Overview
About some things you should know.
Foreword
Please rate my guide. And if you downvote, please comment why so I can improve it. Thank you.
I’m a (bored) player with a level 30 upgraded castle with 4 level 30 characters. I wrote this guide because people on the steam forums often ask the same questions and because of the absense of Ubisoft in these forums in general and because I got bored. If you need help regarding bugs go to their official forums at [link] You also find customer support there if you get stuck with a bug that does not allow you to continue to play. People here on Steam can not help you with those problems.
To be honest, I like the game’s genre. But I do NOT like this game itself due to it’s major shortcommings including ones that make me frown for even putting it in a closed/open beta.
Note that this guide was written during open beta and may no longer be useful anymore due to the massive overhaul in gameplay (and pay2win).
FAQ
Every creature has a defense rating. And to prevent like 20 cyclops jumping on you from around the corner they implemented a system that limits the maximum amount of creatures that can attack you. Instead of attacking you the other creatures will stay at a fixed distance from you.
The image below showst he maximum agro you can have (updated 9 April 2014):
The soft cap is the max. amount of creatures that can agro you by default. But if you attack creatures that are outside the soft cap then they will also attack you unless the hard cap is reached.
Yes. Long range skills and big aoe skills like “Vortex Rift” can still hit creatures outside both caps. And yes this can be exploited by pulling max agro and then killing creatures outside the hard cap. I’m not sure if you can get banned for it though.
Attacking friends and castles that you searched by name are “practice only”. So no crowns, no xp, no loot.
As of patch #5 this was slightly changed. You can now attack them by name again. But it’s limited. See the next section.
- Targeted Attacks allow you to attack your friends even if they are in another league.
- Targeted Attacks replenish at the rate of 1 every 8 hours up to a maximum of 5 total.
- Number of Targeted Attacks is displayed in the upper left hand corner under the gold/life force storage amounts.
- A Targeted Attack button is displayed next to each one of your friends in the friend’s list.
- Players defeated by a Targeted Attack can take Revenge on the Attacker.
- A Targeted Attack is not consumed by a Revenge.
- A Targeted Attack cannot be initiated if the attacker or the defender do not have enough crowns to lose or win (depending on the outcome of the attack).
Click on the button in the lower right corner of the attack-mode screen that says “More Castles”. You will effectively buy a new set of castles to attack. This is how to spot a chicken farm:
- Has a low amount of crowns (usually < 100).
- Has a high rating and is therefor usually green colored just like the npc-castles.
- Gives way more xp than any other castle for your level. Example: if other castles give only give 4-8k xp then a chicken farm will give around 20k xp.
- Has an easy difficulty rating
- Has several thousands of defeated heroes listed. Yes some people die in chicken farms plus some people just restart it w/o finishing.
Now you can just keep raiding this farm until you get tired of it.
There are currently plenty of chicken farms starting at level 6 and going all the way to level 30.
Don’t tell me that there is none for your level because the fix that the devs applied to counter this was a total joke.
Tips regarding chicken farms:
- Don’t forget to empty your inventory once in a while. You don’t want that epic item to drop and when you walk over it only to hear: “My inventory is full!”.
- Tip2: If you run chickenfarms in like 30-40 seconds/runs and you mass sell those items really quickly then for some reason the enormous “buy back window” can cause the server to kick you. To prevent this just relog (or wait for the server to kick you). (Patched)
- XP, loot & resource boosts still expire if the server kicked/dc-ed you or if you logged off.
- Chicken farms seem to be the best way to farm legendary, epic loot and resources in endgame.
- If you don’t want the loot then just restart the castle instead of finishing it. Unless you don’t want to lose your crowns.
Do NOT pick the runaway as your first hero. She is currently highly underpowered. She is fun to play though.
A tip: while using “Spin Spin Sugar” hold down [shift]+[LMB] and you will get the “Spin Spin Sugar” visual fx added to your basic attacks. How cool is that? Yeah it’s probably another bug.
Sample:
Tip: If you ever need to amass a large amount of life force or gold (like 300k+) then unshield your castle just before you start to farm and wait until someone raids it. Then the shield timer is reset and you have more time to farm. You don’t want someone to raid your castle while you have 250k resources as that would be extremely painful.
That ‘well’ inside the mine has a certain amount of gold or life force crystals in it. The more there are the fuller the mine is and thus the more you can loot. If there is almost none in it then it probably only has loot drops with the value of 1.
Now you can just destroy a mine w/o wasting time collecting the 1-value loot from it during a raid.
Example of full mines that are worth looting:
Note that you should always rotate your own mines in such manner so that the attacker can not see how much is in the mine (only works for higher level mines)
Because you didn’t beat the castle with 3 stars. Here is the table that shows the crown reward per amount of stars collected:
1 star for beating the castle w/o dying, 1 for beating it faster then the castle owner, 1 for destroying all mines and 0 stars if you die. Using the “Heal Me” button will also count as 0 stars but you get to keep the items you found.
As of April 2014 there are also penalties for repeatly attackin the same castle:
1st attempt: 100%
2nd attempt: 60%
3rd attempt: 30%
4th attempt: 10%
Any other attempt: 5%
Comes down when you get near it. The timer does not start when the bridge is still up. You can dash over the bridge before it comes down but it’s animation must have been triggered for ~0.5 seconds. You can use this to win like half a second in time.
Because most people build instant-kill-traps the knight is probably the strongest overall due to his high tankiness. But that could change any patch from now. This also depends on the ‘castles-meta’.
FAQ – Part II
- Do not use rooms with multiple pathways. The enemy will just take the easiest route plus it costs you more defense points guarding both pathways.
- Do add empty rooms to your castle as ‘side-ways’ for enemies to walk through. Why? Because they might think that there is a mine in there and they way time in it making it less likely for them to beat your time.
- Do not build a castle against one specific hero.
- Remove the traps and creatures inside a room before you delete the whole room. The game has a tendency to crash when removing a full room and rolling your changes back in the process…
- Spread your mines throughout the level (hide them if possible) because if they miss a mine they get only one star, and if they back track they get 2 stars at most. Yes I know it’s lame but many high levels do it. Whatever works to keep those pesky invaders out.
- Spend your resources so that invaders loot less. Too much gold? Spend it on potions. Too much life force? Spend it on upgrades.
- Make your castle as boring and annoying as you can to prevent people from doing it over and over again and to keep them away in general. See our chat example:
Originally posted by “Cyrogem”:Cyrogem: i read your guide and was wondering about trying out your castle. I have 550 crowns at the moment but whenever I log on i’m always down another 70-90. I’ve lost 73 from the last time I logged on which was only like 10 hours…
Me: I don’t have that problem. <I tell him my castle name>
Cyrogem: I just walked a giant empty circle lol, curse your empty rooms
Me: You just lost one star :P.
Cyrogem: I don’t like your castle. Well I love it. But I don’t like doing it.
Me: That’s the whole idea. Make your castle as boring and annoying as fu** and you shall find peace (and keep your crowns).
3x in the npc-castle and 2x in a player castle.
1. Trigger the first spring trap and then walk back while it activates. Then the trap needs to recharge. Use that time to walk over it and do the same to the next trap. Then use a dashing ability to dash through the minefield. Yes I know it takes practice and might make you go like “aaargh #@$@#”.
Some people swear that it is impossible if there is a jelly trap right in front of the first spring trap. Yes it does increase the difficulty but it can still be done with any hero and even without any gear at all.
Step #1 failed? If you are a knight there is a second chance. The mines never go off at the same time so just drink a strong potion when your hitpoints reach roughly 20% in order to survive it.
Step #1 failed? But you are not a knight? There is another chance. If you have 20-30% control resistance (helms often have 20%) then you can still dash away from the mines after the spring-trap stun ends and you will only take a little damage. Use the above potion-trick if necesary.
If you are an archer you can use the “Spiral Shot” + “Roll” skills to get through it.
If you fail to learn how to deal with fire mine traps then currently you should consider not playing the game passed ~level 24 until they patched some things. Because 90% of all player castles use at least one of those traps.
Note: I will try to post a video of this.
There is a limit of 10 tombstones simultaneously. Yes it’s bad I know. If some lvl10 guy dies 10x in your level 30 castle then the next 20 tombstones are wasted.
On level 30 they give 5000 Life Force per tombstone.
You might have to temporarily move a trap in order to click on a tombstone. Hopefully they patch this soon.
30. After that all experience you accumulate will be wasted. But don’t worry. You probably haven’t evne maxed out your castle by the time you have 3x lvl30 hero. The castle upgrades are insanely expensive at some point (300-400k resources each depending on how many creatures/traps you already own). And even on level 30 you still only get like 1.5 to 3k resources for a player castle per succeful raid.
Out of more than a 1000 raids only 1 player castle that I raided had over 50k resources and probably 99% < 5k. So don’t expect to get rich.
- Explosive Strike : High-damage AoE around the target (5% chance to trigger by basic attacks)
- Icy Blast : All creatures around the target suffer a penalty to attack and movement speed (5% chance to trigger by basic attacks)
- Blessed Armor : The hero’s physical and magical armor is increased for a short duration
- Frenzy : The hero’s attack speed is increased for a short duration
- Health orb bonus : every time a health orb is picked up, an additional amount of health is gained
- Control resistance : reduces the effectiveness of stuns, snares and knockbacks
- Armor per adjacent creature : the more creatures in melee range (up to 10), the higher the bonus to both physical and magical armor
- Rage : when hero is below 30% health, his DPS is increased
- Raise Dead : Raises 5 spectral skeletons to fight for you. They can trigger traps, soak projectiles and agro new groups of enemies by engaging them. They also have hitpoints. (5% chance to trigger by basic attacks)
Your items have a chance to trigger one of its abilities any time you attack a creature. (I believe on normal attacks count, not skills). And no you can not activate these abilities manually by pressing some button.
The number of clickables in your castle. Tombstones from fallen attackers and your mines can be clicked.
Note: Currently the tombstones may slightly bug and the counter itself may also display the wrong number. This because it sometimes doesn’t register when you click on a mine for example for some reason
If there aren’t too many unshielded castles around your level (often the case at level 30) then you could:
- Write down those names of those hard castles.
- Click on “more castles”.
- Then attack those castle that you wrote down by name (practice mode).
- Click on “more castles” and very soon you will find those castles again. Now you know their layout and how they work so you can 3-star them relatively easy for easy crowns ;). They also have a higher chance for more loot because not many people raid those.
- Attack a player castle with more crowns than you and no more than 3 levels lower than your hero.
- Carry the best available potions for your level and make sure you have plenty in stock.
- Sometimes you can raid the same castle several times in a row and still get crowns (even if it’s shielded). Just look in the ‘attack info window’ before attacking if you still get crowns from it.
FAQ – Part III
People from the previous wipe claim that:
- Ubisoft promised not to wipe (no proof).
- That you get your boosters refunded.
- Only one week notice.
According to developer Rook Fell there are currently no plans to wipe the accounts when open beta ends: [link]
Minimum: 10%
Maximum: 80%
Probably all heroes have some hidden stats. The knight for example has an extra invisible damage reduction (which is is estimated at ~35%).
I don’t know about the other classes. But we do know that the resists and damage reduction displayed on your character sheets are currently (= 19 March 2014) incorrect.
Replays
These are not my best replays and I’m not a pro or anything. Especially not with the mage but nobody wants to see a facetanking knight or a castle-wide-kiting-double-jumping archer replay…
I also use weak potions because I just need them to make sure I don’t die in one hit, that’s all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axdOaFU6zL8&feature=youtu.be
This was a lvl 30 castle with 90% winrate.
I failed both traps but still got out. I don’t know why people swear that it is impossible. Yes I know there are harder firemine setups but I can’t find a castle that has them at the moment… The best ones have zekes and another layer of spring traps behind the firemines and such along with dampeners and stunners and more spring traps (5 I believe instead of 3). But that won’t stop me either.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TizC8VQKlEQ&feature=youtu.be
In this one makes use of the heal abiliy. As long as you don’t get instantly killed the mage is the safest hero by far.
And god do I had Spiders 8.0 as a mage…
You see me running and clearing those boss rooms realllly slow. That is because one stun can potentially kill me. Also 1 zeke combo will remove roughly 90% of my hp so I have to be careful.
Archived (deprecated/patched info)
- If you failed a castle just attack it again (with the same hero or it won’t work, but you can change your gear & skills). Why again? Because on the second try you lose 0 crowns. But you still win crowns if you beat their castle. I believe this does not apply to castles that are much lower in level than your hero. You can confirm this in the attack-window when you click on the castle in the attack screen. It should say: “You lose 0 crowns”.
You can even try to do it with 0 potions if you lost the first raid. You can try it as much as you want anyway it doesn’t cost you anything except potions. - Because of the above, it always pays to attack castles where you win more than double the crowns than you could possible lose. Because you will always finish with at least 2 stars.
- Another tip: If you can win 30 crowns but lose 20 and you failed the first time, try to beat it with 3 stars so you still come out positive. Just hit the restart-button if you are about to finish it with 2 stars.
Yes it’s super lame I know. Don’t blame me for doing/writing it, blame the game designers. They do it to me as well see:
