I’ve been playing and researching Kingdoms Live for a while now and wanted to share some learnings that my friend and I have come up with. The main topic today is Armies and Battles, so I will jump right in with Armies. While I mentioned in my primer part 1 and part 2, that early on, you shouldn’t accept the army invitations any sooner than you need to for quests, eventually you will just be able to accept all the invitations, because the maximum effective army size (MEAS) is 5 times your level. So if you are level 12, your army will fight as an army of 60. Even if you have over a thousand members of your army.



And as I also said in the primer, each member of your army can use 1 weapon, 1 armor, and 1 spell. This sounds straight forward, but you might get caught up in some of the game play and purchase some extra armor that won’t get used. An example of this would be if you purchased a small iron shield, leather armor, and leather helm for everyone in your army. It would make sense that each member could wear all three, but they can’t. They can only use one item at a time PER BATTLE (this will get important later.)

This leads me to how an army behaves in battle, and what I have learned about the in game battle mechanics that determines if you win or lose. I should also take the time right now to mention that if you disagree with anything in this article, or have anything else to contribute, please leave it in the comments. For most of my examples, let’s assume the character is level 10 with an army of 50. Let’s start with weapons and then move on to armor and spells. When you are attacking a rival army, the attack stat on a weapon is used. At this level the highest attack is 3. You can get this from 3 different weapons, short sword, wooden hatchet and broad sword. You don’t want to stock up on hatchets, because they are the exact same stats as the short sword but cost over three times as much. I have seen many armies stacked up with broad swords, and I now believe this to be a mistake and I will explain why shortly.

So once you have stocked up your army with 50 weapons (ideally short swords at this point for maximum attack per gold), it’s time to move on to armor. Here is where things get a little more involved. We are still considering attacking and not defending for right now, so we have a few options. A leather helm is only 45 gold and has 2 attack. The small iron shield is 75 but only has 1 attack (but 7 defense!), and the leather armor (I can’t remember what level this opens up at, lets assume you can buy it at level 10 for this example) has 4 attack for 120 gold. Now why am I specifically looking at attack levels and not the combination of attack and defense? The reason is that I have evidence that shows your army will switch to use high defense items when defending, and higher attack items when attacking, and that those are the only stats used in the calculation of whether or not you win the battle. Again, I will go into more detail on this later.

Lastly, there are only 2 choices for spells at this point. Fireball and Force Shield. Both of them come with an upkeep and are expensive compared to weapons and armor with comparable stats. That said, it’s much more affordable to stock up on a bunch of fireballs (50 fireballs would be 100 upkeep, so make sure you are spending some of your gold on land), and it would give you quite an advantage in battle of a player with all the same weapons and armor, but no spells.

Now lets look at defending, and go back to weapons. Again, the highest defense on a weapon is 3. You can get it from a longbow or a broadsword. How about that, broadsword came up twice in our best of class analysis. Does that mean we should just buy broadswords and not need to have separate weapons for attacking and defending? You could do that, and like I said, I have come across many armies that are similarly equipped. But the problem is it costs 100 gold for a broadsword, and it costs 72 gold to buy a short sword and a longbow. Which would you rather spend? I think many players do not realize how the came mechanics work, and if it were not for some testing between a friend and I, we would not have figured it out. The reason this is tricky to figure out, is that while you get to see what equipment your army and your opponent uses when you attack, you don’t get to see that when you defend. After trading screenshots back and forth, we realized that the game was doing what I described above.

So now let’s finish up on armor and spells. At this point in the game, its an easy choice for defense when it comes to armor. The small iron shield at 7 defense and only 75 gold is an easy choice. The same goes for spells, with Force Shield having 8 defense compared to Fireball with only 3. But Force Shield is pricey, at least at this level. 250 gold plus 5 upkeep is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, one of my next articles will be on why defense can be the fast track to leveling up in an instant.

So what’s the final conclusion. Well here is my ideal army at this level, for both stats and least amount of gold cost.

Weapons (excluding quest rewards or freebies like the warhammer):
50 Shortswords
50 Longbows

Armor:
50 leather armor
50 Small iron shields

Spells:
50 Fireballs
50 Forceshields (If you can afford it.)

That’s it for now. Like I said, leave comments if you have anything to add or if you disagree with anything in the article. And come back in a couple of days when I have my article on defending and it’s benefits on leveling up.