Diplomacy is Not an Option – Things You Should to Know

Helpful Things

General Tips

• First 4 days are super important. You need to establish your lumberjacks stonequarry and houses + fisheries quick and in mass. The first wave is forgiving but the second one amps in difficulty quick. So by day 4-6 try to reach tier 2 and get iron mines setup to get farms ( cause food will become a problem with all the houses) and build a engineering barracks for catapults as you will start getting catapults from wave 3 onwards. From this point get market to stabilise economy and from here things should become alot easier. By day 10-17 try to reach tier 3 castle, this depends on your luck with resources.
• A tip is to build alot of watchtowers to understand where to place lumberjacks ect early. And use your starter troops to slowly chip away and clear the forests for your lumberjacks.
• Store wood by placing wood towers and pausing their construction.Demolishing a building that hasn’t started construction refunds 100% of its build cost. It s not about being space efficient, as much as being time efficient.The point isnt that you wont ever use storages,but rather you will need to build less storages as you can empty them immediately as they re filled so you wont ever need more than one storage for your workers to be at 100% efficiency.

• This placement of houses allows you to always be able to upgrade each house making it the most space efficient yet upgradable housing block.

• Build harvesters near resources (i.e., lumber mills by trees) and storage near harvesters (i.e., stockpiles by lumber mills). This may seem obvious, but it legitimately makes your city 3 times more efficient. Once lumber harvesters run out of nearby resources, delete them. DON’T expand their radius.
• Don’t build defenses/walls until the wave direction warning shows up. Every resource counts in the early days, so spend them on houses, stockpiles, and stonemasons. Build lots of builder huts in different areas of your base so things get done faster; otherwise, it will take forever, especially for walls.
• You could use a double wall to cover stretches of your base you feel lack defense but haven’t got attacked from yet… And post like 3-5 archers on each side of wall to pick off raider groups.
• Tip for the day when the zombies come from corpses, just add a line of wood wall. Dont need full tower walls. Zombies do very little structure damage.
• Try to keep your walls straight. It presents less angles for enemies to hit individual walls, making sure they cant get enough units onto a single spot to bring it down. Always funnel them with natural terrain when you can. That section on the lower left, all those towers should be BEHIND the funnel, not in front.
• Once you have a decent economy set up, reduce the coverage of your builder houses to not cover the walls then put individual houses close to your defense. Make their coverage area just a single section of the wall. Get a few of them down so your entire castle is covered and set auto repair. That way, there’s always workers close to where they need to be and they can get started quickly.
• Watch towers early game instead of slowly exploring with units is a great idea. im on day 10 got watch towers covering the entire map nearly and not built a single wall yet as I can see and react faster now I can see the map.

Other Quick Tips:

• Pause the game often when things get overwhelming.
• Make sure you research frequently and not last minute.
• And you wanna build a ton of houses in the early 1-3 days.
• More houses = more pop per day…. And early on in the run it is essential, especially at the harder levels.. you need those population to spend on early stone mines, fishing huts, and lumberjacks… Also don’t forget about building huts, spam a few at your kingdoms outskirts now and then.
• More builders = more multiple structures being constructed at once.
• Which becomes super important during the first set of raids since you need to quickly deploy walls. Plus by now you should be tech to tier 2.

Under Pressure (Hardest Map)

Played under pressure (the hardest map) a lot and here are the tips I’ve learned so far:

• Have a strong focus on what is currently constraining your growth. I.e., in all cases where you lose the game, your constraint will be too small of an army (or poor army composition, e.g., not enough AOE units). However, this will have in turn been caused by too small population, and that in turn can be caused by too little wood. The solution?
  • Try to come up with a rule of thumb for allocation of population. I use 50% army, 15% wood, 15% food, 10% other, 10% mines.
  • You don’t have to stick to this exactly: I suggest at the start of each day, use up 50% of new population for army THEN use roughly the above percentages for each resource.
  • Of course, use judgment if you see wood/iron/etc. is currently the biggest issue (i.e., you have none), then build more of that.
  • But never build less than 50% army OR purely 1 resource (e.g., wood); this will just cause you to constantly run into new constraints.
• Allocate heavily to army; 50% of population should be army.
• Never stop expanding with armies until the wave is nearly at your base, then fall back.
• Meet certain goals, then try to improve upon these next game. I suggest: 300 pop and at least 2 stone mines by start of day 7. T2 town hall by day 9, T3 town hall by day 18. Failure to meet these will likely mean end of run. By day 22, you should have 1000+ population.
• Build as many houses as you can. Don’t worry about starvation and such; just keep building houses and sticking roughly to the above stated allocations. With 15% population allocated to food, you should not run out of food. Population growth is based on both current population AND number of empty houses!
• Army stages:
  • Build only archers.
  • Switch to horse archers ASAP AND build A LOT of catapults (AOE is king).
  • Build purely trebuchets.
• Use statistics tab to see what currently might be a constraint.

How to Counter Cavalry

Cavalry is no joke since you cant kite them like you would with other units. I suggest clearing the early camps as usual but if you start to see cavalry you need to wait for T2 spearman. Not only do they do 3x damage against cavalry but im pretty sure they dont take charge damage as well. They are the ultimate hard counter for cavalry.

How to Counter Hulks

I’d suggest setting up a ton of trebuchets and build many tall towers with ballista and set most of those ballista towers to target strongest/highest hp enemy. This way they will automatically take out and target hulks, catapults ect while the rest of your forces take out bulk of the small guys. Make sure you upgrade crossbowmen and trebs, they are super important upgrades.