Introduction
Note, this is a guide for beginners and it greatly simplifies the process. Another post on advanced players has already been posted and will be expanded on in the near future.
Please also check out more medal farming on the Evony forums. It's another great guide.
In this article, I explain how to attack valleys efficiently and with minimal loss. Attacking valleys differs dramatically from how one attacks NPCs. Different valleys may be categorized by expected number (and value) of losses. On “newer” servers (after 40 or so), medals drop only from valleys levels 5 and up, and not from NPC / “Barbarian” cities.
The medal drop rates are best in valleys 9 and 10. After personally making hundreds of attacks, and noting the “misses” as well as the “drops”, and running statistical analyses, I have concluded that there is no relationship between the medal dropped and …
- … The valley type or valley level. We’ve seen Justice medals drop on L5 forests, and Cross medals drop on level 10 grasslands. Rose medals have dropped from lakes, grasslands, and so forth.
- … The attacking hero — its level, attack, politics, or intelligence!
- … Whether or not you lose troops! Some people swear 0 losses produce a higher rate, while others swear by many losses. It doesn’t matter!
- … How much prestige you gained recently or since the last drop! I spend three days tracking my change in prestige. If there was a pattern, it was so crazy, it might as well be random.
Whether you agree with these conclusions or not, this guide will still be of use to you. Valleys are also excellent places to find resources and gain hero experience. For instance, level 10 valleys can be harvested for about 450k iron every hour. Your city would have to have a base production of 325k iron per hour for the hill’s 23% buff to be more useful than hourly farming. Your hero also gets about 100k experience for every successfully attacked level 10 valley. That’s about what you get when hitting a level 5 NPC with zero losses.
Preparation
This guide was revised for low-technology players. To effectively hit level-9 and level-10 valleys, however, you really need level-9 archery. It was tested using level-4 Military Tradition (“MT”), Iron Working (“IW”) and Medicine (“MD”). My compass was level 10, but for this guide, it should make no difference. If your techs are higher, you can cautiously reduce the number of units needed.
To make the attacks, we recommend you have a minimum of 30 k archers and 50 k warriors, plus several of each scout, pikeman (“pikes”), swordsman (“swords”), and cavalry (“cavs”). Your heroes should have an attack level 100 or higher. These requirements can be relaxed if you attack only level 9 valleys. For optimal efficiency, have enough archers and warriors to send out 7 or 8 waves at a time per city. To get your hero that high, find a hero with a good base (66 and up) and use it to repeatedly raid NPCs using ballistae and sacrificial warriors (which boost experience). When you the hero has accumulated a few million experience, upgrade it as far as possible.
From, from each city you attack, keep all valley slots filled. Simply capture nearby low-level valleys with 1500 archers (cavalry are not found in valleys below level-6 and no archers below level-4) to fill the slots as needed. Keeping the slots filled is simply more time-effective. While it will work just as well by capturing and abandoning valleys, it’s more time-consuming and will cause the valley’s defenses to completely reset, possibly making them un-attackable (for purposes of this guide).
Steps
First, once a day, scout the surrounding valleys you want to attack (usually level 9 and 10 valleys).
Attacking a level 10 valley without knowing what’s in it is a sure way to lose troops. Scout first.
The optimal way is to move in outward spiral from your attacking city, scouting each “interesting” valley along the way. An alternate way is to scout first only level 10 valleys, and then only if there are not enough interesting targets, repeat with level 9 valleys, and so on. Sometimes it makes sense to attack certain valleys and not others (if you believe that certain medals prefer certain valleys, or if you simply want to farm valleys for their resources). In that case, you could scout only valleys of that type but of level 7 through 10, and then repeat for all other level 10 valleys. While a spiral is optimal, a tight spiral is not always convenient, and I often veer off the path a few miles in each direction; sometimes this leads to scouting the same valley twice; unlike with an NPC city, scouting a valley repeatedly does not alter its hero. The only way a valley’s defending hero will change is if you capture the valley and abandon it, or capture the hero during the attack. The latter is relatively simple if you have an open slot in your Feasting Hall. But there is no penalty for scouting a valley multiple times.
Second, go through each scout report (SR) and classify each target:
- Zero losses — valley contains no archers and no cavs. Examples include:
- 32192 Warriors
- 8195 Warriors, 4201 Pikemen, 2192 Swordsmen
- 2992 Swordsmen
- Small losses — valley contains no footmen
- Only Archers — 7425 Archers
- Only Cavalry — 383 Cavalry
- Cavalry and Archers — 1500 Archers, 710 Cavalry
- Everything else — just discard the report and ignore the valley (or ask a more experienced player to take it, abandon it, and re-scout).
Third: Go through and attack them in sequence — starting at the first scouting report, which should be the nearest valley. These will return the quickest and will allow you to maximize the number of valleys you can hit.
Finally, step four. Once the attacks succeed, delete the original scouting report. This way you can know which valleys you hit and which ones you have yet to hit. By keeping the battle report, you can know when to attack it again — give it about 1 hour for the troops to reset, and slightly longer for the resources to fully replenish. Also, be sure to heal and casualties. If a battle does not go as expected, but you did everything right, please come back here and flame me in the comments below.
Attack Formations
For the “zero losses” category, ie, footmen only, use archers and a pikeman: 20k for level-9 and for level-10, 30k is safe. The pikeman ensures your archers “have time” to hit their targets if you have low compass, archery, or MT. If you have enough archers or your other techs are high enough, it’s not needed, thus “zero losses”. However, when your techs are low, it’s better to have 1 pikeman lost than 5000 archers. Also the better your tech, the fewer archers you need.
For the “small losses” category having only cavalry, use only warriors. To minimize losses, the number of warriors should be 10 x the number of cavalry. The most we’ve seen is 4300 cavalry in a valley, so that means 43 000 warriors. With max tech, you can expect 1.5 x C(d) losses, where “C(d)” is the number of defending cavalry units.
For the “small losses” category having only archers, use warriors plus a rainbow, that is, warriors + 1 pike, 1 sword, 1 scout, 1 horse. Each unit is critical. The number of warriors should be 3x the number of archers. The worse case is 9000 archers, and there you would need 27 000 warriors. You can expect to lose only the rainbow. If you lose more, it’s possible your compass or MT or hero’s attack are not high enough; add more warriors.
For the “small losses” category having cavalry and archers, use warriors plus a rainbow as with only archers, but with more warriors, as with only cavalry. To minimize losses, the number of warriors should be 10 x the number of cavalry. With max tech, you can expect to lose the rainbow and 1.5 x C(d) warriors, where “C(d)” is the number of defending cavalry units.
