General Tips and Tatics

Contents

Introduction
Understanding Tools
Understanding Espionage
Understanding Resource Villages
Understanding How to Spend Your Rubies
Understanding Coins and AI Castles
Understanding Public Order
Understanding Alliances and Wars






Introduction:

Welcome to my guide on how to play Empire. As for my general aim, I have tried to keep it as short and as helpful as possible. The reason for writing this is purely down to being asked the same questions countless times by players in-game and by seeing similar questions posted and re-posted on the forums. I hope to do more than answer the questions but to explain them and not at a completely basic level: this guide is intended for readers who have started playing and who perhaps want their armies to be more successful or would like to get the most out of their spies. This guide is for the improvement of their game-play and I am confident that even many top-level players will find something of benefit here.

As a quick caveat, however, the game is constantly updated so if any of my information is incorrect or out-dated please let me know.

 
Understanding Tools:

The reason why I have started with tools is because I so often see incorrect information passed on. People may lose battles even with large armies, because they have used tools particularly ineffectively and as a result have lost the battle or lost excessive troops.

Firstly it is important to understand exactly what tools do. When defending they increase bonuses that are already present due to castle defenses. For example having Stone-throwing tools in two slots will increase a castle wall bonus by an additional 50% or (25% each). What does this actually mean? It means that the defensive power of any troops stationed on this wall will be boosted by the bonus giving them an advantage. When attacking the aim is to reduce the advantages or bonuses that the defender has to 0% meaning the troops will fight an even battle. An important note here is that by overloading attacking tools you will not receive any additional bonus-the defending troops will still fight at normal strength. If, for example you have spied and the enemy has an 80% boost on his wall then it is only necessary to use 8x ladders which reduce it by 10% each. Using 9 or more ladders will have no effect on the battle at all.

A castle with level 4 walls and a level 4 gate has a natural wall and gate bonus of 80% without any defensive tools, so even if your spy report shows the enemy has no tools, it is still important to send attacking tools to reduce these bonuses as precisely as possible to 0% if you want to reduce your troop casualties. If you are farming high level players its worth throwing 20 or so ladders at the castle since you will likely be plundering tens of thousands of resources anyways.

So far, so good? Well now tools become more complicated as you will see! There are four basic types of combat bonus tools (with corresponding attack and defense ones): Wall bonus, such as Scaling Ladders, gate bonus, such as Battering Rams, ranged defense bonus, such as Flaming Arrows and finally moat bonus, such as Fire Moat.

Unfortunately when attacking there are only 2 slots on each flank and 3 slots in the center  meaning that the defender can always get a bonus somewhere. For example the defender can bolster his moat on his left flank with Sharpened Stakes, his wall with Stone-throwing and his wall with Flaming Arrows meaning that on each wave his defenders will receive at least some bonus. This knowledge is vital as attackers, often because Siege workshop level 3 is a high-tier building, omit moat tools meaning the moat offers an excellent opportunity for a very significant defensive bonus. If they have omitted wall tools in favour of mantlets and moat tools, then boost up your wall bonus and sacrifice your moat tools, just pull them out and save them for your next fight-be sensible as if your tools aren’t doing anything just save them until next time! If you see 80 Belfries (which reduce wall bonus by 20%) then why would you leave your stone-throwers in there? 

As for tools there are two more crucial things to understand, the first of which is Mantlets. They are the ONLY type of attacking tool which can reduce the defensive soldier’s capabilities to nothing-by this I mean that wall tools have no effect after eliminating the defensive bonus as explained in the previous paragraph. Mantlets (or other types of ranged defense bonus attacking tools such as Shield Walls) reduce ranged soldiers effectiveness rather than advantage. What does this mean? If your enemy has 100 long-bowmen on one flank, you could actually send one bowman, who is a very poor offensive unit to attack them with 20 normal mantlets (each reducing effectiveness by 5%) and he would kill all of them.

If you are defending a mantlet-heavy attack be sure to alter your ranged-melee percentage of defenders, you can do so by clicking the icon with a bow and sword on the defensive page. If you have no tools which can re-increase the ranged defense bonus then consider defending with 100% melee defenders. Melee defenders are actually very competent against ranged attackers with a decent moat/wall bonus so if there are lots of mantlets, use melee defenders with lots of moat/wall bonus and you will be fine!

The final thing to note with regards to tools is the Armourer. It is a random event which occurs approximately every 10 days, but when he comes make sure you purchase some good Armourer tools. The Fire Moat costing 88 rubies is a solid purchase as the 110% bonus can often save many troops and the Arrow Slits and Machiolation offer a substantial bonus too. In general it is very difficult to defeat a castle with Armourer defense tools without heavy ruby attack tools yourself so it is well worth stocking up next time you see the fella pop up underneath your castle.

For now I am going to omit tools such as loot carts and glory banners as they are self-explanatory and will not influence the verdict of the battle itself unless an attacker has decided to use too many profit-gaining tools as I like to label them as opposed to battle tools.