Early game strategy. Sabotage immunity -- KOC's barrier to entry.

Simply put, until you have reached the sabotage immunity level of ~128,001+ Covert Action rating, all armor you purchase can be easily destroyed by hundreds of other players, and all weapons are liable to break the first time you try to use them. You will not even be notified of who successfully sabotages you.

This leaves only one safe way to play the early game: get sabotage immunity off of the regular income your soldiers provide. Do not try to attack in this phase of the game except under unusual circumstances; all your weapons are liable to break before the battle has even begun, and in this case you have lost your entire weapon investment, and your soldiers have to fight the current battle empty-handed! As much of a fan as I may be of martial arts... I still must plead, please don't do this to your army!

But how on Earth are you supposed to get to sabotage immunity just off of your regular income? Aren't the higher spy levels ridiculously expensive? Aren't you going to be robbed by others before you have anywhere near enough gold to purchase the higher spy levels?

Banking.

While anyone can chip away at your armor's durability, and many can outright destroy it if you do not have sabotage immunity yet, you, and only you, have control over when your weapons can experience wear and tear, or break from sabotage. (There is one sad exception to this: account hacking. It has been known to happen. Choose a strong password, and try to take some of the standard measures re: preventing rogue programs from executing on your computer and sending keylogging or other information to malevolent entities, to protect yourself from this.)

In particular, you can sell a sabotaged weapon for just as much gold as you can sell a regular weapon, as long as you have not broken the sabotaged weapon in battle. (Contrast this with the utterly useless Sabotage Check game function, which costs you money AND breaks the sabotaged weapons anyway. Friends don't let friends Sabotage Check.) This amount of gold is 75% of the weapon's purchase price, assuming the weapon is unused.

Therefore, if you are not attacking, you can save gold by purchasing weapons. Typically players buy Knives for this purpose, both because it's the cheapest item, and because it's easy to divide your current cash on hand by 1,000 to determine how many Knives you can buy when you log on.

This lends itself to a simple, boring, but effective way for anyone to achieve sabotage immunity: keep "banking" Knives until

(cash on hand) + (sell value of knives) >= (cost of next spy level)

then sell just enough Knives to purchase the next spy level. (I recommend having two Kings of Chaos windows open at the same time when doing this, one open to Armory and one open to Training. Click to purchase the spy level immediately after you have sold your Knives. You do not want to give others a chance to attack you before you have spent your gold!) Continue this until you have achieved level 9. Then train 251 spies (unless you're an Elf, then you want 201 spies).

This takes a long time. But there is no alternative. It is the barrier to entry for creating a real Kings of Chaos account, it is larger than it should be, but we've got to live with it this Age.

Weapons and armor, specialization, and combat damage.

An item wielded by a general soldier adds a base of 4 to your Strike Action or Defensive Action for every attack/defense point of the item. For example, a fully repaired Excalibur, providing 2560 attack points, will add a base of 4 * 2560 = 10240 to your Strike Action. A slightly damaged Excalibur, at 2540/2560 strength, will add a base of 4 * 2540 = 10160 to your Strike Action.

An item wielded by an appropriately specialized soldier will add a base of 5 to your Strike Action/Defensive Action per attack/defense point instead. Thus, a fully repaired Excalibur, in the hands of an attack-specialized soldier, will add a base of 5 * 2560 = 12800 to your Strike Action instead.

This is a major increase for a mere 2000 gold investment. So, as a rule of thumb, you will want to have enough specialized soldiers to wield all your major weapons and armor.

How does Strike Action/Defensive Action translate into actual damage dealt? Some people make the silly complaint that they're somehow "losing" damage they should be doing, because they are consistently dealing less damage than they have Strike Action. In actuality, the Strike Action/Defensive Action appears to be the theoretical maximum on the amount of damage you deal, rather than the average. If you have a reasonable amount of weapons, you will always deal an amount of damage close to the average, which appears to be 70%.

You can use the 70% average to infer how much Strike Action you need to penetrate a target's defenses, given information on the target's counterdamage. For instance, if someone is reported to deal 14 million counterdamage, you need a Strike Action greater than 14,000,000/0.7 = 20 million to expect to successfully attack them.

Protecting your underlying army.

One complaint occasionally heard from players that have spent a reasonable amount of time on the game is, "people are killing my troops as quickly as I can recruit them!"

This is entirely avoidable. If you ever lose a single actual troop (rather than a mercenary, which can be trivially replaced) in battle, you are probably misplaying.

What is the correct approach? It is founded around three basic game mechanics:
- Your attack specialists do not participate in battles where you are defending.
- The number of casualties you suffer when fighting against a similar-powered attacker is roughly n/100, where n is the number of your troops participating in the battle. (In particular, if you have less than 70 troops or so participating in a battle, you cannot suffer losses.)
- Mercenaries always die before regular troops, and are easy to replace.

Unarmed troops deal a negligible amount of damage, compared to the undesirable effect they have on the number of casualties you suffer. So you want to minimize the number of unarmed troops participating in defensive battles, because you cannot control the number of defensive battles you must fight. In contrast, because you do have control over your offensive battles, you can always ensure that you have enough mercenaries on hand to absorb losses when you attack.

Therefore, most players will want to train their entire army, except what is needed to wield defensive weapons, to attack specialization, and hire General Mercenaries to absorb expected losses when attacking.

The paranoid (like myself) even do this while still in the process of working toward sabotage immunity. However, this usually slightly lengthens the amount of time it takes to achieve sabotage immunity, so if you're the impatient type, you may want to accept troop losses in your initial battles, and wait until you have a reasonable offensive arsenal before you attack-train your whole army.

Item durability.

Some players complain that they have to spend all the gold they earn just on repairing their items.

While, if the game's durability model was more coherent, this would be more of an issue, right now this is avoidable.

The durability rounding bug, and its consequences.

When you purchase new items to add to an existing "stack" (e.g. you have 99 Dragons and purchase 1 more), the durability is averaged, and rounded up.

This is a conceptual bug which typically allows repair costs to be completely ignored. Let's get back to the example where you have 99 Dragons; say they are at 2558/2560 durability. You purchase one more Dragon. The durabilities are averaged:

(99 * 2558 + 1 * 2560) / (100 * 2560) = 2558.02 / 2560

and then the 2558.02 value is rounded up to 2559!

Effectively, you have received 0.98 points worth of "free" repair for every item in the stack. To exploit this to the hilt, you will want to always purchase items 1 at a time until your stack is at full durability.

Combat durability loss. 5x1 attacks.

An attacker's Dragons will lose anywhere from 0 to 10 points of durability per attack, regardless of the number of attack turns spent. A defender's Dragonskins will lose an average of 2 points against very weak attackers, and I believe slightly more against strong ones (I am not certain of this).

If you are not powerful enough to steal gold from someone, and they are sabotage-immune, the only way you have to hurt them is to whittle down their item durability. The most efficient way to do this is to get as many people as possible to participate in the controversial operation known as a 5x1 attack.

What's the "5"? You are not permitted to attack any target more than 5 times in any 24 hour period. Therefore, to inflict maximum pain on a target in the shortest amount of time, you'll want to attack 5 times in a row.

What's the "1"? Unlike regular attacks, where you want to pillage gold and therefore want to use 15 attack turns, there is no reason to use more than 1 attack turn in this operation. You'll inflict the same amount of durability loss either way, so best to economize on attack turns spent.

Since every weak attack inflicts 2 points of durability loss on a defender's Dragonskins on average, every participant in a 5x1 attack inflicts an average of 10 points, and the number of participants required to completely wipe out a target's defensive durability is roughly 2560/10 = 256. This applies to anyone, even orc00 and LordStriker. Because of how this encourages creation of fake accounts, I consider this a game design flaw. The Red vs Blue Alliance, which I am a member of, will never allow the use of fake accounts in its own 5x1 attack operations.

On the other hand, because the durability rounding bug allows free repair of items, the adverse effects of this game design flaw have been kept in check.

Calculations:

Strike Action:

Let x=damage points of weapon (example, dragonskin had 2560)
Let y=percentage multiplier, in other words your fortification/siege. If you have battlements it is a 100% multiplier.
Let z=what you get after you multiply in the percentage.
(the 5 is used for trained soldiers; untrained soldier recieve a 4 in its place)

Defensive Action:

5(x)(y)+z=weapon strength
Let x=damage points of weapon (example, dragonskin had 2560)
Let y=percentage multiplier, in other words your fortification/siege. If you have battlements it is a 100% multiplier.
Let z=what you get after you multiply in the percentage.
(the 5 is used for trained soldiers; untrained soldier recieve a 4 in its place)

Calculating how many spies can get through

You can safely sneak
X * Spy_Efficiency / CA
into an enemy camp, whether to spy or sabotage.

X is a constant. Some say 100, some 102. (I use 100 to calc how many I send in, 102 to calc how to keep others out, just to be on safe side)

Spy efficiency is 2 ^ You_Spy_Level. (1 if lvl 0, 2 if lvl 1, 4 if lvl 2,..., 512 if lvl 9, 1024 if lvl 10). This is 25% higher for elves.

CA is your enemies CA

Selling items:

You get back
price*0.75*current_strength/max_strength
when you sell items. (i.e. a dragonskin reduced to 1280 would gain you 167,800*,75*1280/2560 = 62,925)

When to upgrade

Level 2 (Ballistas): after $120,000 spent on attack weapons
Level 3 (Battering Ram): after $240k
Level 4 (Ladders): after $480k
Level 5 (Catapults): after $960k (about 6 Excaliburs)
Level 6 (Siege Towers): after $1.9m (about 11 Excaliburs)
Level 7 (Trebuchets): after $3.8m (23 Excaliburs)
Level 8 (Dynamite): after $7.7m (46 Excaliburs)
Level 9 (Cannons): after $15.4m (92 Excaliburs)

N.B. It works the same for defense, and I don't think that Orc/Dwarf bonuses make any difference

Combat damage:

You can use the 70% average to infer how much Strike Action you need to penetrate a target's defenses, given information on the target's counterdamage. For instance, if someone is reported to deal 14 million counterdamage, you need a Strike Action greater than 14,000,000/0.7 = 20 million to expect to successfully attack them.

Pillage:

(target's cash on hand) * (random number from 50% to 100%) * (attack turns used / 15) * min (1, their true army size / your true army size).

If you always use 15 attack turns (I recommend this, except when probing what a target's counterdamage is, in which case use 1 attack turn), and never attack anyone with a smaller true army size than you, this formula is simplified to:

(target's cash on hand) * (random number from 50% to 100%).

Attack damage:

5(x)(y)+z=weapon strength

Let x=damage points of weapon (example, dragonskin had 2560)
Let y=percentage multiplier, in other words your fortification/siege. If you have battlements it is a 100% multiplier.
Let z=what you get after you multiply in the percentage. Let's use an example:

Dragonskin with battlements, race = humans

5(x)(y)+z
5(2560)(100%)+z
12800(100%)+z
12800(1)+z
z = 12800 (because 12800 * 1 is 12800 obviously)
12800+12800=25600

That's how much a dragonskin will give you if you have battlements.

Just another example so people aren't confused:

Flaming Arrow with trebuchets, race = elves

5(x)(y)+z
5(2560)(150%)+z
12800(150%)+z
12800(1.5)+z
z = 19200
19200+12800=32000

So a flaming arrow will give you 32000 strike action if you're elves and have trebuchets.

Note: If your race is Orcs or Dwarves and are using this forumula, just add an extra 25% to the attack or defense value.

Note: The '5' at the beginning comes from a trained soldier.
If you have a trained soldier with the weapon, use the formula 5(x)(y)+z
But if the soldier is untrained, use this: 4(x)(y)+z