Joe’s Journal, Volume 13

Joe’s Journal, Volume 13

Let’s talk about monster citadels. I get a lot of questions on these bad boys, because they’re both challenging to defeat and don’t give you a lot of information as to whether or not you’ll be victorious. I know many of you have seen the text that states minimums regarding who and what to bring to citadels. It looks something like this:

Elven 10: 100 E2 + ranged + flying

Elven 15: 320 E3 + mounted + flying

Elven 20: 800 E4 + melee + flying

Elven 25: 3200 E5 + melee + flying

Cursed 20: 2200 E4 + melee + flying

Cursed 25: 7800 E5 + melee + flying

These are great general guidelines, but so much is dependent on your captains, your research, your talents, your other bonuses. So I am going to tackle this by telling you how to effectively calculate what you’re capable of! 

Here’s what I want you to do. Use the prior guidelines and attack a level 10 elven citadel. Please send a copious amount of troops, and three of your best battle captains. Also use the equipment and artifacts you plan to take with you for citadels. Take that thing down! Once you’re done, let’s look into the battle report. That is going to tell us what we need to know. In the report, the initial page tells you that you’ve won (I hope). It’ll show the number of troops on each side, in their stacks, as well as your captains. On the bottom you’ll see how the battle progressed. Your engineer corps attack first, always, in a siege, followed by the rest of the battle. Ideally, you’ll have taken down the walls in one hit. Note that if a stack was completely killed before attacking, it won’t get a shot in.

The battle report has some more details in it that we should look into. Select the icon for the enemy’s walls. In a level 10 elven citadel, there are 90 walls with 30,000 health each, meaning your siege engines need to put out 2.7 million damage to take them down. If they didn’t, you’ll have seen that in the report. Check out the damage your current set up did, and compare it to the chart at the end. Additionally, you can look at your catapults to see what kind of bonuses your talents, research, and equipment add, and adjust accordingly, if you’re doing more damage than needed.

Now let’s look at the monster types. Inside the walls you’re dealing with 5 stacks of monsters, regardless of citadel you’re hitting. To answer the question of how many troops you’ll need to bring, the absolute minimum should be able to do enough damage to kill the biggest stack of enemies. Determine that by multiplying the number of troops by their health. I also like to bring a couple extra sets just in case I am not first to strike. You’ll see the reason why specific troop types are recommended is that none of the citadels have troops that are specifically strong against flying types and many have another type that they don’t have a bonus against. Enemies don’t have a plethora of bonuses from captains or research working for them.  Now it’s just a matter of calculating the total health of each set before you go into battle, and making sure your troops can deal that or more. I’ve done a lot of the work for you here:

Elven Level 10: Walls 2.7M, strong against melee x3 and mounted x2. You must deal 184.8K, 360K, 270K, 594K, and 467.4K damage. Bring ranged/flying troops.

Elven Level 15: Walls 21M, strong against melee x2 and ranged x3. You must deal 1.5M, 2.97M, 2.262M, 4.599M, and 3.807M damage. Bring mounted/flying troops.

Elven Level 20: Walls 109.5M, strong against melee x1, ranged x2, and mounted x2. You must deal 9.72M, 19.5M, 15.18M, 24.09M, and 29.52M damage. Bring flying troops.

Elven Level 25: Walls 957M, strong against melee x1, ranged x2, and mounted x2. You must deal 70.8M, 158.4M, 192.72M, 345.6M, and 105.78M damage. Bring flying troops.

Elven Level 30: Walls 4.05B, strong against melee x1, ranged x2, and mounted x2. You must deal 382.2M, 792M, 941.7M, 1.656B, and 516.6M damage. Bring flying for sure.

Cursed Level 20: Walls 276M, strong against ranged x2, mounted x3. You must deal 3.132M, 6.24M, 7.92M, 9.6M, and 4.698M damage. Bring melee/flying.

Cursed Level 25: Walls 2.325B, strong against ranged x3, mounted x2. You must deal 26.4M, 53.46M, 115.2M, 67.65M, and 34.8M damage. Bring melee/flying.

Take this information and compare it to what you’re capable of doing against a lower level citadel. If your numbers are close, consider adjusting the captains or the amount of troops. Also, a good rule of thumb is this: if your guards aren’t the same color as the citadel, it might be out of your grasp.

Thanks 275,

Joe