Hero Skills: When to use which?

skill morale boostHero Skills have been released for a while now, with even a new batch of offensive Skills released recently. But which skills are best in certain situations? In this article I while detail a number of situations and sketch a number of ways on which Skills are most useful in each. Some are very straightforward, others require some more thought. In the end, this will not be a long or difficult read, but could be helpful to some…

  • 1. Types of Skills
  • 2. Attacking general
    • 2.1 Attacking wall/advanced
  • 3. Defending
    • 3.1 Defending wall/advanced
  • 4. Campaign general
    • 4.1 Boss level double-tap
    • 4.2 Advanced campaign set-ups
  • 5. Mining
    • 5.1  Mining warfare
  • 6. Resource production
  • 7. Final words

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Tokens removed from Smaug: Big mistake or change for the better?

tokenAs many of you know Kabam has been battling with auto-clickers/bots for some time now. These programs/bots enabled certain players to constantly and relentlessly attack Smaug faster and longer than humanly possible, giving these players thousands of tokens or massive Goblin kills, and the benefits that come with that.

Of course this was seen by both Kabam and the majority of players as being unfair, so action was decided upon. But the problem proved tricky and a neat solution difficult, although the suggestions on the forums and other places were plentiful. Last week, we were presented with the not that great (to put it mildly) limit on attacking campaign, where after a certain number of attacks players had to wait a cool-down period to be able to attack again. Reactions weren’t that positive understandably, and the changes would also break tournaments such as GK and BK, and possibly even CHS. So from the start this would be temporary.

Today we received an email from Kabam about a more permanent change to Tokens and Smaug. Tokens drops will be limited in the Smaug campaign map, so the old way of getting them is gone. Instead, Tokens will be added to the Calendar, Moon Rune and Goblin Caverns/mines. Also Kabam stated that the daily amount of obtainable tokens would be the same as before, but seeing as it was dependent on effort instead of availability, I have yet to see how this plays out.

Although I agree the botting needed to be stopped, I’m not too happy with these changes at all. Again, non-spending casual players are going to be hot hardest. The Calendar will likely contain limited amounts of Tokens. The Moon Rune is too irregular in timing to provide a constant income of Tokens. Mines will most likely be dominated by the bigg buff players.

And I have seen better suggestions put forward as well. One of those was to have a random element put into Smauging, like a randomly location-changing button in the process. These kind of solutions would eliminate most if not all of the auto-clickers as well it seems to me, while maintaining a nearly identical experience for normal players.

I never was a huge Smauger. I was happy to have the time to farm 30 Tokens a day, and that already helped a lot in keeping up to date with all the new features. I just hope I am being overly negative here and things will be better than what I expect them to be, but I also want to know what you think of the new Token changes, so of course, a poll (multiple answers possible):

 

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

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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

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City Buildings: the Sage Tower

headerThe Sage Tower acts as the event center of your cities. Uniting your cities, only one center can be constructed, serving all your four or five cities. Items won in special events can be exchanged in the Sage Tower, while other items such as gear and Gems can be exchanged for materials acquired in campaign primarily. As there are a large number of Sage Tower trades, this articles is meant to give an overview of these for less-experienced players.

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Campaign: The new Smaug

smaug thumbnailLast 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…

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Attack and Defense runes: When to use them

alone ROFI 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.

alone ROIIn 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.

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Campaign Spreadsheet updated!

smaugThe 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!

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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.

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Hero equipment: All you need to know

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article headerOne 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.

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