This article serves as a small follow up of the previous article on getting great campaign scores. I want to delve a little deeper and discuss some issues not touched upon in the previous article.

I will discuss the make-up of a campaign high score visually with a graph I made, go a little bit into Hero gear, discuss the use of guides, the new non-trainable troops and more.

If you have suggestions for more tropics, put them in the comments.

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I am going to discuss the following things:

1. Make-up of campaign scores
2. Removal of marching times
3. What to focus on for getting good scores
4. Use of Hero equipment
5. Using guides to campaign
6. The new non-trainable troops
7. Scoring during campaign events

1. Make-up of campaign scores

This is perhaps not really necessary, but it will give a nice visual illustration of how your troops numbers result in a certain high score. I explained in the previous article how efficiency and vitality are basically the number of troops you send in and the troops that die. Below is a graph showing you what sending a certain amount of troops does to these values, and by extension, your score. Please take into account that the scales on this graph are way off.

The red line shows the number of troops you send in increasing linear, up to the maximum allowed by your Musterfield level. The green line shows how many troops die of those that you send in. The blue line shows approximately the score graph shape that comes with it.

0-A

Between 0 and A, troop numbers increase, but you are sending insufficient troops to defeat the goblins. The deaths graph is the same as the troops graph, and up to point A, you get a zero or no score.

A-C

At point A, the goblin army and your troops are evenly matched. Between A and C, you defeat the goblins with fewer and fewer losses. The deaths graph doesnt go down smoothly, as several numbers of troops tend to result in the same losses before more or less troops are lost. As your losses become less and less, your score starts to increase.

Increasing the troop number further and further, we reach point C. It is at this exact point that combat transitions from multi round battles into one round battles. This means that the goblins have only one round to kill your troops, which means they reached the minimum number of troops the goblins will kill, regardless of troop numbers send in. You can send in more troops, but the goblins will, due to the way battle is done, always be able to kill this amount of troops, so the line becomes horizontal. From point C onward, scores go down, as vitality remains stable, while efficiency score goes down.

Point B

Somewhere between A and C lays point B, the maximum score you can get on that particular map. For maps where you a reasonable number of troops to win, this point cannot be at point A, but COULD, theoretically, be at point C. However I do not think this is the case. Hitting this point is what each campaigner wants; optimal efficiency, low vitality, and the best score possible with their set-up. Setting up a campaigning guide will be mostly about fine-tuning the troop number to reach this point.

C-D

Between points C and D, the number of troops killed by the goblins is fixed, and increasing the number of troops sent will only decrease your score. It will not however return to zero again, but slowly move towards a minimum, which is around several thousand points for most maps.

Point E

At point E, we have reached the maximum number of troops we can send out, dictated by the Musterfield. It will be close to, if not THE, lowest score you can get.

2. Removal of marching times

As most of you will have noticed, marching times have been removed from campaign altogether. Not that it ever functioned properly, it simply was 30 seconds in virtually all cases. Removing it means no more Bilbo glasses needed, and no more worrying about how quickly you can press the speed up button.

3. What to focus for getting good scores

Now, in the first article, I explained what the basic points are you need to take into account when going for high scores. You want to get to point B in the above graph, which is at a different point for each player/set-up. What I want to add here, applies when you’ve almost reached that point and are fine-tuning the numbers down to individual troops. My point here: Vitality is more important than Efficiency!

In approaching the optimal score, you can try to fine-tune efficiency by sending out less troops, or vitality by sending out more and lowering vitality/deaths. My experience, is that the latter (vitality) has more of an impact on your score. If you send out 4 more troops, resulting in loosing 1 less, scores tend to increase. This seems to be because 1 troop less lost is proportionally better than decreasing efficiency with 1 troop, as the number of troops you send in is ALWAYS higher than the number of deaths (or you’d lose the battle). So in fine-tuning the last steps, try to focus on loosing 1 or 2 less troops, instead of sending less troops altogether.

4. Use of Hero equipment

Just quickly pointing out here, that you want to go for the highest gear you have at your disposal of course. Now, since we know from point 3 that Vitality has a bigger effect (in general) on scores compared to Efficiency, it is best to focus on gear with high life bonuses. Point in case: Ent Gear. As I already suggested here, Ent gear has decent base attack and life bonuses, PLUS 2% life  bonus to all troops per gear piece. So if you have Ent pieces, put them all on, except for the shield, for which the Pilfered shield has the same life bonus but higher attack.

Theoretically, it is possible for a set to have such an amount of added attack bonus as to be better suited for campaign, but with the sets I have seen so far, the added life bonus from the Ent items outweighs the small loss in attack compared to Pilfered, and helps increase your campaign scores.

If you do not have full sets but pieces of several sets, try to see which combinations gives the best life bonus to your troops, without sacrificing too much attack.

5. Using guides to campaign

Now everybody, as soon as a CHS event starts, starts looking and asking for the perfect guide to do the campaign levels and get the best scores, and many people indeed have made guides and will pass them around. But let me clear something up:

There is NO ultimate campaigning guide that suits everybody

This should be more than obvious, but if you look at the comment section of the first article, one person proclaims to have a good list, and almost all comments following are requests to get the list. This seems a bit silly, as each individual player will have different Heroes, different gear, different permanent buffs and different Guardian buffs. And these have a huge impact on campaign scores. If you get two or three more Shield Walls, you can basically throw all your old numbers away. They won’t be useless, but the highest scores will now be for different troop numbers and you’d better get down to fine-tuning your guide again.

So if you want to participate in for example an Alliance CHS event, you can use guides, get good scores and help your alliance. BUT, if you want to go for the top spots, you will need to fine-tune each guide to match EXACTLY the specs and buffs you have at the moment. This does not apply only when you are lucky enough to find a guide tailored exactly to your specs already (lucky bastard), or if you figured out the exact formulas for battle outcome and campaign high scores, which I haven’t seen yet.

6. The new non-trainable troops

Now a big monkey wrench in all of this is the addition of the new non-trainable troops just released: Stone Giants, Master Rangers (and Pack Mammoths). The Stone Giants act as Tanks, buffering a lot of damage for your damage dealing troops. These in turn, are the Master Rangers, dealing massive damage but who are quite vulnerable on their own. Pack Mammoths are simply high tier supply troops.

The best thing to do right now to increase high scores in campaign is to get the right numbers of Stone Giants and Master Rangers. They explode scores obtained with normal T5 units. Please look at this article to get to know everything about these new units.

7. Scoring during Campaign events

Now this short points stems from a lot of confusion I’ve seen with people on forums, in my alliance, and here on my site. People often wonder if you need to beat your personal High Score during an event for that score to count. The answer is NO!

Only the highest score DURING the event counts towards your score!

So especially in Alliance based events, it is more important to actually do every map at least once than to get the highest score. Don’t worry you can be just below your personal high score and still make a lot of points count towards the overall score. If, during the event, you do a certain map for a second, third or more time, the highest score among those will count towards your overall score.

And that concludes this article. Hopefully I will have touched upon most issues or questions by now surrounding high scores in campaign, but suggestions for future articles or additions are welcomed in the comment section. Happy campaigning!