Welcome to BeardMonkey’s Kingdoms of Middle Earth blog

Hey everyone, welcome to BeardMonkey.net. I use this site to help other understand the game and write my opinion on certain aspects of the Kingdoms of Middle Earth. I do my best to cover every possible (important) topic related to the game and provide you with new information as soon as possible.

Information is split up into Articles and Blog. Under articles are filed posts of a permanent nature, providing information on various subjects which remain unchanged or are updated regularly. Under the blog category posts are made of a more temporary nature, concerning quick updates or more opinion based material.

The Index page lists all the articles and is the best way to find information. Articles are divided in the categories Kom101/beginner, Heroes and Equipment, Campaign, Troops and War, Alliance, Cities and Buildings, Tournaments,and Gameplay and Updates.

Please remember that this is not an official site in any way for the game or our alliance, just a collection of my thoughts on certain subjects.

 

321 thoughts on “Welcome to BeardMonkey’s Kingdoms of Middle Earth blog”

  3. As an new player of this type of game I have been reading your articles, I do have some questions that I didnt see touched upon.
    1) When attacking from a second city, does the Sage Tower come into affect for drop rates or do you have to attack from the first city?
    2) Friend asked me a question to ask, an alliance she was in merged to another, the new one is not her style and wanted to know if she leaves, does she get the Entrusted stone back?
    3) I attacked a Level 10 Goblin Camp and used the method you described about attack waves, after the second attack there were no kills, resources or relics of any kind. I waited about five minutes, and attached again, other than a few resources no relics of any kind, I attacked several times, it seems that after the initial attack it does no good to continue. Do you know if this was changed from when you did your write up?
    I really enjoy your write ups, some are too in depth for a casual player, but they are very informative, back in my CS days these kinds of write ups would have been great. Dont stop, waiting to see what you have to say about the Lake City and how to get it.

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    • Thank for the comment. Concerning your questions:
      (1)Yes Sage tower affects al cities. The latest atricle on the City Building overview covers this point.
      (2)There is a penalty for leaving an alliance with entrusted points. Something like 30% from memory, but not sure. Stones in inventory are safe of course.
      (3) Yes it seems this mechanic has changed and doesnt work anymore. The comments for that article have more people noticing a change.

      Again, thanks for the comment!

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  4. I would love to see an article on the hero upgrades using legendary pages. What is agained? Is there a difference between Gandalf I, Radagast I, and Bilbo I. Is Elrond a hero with special attributes? What are the benefits of the new hero levels?

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  5. Do I need to have an academy in every city to gain the maximum effect of my wilds in each city? Even though I have high heroes in every city and max wilds, max research…it seems that only my city with academy has the max production. It is a big difference, like 200k to 2 k.

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    • That seems rather impossible. And no you only need one academy. In fact, after reseraching the max levels, you can even destroy it for another home or barracks, the research stays.

      But production is dependent on wilds(+lvls), guardian statue, hero assigned, research levels and any rss runes running.Probably a difference somewhere there between cities.

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      • I have 3 lv 10’s as of right now to max out all the research and when that is finished I will probably just leave one in the main city just in case kabam decides to come out with more research topics.

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  6. What is the trick for getting galadrien tokens from erebor chests from smaug. I’ve used millions of might and every conceivable troop combo and continue to get almost always hourglasses with the odd hbc and renown but out of thousands of erebor chests Nvr galadrien tokens. Please explain this to me or tell me what I’ve missed. DO

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    • really dude? I was hitting smaug last knight and was getting great drops on tokens. Theuy key is to rune up with fury and invincible and use your highest hero

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      • You wanna hit Smaug, Full runed 130%+ Full geared, Marshaled hero 250 ” Doesnt do much for campaign but w/e ” and hit with a 250.

        I hit with 10k porters and 110k+ MRs I loose about 6k porters each hit.

        If you dont have porters use SMs

        Those are the troops that i have gotten best ratios with.

        I typically come out ahead for smaug. Rule of thumb is every 25 erbors chests one 16 token. However have been times where out of a 100 I get no tokens and out of 30 I get 5 is a gamble either way. Ultimately I believe you also break even or come out ahead once Premium comes around. Even if all you get is 10mil might you have made your might lost back.

        Disclaimer,
        I have noticed on my world and a few others Smaug drops different and premiums comes more often. Am active on 4 worlds and 2 of them smaug doesnt drop a chest every time you hit him. On my other 2 he drops chests every hit and premium comes regularly. The drop rate has gone slightly down noticeable but my Alliance still actively hits Smaug our members hit 200-300 times daily unless they arnt able. I maintain a 170ish refills in my items. Again I normally regain everything I used to hit smaug between premiums and either alot extra or alittle bit. As they say every little bit helps.

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        • As NIghtstar described, have the same at world 1 and 106. While at 106 every hit gives u something (drop rate for Erebors around 2.10), at world 1 i receive one Erebor after 20! hits, the rest gear or mostly nothing.

          After the Maintenance today, it will be interesting what and how often smaug will drop….

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        • 7000 porters
          1350 carts
          250 stone giants
          250 lycean riders
          Rest of the wave, Master Rangers is the best and most effective.

          Also, if you have 180%+ defensive buffs and high (5%+) city buffs,
          Send a full wave of mammoths with a 250 hero and your best def gears.
          (Most effective)

          As well as another method like; 5000 wagons, 5000 porters, 250 sgs, and rest mrs.

          There are many ways of killing smaug, but these are by far the best and easiest to replenish after using

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    • Token drops have been nerfed significantly, I have people in my group hitting Smaug hundreds of times for a few tokens…IMO not worth it anymore.

      And about specific drops: sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you dont. In the long run, results should suck compared to what they used to be.

      I think they nerfed it because right now, everyone has so much might that it is no effort to attack Smaug many times, as it used to be back in the 1M days…..

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      • Bearded,

        Ive heard many stories and claims pertaining to guardian city buffs and what effectivness they have when attacking/defending a city.

        Ive heard, and I would like to have this cleared up today, that 1% city buffs is equivalent to 5-10% buffs towards your troops when attacking/defending your city. So inessence these claims have stirred the idea that 10% def bonus ia equivalent to a 100% (roi) buff.

        Others say that 1% city buff is merely 1% which contradicts the first statements. Could you shed some light on this subject amd straighten it, once and for all? Id appreciate it

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    • I play on multiple servers and have spent a ton of money on this game and continue to get screwed by kabam. Obviously if you read kabam forum I’m not the only one. IV been playing almost 3 years and am looking for a way to screw kabam. If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them. I’m known hobbit wide as HK. IV talked to Google about kabam and have talked to the bbb I’m tired of being stole from .

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    • no clue and dont care. I dont do in hacks, nor will I discuss them here. The only working “hack” are the map finders that everyone seems to be using.

      Other than that, stay away from them, most likely contain viruses or use stolen CC information. Be warned!

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      • sorry I will not give out specialized tips for one person on the basis of a server number. I have an article on how to speed up troop training times which holds all available information in my view. The rest is up to the player.

        Besides, mentioning 125 doesnt tell me anything, as I dont know where all servers are in their evolution, nor do I know what alliance you’re in, what your level an might is, and what your cities look like.

        I simply dont have the time to give such specific advice/information….

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  14. I’m trying to find out how to train t1 troops faster and more if them during a troop train a thon. I keep using up RSS and population and still not training as much troops as others do on my server. Dwalin 112. They train over a mill or better during a tourney while I’m only being able to train up to 30 k troops at most when RSS is full and population is high. How do you continue to train this amount without running out of items or RSS or population ?

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    • Well its starts with enough high barracks and homes. You should at least be able to train 5k troops per city per hour. for 24 hour tournament that makes 120k per city, times 3 cities makes 360 k troops, or 1.44 m might.

      But of course, this all depends on where you are and what server. Older servers have more experienced players with much better constructed cities, so tournaments tend to go much higher as well.

      Im in the nr1 alliance of the entire game might-wise, and training times have become less and less important. You know who wins? Spenders, with incredible amounts of speedups and open gates items, and available rss, either through farming or more likely from their alliance. With sufficient speedups, you can have more homes, bigger population, bigger queues. People in my alliance can key up 250k troops in one go, speed it and produce 1 m might instantly.

      So again, depends on where you are. And btw, it helps to give the length of the tournament for perspective. 1M might is more impressive for an 8h tournament than it is for a 48 h one….

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      • OK some one said something about dismissing porters to regain population and or canceling training ques to get more population back faster and retrain that amount. My barracks are at *7 with at least 15 – 25 barracks in 3 cities. Only have 6-8 homes per city minus my troop city. City guardian buff is at 20% for troop training speed . so when I first set ques I can train 30-50k t1 troops . but then after that unless I have a lot of open gates or aton of RSS I have to wait the population to return . to be able to train that amount again. Other wise I’d only be training 3-5k troops each hr on a 8 hr train a thon.

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        • yeah when you queue a queue :), population drops and regenerates to max. But if you cancel a queue, a percentage of the queue’s needed population is returned along with the rss.

          So if you can queue 100k troops, wait for pop to grow to max again, and than cancel it, you can go over your max population, which you can then train again. But like I said, doing this effectively to the point of winning tournaments requires many many speedups and open gate items, at least in my server…

          Rinse ,repeat and you can go on forever popping might instantly almost as long as you have resources,speed ups and open gates….

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        • Actually u can dismiss porters to get instant idle pop. Do a que. While idle pop is still 0, go to barracks, click on porters, go down and hit dismiss. Now type in the same number of porters equal to your idol pop. If your idle pop is 124,000, then type in 124000 porters and hit dismiss. Force app refresh and wah lah instant idle pop. Did 19 ques in 5 min during last train a thon. Ran out of porters. But have tried other troops. Used t1s and other transports. But iI wouldnwouldn’t recommend using t1s unless the prize is too good to pass up. I train t1s in 3 cities and.porters in troop city. Hope this helps ya.

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    • also if you queue t1 wall first and wait the roughly 2 hours (or dismiss porters ) then once your idol pop regenerates cancel the wall and you idol pop will double as you regain the population used for the wall as well as what you currently have .

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  18. Hi, sorry for offtop. My name is Paul. I’m viceregent of one of the top Aliance from 101World. Something unexplainable ia happend during PvP tournaments last 2 mounthes in our World. I can show skrins 2 U – if U tell where… It brought our knowledge about deffence and offence Gear

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  19. love the site, just have 1 question; where can i get Beorn’s Call and Tauriel’s Verse for my forth city. any help is appreciated, thx

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    • yes they can be collected, and 450 of these can be traded in sage tower for epic books for a specific hero. The upgrade increases the march size for that book’s hero, but beware, the message we got made it seem as if you can only do it to ONE hero in all your cities, so wait for your attack hero’s book to come out before rushing in and spending the pages…..plus they take a long time to be farmed…

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  23. T1: mounted: mounted elves. Ranged: elven archers. Foot: elven militia. Supply: porters might: 4. T2: mounted: mounted hunters. Ranged: scorpions. Foot: elven warriors. Supply: carts. Might: 16. T3: mounted: mounted galadhriems. Ranged: ents. Supply:wagons foot: battering rams. Might: 24 T4: mounted:galadhriem lancers. Ranged: great eagles. Foot:mithlond sentries. Supply:supply caravans. Might: 72 T5: mounted riders of rivendell. Ranged: galadhriem archers. Foot: elven rangers. Supply supply columns. Might:144 P.S dwarf version will upload tomorrow morning.

    T1: mounted: mounted dwarves. Ranged: axe throwers. foot: Dwarven militia. Supply: porters. Might: 4 T2: mounted: boar riders. Ranged: siege crossbows. Foot: Dwarven warriors. Supply:carts. Might: 16. T3: mounted: heavy boar riders. Ranged: catapult. Foot: battering rams. Supply: wagons. Might: 24. T4: mounted: boar archers. Ranged: catapult wagons. Foot: dwarf phalanx. Supply: supply caravans. Might: 72. T5: mounted: riders of Erober. Ranged: crossbow warriors. Foot: grim hammers. Supply: supply columns. Might: 144.

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  24. Hey beardmonkey if u want gear pics of guard or annihilation,please email me. If you have them already, just reply and tell me you already have them.

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  25. This is awesome, it’s like I have a question and there it is. You have done an amazing job with this blog, I am extremely impressed with your work.

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    • they are prizes in the current series of cross world tournaments. You cannot use them, KABAM only uses them to track who scored what points. The more matrks, the better.

      At the end, the alliance with most overall average marks per player wins the server tournament, and possibly the world tournament.

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  30. I have recieved a few map pieces in a chest from Galadriels prem and I have no idea what to do with them :-/ any help would be appreciated 🙂

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  32. Hi beardmonkey. I would like to put a link for ur site on my alliance site as i think the work u do here is amazing. But wanted to check with u first before i include it on my site.

    Many thanks
    MsryMaker
    Thorin98

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  33. Hey Beardmonkey, great blog very helful I’ve spread the word in my alliance :-)…..was just wondering if you guys have a system in place for hitting a summoned boss…because of the new update and good chance of snagging val runes for upgrade on gear….we were trying to get some kind of group hit with max numbers to share prizes but dont know what that number is , I did notice in 1 of the blogs you said it may take diff math compared to the usual is there any update on that…..thanks hairtrigger

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  37. Wonderful blog. Great information across all aspects of the game!! Amazing effort gone into this. Very much appreciated! ❤

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  38. Hello, I was wondering if “Life” and “Defense” does anything. In your campaign spreadsheet (Thanks for that!) you only mention attack bonus and honed blades, not defense bonus and Vigor. What’s up with that? Does Vigor and Defense bonus not do anything for your units when attacking?

    Thanks a bunch!

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    • yup, they help survivability of your troops and are a major factor in getting great scores, as expected. However, for the specific equation of finding out how many troops you need to send at a certain goblin army to wipe them out in only one attack, I only have to look at goblin defense/life versus player attack.

      Since I have no battle calculator to work out the battle outcomes beforehand, I have no use for defenses in the campaign sheet. Getting the best scores possible is up to the individual player, the sheet is just a starting point…

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  39. Campaign use of rangers and giants. As you mentioned in you campaign article giants absorb damage like a tank adding even 2-3 with rangers yields higher scores. So given the import and value of these troops it pays to hide them in a closed city as they attack and/or defend first and you will lose them if your city is open. I am Lord_Sauron on server 32 and have the highest troop kills on all servers and might gained. Great site well done very useful for a lot of members in my alliance. Unfortunately, for me my buffs are maxxed out at 127 attk and 127 defence so Im just tinkering with campaign highscore now but I think max possible score is around 120 mill but I’m still working on non-regenerating bosses with t6 giants and rangers … The machine rampages on. All hail Kabam.

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    • There is a max score for each cave in campaign which varies by cave. Kabam sets two constants for each cave which determine the max score. Currently in World 65 the highest score is 167M. I’ll give the score formula, but I don’t know the constants (the first is usually near 3000)

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      • The constants are C1 (usually near 3000) and C2, E is Efficience (total troops sent), V is Vitality (troop deaths)

        Score = C1/E + C1/V – T + C2

        3 is the lowest for E and V. If you get lower, 3 is used instead.

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  43. Mooie blog, mocht je tips willen inzake TK dan kun je contact met me opnemen. Ik speel in Eladriel 5 en sta op nr 9 TK all Time. Naam T1LB04RMY mzzl

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  45. Bro, i dont wanna sound rude, but… your knowledge about the effect of buffs (runes, herolvl, equip etc) is not correct. You can contact me on Bifur94 (s1nnl0s) to get some information.

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    • Before getting into contact ingame, could you please state in what way or in which article I made wrong assumptions? So far this subject has I think only been touched upon in the campaign spreadsheet….is that where you found errors?

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  46. Great blog! Could you do a post on the best city setup for training troops? What are your thoughts on the method of training: do you suggest to max out the number of troops trained or do you divide max number by number of barracks and train that number to have all ques filled? Do you recommend building up all RSS plots in a city or only a select number, since the idle population will be reduced to work the RSS?

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    • Great question. Difficult to get into an answer in this comment, also because every player has a different style of playing, but Ill keep it in mind and will perhaps write an article on the coming time! Thanks for the suggestion!

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  47. Love your Blog. I am going to share the information with my alliance and I am sure you will have a number of new followers as a result. Really good stuff!

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  49. Thanks for all the nice tips. I’m a generally new player and your blog is helping. When I play games I get obsessed with small details that only hardcore players care about.

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      • Think you can make an advanced guide on Smaug? Like drop rates of Smaug and how exactly to attack him. Although, I am more interested in drops. And what exactly drops from each chest. And yes, this is going to cost a lot of might :\ but do it for the sake of my laziness! I don’t think anyone knows numbers for Smaug yet.

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        • When hitting smaug just for drops use one troop type only, doesn’t matter which. T1 for best might loss ratio but t3 if saving t1 for proper fighting. save t5 for campaign high score. One thing we just noticed is that drop rate of good chests dropped during the recent Goblin kill event on E5. One of my members won a significant amount of chests and found that he received far poorer prizes from the chests he opened during comp compared to those he saved for a day or two. Worth considering…

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