Attention Countrymen. Please consider this message.
We want the backbone of our country this age to be cavalry units. As close to 100% Cavalry as we can get!
The tier 3 cavalry we want the most of is Mangudais. The tier 2 cavalry we want the most of is Horde Bowman.
These soldiers have good ranged and strength values for their wage and so I believe having a LOT of them will make our main army strong.
And so in this topic there are two options I think would be good choices for you to follow to have a strong army that will contribute a lot to what we want here.
Option Number 1 is to get 46 Bowman/Mangudai [this option involves training with apprentice units until 2401 XP]
Option 2: 36 Bowman/Mangudai + 6 Tatar/Keshik [this option involves training with apprentice unilts until 1901 XP]
Option 1 will result in a FULL mangudai army, and it results in 3 extra soldiers instead of 1 extra soldier. But as a trade off you will have to stick with apprentice units a bit longer.
And so on one hand it is long term better for the country, but on the other hand it means it will take you a little bit longer before you can promote your units. Basically you can trade a bit of a slower start for a stronger mid to late game. I would honestly prefer more people to use Option 1 because I'd rather have more Mangudai's + Bowman and less Keshiks + Tatars, but ultimately its your army so the choice is yours.
~~ Option 1: 46 Bowman/Mangudai ~~
Training with apprentice units means exactly that. Training with APPRENTICE units.
That means DO NOT PROMOTE YOUR SOLDIERS UNTIL YOU HAVE ENOUGH OF THEM. (In this case that number is 46)
I cannot stress this enough. If you promote your soldiers BEFORE you have enough of them then it is going to take you EVEN LONGER to get "enough".
The Tier 1 soldiers you will be using are called 'Horde Riders'. They are a cavalry unit with 10 damage and 10 ranged damage.
Ranged Accuracy is going to be extremely important for our armies. If you are going for the 43-46 Bowman/Mangudai then every single one of your soldiers is going to use Ranged Damage at all levels. And so for this reason I do not recommend dismissing injured soldiers and replacing them to speed up training because sometimes you end up replacing a soldier who had high ranged accuracy with a brand new unit who only has 44% again. But IF you ARE going to dismiss any injured soldiers only do that if the injured soldier still has a low R-Acc. Just remember that I'm advising against it, so please only do that if you are an experienced player who knows enough about TLK to make good judgement calls about that kind of thing.
And so at private you will buy 8 apprentice horde riders and begin training with them. When you hit Corporal you will buy 2 more. When you hit Corporal* you will buy 3 more.
You keep doing this. Every time your commander ranks up you need to buy as many more Apprentice Horde Riders as you can. Reminder: DO NOT PROMOTE THEM YET.
You should have the following number of Apprentice Horde Riders at these ranks: Private - 8 Corporal - 10 Corporal* - 13 Sergeant - 16 Sergeant* - 19 Sergeant** - 22 Lieutenant - 33 Lieutenant* - 37 Lieutenant** - 42 Captain - 46
Please keep in mind that training with apprentice units is probably going to be pretty slow going at first. You are going to want to do all of your training after lieutenant on DESERT if you where we have a +8% bonus to our soldiers. Fortunately apprentice horde riders have reasonably low HP and so you should be able to train every 2 (maybe 3) ticks with them for awhile. Please try and be diligent to get through the apprentice phase as quickly as possible.
Once you are a Captain with 46 soldiers you can start to promote them. I suggest to promote your soldiers as evenly as you can instead of spending the your wage to just promote a few soldiers many times.
Your training runs should begin to improve dramatically at this point. My only suggesting for training at this point is to STOP training once you have less than about 40-50% of your army standing. Ranged accuracy is very important for us and so it is better to have a lot of low XP battles with 100% of your army standing than to have a couple high XP battles with only 20% of your army standing.
I suggest staying at a full 46 soldiers while you rank up. It will mean that sometimes your wage will be hardcapped and you will have guys waiting to promote, but that is better than dismissing down and being very FAR from hardcap at the next rank. Eventually (when your commander is a very very high rank) you can get buy with only 43 soldiers, but it will take quite awhile to get to that point.
If Anything I've mentioned for Option 1 doesn't make sense or doesn't sound explained enough then please message me and I'll do my best to help.
This option starts out EXACTLY like option 1. Training with APPRENTICE Tier 1 Horde Riders until you have "enough" of them to begin promoting them.
That means DO NOT PROMOTE YOUR SOLDIERS UNTIL YOU HAVE ENOUGH OF THEM. (In this case that number is 42)
The benefit of using this strategy is that you only need 42 soldiers, not 46 before you can begin to promote them. That means you only need to hit Lieutenant**, not captain which will save 500 XP of training with apprentice units. But the drawback is that you will not have 100% Mangudais. You will end up with a mix of Mangudai's and Keshik, which aren't quite as good, in my opinion. So it's a trade off and the choice to take is yours.
Just like with Option 1; at Private you will buy 8 apprentice horde riders and begin training with them. When you hit Corporal you will buy 2 more. When you hit Corporal* you will buy 3 more.
You keep doing this. Every time your commander ranks up you need to buy as many more Apprentice Horde Riders as you can. Reminder: DO NOT PROMOTE THEM YET.
You should have the following number of Apprentice Horde Riders at these ranks: Private - 8 Corporal - 10 Corporal* - 13 Sergeant - 16 Sergeant* - 19 Sergeant** - 22 Lieutenant - 33 Lieutenant* - 37 Lieutenant** - 42
Now that you have 42 you can begin to promote them. You should promote them as evenly as possible. Which means if you do it right then you will have all of your soldiers as Veteran Horde Riders before you start promoting them to their Tier 2 units.
And so now you have 42 Veteran Horde Riders it's time to promote then.
Your first 36 Tier 2 Units should be Horde Bowman Your last 6 Tier 2 Units should be Tatars
The Horde Bowman you will later promote into Mangudai's. And the Tatars will later turn into Keshiks. Tatars do not have any Ranged damage and so hopefully you can arrange to use your Lowest R-Acc soldiers on those 6 promotions.
This Option has a faster early game because you only need 1900 Xp before you can start to promote and so your training speed will pick up earlier than it does in Option 1. But the drawback is that with only 42 soldiers you cannot afford to lose any of them.
If you eventually make it to marquess you are only going to need 41 soldiers to hardcap (you will have 1 extra Mangudai), but that is a long time away and you probably never feel like you have too many soldiers until you get to that point.
If you followed either of these options then you should be contributing a lot of quality cavalary units to our Main Army! Please try and keep training them up when we do not have war so we can stay competitive with all of the countries who use a lot of High HP Infantry soldiers.
It's going to take a group effort to keep our Main Army full of Cavalry AND to keep it as strong as we can.
I'm going to include some recommended skills to get on your heroes. These are just recommendations and things that I think are good to have for the type of army we want. Feel free to consider these advice but to do your own thing if you want.
~Hero 1~
Start with Duelist, about 16 or 20. Whether you want to be aggresive and PvP or whether you just want to have a hero who will do well when the enemies PvP you it is important that your strongest Hero does all the Duels so get some duelist on him so he can start getting duels in Training Battles too.
Next get some Trainer. Hardcapping might prove difficult with Option 1 and Option 2 and so I think you should shoot for at LEAST 15 Trainer, even in hero 1. 20 would be better still. Using trainer Xp to help your soldiers promote will making hardcapping that much easier and it will make your army that much stronger.
Get some Leadership now. At LEAST 10 (and wear a banner once you are level 11) to make sure you always have leadership advantage in Training Battles. (You will want a lot more than 10 later)
Next is some Healing. Most of our damage is coming in the Artillery and Cavalry rounds of battle so healing isn't as big a deal. Get 25 to help with training, but don't feel like you have to get much more than that if you dont want to for awhile.
Merchant comes next and you will want quite a bit of merchant. Having a lot of gold on hand means you can Heal your soldiers more often at the hospital if you need to and things like that. Which is great to heal after PvPs or just to heal 1 tick sooner to get more training in between wars. You probably want at least 5 more into Mechant than you put into healing. And even then once you have some duelist skills on this guy you will want more merchant.
Now gets some dueling skills. Your hero1 is going to be one of your biggest lines of defense in pvp. That means he needs Parry, Agility, and Resilience for sure. And then it depends on if you make him a Cav Hero or a Ranged Hero or just a Melee hero, but you will want to put some stats into whatever kind of hero he is. There is no "best" hero build, so just use your best judgement here. But your hero1 should NEVER lose a duel in training and will hopefully help you win duels in PvP as well. If your hero1 loses a lot then he probably needs more dueling Skills.
~Hero 2 + Hero 3~
Start with Trainer, about 20 Next is Leadership, 10-15 to start. (you'll want much more later) Next is Healing, 25 or so to start. 30 Merchant or so is next. And maybe 10-15 points into Parry/Agility, just to cut down on random hero injuries.
Then keep maxing Leadership and Merchant, with maybe a bit more healing thrown in, if it's cheap enough.
The idea with your heroes here is to try and support the kind of army we are going for. It involves a bit of trainer because hard capping with our armies might get difficult. Especially around Baron and Count and so we want to try and limit the problems that this kind of build might run into. If you decide to deviate from the guide and something different then let me know how it turned out. If you find out something that works really well then let me know. And if you try something that works really bad then let me know that too so I can encourage people not to do that. Let's just work as a team to have a massive cavalry main army, and then we'll see where the age takes us from there.
^^I think that is basically what we're using this age^^
I should probably write up a guide for people to follow if they join the age late and will be relying on mostly SFs for XP. Not right now though =P
17 people in main. 8 go into a SF. Conversation about dropping the opponent. LD decides to drop, but never tells the SF to merge so hits with only the offliners.