 14:56 to train a level 1 to level 8. But it takes 18:01 to recruit a level 8.

You may think it is faster to recruit level 8 straight up. But if you consider that you can recruit level 1 while you are training another level 1 to level 8, then the output is a level 8 every 14:56 instead of every 18:01. That is 20% more soldiers per troop in the same given period.

But wait, that is NOT the optimal. The production rate is actually the larger of the 2 numbers in a row. So the optimal in the case above will be to recruit a level 3, and then train him to level 8. In that case, a soldier is produced every 11:46. That is 53% more production than straight up recruiting.

So, I have show you how to do it, you will of course have to plug in your own numbers, as everyone's scenario is different. In fact, it could be different in every city.

Now, there's yet another twist. For those whose military rank is General or higher, you actually get 2 cavalry lines. So you actually need to half the recruiting the time when doing your optimization. For me, that means I should be looking at this table instead :

Level Recruiting Training to level 8
1 4:19 14:56
2 4:49 13:21
3 5:19 11:46
4 5:55 9:50
5 6:41 7:24
6 7:24 5:07
7 8:17 2:17
8 9:00

That means, my optimal production is recruiting of level 5 and then training them to level 8. This yields 21% more production than straight up recruiting (not as big a gain for those with only 1 queue). This also applies to players with lower military ranks, but using soldier queue specials.

For those with 2 queues and using soldier queue to get a 3rd, you will have to divide by three. And the gain will be even lower. For me, if I use soldier queue to get a 3rd queue, the optimal will be to recruit level 6, and the gain is 17%.

To get the faster production, it is some work. You will have troops sitting in the pipeline that are of lower level and consuming food. But considering that you will be using less food for the production, and you only need to keep 200 troops in the pipeline (for 2 queues, and daily maintenance), it should be more efficient, even from the resource view.

So here's how you do it :
Build level 5 for first day.
On second day, continue building level 5, but start TWO upgrade queues for all level 5 soldiers.
On 3rd day, one of the upgrade queue should have completed, and you start a upgrade queue, while also continuing to build level 5.
Repeat 3rd day procedure, and you're in the zone for pipeline production.