Banking

            As your army size becomes bigger and bigger, you will be making more and more gold each turn. If you let too much gold build up in your account, you will become a plump target for attackers, who will remorselessly steal it all from you. How do you keep them from doing that? The answer is banking. To “bank” an account is to log into it and spend its money, usually on weapons and tools, so that it cannot be stolen.

Large accounts often have to bank their accounts every 3-5 turns, which means they should try to never be away from a computer for more than a couple of hours at a time. In reality, it is impossible to always stop attackers from getting to your gold, but you should try to log in to your account often in order to save as much of your hard earned gold as possible.

Attacking

            If you plan to play an attacking account, rather than spending your time clicking, you will spend it looking for plump accounts to plunder. As you receive one attack turn each half-hour and it is best to attack with 15 attack turns, you can only attack about three times per day. Thus, it is your goal to earn back in those three attacks the turn based gold you lose by having a smaller total fighting force (TFF) than growers.

Army Size

            In order to take most of the gold sitting in an account, that account must have a larger TFF than you do. This usually is not very hard to do because growers are focused primarily on increasing their TFF as high as possible. Attackers, on the other hand, only need enough soldiers to be able to equip all of their weapons and tools. Any extra men should be trained to spies and sentries, where they do not count towards your TFF.

Strike Action

            As an attacker, your strike action is your best friend. While no stat should be completely ignored, you should spend more money on increasing your strike action than you do on increasing any of your other stats. While people who are trying to get high ranks right away will be increasing all of their stats equally, attackers care mostly about having an SA capable of defeating their opponents Defensive Action (DA).

How to Best Spend Your Gold

            At the beginning of the game, there are so many different ways you can spend your gold. You can train your soldiers to be attack and defense specialists, spies, and sentries; you can buy weapons and tools; you can hire mercenaries; you can increase your fortification and siege technology; and you can upgrade your spy level and unit production. What is the best way to spend your gold at the beginning of the game? It depends on whether you want to specialize in attacking or in growing.

Growing

            Your first priority as a grower should be to increase your Unit Production. Upgrading unit production can be fairly expensive, so save up for upgrades by buying weapons and then selling them all at once when you have enough to cover the cost of the upgrade. It is important to make this your highest priority, since each day you delay costs you hundreds of free men, and the turn based gold they would have produced for the rest of the age.

            Once you have the first few unit production upgrades, you should also begin to upgrade your spy level. Every time this is upgraded, your spy and sentry rank double, so that by the time you reach level 10, each spy and sentry (and the tools they are holding) is 1,024 times as powerful as it was when you were level 0.

            Once your TFF passes 100, you will start to lose soldiers whenever you are attacked. Losing soldiers is a very bad thing, as they will no longer be producing gold for you each turn. Believe me, the lost gold adds up quickly. To avoid losing soldiers, you should hire defense and/or untrained mercenaries. When you are attacked, your mercenaries will always die before your soldiers. It is a good idea to always have plenty on hand.

            When you have reached 640 UP and spy level 10, it is time to begin building up your defense and your sentry. Buy the most expensive defense weapons and sentry tools you can afford, and train as many sentries as you need to hold the sentry tools you buy. Don’t bother training spies or extra sentries because they produce less gold each turn than soldiers do. Likewise, train as many defensive specialists as you need to hold the defensive weapons you buy.

            When your Defense Action reaches a certain point, it becomes beneficial to upgrade your fortification. If you are not sure how to calculate when the best time is to upgrade your fortification, there is an Excel spreadsheet that you will find helpful. You just enter your details into the boxes, and it tells you when it is time to upgrade. You can download the spreadsheet from the ‘Downloads’ section of RiP.

As for the rest of your TFF, you will want to train them all to be Attack Specialists. This will be costly at first, but in the long run you will save a lot of money by not having to hire as many mercenaries (attack specialists do not fight when you are attacked, and so they cannot die).

            This strategy will lead to a very high Defense Action and a very high Sentry Rating. Defense is important because the higher it is, the fewer people are able to attack you. Sentry is important because it limits the amount of people who are able to see how much gold you have, and helps to prevent your weapons from being sabotaged by your enemies.

When the time comes that you want to jump up to a really good rank, you will need to start buying attack weapons and spy tools to increase your Strike Action and Spy Rating. Towards the end of the age, many growers decide to train their entire TFF (except for the soldiers that are holding weapons) to be spies and sentries. This provides a great boost to their Spy Rating and Sentry Rating, and allows them to use up some of the attack turns that have been building up since the beginning of the age. 

Attacking

            As an attacker, you should begin the game the same way you would if you were a grower. Focus on upgrading your Unit Production and Spy Level, but it isn’t as important that you upgrade to 640 UP as quickly as you would if you were a grower.

            Once you’ve reached spy level 10, you should train all your excess soldiers (the ones not holding weapons) to be spies or sentries, usually attackers train more spies than they do sentries. You don’t need a really high spy rating at first, just enough to see the gold of people of about the same rank as you. In case you didn’t know, you can see someone’s gold by having a Spy Rating twice as high as that person’s Sentry Rating.

            From now on, most of the extra turn based gold you make should be spent on increasing your Strike Action. You will want to buy the most expensive attack weapons you can afford, and when the time is right, you should increase your siege technology. If you are not sure how to calculate when the best time is to upgrade your siege technology, there is an Excel spreadsheet that you will find helpful. You just enter your details into the boxes, and it tells you when it is time to upgrade. You can download the spreadsheet from the ‘Downloads’ section of RiP.

            Now comes the exciting part, the attacking. When selecting a target to attack, there are four things to keep in mind. First, you want to find a target with a larger TFF than you. Targets with smaller TFFs yield a much lower percentage of the gold they are holding than targets with equal or higher TFFs.

Second, you want to find a target with a lot of gold sitting around. This one is pretty obvious, but one thing to keep in mind is that if you have a high Spy Rating, you will be able to see accounts who are holding much larger sums of gold.

Third, you want to find a target whose DA is more than 10% lower than your SA. In KoC, it is easy to lose a battle even when your SA is a little higher than your opponents DA. To find out what your potential opponent’s DA is, you need conduct a reconnaissance mission. When conducting recon missions, it is best to just send one spy in at a time. They will never die, and since you have 11 tries, you will almost always be able to succeed before you run out of tries.

Fourth, you want to make sure you haven’t attacked your target before in the same day, or more than once before in the same week. There are thousands of accounts you can steal gold from, and to pick on one guy over and over again is bad sportsmanship. If you don’t care about that argument, consider that attacking too much is a great way to make a permanent enemy and perhaps even start a war. Wars don’t have winners, at best, some sides lose less than others.

If you keep these strategies in mind, you will make a great attacker.