Joe’s Journal, Volume 2

Let’s dive into another interesting advanced topic; troop stacking. With this technique you can drastically increase the power of your attacks. I would like to draw your attention to two interesting battle reports, posted above. One, you’ll notice, was an utter and epic failure, where the attacker (me) got literally nothing. In my defense I did this purely for informational purposes and I was not dropped on my head as a child. The other was a great victory, with a ton of points! You can clearly see the difference in the attacking squads, but let’s dive a little further into it.

Fauk had 13 stacks of troops, defined by the individual grouping of each troop. His most powerful was the stack of 2,304 Quicksands. I had just 1 stack of 523 Epic Monster Hunters. Due to the number of stacks, Fauk got a grand total of 25 individual attacks on the epic monster, while I got a whopping 0. This is because all stacks of attackers and defenders have had an attack in a round of combat unless they are killed first. The round then repeats until one side has no more troops left to attack. This means that some of Fauk’s stacks had the opportunity to attack two to three times, multiplying their value!

Troop stacking is all about maximizing efficiency. How do you insulate your most effective troops to ensure that they have one or more attacks and you don’t end up with dead troops before they swing? The game determines combat order randomly. The only way I have seen initiative come into play is with engineers in a siege. So the first attack may be yours or you may lose a stack of troops. Luckily, the order is switched each round of combat, if you make it that long. The game determines the first attacker based on which stack can deal the most damage to the enemy, and the first recipient of damage on who will take the most damage, each considering bonuses, but not your troops’ features. In an epic monster battle, since all your troops will assuredly die, your first to die stack will always be the stack with the highest total health.

For best stacking practice against epics, you will want to ensure that your least effective, and cheapest troops, have the most total health. This is so they die first, and leave the more effective troops to be the ones that benefit from the multiple attacks. These low level troops will coincidentally be the cheapest to train! A good and general way to go about this is to use the following format: 100 G1 Archers, 100 G1 Spearmen, 50 G1 Riders, 50 G2 Archers, etc. If you have Epic Monster Hunters, resist the urge to throw them all at the monster like I did!

The more stacks that you have in a battle the more attacks you will be able to squeak out, but it is also highly dependent on the number of stacks you are going against. For this reason, many players prefer to stack effectively against Doomsday, Hellforge, Ragnarok, and other epics with 4 stacks, as opposed to Arachne’s Swarm which has 8. Once you unlock monsters and specialists, the amount of potential stacks you can attack with can grow immensely. That said, you may find it more efficient to take only up to 3 levels of troops, and relieve your lower level ones as the benefit to cost ratio diminishes.

Anyway, a good resource that I have used to help determine stack amounts is totalcalculator.org. This helps take some of the labor out of your bolstering. I would also be remiss if I did not state that all this only applies if you expect to lose the battle. If you’re going to win, ignore everything you just read. If you have any questions or see that I have made a glaring error, please write “wrong” as many times as will fit in one message and send it to me directly.

Thanks 275,

Joe