Battle Mechanics III: Why your opponent doesn’t matter

skill fierce loyaltyWelcome to part III in this Battle Mechanics series. In part I and II, we constructed the basic battle formula with buffs and debuffs, focusing specifically on gear buff and debuffs. Now it is time to chose the optimal set of gear. But before we get to that, we consider here our opponent. Many people still tell me that I have to take into account the opponent’s gear when choosing my own, in the sense that (usually), if an opponent has mostly debuffs, I should aim for buffs, and vice versa.

In part IV, we are going to (for the last time hopefully) discuss our own gear choices, taking Diminishing Returns into account, but here in part III, I will first briefly detail why you should never look at your opponent’s buffs and debuffs distribution.

Continue reading

Masters Season II tournament series

trophy-cupThe Masters Season 2 has officially begun. The series of events spans the entire remainder of the month of March, consisting of both individual and alliance based tournaments, in which special items to track progress can be won. Also, prizes will consist of special items that can be traded in in the Sage Tower for various prizes, giving the players freedom to spend their earnings on whatever prize they need most! In this article I will provide all known information about the tournament series 2 as it plays out.

  • 1. Series in a nutshell
  • 2. Schedules
  • 3. Sage Tower trade-ins
  • 4. Season 2 prizes
    • 4.1 Alliance prizes
    • 4.2 Individual prizes
    • 4.3 Cross-world Alliance prizes
    • 4.4 Cross-world individual prizes

Continue reading

Tournaments: Alliance Boss Kill

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUGThe Alliance Boss Kill tournament got introduced shortly after the introduction of Alliance Bosses on the campaign map. During normal play, the Bosses can be summoned and killed to receive rewards including Vala Stones, gear, Valto runes and Gatherer Stones to level up your City Guardian. During Boss kill tournaments, you get points for killing the bosses. It is a pretty straightforward principle, so this article wil not be that long or complicated.

  • 1. The basics
  • 2. Scoring
  • 3. Tactics
    • 3.1 Go for the highest Boss(es) only
    • 3.2 Use you attack Hero/gear
    • 3.3 Set your timers
    • 3.4 Spending can seal the deal
  • 4. Conclusion

Continue reading

Masters Season 1 tournament series

trophy-cupA new series of tournaments has been announced by Kabam: The Masters Season 1. The series of events spans the entire remainder of the month of February, consisting of both individual and alliance based tournaments, in which special items to track progress can be won. Also, prizes will consist of special items that can be traded in in the Sage Tower for various prizes, giving the players freedom to spend their earnings on whatever prize they need most! Considering the name, there will likely be more Master Seasons in the future. In this article I will provide all known information about the tournament series 1 as it plays out.

  • 1. Series in a nutshell
  • 2. Schedules
  • 3. Sage Tower trade-ins
  • 4. Season 1 prizes
    • 4.1 Alliance prizes
    • 4.2 Individual prizes

Continue reading

City Buildings: the City Guardian

guard headerAs soon as you open your city, it’s there: The City Guardian. A large statue in the middle of your city, seemingly more decorative than functional. But the City Guardian actually functions as a protector of your City, providing very useful buffs that will certainly help even the most experienced players. In this article, I delve a little deeper into the Guardian and give an overview of how it functions.

Continue reading

Kom101: City Buildings Overview

buibarracksOne of the basics aspects of the game Kingdoms of Middle Earth is acquiring and building up your cities. When starting the game, you have one city, but this can be expanded to 4 cities, and a special 5th Lake-Town city. Cities can contain a number of different buildings, each with their own function and dependencies.

In this article, I will summarize what each building does. Two types of buildings are mentioned: The City buildings contained within your City Walls, and the Field, or resource buildings, which are constructed on field plots. Buildings from the 5th Lake-Town city will come in a separate article.

Although most building and research dependencies for each building have been mentioned, this article on normal construction, and this article on Runecrafting can also help figuring out requirements.

NOTE: Images of the buildings are courtesy of the HobbitArmies Wikia page here

Continue reading

Master Ranger Might increase

master rangerSo by now I believe all servers have had the Master Ranger might value changed from 0 to 10. With zero might, the Master Rangers gave attackers an incredible TK ratio advantage, and many servers and alliances decided not to use them in TK. But as there was nothing preventing it absolutely, many players complained about the MR usage in attacking other players.

Although Kabam’s initial reactions were mixed or even a bit confusing, they now gave in and gave them 10 might, making them slightly less attractive, but still better than T1. So what are your thoughts on this? Do you agree? Should the might value be even higher? Or should they have done something different. Let me know in the poll and comments. In the mean time, the might value has been updated in the TT article.

Hero Equipment: Mining Gems

dwarf pickAs proposed earlier, I have put this subject in a separate article, to keep the information on both Gem mining and Embedding separated and thus hopefully easier to comprehend. The main purpose of mining in Kingdoms of Middle Earth is to acquire the Gem Shards needed to make the Gems used for embedding in gear.

Here I will give an overview of the things necessary to find the mines on the map, mine them successfully for Gem Shards, and other possible benefits from mining. To mine we need to know the following things:

  1. What is Mining exactly?
  2. What types of Mines are there?
  3. How do you find Mines?
    • Watch Tower
    • Search Results
  4. How do you start mining?
    • Attacking a Mine
    • Mining progress and report
    • Reinforcing a Mine
    • Gem Pouch research
  5. What are the possible drops?
  6. Defending Mines
    • Strategy
    • Use in TKing
    • Alliance agreements

Continue reading

KoM 101: Farming made easy

small-farm-tractorsPerhaps not long awaited, but certainly long planned…my post on farming in Kingdoms of Middle Earth. Farming resources from other players is on of two ways of gaining resources, the other being producing it yourself in your cities. Farming other players however, is vastly more profitable than producing, and so will quickly become essential for your might growth, if done properly of course.

In this article, I will explain to you my method of farming. I know there are many methods and styles to choose from, so if you don’t like this style that’s ok. I’ve just found that it nets me more than enough resources in a short time, trying to be as efficient as possible. It will take some effort to set up, but once working, will really ease your farming trips.

Continue reading

Alliance Shop: Where to farm Vala stones

amber blablaOk, ok, so by now everyone who has leveled up their alliance somewhat, knows that acquiring Amber Stones of Vala becomes more and more important. At level 30, I could entrust roughly 300 stones per day, now I need to entrust over 750. More then enough to make keeping up with Alliance Bosses time consuming, and assuming the Stones aren’t bought in shop.

So farming these Stones becomes more and more important. Whether you do a whole lot in one Invul burst, or farm daily what you need to Entrust, knowing where to find them at the least might loss is important (it seems?).  I just want to give two small tips for farming the stones most efficiently.

Continue reading

Hero Equipment: Upgrading gear

up[gradegear article headerFinally, one of the biggest promises of the last few months has been fulfilled: Upgradable gear has arrived. No longer are we at the wimps of luck or mithril…now, we can start upgrading our own gear and make the best gear combinations possible. In this article, I will try to combine all possible information on upgrading and enhancing your gear pieces. Like always, if I learn stuff later on, I’ll add it to the article.

Continue reading

Update 10.0: Not so Major yet…

As promised in their forum post on future updates, Kabam just released update 10.0 (at least for Android) for Kingdoms of Middle Earth. The main feature of this update should be an Alliance center of some sort.

Although no actual implementation of these features can be found in the game yet, some information screens hind at what is coming. Read more to find out what I know so far, and check up regularly on future, more detailed posts.

Continue reading

KoM 101: Getting through your first 7 days

bubbleWhen you start playing Kingdoms of Middle Earth, you are thrown into a busy, confusing world, with cities, wilds, goblins, alliances and players yelling in GC. It can be difficult to get a grasp of the many game aspects. I remember my starting point as extremely slow in hind sight…Figuring everything out by myself, occasionally guided by the KoM wiki, progressing ever so slowly. If I would have known what I know all now, progress would have been much faster.

This article is meant for new players who, instead of figuring out everything by themselves, want to get a head start. Starting a new game, you are placed in your safe bubble for 7 days. But how do you start your journey? What should you build and train, what aspects to focus on? All this and some more tips after the break!

Continue reading

How to get great High Scores on campaign levels 2

campaign pictureThis 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.

Continue reading

Shout out: KoMMercenaries.com

A quick shout out to another great Kingdoms of Middle Earth web blog:

www.KoMMercenaries.com

The blog is run by a lady named LucilleTwo, and contains many useful articles. She writes both articles specifically for her alliance, as well as excellent posts on general game related topics for everyone, and when possible, we will cooperate and share information between our blogs.

Great articles include those on locations on the KoM map to move to, an enhanced/different version of the campaign spreadsheet , and various articles on the buildings withing KoM.

Be sure to give the blog a visit and give her your feedback. Cya!

Alliance Boss Battles: All you need to know

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUGLike mentioned in my post on update 9.1.0, it brought to the game the exciting new feature of Alliance Boss Battles.

At the time of writing that piece, the feature had not been fully implemented yet, but it has in the mean time, and it is such an addition it merits its own article. So here, I will lay out all the necessary information you need about this feature.

Continue reading

How to get great High Scores on campaign levels

campaign pictureDoing campaign levels in Kingdoms of Middle Earth is fun and good for a number of things, such as: Leveling up your heroes, farming items and hourglasses, getting armor scraps to trade for equipment, or get awesome equipment/items/ tokens from Smaug. But there is also the Campaign High Score Event, either individual or alliance based.

Most of the times, people will run down the campaign levels with full t1 armies and wipe out any resistance. But this strategy gets you far from a high score on the different levels, which you need if you wanna compete in the aforementioned events.

So what army should you use? T1 or T5? Mixed or single troop type? Should you use speed ups? How is campaign high score even calculated? In this article, I give you a rundown of some very basic tips to get your high scores up and be competitive.

Continue reading

How to ask Alliance for resources/help

ImageEvery player is likely to, some day, run out of resources to build troops, do research or construct buildings. Its incredibly annoying to have to wait for your farms and quarries to produce the needed resources, or to have to farm it for yourself. Luckily, one of the better features of being in an alliance is the ability to ask your alliance buddies for the needed resources, or better yet, the alliance bank.

However, too many times, players -especially the new ones- ask for resources or help at the wrong place. So here are some simple, easy-to-follow rules on how to correctly ask for either resources or help….

Continue reading