A Noob's Guide to Leveling, Surviving the Early Years

Note: you can read all my Little Empire Blog Posts here:

http://littleempire.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Azyle00

The Long and Winding Road

(Work in progress, updated and added to daily, reread often if you are using it. March 11, 2012 latest update)

Note: When I write lineups, I write them as FTNP for example which is opposite how they look on the screen. I do this because the lineup would flip when referring to the opponent and I want clarity. So as you read any lineup I type in text, the First letter = the First unit. Even though it would look like PNTF on your screen side and FTNP on the Enemy screen side, I always write it First unit to last unit no matter which side I refer to, so always in the format FTNP, where the first unit is a Footman, the next a Troll etc. In my Battle Charts, I always lay it out as it would appear on your screen.

Disclaimer by Azyle

Much of this guide is meant for reference and to highlight and explain many of the battle mechanics of the early game. The bottom line is that my goal is to provide a system to go from level 3 to 14 as painlessly and as fast as possible. This is not a "how to win" guide. Many of the battles you face are subjective to you being extremely good at evaluating the battlefield and deciding how much XP and how much resource and time cost you are giving up for the XP.

This is a work in progress. As I further test ideas and dream up new methods as well as begin to determine how to effectively "spend" resources along the way to "buy" XP, I will continue to expand it. There are many ways you can minimize your losses and maximize your XP. Also the dynamics of each Hero also come into play.

If nothing less, I aim to give the new player insight and tools into what works in battles and what does not. I am constantly tinkering with the low level of the game trying to find systems of play to go inifinite, to have trick setups that can really work to a player’s advantage.

It is really hard at early levels to make XP without spending resources and losing units. This is the reason above all else I always explain how valuable it is as a new player to never spend your resources on things you simply do not need as one of the fastest methods to leveling is to spend Gold and Crystal on units who die in battle but those resources end up converting into XP and a surprisingly horrible ratio.

Introduction - The Game is not Quick and Easy

The new players, certainly the ones below Level 14, that I know are always asking me how to level effectively, what lineups work and how can they even get to Level 14 so they can start using my "other" guide. Some have seen where I say getting to Level 10 should only take a week and from then on you should make a Level each day. So why are they stuck below this for a much longer time? After thinking about my early days and how I overcame many of the difficulties of hitting the mid-teens and dealing with the frustrations that my girlfriend is having leveling her Succubus (Why oh why is the only "girl" character also the hardest to level), I decided to write a guide explaining my own experiences and thoughts regarding those brutal early days.

Three Heroes, Three Paths to Glory...But Three Very Different Paths

Attention! The Heroes are NOT the same. Each one has its own perks and downfalls. In fact, if you have not made your account (which you likely have if reading this) or you are still low enough level to reset, you may want to carefully consider what I have to say about each one.

Behemoth - Tank Leveling God

Lets face it. The Behemoth is overpowered. When I first started Little Empire I had no knowledge about the game at all, no friends and was bored on a very long business trip where I would spend hours on the train and in cars going all over China. It seemed a great thing to kill time during the travel. And it was. Like I have done in the past with MMORPGs, I tried each Hero right up to the "Reset Cutoff" point, then reset the account to try another. First was the Behemoth which I liked an awful lot. He was to be the benchmark for my testing. I found the game quite easy and even though I planned to "reset" him I made full use of testing all sorts of different things related to resources and building etc on that first go. I was overly impressed with his ability to Tank and do decent damage. I found the starting spell was perfectly suited for his play type.

Back to my main point, the Behemoth is overpowered. He is the easiest Hero to utilize in leveling. He is a front line monster who can occupy two rows, basically filling the front ranks as 4 units and really, because he rarely would die, he super cedes all the units that would be in those rows, effectively in the early days of total melee combat, he is worth 6 to 8 units himself. To make things even better, he hits two targets at once. He also has access to another Melee Strike spell, Sorrow Smash that is perfect for him and useful throughout your leveling days meaning you can actually spend the first 90 Mojo you save away by the time it unlocks. Without a doubt, choosing Behemoth as your Hero is going to make your leveling life much easier. But even this still has to be paired with a very strong strategy in order to level at a fast rate.

The downside to Behemoth will come at the end game where it has become clear to me that Succubus is the Champion of the 30+ world. I know this from playing at the higher levels and facing a properly geared Succubus with full end game spells and feel the pain of the spell slinging nightmare she is. To make matters worse, another Behemoth Hero in end game battles engages in a Hero VS Hero battle. I find these fights quite easy to win even when facing the mirror match because I am the attacker and can tweak things to give my Hero the edge allowing him to win and live, while the enemy Hero dies. And at the higher levels, once the enemy Hero is dead, you should and will win the battle. End game is about slinging spells because everyone has good lineups and fairly decent equipment. The problem is that a Succubus hides behind enemy lines, deeply buried away and there is no way to kill a high level good Succubus Hero until the Behemoth gets his hands on her and beats her into a bloody pulp. This allows the Succubus Hero, whose spells are on a faster cool down because of equipment than yours and of a different caliber than the Behemoth to assault you and your forces until nearly the end of the battle. She often wipes you and you army because she is alive the whole battle.

So although the Behemoth is the easiest to level fast, he is also the loser in the final days, in the serious end game battles against good ole sister Succy.

Berserker - God's Horrible Mistake

I am sorry about everyone who has taken Berserker. You can only hope that Camel Games tweaks him to make him actually be competitive in the game. Throughout the entire game you will be the ugly kid step brother to the Behemoth. Although the Berserker has more Attack Power possibilities than the Behemoth, it is meaningless when you face two targets, as the Behemoth can hit two targets in front of him at once, and you cannot. The extra damage you do will never out DPS the fact the Behemoth is hitting two targets at the same time for full power. Only after level 25 once Troll Cyborgs come out is there a front line unit that takes two spots and now against that unit you are actually doing far more damage than the Behemoth, your DPS has outstripped him in this case. The only other case where you will always out damage him is when you face him toe to toe as you will likely out DPS him in a fight. But having to face the Behemoth face to face to achieve this has left another feature of the Behemoth unavailable to you, straddling the enemy Hero. Every Behemoth player knows you do not fight a Hero face to face, you fight half the Hero and another unit in a row below or above, effectively tanking 3 spots and hitting the enemy Hero and another melee unit at the same time. Luckily, when you attack, you can square off against the Behemoth and go man to man.

To make things worse in the end game days, you lack less raw cutting power VS the Succubus. The Behemoth uses all his might and glory to clear a direct path to the enemy Succubus, often the entire field and destroy her. He takes two spaces to walk, so much clear everything in two rows up to her feet, often 5 spaces. By double hitting and using his melee strike and blast spells, he can do this very fast. The Berserker must single hit, so he takes longer doing this. Further, staying alive on your charge up the field to her is problematic because if you have Absorb items, they work half as well because you are single hitting and therefore absorbing about 60% health compared to the Behemoth who uses this Absorbing (Blood Talisman) to keep himself alive while charging through the field.

Another key defect in the Berserker is his special ability, which is so many ways is a curse, not a benefit. This is his ability to hit 2 spaces ahead of him, unlike the Behemoth who has a range on 1. His range of 2 is detrimental to your lineup behind him. It effectively means that unless a range 1 melee unit is attacking him who will close into range, the units behind him are pushed back an entire space of range as he will stop at range 2. This means Trolls and any ranged unit he is fighting will sit at range 2. This is something that must be considered in lineups with the Berserker as far as the units that are behind him. Luckily there is no range 3 unit that exists, so it really does not fully mess him up, but it does mean that Priest, Mage, Archer, Iron Wheel stacked behind him does not work when he is fighting ranged units, including Trolls. All the units behind him are effectively at range +1 than if it was a Behemoth. So it is not possible to have the Priests behind him and have the deeper ranged units firing. If you keep the Priests, must drop the mages in order for the archers and Iron Wheels firing throughout the battle. This ends up being a long term problem to the Berserker especially at higher levels where maximum DPS is so critical, stacking effective firing ranges extremely important. Certainly when facing a high level Succubus, not having a perfect Hero two row stack to aid him in slaughtering the path to her while having Priests/Shamans behind him is crippling.

Unless you really like playing the weaker class in games, love the challenge, need something to complain about or have faith that one day Camel Games will balance the Heroes and bring the Berserker up to speed, I suggest choosing the Behemoth or Succubus over him.

Update: As I hit the End Game, I still believe Behemoth is the better choice over Berserker, however, I do not believe he is as underpowered at the End Game as I originally thought. There is a aspect to them in Uber player VS Uber player combat that makes them a highly effective "attacker" in the Arena. Even though I do not play one, I now understand a specific tactic that I must use with my Behemoth in those Clash of the Titans where the Berserker would be better at this than a Behemoth is. The feature of the Behemoth straddling a unit next to the Berserker or other Behemoth Hero and going man to man does not work at this level of game. So we must square off man to man. In this situation, the Behemoth advances into the Berserker because the Berserker has range and due to the setup of the Berserker player, you are taking more ranged unit damage than he is, he gets an extra hit or two as you advance and he is doing more DPS to you than you do to him. All this results in a Berserker killing the Behemoth Hero time after time again when they have similar equipment and unit lineups.

Furthermore, my solution to winning battles where I face a fully geared up Behemoth or Berserker Hero is a systematic (Article coming later) procedure that I have created to guarantee winning the Mirror Match. My system works as the attacker 99% of the time, but this actual system that I plan to use all the time for winning the Uber Mirror Match would actually work far better if my Hero was a Berserker. Since I also rarely lose to a Succubus player using my Succubus killing attack system and the Berserker would work almost as effectively as a Behemoth doing this system as well, I think we have a situation where the Berserker at the Uber End Game level is perhaps the best Hero you can be playing with. This is based on gearing up fully using $$$ to buy Mojo etc. We are talking long term End Game here.

Succubus - Hard Life Being the Best

In my opinion, the Succubus could be the premier kick ass class at the end game. Already from my experiences, she is a force to be reckoned with past level 27 or so. While the Behemoth can use his Melee spells and tanking ability to draw enemy fire while clearing 4 lanes of the field, the Succubus utilizes the true end game mechanic like a pro...Spells. Spells are the real deciders at the high level of battle. Having the ability to choose the 3 best damage spells available, whereas the Behemoth must utilize the 3 best spells for him has a big impact. Succubus is not clearing a path, acting like a lightning rod for damage. She has the luxury of setting a 6 row lineup, which often means her lineup can be optimized for moving in synch or even surviving longer etc. Mass DPS of her units becomes less important as she will rely on the pure fire power of the heaviest hitting DPS spells in the game. Her thoughts are that she will not race to the end wall like a Behemoth but rather sit back and wipe out the entire enemy units over time with AOE spells delivering the most damage possible. She also has a range of 7, meaning she is still laying down DPS to the front lines from the start until the bitter end. Her biggest threat is always the Behemoth or Berserker trying to get their hands on her, but as luck has it, when she attacks, she gets to choose where she stands, allowing herself to never be touched by those Heroes.

To further add to her spell power, the decider in end game battles, she has the best equipment in the game for Shorten Spell Cool Down Time. Anything that allows the deciding factor in a battle, that being spells, to happen faster than your opponent is huge. She will eventually have the fastest Spell Cool Down Time, meaning she is dumping her spells at a faster rate and out DPSing her enemy.

The brutal part about a Succubus is she will really have the hardest time of the three Heroes when it comes to leveling. Especially at the lowest levels, but most players find her more difficult overall than the other two Heroes pretty much for their entire leveling days. The lowest levels are the worst as the spell all Heroes start with is a Melee strike spell and complete garbage to her. I feel it is like playing the game without an actual Hero for the first 14 levels or more compared to how huge of an impact the Behemoth makes on the battlefield while leveling and especially at his low levels. But the hard life and long chore of leveling a Succubus means that one day you do get to enjoy having the Spell Slinging Fool she certainly turns into and laughing as you turn the whole enemy battlefield into messy goo.

So Which Witch is Which?

No matter whom you choose as your Hero, the early levels can be frustrating. Think carefully as to the challenge you want and what you wish to become down the road, make a choice and if you find yourself not enjoying your Hero, the hit that reset button and try another.

The rest of the guide is going to focus less on Heroes and far more on general unit and building strategy. Assume when I write that if you are playing a Behemoth or Berserker, that you should be using your Hero in my lineup strategies how is best for the situation and the Hero in question. Behemoth should be a front line Hero, tanking and mauling away beside his grunts, slinging his melee strike spell as fast as the Cool Down is ready. The Berserker should for the most part act the same, but being selective and placing two Footmen in front of him as he has a range of two and can act like a big Troll. The Succubus is in the back of your pack, usually facing the Enemy Hero and slinging her range 7 attack, silent but ever present. The majority of the write up has the Succubus in mind as she is not a front line Hero during any early levels and the lineup are written thinking that all the 6 rows are full of units.

Important Concepts - Mechanics are Key

I will get into more depth on some of these things as we go along but I want to make some critical summary ideas here:

Resource management is the key. It is extremely important to understand Net Positive Battles, Net Loss Battles, Time Loss, Necessary Upgrades, Rate of Return and Battle Appraisal.
Net Positive Battle is when you gain more resources from a battle than you lose in lost units and Hero death.
Net Loss Battle is when you lose more resources in lost units and Hero death from a battle than you gain in Battle rewards.
Time Loss is the amount of time you lose in unit building for lost units from a battle effectively slowing down your progress and is serious factor in leveling speed.
Necessary Upgrades are upgrades that are critical to your progress and development AND in fielding the best lineup possible for your current level. Unnecessary Upgrades are the opposite and are a waste of resources and a slow down to your progress overall.
Rate of Return is your overall return over time in resources, time, experience, wheel spins etc for the expenditure you have made and is an appraisal number all players need to be good at calculating, especially prior to any battle.

Battle Appraisal is when you examine the Task or Arena battle before you and given the lineup you are going to field, to be able to predict the outcome in unit costs and in rewards (Rate of Return) and properly decide if this is a positive battle or a negative battle overall.
Protection from the Gods. This is an incredibly important aspect to realize. Up until Level 6, you are not able to be attacked by other players. However, this is the least important aspect of this protection. The real factor is that you will NOT lose your units that die in Arena battles! Because of this unique aspect, we have a situation that allows us to abuse the Arena at early levels to push forward our XP making from all other sources until later, generate resources and Wheel spins as all Battles prior to level 6 in the Arena are considered Net Positive Battles.
Battle Mechanics are important. It is hard to properly assess lineups and battles unless you have a firm grasp of battle mechanics, and at early levels, specifically Footman VS Troll and ranged units interactions.
The Task battles are "set".
The Arena Battles are derived from all the available units and Hero that your opponent has on hand by the game system and are organized by the "Auto" mechanic of the system to give you the enemy lineup. This actually works to your advantage as the system does not organize the units to the best effect, nor does it use "tricky" lineups.
Big battles are juicy for experience and reward level, but unless you handle those battles effectively, they can also be a detrimental loss of resources and time to your progress. Therefore, you should be always ready for those battles both with units on hand and proper strategy to minimize your own losses from these XP bags. Unfortunately, there is simply no way to bring in these big bags of XP effectively early in your leveling career.
There is no reason to not exit a Task Battle that you are losing and save units.

Rank Does NOT Matter - You are Power leveling, Not Power Ranking

You must understand that rank is a static thing. Being 57-0, while looking nice and certainly giving you a score of 570 in the Arena, is not much different than being 57-57 with a score of zero. The only thing rank does for you is determine your placing in the Weekly, Monthly and Overall Rank Score charts. It does not affect who your opponents will be. While you are leveling and certainly if power leveling is your thing, you should care very little about your score. Furthermore, taking losses early in your career in Little Empire is easily overcome later on when you are high level. When you are high level, your Wins in the Arena will be well over 10,000 in no time, so even taking 1000 losses in your leveling days means nothing. It is something you can pay back later and will end up paying back. In fact, by taking those losses, you are going to level faster and therefore be willing rank quicker.

You score is determined in the most simple sense that a Win gets you +10 and a Loss gets you -10, so every loss you take early just means you need to get 1 more Win later on. Again, getting 100+ Wins per day past level 20 is a fairly easy thing to do if you are a good player. Do not care about your losses. Care about leveling and gaining resources as fast and as effective as you can.

Hunting Noobs, Friendless Heroes and Doormats - Your Early Arena XP Targets

I am going to refer to Noob Hunting throughout the guide and it is important for new players to fully comprehend what this is. Each day in the Arena you are going to get a maximum amount of possible opponents. There is 6 matchups per Arena page. You get a certain amount of refresh pages, somewhere between 8-12 pages when you start the day depending on how fast you clear them, and then you hit the "Refresh Wall". This wall is where you try to get a new set of 6 battles listed and the system tells you that you have used up all your refreshes and you must wait 1 hour for another. At this point, you are now only getting 1 page or 6 battles per hour. Typically a player therefore only has about 20 pages available in a full day of playing from sun up to sun down assuming you sleep. So this means you can get 100-120 available battles per day. At later levels, it becomes very important to make sure you participate and win as many of these as you can. From Level 2-6 you must win and fight in as many of these battles as you can because you will lose no units. But at levels 6-8, it is simply not possible to win them all in a cost effective manner. Many of the battles will be losers to you as far as ROI.

Therefore, in order to get the maximum amount of XP and Wheel Spins when you are a low level player, you must hunt for the Noobs. These are Arena battles where the player does not have a decent army on hand or perhaps has no army and just a Hero. Many times, players who have quit the game have done so because they go wiped out at a lower level and gave up, leaving only their Hero left on hand. A Hero only battle will get you 96 Gold, 8 Crystal and 7 XP. It is not a lot, but considering how difficult it is to get resources, it is important nonetheless. It will still get you 200 XP to 300 XP a day just from Hero only Wins as well as it is getting you spins on the Wheel of Mojo, which are a critical source of Gold, Crystal, Mojo and Equipment. So Noob Hunting refers to going into every single battle offered to you, checking to see if the player is weak with units on hand or even just a Hero only and winning does battles without losing a single unit of your own. The battles that are non-Noob and will result in a loss of resources, bad ROI, you simply leave and take the loss. Do not try to guess which battles will be a loss or win by looking at the opponents Score, Rank or Win/Loss ratio. Even the players with zero losses could be without units or very low in units. It is not predictable and you need to check every battle and just forget about the loss and your score for now. You are leveling, not ranking up.

Level 2 - 6 - You are not leveling, you are gathering "easy" Mojo

Noob hunting is the Arena is the same at low levels whether you are level 2 or level 5 primarily in the sense that you will use 2-4 Footmen and/or 2 Trolls to kill the enemy Hero or any other effective combo to clear out the trash Hero with losing as little possible of your own units. However, what you must realize is that early in the game you have the rare opportunity to win these cost free easy fights at a higher than normal rate. Later, you will not find these dead Heroes so easily. In fact, each level you gain makes this hunting game harder and harder to maximize the number of Noobs you can roll over like this. Because the Wheel of Mojo does not change at higher levels, there is no advantage to being higher level when spinning it other than at much higher levels, you get access to better equipment. This means you have the same chance to win Mojo as a level 30 does on the Wheel. But until at least level 14, you will not be able to have any effective lineup that allows you win all the battles, gaining the maximum number of spins possible in a single day of Arena play. From level 6-14, it will take resources and time to even try to hit the refresh wall. And if you resort to Noob hunting at those levels, you will find far less easy matches and will not be getting those easy spins. In fact, until you are well above 14, you will not be able to run an entire board in the Arena over and over nonstop gaining the max number of spins. So what happens when you rush to level up at the beginning of the game? You literally are giving up spins and Mojo that you are never getting back. From level 6-14 you begin to lose units in battles and therefore begin an era of buying XP with Gold and Crystal via lost units.

In reality, if you could simply stay at level 3 as long as you want and max your searches for the easy fights in the Arena, say 120+ possible battles per day, you probably will find 100+ battles you can win. That means 100+ Spins on the Wheel. And you could do this every day for as long as you wanted, racking up Mojo so you could buy Spells for when you start into the 6-14 hard stretch and even more so, have a far better set up of spells than most people at 14+ and so on and so on. But you cannot do this because even an enemy Hero by himself gives you XP. You will get minimum 7 XP each fight. You need 400 XP to advance from level 3 to level 4. Even if you only fought Enemy Heroes that are alone, you would still level up after 55 fights or so. A good day of hunting along with throwing in the couple of Footmen and Troll XP kills where a Hero has 1 or 2 units with him would easily force you to level up.

This new idea of purposely NOT advancing in order to maximize our early Mojo hunting on the Wheel extends further into the other concept of saving all resource (Gold, Crystal) until level 6 or later. Because you are maximizing your Wheel spins and trying to not gain XP, then that means you are not losing units and not ineffectively buying XP for resources and gaining resources from the Spins to a maximum rate for the level you are advancing too. Later I will talk about how you are going to "buy" XP with resources, but do it in a far better ratio than is possible until level 8 or 9. You are saving everything possible, including tasks, gaining the maximum possible on Spins, getting as much Mojo as possible in those early days from the Wheel and waiting until you are forced to level to 8 or even 9 and then you flip the attitude and effectively buy XP by using your units to clear Arena fights, losing units in those fights, but winning the battle and getting the better XP for your expenses and losses. Because you have saved all these resources and gained more than the average player at level 8, you simply are going to power through the curve with the goal of achieving level 14 - the level where the entire dynamics of the game change forever because you get Mages and can use TTTMAP setup. Also at these levels, currently their is a heavy use by inexperienced players with Knights and Knight/Priest front lines, which TTTMA dominates over. And Knights are juicy XP. Life at 14+ is about using the proper lineup to roll the bad lineup and get the big xp rewards.

This means you do not do any Tasks that give XP until level 6 or later period. It includes the starter battle Tasks etc. Do as little Tasks as possible because especially at level 3, it is so little you need to advance. You need that XP at level 6+ when you are in spending mode.

Footmen and Trolls - The Grunts of the Early Levels

The field is thick with Footmen and Trolls for many of the early levels, likely until level 14 or so, they are the most common unit to see on the field and specifically they are the front line units for a long time. Furthermore, because the game system organizes the units based on what the player has on hand, it follows specific patterns at the early levels that are often highly predictable meaning you will see some specific "fat" battles quite often and exploit those lineups for maximum effect. It is not uncommon for a player from level 6 through 10 to have up to 60 units on hand composed primarily of all Footmen and Trolls. The depth of those lineups can vary and understanding the mechanics of these units with each other and against each other is important.

A Footman has 290 HP and does 22 damage to another Footman and 13 Damage to a Troll.
A Troll has 220 HP and does 9 Damage to a Footman and 30 Damage to another Troll.
A Footman takes 14 Hits to kill another Footman (no crits) and 17 Hits (no crits) to kill a Troll.
A Troll takes 32 hits to kill a Footman (no crits) and 8 Hits (no crits) to kill another Troll.
If a Troll and a Footman square off on the front lines, the Troll will get 1 bonus hit in before the footman steps into range and begins swinging.
Trolls can attack through one ally unit because it has range 2, effectively allowing you to double up DPS on the melee lines. The most common setup of course is a Footman followed by a Troll or a Troll followed by a Troll. These stacks are quite common at low levels and are key to understand in battle evaluations.
Stacking two Trolls, while effective VS a melee unit like a Footman, does not work VS another Troll or a ranged unit because the first Troll stops at range 2 and the second Troll has no range, therefore it is key to understand that two Trolls can never both attack another Troll at the same time.
If a Troll fights a Footman straight up, the Footman will win.
If a Footman/Troll combo fights a single Footman, the Footman will die in 10 hits.
If a Footman/Troll combo fights a single Troll, the Troll will die in 7 hits.
If a Footman fights a Troll/Troll combo, the Footman will die in 16 hits and likely live, but the first Troll will be almost dead.

From this fact, stacking Trolls effectively makes them equal to Footman, unit for unit. The end result however is +1 Trolls. 7 Footmen VS 7 Trolls will leave 1 Troll still alive. See this Battle Chart:

F

T

Furthermore, on the opening front line advance and after each unit on EITHER side dies, the Footman must advance and the Troll side gets an additional hit. In a 7 on 7 fight, you would end up getting about 13 or 14 free hits and coupled with the extra hit each near death Troll takes causing an additional 2 free hits by Trolls for 14 more, you are almost to the point of seeing 2 Trolls live in a 7 VS 7 fight. With Crits and chance involved, this happens. The real factor of this is when less numbers of Footmen fight VS Trolls, often the end result is Troll being alive +1 on the stack even in small numbers with an additional Troll alive with some HP left to press on.

These points are useful in evaluating early battles in your history because other than Archers, it is grunt on grunt warfare. Because of how people have oodles of Trolls and Footman on hand, this comprises the field. We will see all Footman packs ranging from 4 to 30 Footman. All Troll packs ranging from 4 to 30 Trolls etc. Sometimes a mixture of Footman and Trolls. A very common sight is a row of Footmen followed by a horde of Trolls.

Lets examine the following battle scenario:

T

F

T

The first thing that occurs is the Player A lineup advances and the Player B Troll gets off a free hit. However, on round 7 of the fight, Player B loses the first Troll. Player A lineup advances allowing the footman to get hit for free by the Trolls a second time, pushing his death to round 15 and basically causes the second Troll and the Footman to die at the same time. As you can see then, the Footman + 6 Trolls VS Trolls is already ahead by 1 Troll after 16 rounds of combat and we have only gone through the opening units AND the step up effect of the Footman has not been a factor that is overwhelming the numbers balance of units. This is not a cost effective scenario as you are losing too many units to win the row. In a full on stacked battle of this nature, you will lose more in resources and time building than you gain in resource reward and XP. So using a pure line of Trolls or a pure line of Footmen is never a winning strategy to your advancing. Bad ROI.

So far we have learned that in a Footman Stack VS a Troll Stack, The Trolls slowly creep up as winners around the Stack size 6-7 rate for 1 Troll. The Footman leading Troll Stack gains by 1 Troll very early in the battle and then goes equal Troll for Troll. Again this ends up being a virtual mirror fight, so like using pure stacks, using a Footman led Troll stack is also an overall losing situation and a very bad ROI.

Next we must evaluate the one feature of the Footman led Troll stacks that seemed positive VS the pure stack, that is using Footman/Troll repeating combos.

Have a look at this scenario:

T

F

T

F

T

F

The first enemy Footman will die on round 10. Our Footman will die on round 14 having done 4 hits to the second Footman. This leaves about 200 HP on their second Footman who then advances into a free hit. The Troll needs about 21 more hits to kill the second Footman so this has the result of us losing a Footman and a Troll to his 2 Footmen and worse off, his Footman advances and gets a few shots in on our next Footman. So VS the stack of Footmen, the stacked Footman/Troll combo is actually losing us ground slowly. True? Not exactly. Because we fight with 2 units for half the fight who can crit and they fight with only 1 unit that can crit, we are actually going to out damage him and our stack is going to win. The crit rate will actually give you about a 15% to 20% advancement on him and will result in being about +1 units after the dust settles. Again, not a good ROI. So while this is another guaranteed win situation, it is not a profitable situation for what we get out of the battle in resources and XP. Next VS Troll Stack:

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

On round 7 the first enemy Troll dies. Our Footman has taken roughly 16 Troll hits by the time he advances on the second Troll. This makes him half dead. He then will kill another Troll in 7 more hits and die by the time he engages the Third Troll. Troll 3 and our Troll 1 now fight straight up and typically kill each other. Now our next Footman/Troll combo is up to bat and they proceed, all things being equal, to kill 2 Trolls. Now enemy Troll 6 and our Troll 2 fight to the death and our third Troll combo destroys their final Troll without a loss. We have lost 2 Footmen and 2 Trolls and he has lost 7 Trolls. For a cost of 340 Gold and 40 Crystal and 10 minutes build time, we have gained 98 Gold, 21 Crystal and about 12 XP. Despite this feeling like a good win, we have not managed to get ahead at all; we have lost Gold and Crystal and build time. 250 Gold, 20 Crystal and 10 minutes build time to make 12 XP is a seriously bad ROI.

So what have we learned here? It is simple. Footmen/Troll melee based battles are all bad ROI, no matter what the setup or stack is. Even with a Behemoth helping the situation to lean towards a more positive gains VS loss ratio, it still ends up being a complete slowdown for the XP you are generating to ever engage in melee combat except the fights that are CLEAR CUT one sided wins. These are the battles with only a Hero on the enemy side or 1 to 12 units that will crumble BEFORE you take any losses. I wanted to illustrate the importance of this because it is such a reverse grind to make the mistake of trying to level up in the Arena at lower levels in this way. Now we can proceed to find out what we should be doing to get going as fast as possible and to give ourselves the best advantage and resources, especially Mojo right from the first day we start playing. What you do in the start has a huge impact on things later.

Level 1 - Tutorial...or not...

You start the game at Level 1 with 35,000 Gold, 3000 Crystal and 25 Mojo. Prior to the Tutorial beginning you have 1 Castle, 1 Maple Tree, 1 House, 1 Lottery/Casino building and 1 Hero Temple.

The Tutorial does the following:

Build a Barracks. (2,000 Gold spent)

Build 2 Footmen. (160 Gold spent)
Speed up Footmen build time. (1 Mojo spent)
Pick your Hero.
Fight in a large battle with units you cannot even build at this time and complete a Tutorial Battle Task.
Receive a Battle Reward: 1410 Gold, 390 Crystal, 168 XP.
Receive "Save the Castle" Task Reward: 100 Gold, 20 Crystal, 250 XP and 1 Mojo.
Achieve level 2 because of this.
If you complete the Tutorial this way, you have roughly 34,390 Gold, 3411 Crystal, 25 Mojo and you are 218/300 XP at Level 2.
If you skip the Tutorial, you are Level 2 with 0/300 XP.

Therefore, if you know how to play the game, you should SKIP the tutorial. You get over 300XP from the Mock Battle with the Quest Reward and this does need to be avoided.

Level 2 - Hello World

We are going to focus on not getting XP. we are focusing on getting resources and Mojo. We are avoiding any and all Tasks that give XP as a reward. We are doing this in Arena battles, rolling Dead players and Noobs and Lonely Heroes.

At Level 2:

Skip the tutorial. You start with 35,000 Gold, 3,000 Crystal and 25 Mojo.
You start with Castle, House, Maple Tree, Hero Temple and Lottery Building.
Build 1 House. Population max 20 now.
Build 1 Barracks.
Recruit 18 Footmen.
Do NOT build anything else.
Do NOT do Tasks at all including "A Great Legacy". Yes you will be Player2473847238473blahetcblah for now.
Fight in Arena Battles until level 3.

The Arena battles will be very basic and you might actually win every single one at this level. Simply stack more Footmen of your own in a line +1 Footmen compared to the opponent's line. So if he has 1 Footmen, you put 2 Footmen in your line facing him. For the Hero:

If playing Succubus, place her in the back row facing Enemy Hero. Put a Quad (2x2) Footman on the enemy Hero. If the Enemy Hero has Footmen in his rows as well, then you must place the same amount of Footmen he has to match those Footmen +1 extra of your own.
If playing Behemoth and facing Berserker or Succubus, go man to man with the Enemy Hero. If facing another Behemoth, place 2 Footmen in front of your Behemoth.
If playing Berserker and fighting another Berserker or Succubus, place 2 Footmen in front of your Hero facing the enemy Hero. If fighting Behemoth, place 4 Footmen in front of your Hero facing the Enemy Hero.

Within 20 to 25 Arena battles, you will level to 3.

Level 3 - This has been Easy!

Level 3 is going to be very similar to Level 2 in concept. We are still avoiding Tasks and XP making with the idea to Level in the Arena and maximize our Wheel Spins and resource making. So at level 3:

Do not do the Task about Naming Yourself "A Great Legacy" as it is worth 300 XP and we do NOT want this XP now.
Build another House. Population max 30 now.
At Level 3 Upgrade the Barracks. (Cost: 500 Gold, 200 Crystal)
Build 4 more Footmen.
Continue to Level via the Arena only using the advice and strategy given in the "Level 2" section.
Once your barracks is upgraded, Build 5 Trolls, then 5 More Trolls then 2 more Trolls for a total of 12.
You now have 18 Footmen and 12 Trolls.
Note: Because you have not unlocked the "Recruit Trolls" Task by avoiding the other Noob Tasks, you will not accidently gain the XP for this Task. So it is safe to recruit Trolls.
Once you have Trolls, you can incorporate them into your Arena battles. On all Enemy Heroes, now use Footmen Troll Combo X2 to roll the Heroes. You can pretty much set up your battles as you wish, but be sure you DO NOT LOSE battles as this is a stupid waste of a Battle! You still do not lose units that die nor take the Hero Death Penalty if your Hero dies, so all that matters in each battle is that you win the battle and get your Wheel Spin.
Be aware that while you should be able to win almost every battle with 20 Footmen and 10 Trolls that you encounter, the larger the battle (certainly the more Trolls they have, the more XP), the more XP you will end up earning and this can end up meaning you get a few less wheel spins than if you avoided those. Choice is yours here.
Do not do or build anything this guide has not told you to do.
Noob Hunt and Wheel Spin until you are forced to level to 4.

With the Trolls added, you can now use Footmen/Troll combo and should use that is your front two lines, followed by the remaining Footmen and Hero as you feel best. Does not matter where you place the Hero really as the units alone will roll your opponent 99% of the time. Example of your line:

H

F

T

F

T

F

Level 4 - Same Same but Different!

By now you fully understand I hope that resources are going to be so important in a few more levels and you are being extremely careful with them. You are Noob Hunting in the Arena with your small force looking for those Noob scores, dead players and Lonely Heroes.

At Level 4 you should:

Do NOT build another Barracks. Do NOT upgrade your existing Barracks. You have 1 Barracks capable of building Footmen and Trolls and you are NOT unit cranking so it is not needed to have anything further.
Do NOT upgrade your land size until you cannot possibly build the things I have told you to build. Squeeze everything in as tight as you can. You should not need to upgrade land size at this time.
Build another House. Population max 40 now.
Recruit 4 more Trolls and 4 more Footmen.
You should have: 1 Castle (9x9), 4 Houses (3x3), 1 Barracks (Upgraded to Level 2) (5x5), 1 Casino/Lottery (5x5), 1 Hero Temple (5x5) and 1 Maple Tree (3x3).
You should have 22 Footmen and 16 Trolls.
Continue to Noob Hunt in Arena. Keep focusing on Spinning the Wheel of Mojo and earning Mojo and resources in a positive and easy way. You are trying to maximize your Noob Hero kills and Wheel of Mojo spins.
Do not do or build anything this guide has not told you to do.
Noob Hunt and Wheel Spin until you are forced to level to 5.

Now you can produce the full lineup as follows. Again this is what a Succubus should use, but really you can fit your Hero in as you feel best and keep the unit lineup intact with the proper idea and strategy, or just put your Behemoth or Berserker at the back:

H

F

T

F

T

F

H

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

T

F

Level 5 - Here Come the Archers...Or NOT!

While you get access to Archers and the Shooters Range at Level 5, believe it or not, you are going to avoid building this structure or recruiting Archers at all at this time.

If you are following my guide to the exact letter, then you already understand where your XP comes from, the Arena and that you do not want any XP from Tasks etc. Building a Shooters Range has a hidden Task reward. Even though it will not list Build: Shooters Range as a task, if you build one, you will complete a Quest that gives you some Gold, Crystal 80 XP and 1 Mojo. But we can do this later when the easy Arena XP making system comes to an end. At Level 5, you are still under protection and therefore your Units do not get taken from you when they die during battle. So in effect you are simply going to keep playing the game exactly like you did at Level 4. There is no difference to your method of operation. Furthermore, if following my guide, you could not even Recruit Archers at this time as you have no population available.

At Level 4 you should:

Do NOT build another Barracks. Do NOT upgrade your existing Barracks. You have 1 Barracks capable of building Footmen and Trolls and you are NOT unit cranking so it is not needed to have anything further.

Do NOT upgrade your land size until you cannot possibly build the things I have told you to build. Squeeze everything in as tight as you can. You should not need to upgrade land size at this time.

You should have: 1 Castle (9x9), 4 Houses (3x3), 1 Barracks (Upgraded to Level 2) (5x5), 1 Casino/Lottery (5x5), 1 Hero Temple (5x5) and 1 Maple Tree (3x3).

You should have 22 Footmen and 16 Trolls.

Continue to Noob Hunt in Arena. Keep focusing on Spinning the Wheel of Mojo and earning Mojo and resources in a positive and easy way. You are trying to maximize your Noob Hero kills and Wheel of Mojo spins.

Do not do or build anything this guide has not told you to do.

Noob Hunt and Wheel Spin until you are forced to level to 6.

Level 6 - Here Come The Archers...No...Really...It is Time!

Things change now. You are going to build the Shooters Range. You can build Archers! Time to roll...or not!

Furthermore, you lose your Protection of the Gods now. You can be attacked by other players and you can LOSE units. Yes the units you lose in the Arena battles are gone. So what this means is you are now actually in a position if you want, to spend resources (via unit loss) to buy XP in battles. This means we need to be evaluating how much the XP costs. Certainly spending 500 Gold and 100 Crystal in a battle through losing units in order to make 12 XP is ridiculous. So we are going to evaluate just how we can best clear the XP bags out and lose the lowest costing units. However, the truth of the matter is, you should be avoiding making XP still at this time and maximizing the Wheel Spins you can get. So we are tending to still give up the Loss and leave the big fights to avoid making XP.

When players first get Archers, they seem to get bloodlust and feel now they can set up some sick lineups that will roll all opponents and allow them to start netting big battles full of units and XP. This is NOT true. While the Archers offer some great additional Front Line DPS options, they are not capable of bringing any kind of "run infinite" setup no matter how many you have built.

Examine the following scenario:

A

T

F

T

The Archers in slot 3 and 4 will be firing on the enemy footman for the opening battle as they have range 4 and 5 once the two footmen meet. This will bring an extra 10 damage per round on the enemy footman. This will cause that Footman to die in round 7 (no crits) and all your units are alive but your footman is going down in about 4 more rounds maximum. The Enemy Troll will take about 60 damage a round as the Archer in slot 3 will sit at range 5 and your slot 4 archer will no longer fire. The enemy Troll will die around the same time as your Footman does. Now your Troll is fighting a fresh Troll at range 2 and 1 Archer only is adding to the damage heap. This third enemy Troll is taking 48 damage per round and will die in 4-5 rounds, your Troll collapses in 7-8 rounds. Basic premise here is that you will kill 2 more enemy Trolls before your Troll is dead. You have killed a Footman and 3 Trolls and lost a Footman and a Troll. Rolling forward, the last three enemy Trolls roll into the Archer firing squad and face almost 80 damage a round when they are at the Archers feet. Remember, the last Archer will never fire a shot because he has no range, the Trolls stop at range 2 on the Archer. Now the first of these last three Trolls is lucky if he gets a hit off, assume he lands one shot for 30, then the next one lands 2 shots for 30 if not 3 and so does his final Troll. This results 99% of the time in you losing 1 Archer as well.

You have lost Footman (80), Troll (90, 20) and Archer (200, 50) for total cost of 370 Gold and 70 Crystal. Killing a Footman and 6 Trolls gets you 96 Gold and 18 Crystal total rewards. Even in the scenario where the enemy has less than 6 Trolls in his line, you are still in the situation where you lost 170 Gold and 20 Crystal to get 82 Gold and 15 Crystal. So while you have lost resources and this is a Net Loss Battle, we must always be evaluating how much XP we gained through the loss.

In fact, to pull profit using this scheme, we need the enemy line to be as follows and your lineup as follows:

A

T

F

T

In this setup, you lose no units and he loses Footman and a Troll. Your cost is zero and you gain 26 Gold and 3 Crystal + XP. So we know that if an Enemy has the Footman Troll stack only, then we should attack and profit, but otherwise, it is a loss if he has any deeper units. Even with good crits and killing 1 more Troll in the stack, does not come close to making it profitable to go any deeper than Footman, Troll on the enemy side.

Our other possible setup would be to not use a Footman. Examine this setup:

A

T

F

T

The Footman advances into us and we have both Trolls and 3 Archers firing all guns. We are looking at 30+ damage per round on the Footman. Furthermore, we have 5 possible units that can crit to his two units. We should estimate then our damage at 35 per round including the crit imbalance. 8 Rounds to kill the Footman. His Footman and Troll will kill our Troll in about 7 rounds. Then we have Troll on Troll action and we are only firing at that Troll with our own Troll and 2 Archers due to range. With crit advantage, we are striking at about 70 per round, killing the Troll in 3 rounds. In the time it takes for him to kill 1 Troll, we kill 2 of his then lose our Troll. Once again though, we are in a losing scenario because the profit does not come close to the loss as we have lost units. So despite this seeming to be a good win, we lost resources, Net Loss and a bad ROI.

So matter what the situation, if the enemy has Footman and Troll combo + more units, it is a loser for us.

Now how deep can we go with other setups before we lose profit?

In this scenario (Footman Stack):

A

T

F

Here we have the enemy Footman taking 40 damage per round and facing 4X crits to the 1 of his. So we estimate total damage per round to be 45 on the low end per round. It has him dying 6-7 rounds into the fight while killing our Footman 13 rounds into the fight. This means that we are going to kill 2 Footman as he kills our 1 Footman. Past this however, his third Footman will be taking about 35 damage per round with crit imbalance, dying in about 8 rounds but taking 16 or 17 rounds to kill the Troll. Typically before our Troll dies, 2 more of his Footman have died. However, because we have lost a Footman and a Troll at this point, we will end up with a Net Loss in this stack up despite the situation that appears to us to be us winning man to man. The only time to make this plunge is when he only has 2 Footmen and then we should simply use:

A

T

F

We play the odds of crits and most times we lose no Footman and over the long run it is profitable.

Against the Troll Stack we discover:

A

T

F

T

We are hammering out 80 per round on the first Troll. He dies clearly in 3 rounds, sometimes 2. Our Footman is going to take 16 rounds for him to die. Each death on either side will allow the Trolls to gain a half round jump on the free hit. However, after the first enemy Troll dies, our second Archer stops firing. We are now doing 60 per round instead of 80. 6 more Trolls will take 22 rounds to kill. So this is too much as we will see death of our Footman and a Troll.

So we simply must drop to stacks of 4 Trolls deep maximum to avoid losing the Footman. Even with the free hits the Trolls get, 4 free hits total of half round gain, the crit imbalance will give the Footman a good chance of still being alive after all 4 Trolls are dead. So finally we have the single and only scenario where we can clear a semi loot bag. 4 Trolls is worth 56 Gold and 12 Crystal. We have nice ROI.

Do not get confused and think though that the following is the same as the above theory:

A

T

F

T

Trying to counter a Troll stack led by a Footman by adding a Footman at the start of our stack will not result in a profitable outcome via trying to offset Footmen losses at the start as a Footman death costs 8 times as much as we gain off their Footman death and our margin is far too tight to be engaging in this trade off.

Therefore we know that VS the melee setups we always are using:

A

T

F

Using this setup, we know we will only fight Footman + Troll, Footman + Footman OR Troll Stack of 4 or higher provided it is only Troll in the enemy stack.

The last thing to consider is how Archers in a Troll stack impact the scenario:

A

T

F

T

A

We are looking at about 30 damage or 10 rounds until the Footman dies. As Trolls die, the damage only drops per round as this will extend the life of the Footman. It will take 3 rounds to kill the first Troll and the second Troll then drops into the range where the last Archer have in the stack loses range. This will cause the second enemy Troll to take 4 rounds to die. Our Footman is half dead at this point and taking 5 to 25 damage a round depending on how many Archers are in the stack at any given time. We are doing 60 damage per round, so taking 3 rounds with crit to kill an Archer. At this rate, we expect the Footman to die about the same time 2 more Archers are killed. Life of the Footman is only extending as Trolls die and Archers die. However, the Footman will die around the time that 2 Trolls and 2 Archers are dead. If there are three more archers in the stack, then you will lose a Troll as well but kill yet another Archer and have the second last Archer weakened. Now you break into Archer VS Archer because of range, finish the second last Archer and see your Archer die to his last Archer and then your second Archer, who has done little since the start of the fight finish him off. Also if they have more Trolls and less Archers, then it actually swings further in your favour. Your cost in this scenario: Footman (80), Troll (90, 20) and Archer (200, 50). Total cost: 370 Gold and 70 Crystal. Total gained: 188 Gold and 46 Crystal. A losing ROI. So in this case we are trying to not lose that 1 Archer ever on our team and avoid the negative ROI, we would only attack the Troll/Archer Stack if the total stack is 6 or less. We are hoping for 1 Troll + 5 Archers or 2 Trolls + 4 Archers as this produces the most ROI for us, although not a lot, it includes XP and Archers are better XP than Trolls are.

Therefore any Stack that begins with Trolls and has Archers of any number following that are 6 Total units on the stack or less should be attacked using the FTAA formation as it results in XP (Archers are worth 4 each) and resources that outstrip your loss.

The same situation applies for an Archer Stack:

A

T

F

A

It is the same situation here, because 5 Archers only does 25 Damage per round to the Footman, so he will go 11 Rounds while your setup takes 2 rounds to kill the first Archer. You then lose your second Archer from the DPS stack and take about 3 rounds to kill an Archer going forward. If there are 7 Archers total, you kill an Archer Round 2, Round 5, Round 8 and down the 4th Archer as the Footman dies. The fifth Archer takes 4 rounds to die from your Troll/Archer. The sixth Archer takes 4 rounds to kill. The seventh Archer takes 4 rounds to kill. You will kill all 7 Archers and lose a Footman and probably your Troll (170 Gold, 20 Crystal total) and 7 Archers are worth 224 Gold and 56 Crystal as well as 28 XP.

A final note regarding using Behemoth and Berserker Heroes is that you must consider that any scenario where I indicate that your Footman and Troll die before clearing the stack to be a bad situation for your Hero as by no means at this level does he equal 2 Footmen and 2 Trolls in HP. I would be very cautious about what you do and where you place him as he takes 4 spots and will end up taking the full brunt of the damage meant for those Footmen and Trolls in these scenarios and likely not deal as much damage as the Footman/Troll combo does. He also costs you 600 Gold and 50 Crystal to rise from the dead after battle. Please be careful. In some cases, with the Behemoth in particular (because Berserker can be placed behind two Footmen and replace two Trolls and the dead spot at slot 3), you are best to sit your Hero out of the battle or in the back lines, similar to a Succubus. It is up to you to evaluate the exact means of how you Hero will fit into the situation. A Hero can only be useful in the front lines at this early stage when it is a guaranteed win or if you actually have your Hero to the point where he can deal as much damage as two Trolls and two Footmen and take more damage than all there HP combined. Since that is 1020 HP, then even once you regulate for his defense and the way that he takes less damage than a Footman and a Troll, you still may find him not up to par with what is being asked of him.

Because we are actively seeking the Troll Stack(4 or less) and the Troll/Archer Mixed Stack(6 or less) and the Archer Stack(can be full), this means we are going to run into a scenario now where we are losing Footmen and Trolls in ROI positive battles. Therefore we need to maximize build times at this level and need a second Barracks. Furthermore, because we want to have a battle team of 6 Footmen and 6 Trolls as well as 12 Archers, we need a population count higher than 20. In fact, we should be building 2 Footmen and 2 Trolls constantly (not 5 at a time, 1-2 at a time) and banking 4-6 of each or more in case we run into a good pack of Troll/Archer type stacks. We do not want to have to wait for the units we lose from Net Positive battles and face downtime. Therefore we need to have all 5 houses now that we can build.

To recap this concept, much of the Archer tech information above is meant to enlighten and help those players power leveling using resources from high level friends. Most players should be avoiding making XP at this time and therefore are still looking for the stacks of two or less units on the enemy side. Furthermore, you are going to lose the odd Footman or two in some battles using FTAA lineup. However, you have a lot of extra Footmen as you are only fielding 6 Footmen in any battle. And the loss of the Footmen will easily be made up in the gain of resources in those fights and be Net Positive. If you fall below 6 Footmen, build more to stay at 6+ Footmen.

At level 6:

Build houses until you have 5 (Should be 1 more)

Expand you land only if you cannot fit all the things I have told you to build. You should not need to do this.

You should have: 1 Castle (9x9), 5 Houses (3x3), 1 Barracks (Upgraded to LVL2) (5x5), 1 Maple Tree (3x3), 1 Shooters Range, 1 Casino/Lottery Building (5x5) and 1 Hero Temple (5x5).

Continue to Noob Hunt in Arena. You are now hunting Weak line Stacks (2 or less units) using the FTAA lineup avoiding making XP.

Do not build a prison. You do not need this yet. The Tasks rewards for doing this and other PVP things is not important at this time. You cannot afford to spend the Gold on a prison. You want to avoid XP rewards associated with building a prison as well.

As you approach level 7, upgrade your Shooters Range to Level 2.

Level 7 - Ninjas, Ninjas and more Ninjas!

The Ninja is a wonderful unit and in some ways is your salvation as it now allows you more options related to the Arena battles you can handle. Furthermore, you will most likely encounter many battles in the Arena against lower level players and players of same level or higher who simply have run out of resources because they spent it all on very illogical things and kept fighting in bad ROI battles, bleeding dry by level 7 and having to wait for resources to come in. In other words, you are going forward in a positive way and have the ability to continue this trend while 90% of the field has been going backwards and is struggling to upgrade their army and pay for it.

It just may be the first sweet spot you find where you feel you are kicking more ass than most playing against you. Let’s find out how we maximize this.

First thing when you level is to upgrade your Shooters range to Level 3 and when it is completed, you have access to Ninjas. Now go ahead and build 5 Ninjas, then a 6th Ninja so you have 6 Ninjas on your team.

Now examine this stack:

A

N

T

F

Because Ninja has range 4, he fits into the third slot perfectly. Now after the stack moves forward, he sits at range 4 and the Archer behind him sits at range 5. This means your DPS stack now has 4 units firing at all times. Furthermore, your Ninjas deal "normal" attack damage, which means Footmen are more susceptible to this damage, in fact taking 10 damage from them. Next feature of Ninjas is that they hit additional targets. They can hit up to three targets; this means the target in front of them, the target above and the target below. So in the following chart:

A

N

T

F

A

N

T

F

A

N

T

F

A

N

T

F

A

N

T

F

A

N

T

F

The Ninjas in Rows 2, 3, 4 and 5 are going to hit 3 targets each. The Ninjas in Row 1 and 6 are going to hit 2 targets each. The Enemy Footmen in Rows 2, 3, 4 and 5 are taking 30 damage per round from Ninjas. Enemy Footmen in Row 1 and 6 are going to take 20 damage per round. It is important to understand how the outside rows are taking less damage and in fact, often I am using the outside row damage in examples to be sure the stacks are clean through all rows for you and not pushing the outside rows into a net loss situation. So for example sake, we are going to cite Ninjas as doing "double damage" per round to targets, when in many cases they are doing triple damage.

What does this lineup do to the Footman/Troll Combo?

A

N

T

F

T

It levels the Enemy Footman in 5 Rounds flat. 4 rounds actually in Rows 2,3,4 and 5. Our Footman is half dead. It them goes on to level the Troll in 3 rounds and our Footman is 2/3 dead. How far can it keep going like this?

Against the Footman Troll combo Stack:

A

N

T

F

T

In all reality it is going to kill the Footman and kill 3 Trolls before our Footman has died. Now after this we will see the Troll we have tank up and handle seeing two more enemy Trolls die, leaving his final Troll who will need to step into the Ninja who sits at range 4 and be getting nailed by a Ninja and 2 to 3 Archers. Whatever the case of Archers, you need only two because his Troll cannot kill your Ninja as he closes and attacks from a Ninja + 2 Archers. The last Archer is overkill. And this is the outside Row scenario. The inside Rows are only going to handle easier. Regardless, without any Enemy Archers in the mix, this is still a loss scenario on the outside rows BUT when you consider that the inside rows often see our Troll living until the end + Hero reward of 96 gold and some crystal and the XP, even this mix results in positive ROI.

But primarily want you want to see is opponents using less than full boats. Stacked Footmen, Trolls and Archers on any mixture are now feeling the heat and you are finding that your new lineup can clear most compositions of those three enemy units especially when they are not optimally organized and Archer heavy. But it is often the case because we see:

A

N

T

F

T

A

This was something we would have avoided before because it was the mirror of our old lineup and therefore all mirrors at low levels are a disaster for us. Does the Ninja added to our mix change the outcome to our favor? We know his Footman is dead in 5 rounds and we know his Troll collapses 3 more rounds later. At this time our Footman will die. Now we are killing Archers at 3 rounds each and our Troll is dead in 2 or 3 rounds. Troll dies, Archer dies. Now we are in the ranged battle of our Ninja/Archer VS his Archer/Archer only because of range. We are doing 32 per round on his Archer and they are doing 12 per round to our Ninja. It takes 7 rounds for our team to kill an Archer and 18 rounds for the Archers to kill a Ninja. It is a close race to the finish here if he has stacked Footman, Troll and 5 Archers, anything else is a win for us, even on the outside rows and on the inside rows, it is a win for us anyhow. Given some good crits along the way, we will nail this fight as a total battle. What will happen in the total battle is we lose 6 Footmen (480), 6 Trolls (540, 120) and 2 Ninjas (600, 120) and we will get 1116 Gold (never mind hero interaction for a moment), so therefore we CANNOT lose a Ninja in a fight and we cannot fight a FULL stack in this way.

You will find using FTNAA lineup can do very well against any Footman/Troll/Archer mix 5 or less deep. So that is what we are looking for now. 6 Deep is getting hairy and 7 deep is going to be a loser. So at level 7 we are still Noob hunting, looking for non full fields, especially those 5 or less deep and playing smart, letting the fatter XP off groups that have archers along with the gold and the crystal.

A big point now is that you must never take a battle that is risky to your costly assets and you must always field the full FTNAA lineup AND still be careful about your Hero as his or her death can cost dearly. And again, you are not rich. You are going to need all the gold and crystal you have been saving and preserving to keep going forward at an accelerated rate.

At Level 7:

You should have: 1 Castle (9x9), 5 Houses (3x3), 1 Barracks (Upgraded to LVL2) (5x5), 1 Maple Tree (3x3), 1 Shooters Range (Upgraded to LVL3), 1 Casino/Lottery Building (5x5) and 1 Hero Temple (5x5).

Continue to Noob Hunt in Arena. You are now hunting Weak line Stacks (2 or less units), Troll Stacks(4 or less units), Archer Stacks(7 or less) and Troll/Archer mixed stacks(6 or less) using the FTNAA lineup unless you are trying to maximize your Noob Hero kills and Wheel of Mojo spins. If that is the case, then you are ONLY fighting Enemy Heroes with little or no extra units present, avoiding making XP. You should still use FTNA lineup in order to effectively avoid losing Footmen. At this point, you should never lose a Footmen using FTNA VS Footman/Troll, Footman/Footman or Troll/Troll.

Level 8 - More of the Same...

Level 8 you can build a house but you do not need to do this. All you keep doing is grinding forward exactly the same as you had been in level 7 and do NOT waste your money chasing XP, fighting battles you lose valuable resources like a Ninjas or a Hero and keep trying to do the Tasks that are obviously easy and do not force you to wipe and spend money for nothing. You should begin to step up your efforts to "buy" XP as the Noob Heroes will now be far less. Toy with it though. Some days you might get lucky and hit a lot of them. Point is, you can begin to focus on leveling to 9 now and should do all the Battle Tasks you can do.

Level 9,10,11 - Priests are Here, All is Saved! No...

Up until now I have not endorsed the concept of spending resources to buy XP. Simply because it was not an effective strategy VS the field based on how little XP Footmen and Trolls give and big battles that included Archers would still cost far too many expensive units for the XP gained.

But at Level 9 the amount of XP needed to Level is now creeping into a larger area and simply looking for the easy juicy rollovers in the Arena is a seriously slow grind. Finally your resource saving and skimping is going to be utilized to buy XP. Yes we are going to have to lose lower costing units in order to get to the meat. And the meat is Archers and Ninjas and even other Priests.

Consider:

A Footman is worth 1 XP

A Troll is worth 1.5 XP

An Archer is worth 4 XP

A Ninja is worth 5 XP

A Priest is worth 6 XP

Archers are actually the juiciest XP on the field when it comes down to it. They have 190HP and wear cloth. Pound for pound, they are the prime target when it comes to buying XP in the Arena. The more Archers the Enemy has, the happier we are as it takes less effort to kill an Archer than it does to kill a Footman or a Troll. The problem is, the Archer body of XP is usually preceded by a few Footmen and Trolls. The system organizes Archers to the back, same as players would.

So what is our concept here now? We must sacrifice units that are cost effective in an effort to clear the way to the Archers and kill all the Archers and we must try our best to lose as little amount of units as possible once we are working over the Archers. One of the worst things facing us in this problem is advancing our units. The most ideal thing we could ever have when facing an enemy archer pack is to have them advancing into us as moving takes time and allows free hits and causes their ranks to be disorganized. Furthermore a row of Priests is most effective when it is healing a non-moving line. In Archer VS Archer warfare, when the line advances towards archers, the first target to break range 5 will be fired upon by 3 Archers, the one in his row, the one above the row and the one below. So this makes things quite difficult if one of our Archers advances into his Archer pack with a Priest in tow. The idea would be to have our Priest heal our Archer in one on one combat and their Archer gets no healer, we are doing 18 Damage to him and he is doing 18 to us and we are getting healed for 15, a net loss of 3, allowing our Archer to live a long time. A second perk of this concept would be Enemy Trolls advancing into a wall of our own Archers trying to close range. A troll trying to close range on 5 rows of Archers will be dead before he makes it to land the first blow.

So we have some key concepts to understand. With a load of Enemy footmen, TPNN will clear a huge amount of Footmen rows. Perhaps even 7 rows worth. You may even end up seeing all your units winning. Against a huge gathering of Ninjas, a simple NP will be devastating to them. NPNP will clear a full screen of ninjas. These scenarios do not happen that often but they do occur and do occur with a variation of units. So when looking at an XP bag, you have to think, "How will I clear the front and get to the meat. Then how will I clear the meat and lose as few costly units as possible?” We know that AP will beat AAAAA time and time again. We know NP will beat NNN quite easily. We know FT will drill down 3 rows of Trolls before the footmen start to die. We know FTNA will clear out FTTT as the Footmen fall. Therefore, we can quickly plan battle successions to gain all the XP and win the big house with a proper formation and that we can predict our losses quite easily.

For example, a common vision at this level has been FTTNNAA. Because many players at our level need those units in even amounts, often in the Arena we see a mixture of exactly that. The game always tried to place the units in mass order. Never in an effective order, so this is why you would rarely face FTFT, but face FFTT. So when we are facing the fat mix and yes we really want that Ninja and Archer XP, you must sacrifice to get it. But let’s be as effective as we cal as Footmen and Trolls cost way less and build way faster. Ninjas do surprisingly well against Archers because of the additional hits and the fact they do not wear cloth. And most likely when we lose a Ninja, the Priest healing him jumps to heal another Ninja, making the line harder to kill as we lose units. We lose DPS but we do not lose the line. Because Priests will not advance into the dead ninja’s space, because he is chain healing the next Ninja, we do not suddenly face a Priest death. So against the mix bag of FTTNNAA a simple FTNP is going to clear into the last Archers and most of the time, clear the field. I used to put FTNPAP figuring if the Ninja line dies, then I need Archers to finish the last few of his that managed to live. But that does not happen and also requires me to hold 12 Priests on hand, which is just too much population to waste on them. For security we simply put FTNPA in place. This will hold the mixed bag together and take it down effectively and will net 70 to 100 XP depending on the mixture. Remember however, if he has Priests in his own mix, the whole game changes. Now typically I predict a loss here of 6 Footmen, 6 Trolls and 6 Ninjas, which often is not the case, typically it is 3 Ninjas and a Priest. It has a cost of about 2000 Gold and 600 Crystal. Expect a reward that will cut the cost of lost units in half. So we are paying about 12-14 Gold and 3-4 Crystal per XP point using our effective measures here. So if we use no Tasks for XP (which you should be along the way at this point when effective and desired), we would find we should have an effective "Buy XP cost" as follows:

Level 9 needs 2500 XP - 30,000 Gold and 7,500 Crystal Minimum. However, because of Task XP, Daily Quests XP and "easy win" XP, I predict an effective cost at 2/3 to be 20,000 Gold and 5,000 Crystal. It should take winning 25 total full XP battles (75XP - 80XP) each. At a churn rate of 10 minutes a battle, it can be done in less than 5 hours of nonstop play.

Level 10 needs 3200 XP - 38,400 Gold and 9,600 Crystal Minimum. However, because of Task XP, Daily Quests XP and "easy win" XP, I predict an effective cost at 3/4 to be 28,800 Gold and 7,200 Crystal. It should take winning 35 total full XP battles (75XP - 80XP) each. At a churn rate of 10 minutes a battle, it can be done in less than 6 hours of nonstop play.

Level 11 needs 4100 XP - 49,200 Gold and 12,300 Crystal Minimum. However, because of Task XP, Daily Quests XP and "easy win" XP, I predict an effective cost at 4/5 to be 39,360 Gold and 9,840 Crystal. It should take winning 45 total full XP battles (75XP - 80XP) each. At a churn rate of 10 minutes a battle, it can be done in less than 8 hours of nonstop play.

When you consider that to be able to crank the units out fast enough is a problem even a wealthy player is enduring, it makes one wonder which is truly going to be faster, looking for easy and cheap kills over a few days or powering resources into building replacement units and taking down large chunks. Having done both, I can tell you that powering through it is faster. Level 9 and 10, with the Tasks you saved along the way along with powering after setting yourself up, is far faster than hunting Noob kills for low XP.

When you get to Level 9, you can have 3 Barracks, 2 Shooters Range and 1 Magic Library. Before you even start banging away trying to level, realize for the next 3 levels, it is a hard grind. You need to be prepared and need to set your situation up for speed. You also need resources, a lot of resources. So now is the time to mine, build and pillage. Yes pillage. You would have built a prison already for the Task XP, so I will emphasize that it is your greatest source of revenue going forward. Not your mines. I highly suggest that the only time you upgrade the mines at this point is if you find for some reason, you are full developed and have over 100K Gold and 25K Crystal. Otherwise build, build BUILD. First a Prison. Then bring yourself up to Three Barracks. Then Two Shooters Ranges. Then a Magic Library. You should have the money to do this and build the max mines you can as well as start upgrading.

I want all Barracks, Shooters Ranges and the Magic Library to be fully upgraded as far as they can go before you even jump back into XP making. You CAN Noob Hunt like you used to, but do not take down XP bags and do not suffer unit loss at all. You cannot rebuild if all the buildings are in upgrade mode. The other very important thing to be focusing on is "Trolling". You are sending a Footman at random players on your Hit List and picking the ones located 10 to 15 minutes away from you. Every time you manage to find a score (Unguarded Castle), immediately pull your troops out. If you are Trolled or attacked back, let them. You will be spending the resources you loot so fast on upgrades etc, they will get very little from you. Also, they will be on your Rivals list, so you can go hit them again later if you want. You will keep doing this until all your buildings are built as I described and all your buildings are upgraded to the max as I described (Not Mines).

Once this is achieved, you can then begin pouring those resources into XP gathering using a mixture as you see fit on hand to pump and dump resources into units and units into effective XP.

Once you hit level 10, the method of operation does not change, but it gets a little bit faster as you can build another barracks. The timing of having two barracks (upgraded) means you can crank 3 Trolls X2 and 3 Footmen X2 in 6 minutes and 3 Ninjas X2 in 10 minutes. In many ways, this can realistically allow you to be pushing at the Refresh Wall provided your resources can keep up. There should be very few Arena battles you cannot clear and only lose 6 Footmen, 6 Trolls and up to 6 Ninjas using FTNAP.

The reasoning here is each battle will take from you 6 Footmen, 6 Trolls and (up to) 6 Ninjas no matter what the composition is. You will rarely encounter an opponent with FTNAP lineup simply because it would require his units on hand to be exactly that composition and hardly anyone at this level has the foresight or the simplicity to constantly have exactly 6 of each type available. Even then, the system would sometimes throw the Priests in the wrong row for maximum setup. I have actually never seen an Arena opponent with a perfect FTNAP setup. Typically they have too many of one unit etc, and this imbalance is exactly why our lineup is the best lineup to clear a horde out. The only real variation is when they are lacking archers and they are Ninja fat. Then we will adjust to the FTNPA or FTNPNA depending on our units on hand. The other deviation you may encounter will be the use of Knights, however, it is less and less common to find Knights being used simply because most players are learning that they are a waste of resources and offer little more in strength when using KP than TTT or FTNAP. If they are using Knights, we simply change the lineup to be TTTNAP.

No matter what the composition of their army, provided you are using these lineups effectively, then you will see a battle unfold where our front line dies around the same time as their front line collapses. Sometimes, will see them be Footmen or Troll heavy and we will not clear out all their melee units before ours die, but this does not matter because those melee units now need to close on our Ninjas and Archers and whether they are Footmen or Trolls, they will perish doing little damage to our firing lines. At this point, unless they have a perfect firing line, which they will not, of NA or NAP, our perfect line will progress and kill their firing line faster and more efficiently. During this process, every time one of their ranged units die, the situation continues to spiral faster and faster in our favour. Ultimately, our Archers back by our Priests will win the day no matter what they have.

Also, if the enemy player has a Berserker or a Behemoth Hero, he will be located in perhaps the worst place possible (system places him there), the front top position. Because the Hero will advance deeper into our forces than his other melee troops, he starts taking ranged damage from the units near him in our lines deeper. Further, he is causing a shift in his ranged units. This is by far the most beneficial thing to us because anytime a ranged line breaks formation and begins to shift, he loses the units faster. In any game of killing units (RTS etc), we have all known for a long time to concentrate fire on enemy units = win. It is better to kill a unit with focused fire, then the next, then the next and in Little Empire, breaking a formation is the only real way to cause this to happen.

In fact, because you have only to use FTNAP (5 deep) to clear a XP horde at this level of play, you can stagger your line here and there backing some of the rows (2 at a time works best, sometimes 3) which will cause an imbalance to his entire set up and allow some extra early ranged hits on some of those lines. Breaking his formation will simply cause more focused fire to occur and this ends up meaning you save units. Nothing is better than saving an extra Ninja or two.

You literally can start rolling like a pro if you stick to the theory here and also can take on just about any battle. The process is simply to keep building Footmen, Trolls and Ninjas in advance to replace your lost units. You should only need to keep 6 Archers and 6 Priests on hand, the rest of the time, be building Footmen, Trolls and Ninjas in 10 minute intervals as best as possible. Once you hit the Refresh Wall, you really only need to clear 1 battle every ten minutes, as the Wall takes an hour to reset. While it may be hard at the start of a play period or day to catch the wall, the easier fights and the fights you skip for whatever reason will slowly allow you to advance on the wall and you may actually hit it if you are playing a full day and really playing smart.

Level 9 through to 12 will require about 120,000 Gold, 30,000 Crystal and 19 hours of play to achieve. Provided you have the resources and the knowledge and patience to always be the "winner" when it comes to XP making, you can do this in 1-2 days easily.

Level 12 & 13 - KNIGHTS!!!! Never mind...they suck as a Front Line Unit

"The best thing about a Knight, is they are worth decent XP when I kill them." - Azyle, Level 15

It actually took me until level 15 when I was playing my Behemoth to finally build Knights. I had already encountered fighting them earlier in my leveling and had discovered the answer to Knights in Trolls. When I had first seen how easily I could take them down, I just could not figure out why I would stop using Trolls and use Knights given the cost to build a stables and the unit cost. Also my higher level friend had told me over lunch that he never uses them. He did not take it farther than that as he was already level 28 and did not have that much insight into the mid levels anymore. The game was different when he leveled. The Metagame had changed however, and Knights were a very popular unit to encounter. Even if a player is not actively using Knights in his Arena battles, if he has any Knights on hand, when he is defending in the Arena, they are going to be in his front line 90% of the time. Also because of the system organizing in a computer scripted formation, you are always going to see it place Knights or Footman/Troll at the front, then more Trolls or Priests if he has them, then all his ninjas and then all his archers followed by a new lineup composed of whatever he has on hand starting with Footmen/Trolls or Knights at the back. This only works to our advantage time and time again because it allows us to predict the general composition of the Metagame we face in the Arena based on what units players are using and building. Because the general theory that Knights are a waste of resource and time and no more effective than TTT, we are seeing less and less Knights being built or used by players.

What this means is that we are not using Knights and we are not fighting players with Knights as often. However, when the enemy has Knights ESPECIALLY when using Priests backing the Knights and a melee Hero, we need to examine the units behind the Knight and Priest very carefully as the composition behind that point can be a disaster for us as we are typically losing 2 Trolls to the Knights and then losing the third Troll to his Archers and Ninjas. More and more I believe the high level anti Knight set up of TT only is probably going to be the smarter play as I find we need to not waste the third troll spot as a finisher on the Knight. Any unit can be a finisher to a Knight and can be far more effective once the Knight dies than a Troll who marches into his death doing no more DPS to the back units. In fact, KPNNAA will be devastating to us using TTTNAPA even though it appears on paper that we would have the winning line when his Hero is melee and is HHPNNAA. Simply we will be underpowered and have a formation breakdown that fails to work to our advantage because of the Hero and we can get into serious trouble with this gambit. However, always finish and lose these battles as you will get XP, just not at the rate that is a good resource ratio. Part of the skill at this level is understanding how to effectively take down a Knight front and finish him off with minimal loss. No matter what however, if the Priests are not backing the Knights, the situation swings far better in our favour as the Knights can be handled then with just two Trolls instead.

What this means is that we do not use Knights primarily because they offer little advantage even when backed by Priests and to be fully effective, they need a Priest to back them as the spot will end up being a dead spot anyhow. But the resource loss is automatically 1 Knight and 1 Priest per row because a full XP bag at this level will always manage to kill the Knight unless it was all Footmen and if it was all Footmen, we would simply use NPNN to destroy them. We simply cannot afford to use Knights as a front line unit because the downtime to rebuild and the resource cost is ridiculous. Note I say as a "Front Line Unit".

Which brings us to the final question...are Knights useful at all? Yes they are. In order to discover the full theory about how to use Knights, you will need to read the Level 14 section. Basically however, you are going to be using FTK*PNA or TTK*PNA to effectively use Knights. The more I play with the idea of not using Knights as a Front Line unit but as a second Front, similar to how at earlier levels we used FTFT, a 2 Front system. So in this respect, we are using Knights now as a secondary Front even if our opponent is using Knights as his Front line. We use TT to weaken his Knights or FT if he is not using Knights and then follow through with K*PNA.

I am experimenting heavily with this concept these days in order to be sure it is valid.

Level 14 - The Breakthrough Level

I have always felt Level 14 is the breakthrough level because you get Mages. These units are so overpowered, they become a staple to use from Level 14 until 25+. Not only do they do extra damage to Knights, but they are decent overall for their damage output base of 15. And to make them even better, the Mage's attack as a slowing effect when it hits another unit, not only to that unit's movement speed, but also to their attack speed. Furthermore, they have a staggering 300 HP. They have a range of 4 which allows them to be coupled with an Archer unit behind them. In fact, the only real drawback to this class is that they wear cloth. This makes them quite vulnerable to Archers, especially if the Enemy has 2 rows of Archers as the Mage must step into range of 4 and that allows both Enemy Archers to fire on him at the same time. You need to be very careful about Archers down the field and what impact that will have on your Mage. A Mage VS an Archer is a pretty even fight despite the Mage wearing cloth, with the Archer doing 16 damage to the Mage and the Mage returning fire for 10. However, the Mage slowing effect of 20% reduces the Archer damage to an effective 13 points. What this means is that a Mage VS an Archer, 1 on 1, the Mage will always win if both units started at full HP.

I want to examine the worst scenario facing the Mage in combat, that being when he ends up confronting double Enemy Archers. Because our Mages will often survive to the final of the battle, this means that anytime the Enemy has doubled up Archers along the way, our Mage is now facing some devastating damage. If he is alone, he is taking an effective 29 per round while doing 10. This is a losing situation for him simply because he will die before even taking the first Enemy Archer to half life. So looking at a battle, we must never allow this to occur as it is an automatic Mage loss. Losing a Mage is equal to downtime. At Level 14 we have only 2 Magic Libraries and Mages have a build time for us of 45 Minutes. 2 hours and 15 minutes to build 6. Therefore, we are never going to engage in a battle that can cost us our Mages.

So facing the dual Enemy Archer situation, let’s examine what happens when we try to give our Mage some backup. First scenario, we add the only unit that can help us, an Archer. Now we are delivering 28 damage per round to the first Enemy Archer and taking 29. We will see the first Archer die at round 7 and when he dies; the damage we receive will drop to 13 per round. At this point our mage has about 100 HP left. So the problem is simple, we are going to likely see the Mage die about the same time as the Archer. However, we are a little ahead of this curve, by about 1 round, so there is a strong chance the Mage can live, but this is again based on him having taken no extra damage at all earlier in the fight or any extra damage from other sources, like a Succubus etc. It is simply too risky to be engaging our MA vs their AA. We also already know that the best answer to stacked Enemy Archers is simply to use a Priest backing our Archer. What this means is that if the Enemy has AA or AAA at all in his back line, we are not using our Mages in the battle.

Next, we have to examine the only other solution we can possibly have and that is using a Priest with our Mage. We look for a solution because we hate to have to always dump our Mages from the battle just because the Enemy has AA, this is a very common back wall and reduces our best unit to a benchwarmer. However, we see that our MP is taking 29 per round from AA. Then it is reduced by 15 by the Priest. Archer dies at round 19 and at this point we have taken 266 damage roughly. This has pushed us already very close to dying but going forward, we are actually taking no damage because of the slowdown effect of our Frost attack coupled with the healing of our Priest. Even if the timing is off, we still have a very large buffer of 30+ HP left on the Mage. And technically, we are taking zero damage from the Enemy Archer on a round per round basis. So here the basic principle is that the Mage with a Priest can take down stacked Archers without dying. But this is only in a perfect scenario and that perfect scenario often has issues such as line formation breaking. When our line breaks off, we are getting into situations where sometimes 3 Enemy Archers all fire at the same Mage at once. Or our Priests do not heal the right Mage and double healing another. All this can balance out for the win of course, but we may see some Mages lost in this case. So again, despite it making sense on paper, the risk is too large and I would tend to want to use Archers back by Priests when facing stacked Archers, unless it is less than 12 total Archers or I am counting on my Hero to have a large impact on their line and cause it to break. Once a couple of his Archers fall, the whole house will crumble. This is critical to understand that you will always win this scenario at the end if your Hero is having the right impact on his line. It will only take minimal impact by your Hero to cause his back end to collapse facing Mages back by Priests.

The next situation the Mage faces is Ninjas. Early in the fight, he is merely adding DPS to help our Front Line destroy their Front Line, but eventually both Fronts are destroyed and the ranged war begins. If his mid field is thick with Trolls, well this is simply a joke as our remaining Front Line Trolls and Mage back by Archer will sweep the Trolls. If he was thick this way, unless he has AA as a backdrop, we will sweep the win. If he does have AA, so let’s say he had FTTTTAA for example, then we would simply answer it with FTAPA knowing that his Trolls will be destroyed as they charge into double Archer fire and then our Archer Priest line will simply finish off his Archers. But if he has the mixed bag that includes Ninjas, then we see something like FTNNNAA, we know that an Archer back by a Priest is going to get rolled by Ninjas as they can be doing up to 21 damage per round minus the 15 healing, net 6 per round, but our lonely Archer is doing only 6 per round. This means that by the time we finish off a single row of Ninjas, our Archers are dead. So stacked Ninjas is something we need to really consider as a threat to our lines and present a solution to take them out.

Are Mages the answer? Well if we have Mage backed by Priest, the Mage is taking a maximum of 18 per round, causing a slowing effect to one and being healed 15 per round. So the Mage VS the Ninja stacks is going to perform very well as he is literally losing no HP. He would need almost 100 rounds of Ninja fire to actually topple him over. It seems like a very good solution, but you must consider the last lines of Archers you face. Now our Mages are going to roll into that Archer fire and have the same impact as before where they are taking damage from the Archers, but this damage is coming BEFORE we finish the last row of Ninjas. When we are facing NA line we are taking 18-20 damage per round AFTER our healing is applied! In fact, even if we had full HP, once we face this NA combo, we are going to be dead before we kill the Ninja. And when a Mage backed by a Priest dies, not only do we lose the Mage, but we lose the Priest, both are costly units and both come from the same building.

So with this in mind, we know that if our Enemy has Ninjas followed by Archers or Archers followed by Archers, our Mages are likely going to their death bed. If they do not have the mix or the mix is weak one way or another (less than 6 of one unit) then we might be able to sweep through and lose no Mages. What do we learn from this? That NA is a great combo to use VS Enemy Mages. NAP is even better. We also know that if the Enemy is void of Archers and only has Footmen, Trolls, Mages and/or Ninjas, we can use Mage backed by a Priest followed by an Archer to sweep his entire gauntlet as FTTMNNN will always get beat by FTMPAAA.

So this begs the question then, how do we beat the mixed bag? We have already discovered that we know how to deal with the front lines depending on what is produced, we know that even FTT will roll FT or TTT or FFT etc, it is a mere math situation and anything that is front line that survives gets destroyed by the ranged units on each side. This is part of the churn and we are used to it. So the middle game of ranged units is our overriding problem. We simply need a solution to deal with mixed Archers/Ninjas and even Mages. If they have all Ninjas, we use Mage/Priest. If they have all Archers, we use Archer/Priest. All Mages? We can use Archer/Priest but will not see all Mages very often. And if do not use Priests to take out the mixed bag, this only leaves us with a DPS answer of NA or MA, both of which we have shown will result in heavy losses on our side, as NA is simply trading units (buying xp at a heavy rate) and MA will cause us to lose Mages, something we simply cannot afford to do.

Knights are Useful?!?

I hate to say it, but our most hated unit in the game, with its high build cost and build time cost, simply becomes the answer to taking down the mixed bag when we add the Mage to the lineup and we also recognize that a stack of 3+ Trolls can do some serious damage to our Knight. However, given that we are going to start using the Knight and the Mage together in a way that will never allow our Knight or Mage to die, is going to open up our game for us and allow us to take down mixed bags, in fact, take down just about any opponent in the Arena by using them in a way that is efficient and highly effective. If we examine how the following two lineups, K*PMA and K*PNA can function for us, we see that they truly are the answer. A Knight has 500 HP and suffers from the Charging Syndrome, whereas he rushes forward to melee ranged units. One of the worst situations we can face will be AAAAA as when he is fighting the first Archer, all 5 Archers are firing on him. Alone he would be facing 35 damage per round and only doing 24 damage per round. He takes about 7 rounds to kill an Archer and he would die to these Archers in about 14 rounds. This means he would only kill 2 of the Archers before perishing. But if we add a Priest, a Mage and an Archer to his line, we are now doing 52 damage per round and taking 20 damage per round. Further we are killing an Archer every 4 rounds and slowing the damage speed of 1 Archer with our Mage. As each Archer dies, their life gets harder and harder because they are doing less and less. So he takes 76 damage as the first Archer dies, then 48 as the second dies, then 24 as the third dies and then takes no more damage as the Priest out heals the damage coming in. If we reduce the number of Archers with Ninjas as is often the case, we find that the situation stays relatively the same even with the extra hits Ninjas get as the most they will do is 9 per round. Our lineup can clear a stack of 5 ranged units and still have our Knight at 2/3 of total HP left. Easily he has 300 HP to spare. In fact, if the lineup we faced was FTNNNAA, we would sweep the entire board with K*PMA and not lose any units. The chance of a Knight death is only based upon the staggered way in which they end up charging into combat which often forces 1 single Knight to be taking the brunt of many Enemy ranged units firing on it at once, so this is where the danger lays. In this way, we can lose Knights and it is frustrating knowing that this will happen. Furthermore, TT or TTT will do enough damage to the Knight while he is working them down, that he will die at some point while trying to clear the field. And we do not want that nor can we afford to be losing Knights or Mages ever. And if a Knight dies, you are likely losing the Priest and the Mage following it and this will lead to serious downtime. We have gone from churning Trolls and Footmen to losing valuable units that we are gambling and hoping it works out. It will not work out consistently and this is not the answer for going "infinite". At this level, there is not ability to go infinite unless you spend a lot of Mojo on gear and spells for your Hero and upgrade him as highly as possible and if you have done this, then you do not need this guide as the game is easy for you.

What I want is a guaranteed solution for clearing the full mixed bags of XP you face in the Arena while using our Barracks to churn out Footmen and Trolls and allow them to be the only lost units. So being that (Hero not included, you must figure out how your HERO best fits in this strategy on your own) FTK*PMA or TTK*PMA do offer these solutions, you will find that by having your front line be either FT vs. other Footmen and Trolls and use TT vs. a Knight lineup, that most of the time you are going to only lose your Trolls and Footmen and very seldom will you lose a Knight or a Mage. By allowing our first two rows made up of cheap units to bring down the front line and then face the ranged middle and end with our Knight lineup, we are clearing house and succeeding over and over.

What this means is that because players will soon begin using Knights again a lot more (my guides seem to affect the Metagame quite a bit), it means you will be facing them again more and more in the Arena. But this means you will be facing them on the Front Lines, not in the secondary position, as the game system automatically places Knights in the front row. Simply using TT as our start will allow us to punish the advancing Enemy Knight enough so that by the time he arrives at our feet, we can easily finish him off. Also, Enemy Priests will slow down our advancement but will not disrupt it because wherever a Priest is being used, it is one less DPS that is being used and this only helps us. Time and time again, I have shown that if you replace a Priest with a potential DPS unit, it is ineffective for any result. Only in slot 3 behind a melee, does a Priest add true value and not detract from a possible DPS unit because there is no unit with a range of 3.

Not counting our Hero, this setup requires 6 Knights (pop 18), 6 Mages (pop 12), 6 Priests (pop 6), 6 Archers (pop 6), 6 Footmen (pop 6), 6 Trolls (pop 6) and we would also like to be using the remaining population of 26 units to be cranking out more Footmen and Trolls. Furthermore, you can substitute Ninjas for the Mages, meaning it is a viable strategy before level 14; you could begin this strategy at level 12 using Ninjas. The Ninjas do slightly more DPS on other Ninjas and Archers, which is good, but do not have the slowing effect that Mages have and I am testing both to see which one works better overall. Certainly having 6 Ninjas on hand to tweak it here and there for maximum effect would work very well.

So there is a use for Knights after all...