I tried to include a poll into my last article on the new Smaug, but it didn’t really look right. So here it is: I want to know what you think about the new Smaug and his drops. Worth it or not? Also here, any suggestions or opinions please in the comments. Thanks!
Last week we received news the New Smaug was introduced. It was highly anticipated, and a lot of players took to the forum to explain Kabam how NOT to ruin the experience in the process of upgrading the dragon. Unfortunately, the new Smaug was highly disappointing and was met with a lot of negative feedback.
But in a surprise move, Kabam decided to listen to the critiques within a week and upgraded Smaug again. Read on to see what has changed form the old familiar lizard and a possible way to fix him once and for all…
Update: Seems Kabam finally got it together and rewarded the correct prizes…
So, we got a nice email last week about the improved Customer Support Kabam has been implementing. All good and well, but unfortunately, it only took a week to be blown out of the water.
Last week (week 44 2014), Kabam organized the Halloween Eve tournament series, coupled with a special Halloween temporary campaign map. The goal was to collect as many Pumpkin items as possible with your alliance, which could be gained in individual and alliance base tournaments and farmed in the campaign map. Especially the individual tourneys had pretty nice prizes for the competitors (500 pumpkins, many chests).
Being the number one ally in the server at the moment, we had individuals work their asses of in these individuals. Last GK tournament, we scored 1st and 2nd. But what happened? Wrong prizes were turned out. In fact, the number 1 got the prizes for 3rd place for example. Unacceptable. And we weren’t alone. More people on the server experienced wrongful payout of prizes, and other servers followed with complaints. Tickets were written, screenshots were made. Kabam’s reaction?
“Nope, sorry, our engineers looked at it and concluded everything went as planned. Here is 5 million might for your inconveniences…bye”
Wait…what?! You are just going to deny it happened? We have screenshots of this going terribly wrong, and you’re going to wave it away and deal out some shitty compensation prizes? We need a better definition of irony for this. Come on Kabam, you send us a mail about improved customer support and only a week later you decide to screw over hard working players who rightfully deserved their prizes? I’ve been lucky to have never been on the receiving end of bad customer support from Kabam yet, but this is just terrible.
Get. It. Fixed!
Kabam seems to be really picking up the pace with releasing new content and announcements. Messages came from the forums and from the new 11.2 update of the game, which is available now in the Google Play Store. Today’s announcements:
It seems the updates keep coming through. After yesterday’s updates, it seems preparations are being made for the inclusion of the two new Tactical Troops, namely the Lake-town Pikemen and Longbowmen. If you go to your Barracks, the building requirements (not rss) can be viewed, and they mention another few additions, seemingly connected to the new Tacticals. Continue reading to see what is known right now.
Updated with all new troops and attack orders! 14-01-2015
Back in the days of Tier 1-3 and Wall, we knew which troops would be targeted first by an attacking army. Wall troops die first, then Tier 1-3 fighting troops, then lastly the supply troops. This held no matter what troops you sent at a city. The only ‘exception’ to this was the fact that a Dwarf army would (and will) attack Elven reinforcements first and vice versa, leading to the infamous cart rein shenanigans.
But unfortunately for us, the Tactical Troops messed this up, as they seemed to prefer other targets over the Wall troops to attack first, flanking the enemy armies and attacking the weak points at the back. For some Tactical Troops little changed, but for some, the order in which they attack enemy armies is a mess. This post lists all the attack orders for all troops available in the game right now, and will be updated when the new Tactical Troops are introduced.
As you probably have noticed, the blog has been moved to a new domain: BeardMonkey.net, instead of the old BeardMonkey. WordPress.com (You will just be redirected to the new domain when typing in the old). It makes the URL a bit more neat, but that is not the main reason why I did it.
The main reason should also have been noticed by regular visitors. It allowed me to turn on WordAds, the WordPress offered option for showing ads on my site. What it means in short is that I will be able to make some income from the efforts put into this site. Now please note, that with ‘some income’, I am not talking big bucks. What I hope to gain is around 100,- per month optimistically, so far from enough to make a living out of, but a nice compensation for the many hours I have put into this website, and I hope you can all understand my reasoning as such.
As I have mentioned before, this site started out really small, but has grown considerably over the past year. More work was steadily put into it, and the articles started to attract ever increasing numbers of visitors. I have now come to a point that enabling the Ads can get me something back for that, and people in my surroundings suggested I should do so. And why not?
What I do want to be careful of is that the main purpose of this site stays unchanged: Informing other players about as many topics about the game, out of my own passion for playing it. I do not want to ‘shell out’ for the money, and I hope you do not see it that way!
So what do the Ads look like? Well, there are 3 ads displayed throughout the blog:
Number 1 has always been there, even at the old address, I simply didn’t get paid for it. So for 1 nothing has changed for the viewer really. Number 2 is new, but I do not think it is hugely annoying or detracts from the website feel that much. Number 3, in the sidebar, is in my opinion the most annoying one, and which does sort of damage the look of the website, but for me personally not in such a way that I’m immediately inclined to remove it. Plus I do not really make use of the sidebar, so I guess it should be possible to sort of ignore it?
It is however also very important to me how you, the viewer, thinks this looks. Of course, it is not as neat as it used to be, but is it really too distracting to enjoy the website like you used to? I hope I have conveyed my reasons for doing it and hope for your support in my decision. But if you really feel it hurts the website, I could tone it down a bit.
So in conclusion, if you have any remarks about the changes, be it positive or negative, please let me know in the comments. Thanks you so much in advance, and happy Hobbiting!
With update 10.3, a new system of enhancing gear has been introduced, besides upgrading and enhancing, namely Embedding (Gems). So what does this feature exactly do and what do you need to do this? As in the article about upgrading and enhancing, I will try to combine everything you need to know into this one article. For a run down of what gears to embed with Gems, see this article.
So a new update has hit the game and it seems promising in that it looks like a bunch of new features and troops are being introduced. Information given here is gathered from in-game mails primarily, but also from word of mouth, so stay tuned to see if those turn out to be right.
First thing I noticed was the ability to finally being able to donate more Vala stones at a time. I can now donate 60 per click…thank god for that Kabam, it was getting rather tedious. But there is more.
Or, you CAN have too much of a good thing….Remember this old post about how each consecutive bonus to a certain process becomes less effective than the previous one? I’ll illustrate shortly with an example. Say you attack some goblins, and your attack value is 100, and you kill 100 goblins.
Now you have 2 items. One increases you attack by 100%, or 100 points, and one reduces the goblins life by 50%, or half their life. Which item do you use? Well, in the first round, it doesn’t matter. Applying the attack item doubles your attack, so you kill twice the amount (200) of Goblins, while the life reduce item also results in double the amount of kills.
We apply the attack item, so attack is now 200 and Goblin life still 1. Again the question, what item do you apply now? Now we see a difference. If we apply the attack item again, our attack becomes 300 and we kill 300 Goblins, not 100%, but 50% more then before. But if we apply the life item now, Goblin life is halved and we kill 400 Goblins, a 100% increase.
And that is diminishing returns for ya: each consecutive added bonus becomes less effective -in this case the attack bonus- , such that other bonuses become more and more effective when used…Now, up until now, this was never an issue with gear because the gear bonuses were not THAT high to make it really noticeable. However with the Replenishing and Necromantic sets, we get introduced to this effect very distinctly, because the bonuses they offer are so incredibly (in my view ridiculously) high.
And that is the reason why a full Replenishing set is LESS EFFECTIVE at defense compared to a mix with Void gear. Individually, the Replenish set is much better. Equip a Hero with Void sword and Replenish Sword alone, and you will see the Replenish sword do better at defending. Test a FULL Replenish set against a FULL Void set, and Replenish wins again. But, because the +life bonus of Replenish is so high, it’s diminishing returns is likewise really high, even so that it makes adding in Void gear work better with its -foe attack bonus. It is exactly like the Goblin example above. The more you use of one, the less effective it becomes and the more worthwhile it becomes to use the other…
And this will make finding the perfect gear set-up more difficult and experimental in nature then it used to be. Please take note of this. When newer, even better sets come out in the future, do NOT mindlessly equip the full set, but mix it with gear with different types of offensive and/or defensive buffs to see whether diminishing returns plays a role (and it will), to come to the best mix of items….Cheers!
So, when I first wrote about this subject in the older articles, Tactical Troops (TT) had not been released yet or just shortly, and I never added a new article about getting good high scores for CHS events. But every major CHS event I see an enormous spike in views, so I guess people are still looking for the ultimate guide. And although such a guide does not exist really, here are the steps you can take yourself to make you personal best CHS guide using TT!
So a while ago I made a post about when to use Attack runes and when Defense runes, as there seemed to be confusion about it even among more experienced players. I recently noticed the same problem with using gear, so I thought it time to write an article on that as well. Especially with the new debuff attributes, it has indeed become less intuitive to know what to use when. In this article I will try give the basics on the available gear attributes, and on when they are best used.
One of the questions on everyone’s mind in this game is what the best hero equipment/gear are for attacking, defending and campaigning. With a pretty constant stream of newly introduced gear with differing bonuses, it can be difficult to decide. So here is a small overview of the best sets currently available, below the fold, as the article has grown a bit longer than anticipated.
So, with tournaments, or even just in general, it is sometimes handy to know what troops you have in your inventory. Whether out of sheer curiosity or for planning for a tournament of might, it can be somewhat troublesome to figure out exactly what you have to pop. No more! The spreadsheet in the link below can be filled in quite easily, after which it automatically calculates numbers and might per troop, tier and totals. The addition of mass unpacking makes it a little less useful, but still…
Perhaps 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.
So update 10.2 hit the servers, and it is IMO by far the worst update yet from Kabam! Even though there isn’t really much that was updated. I thinkthere were some minor updates to the graphics, but I also got a new phone so that might be it as well. Also, a few names have been changed.
The Eldar set is now called Elven Elder, while Avari is now called Arcane. No doubt these changes came from legal disputes over the names. New “Epic” equipment has also been announced, like a staff for Gandalf and Bow for Tauriel, but I haven’t seen those yet.
But the most shocking and annoying change has been the introduction of the bulk buy and open feature. It sounds great, not having to endlessly press the damn unpack button for chests and troops, until you enter a ToM that is. Tournaments of Might have effectively been killed by this feature. No longer is any strategy required. During the last minute, you are able to pop all your troops at once and it becomes a lottery who wins….
It really took the fun out of those tournaments. Hopefully, Kabam will be smart enough to turn that feature off during ToMs….And that’s it. A small update, and definitely not one of their best. Still waiting for the new campaign map, Wilderness outposts and trainable Tacticals….
One of the later additions to the game has been the introduction of temporary campaign maps. These maps appear at seemingly random times every now and then, and disappear again as well after usually a few hours. I thought about including them in the campaign spreadsheet, but seeing as I am not convinced they will be reused, I will write here a small article on how I think you should generally approach these and what the potential rewards are (and they are pretty good).
Update 10.1 has hit our server a while ago, again bringing some new features to the game, although this time nothing as major as the previous updates (Hero equipment and equipment upgrading).
Read on to learn more about the new update, including an upcoming new campaign map, Tactical Troops training, and high level Vala stones. This and more, below the fold.
So I’m giving this its own post, as I want to keep the main Hero Equipment page mostly about the available sets, certainly with all the new sets added to the game. Below is a chart with the percentages bonus each of the currently 4 Tiers of equipment bonus do, from level 1 to level 10.
The four Tiers (marked *1-*4 in KABAM emails) start out at 1%, 2%, 4% and 8% bonus respectively, but can grow to considerable amounts if you happen to be lucky enough to get gear at level 10! Use this as a reference for determining end-game gear specs, or whatever you like :). Thanks to QuietschEnte for confirming the numbers!
Another short post. Probably a lot of you have this already, but here goes. With servers that are older than a few months, Tournaments of Might very quickly turn from who can train troops most efficiently, to who can press the pop-troop-chest buttons the fastest and longest. Training should no be neglected, but popping chests makes for most of the might gain.
Of course, every chest pops a certain number of might, and with that comes strategy. Whether you want to go full out in the early hours, or start T1 slow and end with a T5 bang, knowing what order to pop boxes in is important. For that purpose, I’ve made a chart with all the possible troops chests ordered in the number of might that is popped per chest. Because of the size, I’ve put it below the fold. Please also note this is the version WITHOUT Wall troops. With those version will follow. Happy popping!
Ok, 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.
So the Alliance shop was added to my server last week. Weird, as some newer servers got it way before us, but anyways, it’s here now! Time to E&D. For those who do not know yet what this thing is all about, I will explain in this article what you can do with and for the Alliance shop. Where do you find it? What’s E&D? What can you get from it and how do you do that? That and more, after the break.
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.
I was tempted to put this article under the KoM101 category, but realized this actually isn’t that simple, going by the mistakes I see people make in attacking and defending. I’ve seen some weird attack reports, with people misusing runes and Tactical Troops.
In this article, I am gonna lay out the basics of when to use defensive, and when to use offensive runes. By no means is this stuff really complicated, but apparently many people still do not have a complete hang of it. So when do you use which runes? That and more, after the break.
So the new minor update 9.3.0 has hit the game, introducing most prominently two new Tactical Troops: the Woodsmen and the Lyncaen Raiders. They serve as glass-cannon and fast reconn units respectively. I will update the Tactical troops article as soon as I come around to it. Also added are new ‘Open gates’ type items which add 5k (Roaming Refugees), 10k (Myrian Migration) or even 50k (Mass Settlement) to your population, great for speed training!
Meanwhile, KABAM also released a forum post which details what some of the future updates hold. I’ve posted these notes after the break for those interested.
With every new update, there is a chance some of my articles become outdated. I’m trying to keep track of the most important information and keep it updated, such as the Hero Equipment article. The old Battle report spreadsheet I posted some time ago was also in need of some improvements, as more than a few new troops have been introduced since the last version.
The updated spreadsheet now contains all the available troops, including the Tactical Troops, has boxes for additional information, better layout, and more useful information about the battle outcomes, such as absolute and relative tk/might ratios and a t1 equivalence calculation. This spreadsheet is handy to keep track of past battle performances without filling up your mailbox, and is great for analyzing why you got a certain ratio in a particular battle.
Download it through THIS link and have fun!
When 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!
Following the article on all Elven and Dwarf troops, some suggestions came in on doing a similar article for the Wall troops of both factions.
Wall troops can be trained in your City Walls. They provide good Might numbers, but are not overly strong, so most people do not actually build a lot of them, as it gives away easy tk’s for enemies. If you do want to use these, do so during Might tournaments or when you can back them up with a high Hero and normal troops.
I have mentioned in past posts on campaigning and the latest update to the game, that new non-trainable ‘Tactical Troops’ had been introduced. Here, I will try to put all available information on these units. Any missing information will be added shortly. The new units are, in no particular order:
So what are they? What do they do? Where do you get them, and how should you use them. All that and perhaps more, after the break.
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.
Another addition to the beginners articles; in this article are listed virtually ALL in-game items you will encounter playing Kingdoms of Middle Earth. From chests, to Hero’s Glory, and from Hobbit building crew to Rune of Fury, this list gives an extensive overview of the items you use in the game, what they do exactly, and what they cost if you want to buy them in the shop (provided of course the item is for sale). Items are listed in the categories: Battle, XP, Campaign, Hourglasses, Chests, Construction and Resources, Tournaments and Various . Hop on in!
I have recently noticed a very annoying bug in the game concerning both the Hero salary and gold production, and would like to know if this is a more common bug or if there are solutions…I know for sure that more people in my alliance are experiencing the same.
I know a lot of you will probably not be dependent on gold production (instead farming it), or on resource production (instead farming it), but I am, as I do not have mountains of time to spent on the game, so here goes. Three bugs:
I figured this could have two reasons: (A) Battle reports are being missed/lost, so someone takes the gold but I do not see their attacks, or (B) there is a bug with the production and salaries.
I tried to eliminate (A) by training some wall troops, which HAVE to be destroyed in an attack for anyone to take resources or gold to be taken. Today the gold producing city, after around 12 hours of not logging on, had a meager 9.5k gold, with no attack reports and wall troops still there. And mind you, EVEN IF I would assign ALL FOUR positions in Great Hall, it still should produce more gold than salary.
So, what is going on, does anyone else have this bug, and what can be done about it? Thanks in advance!
A new update has hit the servers. The update delivers several very exciting additions to the game, which I will detail below.
Immediately noticeable is the VAST decrease in lag, to levels similar to before the last update, which made the game painfully slow. Good job KABAM.
Other additions on gear and Tauriels Circle of Fate are described below. Information will be added as its coming in, as not all features seem to be fully enabled yet.
Continue reading
When you’ve played Kingdoms of Middle Earth for a couple of months, sit on millions of might, maxed out your four cities and are comfortably inside a big supporting alliance, it is easy to lose perspective on how things were when you started playing this game. I was reminded of this fact by a new player in our alliance, who I am helping out on growing as fast as possible. This inspired me to write some articles on the basics of the game, starting with this one.
For new players, it might be difficult to recognize all troops that are available in the game. What troops are what Tier and what do the troops of the other faction look like? Below are two images which contain all currently available troops for both the Dwarven and Elven race, Tier 1 to 5. Time to keep these warriors apart (click for larger version):
With the new update to the game, 4th cities can be runecrafted, and runecrafting up to level *11 is finally possible, although a pain in the ass. Just think about the number of Hobbit Runecrafters you need to to be able to train all Tier 4 units and then think about how available these things are to get your hands on. But I think it is a great time to go over the topic of forging runes, the runes you need to get to level *10 in the first place.
So where do you get these runes? What do you use them for, and how? Which trade from the Sage tower is most profitable? And how many do you need to upgrade your buildings. In this post, I will try to combine all available information on the topic.
The Campaign Spreadsheet has finally been updated! It has been a while since the last post, and in the mean time T4 and T5 troops were introduced fully, mistakes have been pointed out, and requests were made to complete the Moria campaign and add more attack bonus stats to fill in.
Read on to learn what changes and improvements have been made and to find the download link of the spreadsheet. As usual, any comments or suggestions are welcomed!
Remember how I mentioned in my article on Hero equipment, that the Ent set is becoming popular to campaign with? That is because each piece of Ent set has two identical bonus attributes: 1% Life to ALL troops (so 2% per piece). But to be effective, do not just swap out all your gear to Ents just yet. To be most effective, use these pieces:
*You don’t need to swap the Pilfered shield for Ent, as it deducts 2% standard life bonus for 2% bonus. See this chart.
**I don’t know whether the 5% life bonus of all 4 Ent pieces weighs up to the 5% attack loss compared to full Pilfered, but I’ve read that the Vitality score outweighs the Efficiency score in campaign, hence this set-up becoming more popular. Try at own risk 🙂
Like 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.
Today version 9.1.0 was released on my world, bringing some new additions to the game. First of all, it seems some aesthetics have been changed, primarily in the icons in the lower bar in city view. A campaign and gear button have been added to the bar. Besides that, I have the feeling the graphics in city view have also been tweaked slightly. But the two major additions are:
Related:
!Scroll down for all available sets!
One of the most interesting updates to Kingdoms of Middle Earth recently has been the addition of Hero Equipment; Pieces of gear that heroes can equip that give them certain bonuses. But where do you find all the information about the gear? Where do you equip them on your heroes? Where can you see all the items’ bonuses and where are the icons explained? And where exactly do you find these items in the game to begin with?
This article will provide answers to all this and more, giving you a complete overview on one of the better additions to this game in months.
To complete this little series, I adapted the “training Tier 4” chart to give a complete overview of the dependencies when runecrafting your city buildings. As I haven’t runecrafted my own Musterfield yet, I am not sure how the dependencies will change, but for level *1, requirements are equal. Note that the Armory is a requirement for runecrafting your City Wall, but that the Armory itself cannot be runecrafted.
So for my post on training Tier 4 troops, I made this nice little flowchart which showed the relations and dependencies between buildings and research which you need in order to train Tier 4 troops. I decided I would do the same for ALL buildings in Kingdoms of Middle Earth, but this time up to level 10. This is because the dependencies change in runecrafting mode. So without further delay, the below two charts show the dependencies for all buildings in your cities.
A couple of times I’ve heard people ask, both in GC and AC, what the best building to spend a Hobbit Building Crew on is. Although I recognize that for many players this question will be obsolete by this point in the game, some newcomers might find my views helpful in deciding where to spend their HBC’s.
Galadriel’s Gift (previously Gollum’s Riddle) is a great way to obtain some of the most powerful items in the game. Besides troops you can train yourself, many items are exclusive to either Galadriel’s Gift, or chests and special events, which are not always around. That’s why it is important to spend them correctly.
Throughout my time playing KoM, I have made and used a number of spreadsheets and JAVA programs to help me out gathering information and making decisions. Some of the info from the spreadsheets was used in other blog posts here, but most remained private.
I thought it might be handy to publicize some of it so you guys and girls can use them too. Below is a list of description for the various sheets and program(s) and a link to download them. (More will follow)
We all know the drill….you build comfortably through the seven-days-protection period and start gaining might in making troops. But sooner or later, the upkeep in food they need will outnumber what you could possibly produce in your city. Especially for armies over 200k might it is nigh impossible to keep up with the needs, even with a high level hero helping production and wilds to give you bonuses.
Constantly asking alliance members is annoying and impossible, as they will also grow their respective armies. Luckily, there is a caveat in the KoM system to help you out.
Kingdoms of Middle Earth made easy 
