I recently wrote the beginner guide part 1 – tactic and advance tactic to follow up in this guide we going to talk about team management:

How to know the strength of your player

The Attributes
In the team management page, you can see your players attributes. Even if a players have a high overall you should focus on individual attributes before his overall rating.
Here the list of attributes:

GT… Goaltending
HT… Hitting
PS… Passing
SH… Shooting
PC… Puck Control
SP… Speed
SR… Strength
S.T.. Special Teams (PP, PK)
ST… Stamina

Hitting and Strength are more important than the overall rating for a defenseman and shooting, speed and passing are what you should be looking for your attacking line.

Injuries

This is indicated by a little red cross. Every manager has to deal with injuries. It’s an important part of coaching to be able to set lines when some key guys are injured. Then again, it’s great when your opponent has lots of injuries, so it works both ways…

You can see details on the injury by going to RECENT INCIDENTS or clicking on the player and going to the player information page. Some injuries can last for several weeks. The most important thing to remember is that some guys can play injured as long as their fitness is above 60….

AWOLs

This is indicated by a little beer bottle or red exclamation mark symbol. These players will miss the game for personal reasons (working, watching TV, vacation..). Every manager has to deal with AWOL’s on a regular basis and there’s really not much you can do… Just set your lines and wait for your guys to return….

Bans

This is indicated by a no entry symbol. Players who take too many penalty minutes may receive a BAN for a number of games for excessive minutes. Bans are usually a direct result of how aggressive you play with certain referees. Players with bans cannot play until their ban is served. Once again, a great coach can work around this….sometimes.

Setting up your team

Setting Your Defense
When sorting your Defencemen onto your lines remember to check their season stats and try to abide by the following rules.
Attacking Line A – Use Players with good Shooting and Passing attributes
Defense Line B – Use Players with Best Hitting and Strength Attributes
C/A Line C – Always use One Good shooting Player. Players with good Speed are a must also

Sorting Player Positions
It is key to have the correct amount of cover in each position within your team.

The ideal layout is
GK – 2
D – 7
LW – 3
RW – 3
W- 1 (The more W the better as they can cover both positions)
C – 4
You can interchange the Wingers if you can get W as opposed to RW and LW but they are not always easy to get hold of. And sometimes their initial attributes can be weaker.

Setting Your Special Teams Units
This is important as Power Play and Penalty Killing can win you games. When setting your Special Teams sort your Players Attribute by the S.T Column to see who your best Players in that department are.
Set the Units as follows:
Penalty Killing Unit –
3 x D-men
1 x Fast Winger
Power Play Unit –
1 x D-man
3 x Wingers
1 x Centre
Remember that these units involve extra Ice Time and tire players so try and spread your Lines and S.T Units about the team. You may find players with low fitness vanish for the next game.

Player Rotation
A Player will improve with training obviously but he will also improve with Ice Time. If you have a fairly good team and are playing an extremely weak team then rest some of your big players and give the others a game. They need to play to improve. Playing also improves their morale as does winning.
Try and stagger when you buy Players in certain Positions. You don’t want all you Centers hitting 7 seasons at the same time or any of the other positions. If you have 2 Goalies try and have them so that one is in his 1st season and the other in his 3rd or 4th. That way when its time to waiver the old one because he isn’t performing, you have a ready made replacement who you have played and trained up over the seasons.
Another way to go is to get all your players at the same time and train them up over 3 or 4 seasons. They will then all be at the top of the game going into the 5th, 6th and 7th seasons and will be pretty hard to beat if you originally picked up top players. The problem is you will then have to replace them all at the same time, or begin replacing some as early as their 4th season.
It is better to stagger them and be competitive all the time.

The 170 Rule (from the forum also)
If a Players Morale and Fitness do not add up to 170 then they do not perform to their highest ability. If possible, try to make sure you keep Morale and Fitness even and only play Players who are above 170.

Stamina
If you are going to double or triple shift a Player then make sure he has high Stamina. The same goes for your whole team in general as if it is low then they will tail off toward the end of a game

7th Season Decline
A Player will stop improving in his attributes once he hits his 7th season with the team. His attributes will start to drop. You do not have to visit the waiver market straight away though because even though he is getting worse attribute wise he is still better than a new player who you have to train up. Use the 7th season players for as long as possible until you can get hold of a decent replacement in the waivers. But don’t think you have to drop him as soon as he hits 7 seasons. As a rule, many of the top Managers will nor replace a player until they can get a new one with higher attributes….regardless of seasons played.

Keeping Your Players Happy
When you set your lines try and use every player who is fit. You do this by making sure everyone is either on a Line or on a Special Team Unit. This will keep your players happy and cut down on them going AWOL. If they get Ice time then they generally turn up for the next game. It will not stop all AWOL’s but it should cut down on them. When doing this remember to keep their morale high and this will also help them as well.

Fitness

A Player is fit enough to play if he is 60% or above (regardless if they are listed as having an injury), However I do not advise playing them if they are that low. If you use training you should aim to keep the fitness level as close to 100 as you possibly can. If a player has low fitness then don’t throw him on more than one line as he will not be able to perform. Also be aware of the stamina of players as this dictates if they can perform for long periods of ice time.

Morale

It is absolutely crucial to keep morale as high as possible. A motivated team will play their very best and an unhappy team will play well below their abilities very often. You can help keep morale high in a few ways:
1. Log-in everyday to manage your team.
2. Select morale-building in the training page. Rehabilitation is the best recommendation for division games. Nice rest for Exhibition games. Note that some player react differently to moral building activity and pub crawl tend to give a lot of AWOL the day after…
3. Play all your guys as often as possible. A guy who doesn’t play will lose morale very quickly.
Also, players love to win and a winning team will generally have good morale…

Hope it helped, the 2 other part are coming…

Inspired from The SLH Beginners Handbook from chinook@gator

Like I told you in my review tactic and advance tactic are pretty essential to set-up. We are going to go in a in deep analysis.

TACTICS:

vs Referees

Here the best way to play the refs

Patty Wagon – Normal (Pansy if losing late on)

 
Jon Bon Phyre – Normal (Pansy if losing late on)
Colin Fairgame – Normal or Mean
Seymour Clearly – Mean (Never Psycho) (Normal if losing late on)
Stan Trial – Normal (Pansy if losing late on)
(Note: I usally got Pansy against this ref)

Ed Jucashun – Normal (Pansy if losing late on)

Stan Dupcomic – Psycho

Note that has been serious debate over the moves to Pansy late on the forum.
Some swear by it, others would never do it.

Remember – These settings are not absolutes. Some refs may decide to call penalties or give out bans even when you set your aggression to normal depending on your players physical style and your opponents settings.

Playling style vs Ice Conditions

Fast Ice – European works best. (Can also use Possession)

Normal Ice – Possession works best. But you can use any tactic that is your teams strength.
Surface Water – D+C (Late game change to European if losing)
Slush – D+C works best. (After 30 mins use possession if your team is fit, but this has also been debated))

Poor Ice – Possession only (if your team is unfit change to D&C after about 40mins)

Instruction

If teams are evenly matched then the tactics decide the game usually. If you have a team with much weaker attributes than they usually do not apply, and your team will lose regardless of which tactics are used. Although, having the tactical edge will make the final score closer than if you didn’t.

Defense beats Counter Attack
Counter Attack beats Attack
Attack beats Defense

Setting up the same tactics as your opponent doesn’t give a edge to any player.

Also of note, when setting tactics is how much time a line will play based on which tactic you select.
Attacking……… Line 1 will play the most (Approximatly 50%)
Defensive……… Line 2 will play the most
Counter Attack.. Line 3 will play the most
So if, for example, you select DEFENSIVE in the tactics page, then you may want your best players on line 2…
Note on setting up tactics versus the psycho aggression level:
Using Counter Attack (unless the ref is Dupcomic) seems to result in more injuries than the other two tactics.

Setting Up For The Game

Scouting (AKA checking the recap)

Go in the schedule of our opponent (click on him first then schedule)

Check some report of his team, the recap part is more important, that where you see when he change tactic.

You see ? When trailing after 12 minutes the Wanderers switched from counter attack to attacking. I might be a good idea to switch to counter if we are leading against them in the advance tactics.

It’s very important for all managers to take a look at their opponents before each game. This is very important against tough teams. You need to go into the team you are playing Schedule. Check back over several games. Try and find tendencies in your opponent.

Read the recaps, and check when he changing instruction particularly, even if you have a weak team vs a strong team if you always have the right counter tactic you can win games.

Try and look at several games where he lost and the same when he won. From this you can see what he does if he goes behind and how he changes things as well as what he does when he is in the lead. If you cant remember it all use a scrap piece of paper or notepad. This will win you games as if you are playing someone predictable you can blast him off the ice 9 times out of 10.

Advanced Tactics

Your opponent can see which tactics you selected, but he cannot see your ADVANCED TACTICS. Like I said previously, this is where you can set your tactics to change depending on what’s happening in the game. For example, switch strategies if losing after the 2nd period or switch goalies or switch aggression levels…

What I usually like to do is to set up one set of tactics (which they can see) and then set my advanced tactics (which they CAN’T see) to something else for the very start to try and fool them….
If you think another manager might do this, you can prevent this by reading their recaps.
If your opponent always plays Counter attack for example but never changes if he is winning or losing, make sure you account for this being the first time he does change, then switch your team in the advance tactic too defence. Note: You can come stuck as not everyone will play the way you expect them to.

Hope you liked that guide, part 2 and 3 cooking

Last week I wrote about starting a new server, I wrote about the really basic stuff, what to build in your capital, do your quiz, do your Historical campaign and battle royal and get you empire one maxed out.

Manor guide

Early on Focus on silver :

While levelling empire one you should focus on building mostly silver manor (maybe 1 troop manor and other silver until you get a hand on 6666 and 7777)

Like some may say silver is the most important resources specially early game. With silver you get better unit, better upgrade, you can use it too boost your kingdom, you heroes and give you gem you can use to produce troops.

Build at least 4-5 silvers manor (or more if you want to go uber on silver) build at least one or 2 unit manors and the remaining are resources manors, your resource manor should be 6666 or 7777 city, for unit manor you can either build on type of troop in a 6666 manor or 2 type of troop in a 4444 or 5555 manor.

You can check my previous Manor guide article.

Here a excellent guide on manor building from the forum :

Silver Manor guide
http://forum.koramgame.com/viewthread.php?tid=28477&extra=page%3D1
Optimal guide for having Silver
http://forum.koramgame.com/viewthread.php?tid=28497&extra=page%3D1

Once you got empire one like I talk in my previous article, the first research you should focus to get is the Hero summit.

Recruiting heroes

1-Max you number of hero so you can get better reward at historical battle & battle royal, lms, plantation battle.
2- get all the bronze and silver heroes and fire the other none silver/bronze heroes. If you are using gold it’s even better because you can host a feast you all heroes will be bronze, silver and maybe gold.
3- focus on the hero that suit your strategy, If you thinking archer try to focus on archer heroes and heroes that have ability and formation that help archer.
Note that any bronze heroes are way better that any and I say any heroes without star (like Zu the Mad is so bad that he will be the one to get you mad)

Hope you liked the guide.

Here some link to the list of bronze, silver and gold heroes to see which one you should thrive to have :

Bronze Heroes

Silver Heroes

Gold Heroes

So you finished the tutorial, you just got your second manors but you’re saying ok but what should I do now.While they are a lot of good guide on the Clash of Kingdom forum but I though I should cook one of my own.

First steps get empire one to level 10

1- Get you capital manor and your first manor running.

For the capital you need 1 or 2 barrack to build carrier and maybe some early units to fight.
Build the matching resource on all bonus lot, get a granary and warehouse and all other build silver. Your first manors build only silver except on the bonus lot (for now).
You shouldn’t have any empty lot build residence (silver) everywhere.
Your goal is to level up empire of one has fast has possible.

2- Get some heroes

While you city is building and you have no silver to research empire one go to the tavern in the city interface and recruit some heroes. Try to use all your tips until you get a star hero, try to recruit all the heroes you can once you can’t tips the owner anymore.

3- Go to the Academy

While you are in the city interface go to the academy and take the best and brightest quiz and play bull eyes to get extra gems. The gem you get from there you can use them to build you city faster (in point 1)

4- Do some battle

From point 2 you are probably wondering why you should max you number of heroes, it’s simply to have them ready for historical battle & battle royal.
Since you get 10 k of each basic t1 troops in historical battle, battle royal you should use your heroes to rally those troops and fight the historical battle, battle royal.

Historical battle fight every fight until you realize your losing, from there fight the last fight you won or a fight that might give extra items like zhang jiao (fortitude scroll) or dong zhuo (rattan aegis shield scroll).

For battle royal, just the participation will give you 10x abyss gem and +1 tax license, so participate everyday.

With these reward you should be able to have the resources to build your manor.

Each time you’re levelling your empire one, you should build a new manor. Note that you shouldn’t over invest in manor that you think will get destroyed.
Once you get your empire one maxed you can focus on manor building and heroes, which will be my next article.

Other guide that worth a look :

Guide for new player (basic information on what thing do)

CoK Forum : Beginner guide 1

CoK Forum : Beginner guide 2

Even I knew about the list before. Our leader in our league sent us the link today, I though you might be interested in it.

It’s the list of all one to three star heroes, their stats at lv 100 and their ability.

Here the link: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tKP0zj3wI93rSPPFbMfBDxw&hl=en#gid=0

It incomplete so if you have a hero that not there feel free to add it.

Koram have gone crazy, there now a new item (the Earth Seal) the turn a 15 farm field city in a 18 farm field city.

You’ve read it, 18 farm field ! That mean all the field of your city will be for food.

So what a 18 farm field city look like ?

Let’s do some math here :

level 20 farm = 4500/hr

Let compare the 15f vs a 18f (only 3 farmland more):

Base food output
4500 x 15farms = 67500/hr (excluding bonus)
4500 x 18farms = 81000/hr (excluding bonus)

Mill Bonus
67500 x 25%mill bonus = 16875 (15f)
81000 x 25%mill bonus = 20250 (18f)

16875 + 67500 = 84375/hr (15flag city total output excluding oasis and politic)
20250 + 81000 = 101250/hr (18flag city total output excluding oasis and politic)

Oasis
with the 3 50% oasis = 150%
67500 x 150% = 101250 (15f)
81000 x 150% = 121500(18f)

101250 + 84375 =  185625 (w/o politic) (15f)
121500 + 101250 = 222750 food/hr (almost 40k more than the 15 flag city field)

Wow 222750 of standard food output…

If we keep the idea of a old post from the art of war, with some gold you can have some thing real nice
(original post here : http://forum.koramgame.com/viewthread.php?tid=6839&extra=)

With emperor’s order (treasure bowl or token of rain), Cao cao, metal alchemy scroll and the level 10 league resource bonus you can boost you food output even more.
- emperor order provide 25% food bonus.
- Cao cao could provide another 30% food bonus because of his max 150 politic (base = 100 + 30 pol bonus generalissimo + 20 pol history of han) 
- Cao cao have a skill that increase food output by 25%
- league level 10 provide 10% bonus food output
- Metal Alchemy scroll give 5%

So  25% + 30% + 25% + 10% + 5% = 95% food bonus
222750 /hr x 95% = 211612.5/hr
222750 + 211612.5= 434362/hr

Note : that I don’t know if heroes can stack skill book with mid skill, if they can Cao Cao could have a farm skill to increase the food output even more.

Almost 450k of food per hours, with that and let say you go in the red by -150k you have a army of 600k soldier

Official news here

Note : you need to have like 10 three star epic hero to win the Earth Seal, so that mean a lot of gold …

Edit : Like Bazzz pointed out the bonus mid skill don’t stack so I modified the gold section.

Edit : Fixed the math wiht Morenzuul comment that the % bonus are always applied to your base output

At some point you will want to maintain a larger army even have a negative output to have a army larger that you can hold.

1- Granary

Granary are essential to keep your extra food, specially when you plunder a lot those extra grain must go somewhere.

2- Satellite city  

Satellite cities are a great way to store you extra troop near you city specially those 9 and 15 food field. Store your troop there while your maxing your granary and get them back with you have to attack or defend your self.

3- County, state capital or Luo Yang

If you have a county, state capital or a member of your league has one, it can be a good place to store your unit and food, since they have a large food output and a lot of food storage space.

Plus your help your league by defending it.

4- Hide troop in other city

At some point in the game, those small city around you won’t be plundered at all, since you know their food output you can put that exact amount of troop in it.

For your information, Starting village usually have : 12 of food /hr (18/hr if you kill there starting hero)

5- Rank

Your rank increase your granary storage capacity, so do a lot of duel and scrimmage to get the items for the court quest.

Other tips for managing food from the koram forum

The Art of war – How to build a large army and support it.

How to build a main city on a 15 food field.

By the way, keep your gift voucher to upgrade high level ressource field (specialy if your shu or wu)

Managing your food supply is probably the most important thing you have to do in most war game.

These apply mostly to Three kingdom online since it’s the game I played the most but can probably be applied to travian to since both games are almost the same.

They two main thing to think about to manage your troop food

1- Maintaining a high food output

2- Storing your surplus & reducing your consumption without reducing your troop.

Today article is about what are the primaries source of food.

1- Farmland

Farmland are the primary source of food in the game so it’s very important to upgrade them.

Later in the game you can try to switch you main to spot that have more farmland that the average six farmland spot.

You can increase your output through oasis too, three +50% oasis double your farmland output (and almost triple it if you have a decent hero with the farm skill.)

More of that in my city placement guide and in one entry from the koram forum on how to build a great city.

2- Plunder

Aggressive player (called wolf) heavily depend on farming other city, this his essential to keep a healthy amount of food in your storage when your cities have a negative output.

At the end of beginner protection, your output is probably somewhere between 400 and 800 per hours, plundering completely a 0 pop population give you 800 of each resources in about 15 minute for a city besides you. That mean plundering a city give you 1 hours ahead of someone who don’t so those who plunder quickly get ahead of those who don’t.

At some point plundering will be your primary source of food (specially if your shu)

3- Trading

Since player usually get more food than the other resource from farming and that unit and building cost more of the other resources than food, food than to sell at 1.5 for 1 on the market. Than mean you can get 15000 food for the price of 10000 of the other resources. (note that note always the case, on server 14 most user I was farming were wei and I tend to get more iron than other resources so sometime I had hard time selling my iron for food, probably because the players on our server were in the same situations.)

When you’re not trading between your cities it can be a good idea to trade on the market your excess resources for food.

4- Heroes

Governor with high politic can increase significantly your resources output. You can add the farm skill to your heroes and increase you food output.

Epic heroes can have special unique skill that give them a better food output, like Pang Tong 25% food bonus, note that these bonus stack.

Finally they are items that can be equipped to your the heroes to increase your food output.

5- Other sources:  Item, tax, quest

There more way to get food most of them are already in my checklist

There are other item that worth mentioning that are not in the checklist :

• The tax license (uptained in the King of the hill event)
  Good old emperor order and dragon bowl (a extra 25%)
• Rotation order (Actually reduce your food consumption and is very expensive)
• Alchemy table (expensive, don’t increase food that much but last forever and you get your gold back)

More in part 2 – Storing your food and way to reduce your consumption

Link on this page :

The three kingdoms online checklist

I wrote awhile ago an article about oasis but I didn’t wrote about how to grab an oasis from another player because I never got the chance to try it.

I seem that it takes awhile before you can grab an oasis from another player not like they say in the forum thread.

When you attack an occupied oasis each time the loyalty of the oasis is reduced by somewhere between 0% and 35 % not 35% like they say in the forum thread.

It seems to depend on how many troops you’re using and if you have a hero or not.

My last wave had two heroes in it and they took the oasis, but I don’t think it’s really matter the just attack constantly and the oasis will be yours, after a while.

Note that the oasis does regain loyalty each hours so be swift with your attack.

Here some link for more info on oasis:

My oasis guide 

The oasis information in the beginner thread

And another thread with more info on the oasis

In my previous post I’ve wrote about how to create a lobbyist train.
But some of my leaguemate seem to have problems with how to build them and how to use them.

First if your completely new to lobbyists you can check koramgame TKO forum thread about them here.
I’ll summarize it for you and add some of my trick in the process.

1- How to build them

That part is easy, you need Mansion or Annexe Level 10, Drill Ground Level 20 and Command Center Level 10 to research a lobbyist. Like the pioneer you con recruit a lobbyist when the Mansion at level 10, 15 and 20, for the annexe it’s on level 10 and 20 only. Once your have all the requirement, you have to research the lobbyist in the drill ground. From my experience, if you decided that your city will recruit lobbyist it better to dedicate your city to lobbyist, so you will have to research it only once to recruit two (or 3 if it’s a mansion) lobbyist.

Note that your first cities should probably be built with pioneer instead of lobbying someone else city. Why ? Because it’s take a boatload of resources to get you city to recruit them and it takes much more time that the simple three pioneer, on top of that it’s easier to create subs that are near your main and you can chose the arrangement of your resource fields if you want to specialized your city.

2- How they work

The lobbyist reduces the loyalty of the attacking city only if it’s not the main and there no annexe in it. They typically reduce the loyalty by 20% (25% for wei), you can increase their effectiveness with a hero that have a scroll of rumors.

Note that you can only lobby a sub city and the annex must be destroyed in order to reduce the loyalty of the city.

3- How attack a city with them

Lobbying a city is three step process, first you need to clear the city from its troops, after you need to destroy the annexe (see using demo with lobbyist) and then you can send your lobbyist. Like explained in my previous article on how to create a lobbyist train it’s better to have more than one to save you from many roundtrip to the city you want to lobby.
Be careful when you attack an active player, he might rebuild troop and hide them just to kill your lobbyist. They can use the curfew command or just rebuild an annexe to prevent the lost of loyalty too.

For more tip on attack tactic here more info from my previous article :
The anatomy of a attack and other offense tactic
Using demo with lobbyist