Advanced Tips & Tricks

[Woldere]

1. Historical Cities

Testing

A lot of players test their theories on the Historical Cities themselves, while there is a method that will cost you a lot less. You need your military techs at LVL10 and find someone else who has their military techs at LVL10. Preferably this would be an alliance member. One of you needs to leave the alliance and hopefully you have cities near eachother for the testing. You can capture a LVL10 NPC near someone also for this purpose. Added benefit is that you don't have to demolish your wall defenses.

The defender recreates a Historical City defense on scale (1:100 - 1:1000) and the attacker sends the wave you want to test on the same scale.

2. Historical Heroes

General

Historical heroes are extremely important. Make these a top priority from the moment you start playing. As I will show later in this guide, you can get free information on 6 Historical Heroes.

HUBs

When you get information on a Historical Hero, the hero is usually very far away from you and long distance attacking is often not even an option. You could advance port on the NPC where the hero is located, but you can also keep a city slot open and build a temporary city next to it (a HUB).

Find a low level flat near the NPC, preferably on 1-1.6 miles, and attack it with scouts or cav, because they are fast. Build time can be up to 20 hours, but your city will build instantly over server maintenance, at around 06:00 server time.

Capturing Historical Heroes from NPCs

When you have your city near the NPC where the H-hero is, you need to attack it. On every successful attack, you have a chance of capturing the hero. This chance is about 3-5% per hit, so about 25 hits on average to capture the hero.

Some tips:

-Always check Statistics / Hero first, to see if a H-hero is already captured. Realize that it is case sensitive!
-It's possible for H-heroes to have lower attack than the 'normal' hero in the NPC. This could make you think there is no H-hero in the NPC, while there actually is.
This basically only happens with INT/POL heroes.
-Do not scout for H-heroes, you will never see one on a scout report.
-Do not capture the NPC where the H-hero is in.
-Hit all the NPCs near your cities, to see if you can stumble upon a H-hero close to you.

Capturing Historical Heroes Player vs Player

H-heroes can only be captured PvP, when the players who wants to capture the hero has his/her portrait by paying cents for them. This has a couple of implications:

-It's quite safe to scout with you best (Historical) Hero, because your enemy will not know that you're scouting him and it's not very likely that he happens to have the portrait on your hero.
-You can safely attack / scout bomb players who don't have a LVL9+ Beacon Tower with your best H-hero, because they will not see the name of your hero.
-When trying to sow discord a H-hero from a colony, you need to buy the portrait of the hero you're trying to get.


3. Free cents

In Age II, everyone can get free 70 cents.

1. 5 cents - to start with.
2. 10 cents - from quest, chatting in beginner's chat.
3. 10 cents - from Item Purchase; buy a Fabric Box in Shop/Chest.
4. 10 cents - from linking your account to FaceBook.
5. 25 cents - from 2x strategem quest. Try to wait until you win them from the wheel. You get them quite a lot from the wheel.
6. 10 cents - from folk hearsay; you get 10 cents back from your first details on a Historical Hero.
(7. 15-50 cents - from commission quests.)

Never spin the wheel with these cents, only spend them on information on Historical Heroes.

4. FaceBook

Gifts


Good gifts are
-Amulets
-Minor XP Package
-Minor Speed-up Package.

Most inexperienced players value speed-ups over XP. Good players will realize that in most cases, Minor XP (anabasis) will be more valuable. Save your Anabases for when you can set your H-hero to LVL150. Use regular LVL5/LVL10 farming to get your H-hero high level first.

Amulets can be sent by Prinzessin players; if you can get some to send you free amulets, this would be the best gift you can get from FB.


Visit empire / Increase production

You can get 38 free resource packages from this per day. This is an absolute must in the beginning stages of your empire. Later in the server, it's usually not worth the hassle anymore and you're better off just sending out your ballistae farming missions an extra time. Click HERE to see how to visit empires and get free resources.


Post items on your wall

Early in your empire:

Corralling horses = 100 Cavalry
Plows to pikes = 100 pikes stacks
Excess lumber = 100 Rolling logs (~90K lumber after demolishing them)
Artifact discovery = Holy Water

Later in your empire:

Help = Reduce troop upkeep 5% stack 20x
Bored = Moving speed and hitpoints increase 1% on heroes stacks 10x
Traveling troubadour = War-horn

5. Gear

Start out by leveling up your gear researches. Do not use your gems for your star level, but save them! Every time you level up your research, you lose 1 star level and you essentially burn your gems.

Really try to save all of your gems, until you absolutely need the attribute bonus from the stars; usually when you want to attack a LVL12 H-city, or get into a huge war with another alliance. Also, when you get stuck on gear researches and don't think you will be able to upgrade them any time soon, you can choose to star using your gems.

Delicate gems:
use 1 delicate gem for leveling up to 3 stars
use 4 delivate gems for leveling from 4 to 6 stars

Flawless gems:
use 4 ultimate gems for leveling 7+ stars.

When you have all stars to level 8, save a huge amount of gems again, and level your star rating to 9, one by one. If you fail 8 to 9, you fall back to 0.

[Woldere]

6. Buildings


Inn

As opposed to low levels inns on Age I, high levels inns are your goal on Age II. At the start of your empire, a high level inn is a priority. You can get high level heroes to boost the development of your beginning empire immensely. For beginner empires, in order of importance:

1. Intelligence Hero - Top priority, get a high level INT hero ASAP.
2. Politics Hero
3. Attack Hero

For advanced empires:

1. Attack Hero
2. Politics Hero
(3. Intelligence Hero is not important anymore)

Post the Artifact pop-up in the alliance chat daily to receive holy water, and click on other people's FB artifacts.

Forge/Marketplace

Remember to keep these in 1 town, for leveling up your gear researches.

7. Achievement buffs

Scouting: Increased Iron production

If you are producing a lot of iron, make sure you get this buff as soon as possible. Simply scout spam a valley on 1 mile from your city. 1,000 successful scouting is not that hard to get.


Colonize: Increased drop rate

Absolutely vital. You do not actually have to colonize cities, you only have to win the first battle. Do not suppress the cities. Make a list of cities close to you, preferable inactive players, and you can colonize those cities 3x per day. If they don't have Walls in their city and don't have troops or have their gates closed, you can actually colonize them with 1 scout + a hero. So you're looking for tiny prestige players mainly.

The Hero: Increased lumber production

Get your Feasting Halls up and accommodate more heroes. Since most of your production should be lumber, this is very important. Spending a Michaelangelo Script on a Feasting Hall is a decent choice anyway.

Marching: Increased stone production

I do not advice building more than 1 Quarry in any city. If you want to be stubborn and have more than 1 anyway, you can achieve this buff easily by sending scouts on missions as far as you possibly can.


The Captive: Infantry cost reduction

Before you start producing serious amounts of troops, you should absolutely have this achievement completed. Find an alliance mate close to you, one of you temporarily leaves the alliance, and scout attack eachother with disposable heroes. Simply don't stop until you both have 100/100

Booty: Cavalry cost reduction

Simply farm tons of LVL5 NPCs for this. High item and medal drop rates from them.

8. Combat

Exercise in rally spot

While the exercise was rather useless in Age I, it is actually a good tool for Age II. For uprising and suppression battles, you essentially fight in 'valley settings'. This means 1. no attacker or defender 2. no range bonuses 3. no walls and wall defenses. The exercice is perfect for this. Only remember that it doesnt account for differences in technology levels and hero attack/intelligence.

No wall defenses

In Age II, it's possible to not fight an initial battles, without any real consequences. You simply don't build wall defenses and keep your gates closed. You could build cheap traps only to discourage any attackers. If they attack you, you have 8 hours to get as many troops as you can into that town, from your other cities and from alliance members reinforcing you.
It's possible to use this tactic on some of your cities, and have normal defenses in other cities.

Advantages:

-You can leave the 'no defense cities' empty with troops, allowing to have more troops in your 'normal defense cities'.
-You save resource on building wall defenses. Can be useful especially before you're farming LVL5 NPCs.
-You can specialize in suppression battles, where there is no attacker/defender/wall defenses.
-You have a lot of time to ask help from your alliance.

Disadvantages:

-No range bonus for your ranged units
-No ATs killing enemy troops

9. Quests

Queen/King quest.

Another top priority. You get a hero with 85 base in all stats if you complete this quest. The Queen/King has infinite loyalty and doesn't take a space in the feasting hall. For help with capturing a LVL8 and LVL10, see these forums.

Allied Forces

Do not donate any troops that you cannot absolutely miss. This means that you shouldn't donate ballistae, until you can also donate Rams/Pults. To get 200 catapults, capture a LVL10 NPC for the LVL10 barrack and LVL10 workshop. The Final Goal reward is quite good, especially the Advanced Teleport.

Donation of Military Material

Prestige is absolutely worthless, the Final goal of this one is not very good. Do not rush this Quest.

Military Feat.

Way too hard; do not focus on this at all.

10. Gear / Attribute switching

1. You can switch all your gear, or partial gear, to either politics/attack/intelligence. This can be useful in several cases.

When you are 100% sure that you one shot all enemy groups, switch to intelligence gear to decrease losses. Very useful for:

-Valley attacking.
-LVL6-9 NPC farming with warriors, as well as loyalty spamming.
-PvP

You can also do exact calculations on what intelligence/attack is needed, and switch partial gear to attacking/intelligence. Click HERE if you don't know what effect hero intelligence has in battle.

2. You can redistribute points with free holy water. In Age I, holy water was hard to come by, in Age II you can get more than enough. Useful for:

-Switching intelligence H-heroes to attack later in the game
-Switching your Queen/King to politics when you do all your training/attacking with your H-heroes.

Questions & Suggestions

If you have any questions or suggestions on Age II specific concepts, please post them in this thread. I will try to implement them in this guide. Please do not ask simple questions about facts on Age II, this guide is only about advanced tips and tricks; how to use Age II facts to your advantage

[Woldere]

Reserved...

[Woldere]

Reserved...

[Asmo]

I don't have any questions as of yet, I will say that I am thankful for this guide and feel that Woldere is one of the more brilliant tacticians of age 2 and I endorse this guide fully.
________

[Woldere]

Thanks Asmo.

I feel like I am still missing a huge amount of tips n tricks, when I think of them, I will add them in this guide. Made this guide in a very short period of time, hoping to expand it a lot.
Also hoping for other people to contribute.

And thanks for moving your post

------------------

Note to self: Improve lay-out and add picshurrs

[japanpimp]

You need to BUY a portrait of the hero in order to cap it? Nice..... News to me.

[WolfgangMA]

Hi Woldere,

I really like your idea of re-creating historical city battles to scale. I wish we knew more about the stats of the king/queen inside a historical city so that we could mirror it for the simulation. I think a good starting point is at least 120 ATK and 120 INT.

Also for the historical city simulations, I wish we had more information on leadership since I don't think a level 100 hero leading 125 troops into battle will correlate directly to what will happen when they lead 125,000 troops into battle.

Great stuff here,

WolfgangMA

[0Spawn0]

Omg you giving away all my little secrets that have helped me get ahead!! bahh!

Really good guide man.

[Gringo]

Good guide, here's a couple more tips

Colonies

Draft from colonies just before you log off not when you log on - give them a chance to build more troops.

If you regularly move your heroes from city to city be aware that enemy heroes captured, via Sow Discord, will fill a Feasting Hall slot immediately though the hero himself may take hours to show up in the FH.