This method requires that your techs be maxxed — notably horseback riding, military technology, and archery — and it also requires that you have either lots of ballistae (1550 per attack) or a few (1 per attack) catapults. Additionally, you’ll need lots (33k per attack) of archers. Finally, this works best when you have one or more cities that are precisely 1 mile from a level-10 valley. If your valley slots are full, you’ll want to abandon one.
The Attack Formation
Each attack should carry precisely as follows:
1 worker
6 warriors
1 pike
1 sword
1 cav
1 catapult or 1700 ballistaeand up to
40000 archersdepending on the lowest attack skill of your heroes. This assumes the worst possible hero — attack 5. If in a given city your worst attack hero is 100 and you use the war horn, 21k archers and 900 ballistae are sufficient. At the end, I’ll give a quick-reference table for different hero values. The reason you need so many is to make sure you lose the least amount of troops possible in the two worst-case scenarios: archers-only and full-house (all 5 types). By the way, I strongly recommend use of the corselet here.
The Technique
Each time you abandon a valley, the troops regenerate. Level-ten valleys are though to have the best drop-rate. Attacking a valley, abandoning it, attacking it again, etc, is therefore the quickest way to hit as many full valleys as possible. That’s what we’re trying to exploit here.
Find a level 10 valley very close to a city, ideally 1 mile away. Make sure this city has a free valley slot. Remove the mayor in the city and fill up the city with all the attack heroes you want to use. Select the valley and click “Attack” and on the march screen, set it up as proscribed above, adjusting the archers to your worst hero in this group.
Now repeatedly send the attack, selecting a different hero each time, and pause maybe 10 seconds between each group. Depending on your computer and bandwidth, it might be helpful to use the following technique: send a wave; now set camp time to 2 minutes and send the next wave; change camp time to 1 minute and send the next wave; clear the camp time and send the next wave; repeat. Now wait approximately 6 to 7 minutes for the first attackers to conquer the valley. You’ll need to act swiftly here – click on the valley, click “Enter” and click “Abandon”. Every time the valley is conquered, the screen will re-center to that city and you’ll need to re-select the valley.
If you have two cities with nearby valleys, even better — you can now pipeline 20 attacks for even faster results. I recommend starting on the second city only after all attacks from city 1 have been sent.
Once all attacks start to return, heal the troops in the medic camp, and check your reports for medals or unexpected results. Your worst loss should be against an archer-only valley — up to 2000 archers will be lost this way. Luckily, most of the time, you will only lose a few footmen and the ponies.
How It Works
As you probably know, the game randomly spawns barbarian forces every time a valley is abandoned (or at reset). There are 5 different unit types, and the valley may contain any combination of these unit types – including none. Combinatorically that’s C(5,5) + C(5,4) + C(5,3) + C(5,2) + C(5,1) = 31 different possibilities. Each unit type appears 50% of the time — so archers will appear half of the time and cavalry will appear half of the time. In less than a quarter (23%) of the time are there no cavs and no archers. So the rest of the time, we’re going to lose some troops. The question is — how do we design an attack wave that will lose as few troops as possible?
Cantankerous Cavalry
Let’s start with this: how do we kill those troublesome cavalry? As newbies all learn the hard way: if you send in 40k archers against 5k cavalry in any valley, you’ll kill the cavs, but they’ll do a lot of damage. But if you send in 15k archers and 15k pikes, you’ll lose a few pikes, but no archers. How come?
It’s has to do with the (1) speed and range of the cavs and (2) the length of the battlefield. Cavalry first appear in level 6 valleys. There, they get level 6 horseback riding, so a bonus of 30% to their native 1000 speed. In other words, they get to travel to position +1300. They also have a range of 100, which means that in round 1, they can kill anything that is standing 1400 paces away. As for (2), tedious experiments and experience have shown that the length of the battlefield is 200 paces plus the base-range of the unit with the highest range on the battlefield. With the archer’s case, the battlefield begins at 1400 paces. So always in round 1, your archers can be targeted by the defending cavalry.
Note in the last sentence, I said can be. Two things can prevent this: (1) one of your units is closer than your archers to the defending cavalry, (2) one of your units has a higher “attack power” than your archers. The “attack power” is referred to in another post, the one on defending against scout-bombs. The second one explains why the cavs in the above example will hit your pikes instead of your archers. Pikes have a base attack of 150, whereas your archers have a base attack of 120. So for the same number of each, your pikes will have a greater attack power. It doesn’t have to be pikes — it can be swords or warriors, or even workers, but in the proper ratio. The only problem with this approach is that on average, it too is quite costly.
Level 7 vallies with cavalry
Let’s look at the first solution — let your units step in the way. To the right is a screen-shot of such a case (click on it for a larger view). You can see that the archers were untouched even though the valley contained cavalry. How? Because the warrior stepped in the way. Note this particular attack wave only works on valleys of level 6 and 7. That’s crucial to understand. In such valleys, the max distance the cavalry travel is 1350 paces. Even though your archers would be in range at that point, your warrior must move forward in order to attack the cavalry. Now, Evony game mechanics dictate that these cavalry must attack the closest in range. So they go after the warrior, and not your archers. Even though this is a level 7 valley, we will exploit this fact in a level 10 valley.
As I stated before, the bad news about level-10 cavalry is that they march up to 1500 paces in a single round.
Optimal attack against cavalry-only L10 valley
It gets even worse — they always get to move first. The good news is, you can extend the length of the battlefield. You can do this by sending a single ballista. The base range of the ballista is 1400, so the battlefield will have a length of 1600.
This means the cavs can still reach the archers in round 1, but it also means, like we saw in the previous paragraph, that some infantry can “step in the way”.
So, problem solved, right? Just use this on all the attacks, right? Not exactly.
Annoying Archers
With very few exceptions, the only way to deal with defending archery is by killing them with archers.
Optimal attack of archers + cavalry
A good “rule of thumb” is that archers kill 1/3rd of their number of archers in a single round. The most you will ever see in a level-10 valley is just over 8400 archers. (I get this by noting the maximum experience I ever received from a valley hit, and dividing by 13.5.) Usually, however, it’s much lower than this. At any rate, you’ll want to cover your bases, if you have the means, and make sure those archers get only one shot at yours. To do that, make sure you have enough archers.
Now, when there are archers and no cavalry, the other worst-case scenario besides pure-archers, is one with all 3 footmen type and archers. I call this “WASP” (warrior,archer, sword, pike) because you will get stung by it if you only send archers. This is where we enter the realm of movement mechanics.
WASP-killer
With WASP, your archer targets the units in the following order: Archers, Pikes, Swords, Warriors. The general rule is that your ranged units (archers, ballistae, etc) will first target the opposing ranged units in order of highest attack power. After that, they target units in order of speed. So we see that after your archers take out the defending archers, it’s pikes (speed 600), swords (speed 550), and warriors (speed400). The trouble with WASP is that the warriors, having speed 400, are within 4 rounds away from your archers, 1400 paces away. By the time your archers can target them, those warriors are in the archers face. Even if you send in your archers with a ballista, this will be the case! So as we saw with cavalry-based valleys, you will need a roadblock against the WASP valleys. But not any roadbl0ck: you’ll need a pony or a pike. The other units won’t keep the warriors from advancing at their normal pace.
Full House
When both cavs, archery and footmen are defending, you’ll simply need to combine the tricks from above. With four unit types, you’ll need two roadblocks for the cavalry, and three more for the infantry.
The reason you need two roadblocks for the cavalry is simple: your archers need two rounds to kill the cavalry. More precisely, they need the first round to kill the defending archers and the second round to kill the cavalry.
Though you have killed the defending cavalry in round 2, the defending pikemen or swords are only one round away from crashing into your archers unless you have a third roadblock. To stop them, you need one roadblock for each of them in round 3, and another roadblock for the last of them in round 4. Further, the roadblock must reach the footmen before they can advance. Since your the defending pikes move before your pikes do, your roadblock here must be one of the ponies. That means that the roadblock for the cavalry must be one of the footmen, which means you will need either 2 pikes, 3 swords, 6 warriors, or 80 workers to prevent your pony from being killed.
This brings us to the “Full House” — all five types. Just like with cavs, archers and too footmen, you’ll need two roadblocks for the cavalry, of which one of your ponies must survive, three more roadblocks for the infantry in round 3, two more for the infantry in round 4, and one more for round 5. There’s only one problem: we don’t have that many types of infantry!
Full-House semi-Fail
There are three solutions to this: (1) pack enough infantry (ie, warriors) so that they survive two rounds against the incoming cavalry, (2) send enough ballistae so that in round 1, all cavalry are killed, reducing the problem to a WASP scenario, (3) extend the battlefield with a catapult so that the warriors are unable to hit the archers in round 5.
In the first solution, you should have 1500 warriors to ensure they last more than one round against 800 cavalry. This is a poor general solution as most of the time, these warriors are just wasted without any benefit at all.
In the second solution, you should have about 1500 ballistae to ensure that they are able to kill all 800 cavalry in one round. They will do this in the same round your archers kill the defending archers. The ballistae probably wont be enough to kill anything else, so sending them along with every battle simply wastes food. On the other hand, they are significantly faster than catapults and don’t slow down the entire march, so this could result in a net savings of food. The higher the attack hero, the fewer you have to send, so consider this fact if all your heroes have over 150 attack, in which case you need to send only 800 ballistae.
In the final solution, you send a catapult (and no ballistae) as proscribed at the top of this article. This gives the battlefield its largest possible range of 1700. Everything goes like it does for the 4-types with cavs and archers, but in this case, the warriors will reach position 1600 in the 5th round, where your archers will easily be able to kill them.
"Full House" valley attacked with minimal losses
Table of “Safe” Archer/Ballistae Counts
You can use the following table to guesstimate how many archers and ballistae to send to the valleys. This is based on the assumption that the defending hero’s intelligence is 90 or less,that the maximum number of archers in an archer-only valley is 8500, and that the number of cavalry in a full-house is less than 900.
Hero Attack | (normal) | with War Horn | ||
Archers | Ballistae | Archers | Ballistae | |
5 | 40000 | 1600 | 32500 | 1430 |
25 | 35000 | 1500 | 29000 | 1280 |
40 | 32000 | 1400 | 27000 | 1170 |
55 | 30000 | 1300 | 25000 | 1080 |
70 | 28000 | 1200 | 23000 | 1000 |
85 | 26000 | 1130 | 21500 | 940 |
100 | 24500 | 1060 | 20500 | 890 |
125 | 22000 | 980 | 18500 | 800 |
150 | 20200 | 890 | 17000 | 740 |
175 | 19000 | 820 | 16000 | 680 |
200 | 17500 | 760 | 15000 | 630 |
