From HiveWiki

This entry began as a forum post and is still being kept up to date here How to build a successful kingdom in knighthood, so if anything seems out of date, please check the original thread.

Due to the rampant cloning, and the number of experienced players making fake accounts and playing the lower brackets(power 24 and on up), it has become more difficult to get started, but hopefully some of this will help new players, and returning players, survive against the experienced players. There are far fewer targets in the war mode, so some of this information may be obsolete.

That said, the core gameplay has not changed. Knighthood is a game that can be won by putting the numbers in your favor and waging war effectively by growing and fostering an army of [vassal]s. That's easy to say, but exactly how do you put the numbers in your favor? There are a lot of variables to factor in. Hopefully, this will help people just starting out, and people who have been in peace for a long time and want to play in war mode.

Basic tips and prospects for success:

1) Alarm The most important part of war mode is alarm. If you have alarm that is big(about the size of your army strength) then you can safely leave your computer without getting seized on. There are 2 ways to generate alarm: through the outpost, and from getting attacked.

2) Defenses. How do you make a good defense setup to defend your vassals from:

3) Attacking. How do you make successful raids and seizes? How do you know what vassal to seize? Should you always try to seize the highest powered vassal first?

What about crusades? How does crusade work? What about weapons?

4) Crusades Oddly, people don’t seem to understand crusades or how they work, or don’t understand how to use crusades most effectively.

5) Weapons How do weapons work? Weapons are another crucial part of the game

6) Advanced battle tactics Heh heh heh heh.

7) Alliances How to make sense of the alphabet soup of alliances.

8) Cheating Cloning and auto healing have gotten out of hand to the point that its ridiculous. The good news is that cheaters are usually lazy and as a result they mess up their cheating.

9) freemen, mercenaries, how to start strong and other final thoughts

10) The Evil Empire! EVIL EVIL EVIL

Contents 1 Alarm 2 Defenses 3 Attacking 4 Crusades 5 Weapons 6 Advanced Battle tactics 7 Alliances 8 Cheating 9 Closing thoughts and other tricks to start strong 10 The evil Empire

[edit] Alarm

• The outpost can make you essentially impossible to seize from if your alarm is high. If you alarm is 400 or more, and if the guy attacking you has an attack strength of about 400 , even if he takes your defenses to almost nothing, it will be nearly impossible to seize from you without using zeal. I tell all my vassals that the outpost is now the most important building in the game, along with the defense structures. The other way to quickly raise alarm is to have a friend in your bracket seize a peace mode vassal and then release it, and you can reclaim it later when you are going to fight again. When you reclaim, you lose the alarm boost, so don’t reclaim. Relying on this isn't always good idea because if you have no outpost, and no one in your bracket will raise your alarm for you, then you will very vulnerable. Build up your outpost.

• Alarm affects seizing and raiding. It is not used in rescuing. Alarm goes up from the outpost, whenever someone is seized, or whenever someone attempts and attack, or rebellion attempt, or rescue attempt(mobilization). It does not go up after a successful rescue or rebellion. When alarm goes up from seizing, it is increased by 2x the vassal's power that was seized. Alarm from seizing has no limit. This makes it harder to take more than 1 vassal as each one taken will continue to raise alarm. Conquering ignores alarm.

• What is alarm mobilization? If you attack someone, then their alarm goes up +1. Alarm from mobilization drops one point per minute- and it begins to drop immediately after the attacker stops attacking. Alarm from mobilization is capped: if you are attacking a power 50 vassal, it can only get a max of +50 alarm boost from mobilization. If you didn't seize anything, you can wait for the alarm from mobilization to drop and try again. Alarm from mobilization does make conquering and rebellion attempts more difficult.

If you look at someones mobilization meter, you can tell how much alarm is generated from mobilization, and how much is from getting seized on, or from alarm from the outpost.

Alarm generated by the outpost has a cap of 2x the strength of the outpost. Alarm will start to degrade 24hrs after the event that triggered it. After about 36 hours, the alarm from outpost will be gone. This is somewhat complicated so I will give several examples.

• Alarm Example 1, outpost empty. On Monday at noon a power 100 is seized from John. His alarm is now +200. At noon on Tuesday his alarm starts to go down. At midnight tuesday night the alarm will be completely gone. If John is getting attacked, the alarm will drop much faster, so attacking someone while their alarm is dropping, actually makes their alarm drop much faster. You can see the mobilization from the mobilization meter going up, but their total alarm is dropping.

• Alarm Example 2, outpost empty. On Monday at noon a power 100 is seized from John. His alarm is now +200. 1 hour later another power 100 is seized. His alarm is now +400. At noon on Tuesday the alarm from the first seize starts to degrade. 1 hour later the other alarm starts to degrade. By midnight on Tuesday the alarm from the first seize is gone but some remains from the second seize. The remaining alarm is gone in the next hour.

• Alarm Example 3, outpost only John's last attack was at noon on Monday. His outpost has a strength of 150. At noon on Tuesday his alarm is +300 and starts to degrade. By midnight Tuesday his alarm is +0. HIS ALARM WILL NOT GO BACK UP FROM HIS OUTPOST UNTIL AFTER HE ATTACKS AGAIN. Remember that last point. The alarm from the outpost does not go up and down and up and down. It goes up, then down and stays there until after you attack again. ALSO, if your alarm is dropping, and someone is attacking you, it speeds up the rate at which your alarm drops.

• If you have a friend in your bracket seize a peace mode vassal from you, and then release it so you can reclaim it later, you will still get to keep that alarm boost from the seizure. If you reclaim the vassal, then you lose the alarm boost. So don’t reclaim.

• Again, alarm mobilization affects rebelling and conquer attempts. Other alarm(from getting seized on and from the outpost) does NOT affect rebellion and conquer attempts

• Originally, I thought it was impossible to seize someone if their alarm is greater than your army strength. If you are seizing someone who is totally undefended And maybe they are unarmed, or you are using all axes and they have a pike equipped, then you can still seize a vassal from them because of the weapon weakness. Its nearly impossible if some of their defense is intact, but possible. This doesn’t change the bigger point: you want a big alarm before you go to sleep, or leave the computer for any real length of time(school or work)

^^ I put alarm at the top of the list for good reason, it really is that important. Put up unbeatable alarm, and you are unbeatable.

[edit] Defenses

• Basic defense advice: Keep your defenses at least 1.5x the size of your attack power. To check this, go to the upper left part of the screen and click "capital". On the left part of the screen, it shows your attack strength. If your attack strength is 200, you want your defense buildings to be 300 or more. (the defense is shown on the middle of the screen).If you are starting out you will probably only have room for a one sided defense on the wall. So if your attack strength is 200, your Wall should be AT LEAST 300.

• If you have enough soldiers, I suggest going to a 2 sided defense, putting all the top soldiers on wall and palisades. Then the next best on tower, then castle, then if you have any seized vassals, use the blockhouse (if you have any soldiers on timers) and the rest on hospital. If you have anything left, put them on the workshop and outpost. Put squirrels / power 10s on the workshop and marketplace. Outpost and alert/alarm levels become extremely useful if they get ridiculously high. You can put strong soldiers there before you will leave for a long time (before you go to sleep). You can put strong soldiers in the outpost, get the alarm up to about 70% of your army strength and then leave some other soldiers in your outpost, and no one will be able to seize from your overnight because your alarm is so high. If you have seized guys on timers, you had better make sure that you always keep your tops on your defenses to defend against rescues, rescues ignore alarm

• When you leave your computer, if your tower has good soldiers, they will keep several thousand gold safe so be sure to keep gold in case you get attacked and one of your guys gets seized, the rest of the compound gets healed. The higher level the guys in your tower, the more gold you keep safe and cannot be raided. When a soldier is seized, then that gold will be used to heal your entire compound (as long as there is enough gold to heal).

If you don’t have enough strong soldiers for a 2 side defense go to a one line defense with wall, then tower, then castle. Try to find a friend who will raise your alarm before you leave the computer.

The garrison stores weapons the same way that the tower stores gold, so its not a bad idea to at least put some squires in the garrison, and if they are undefended, just recruit more squires.. That is the nutshell defense advice I can give.

• On Tower: The protected gold will be in proportion to the total power of the vassals populating the Tower. More precisely, the sum of money protected is equal to (Tower population) * (20 + Tower upgrade). For example, with a Tower population of 40 and upgrade level of 2 there will be 40 * (20 + 2) = 880 gold coins protected from raiding

•••• *When defending, is the damage done to attackers calculated just based on the raw total powers of the defenders, or do building level modifiers factor in? Again, what about weapon bonus/penalty?

• This is important, the cost to heal after an attack is telling you how close you are getting to a successful raid, or seize. Building upgrades play a huge factor, if I have 10 upgrades on my wall, and you attack my wall, you will be doing a lot of healing after every attack(it goes up by 5% per upgrade, so with 10 upgrades, you would be taking an extra 50% damage when you attack me). And yes, all weapon modifiers apply.

• If the target is in a supplementary defensive structure, such as the tower, or outpost, the defense of that structure is added as well. If in the tower, the vassal's becomes twice as hard to seize. Targets who are protected by the blockhouse add ALL of their health to the total HP of the blockhouse defenders. The blockhouse is incredibly powerful for blocking rescues, or if you are trying to protect your favorite vassals with additional protection

• How do blockhouse blockers enter into/modify all of these situations? Does a blocker just act like any other defender when a seize/rescue is attempted. If so, then how is damage applied for/to them? Do they get a building bonus, or a weapons bonus/penalty?

• I love the blockhouse. If blocker has 150 health, then he would give 150 health to whoever he is protecting(+ any modifiers from upgrade, 5% per upgrade and all weapon modifiers). If you seize someone, then put the timer in a tower and put a full blockhouse on them, well that will make a power rescue difficult.

• Trappers aren’t a bad idea to use when you are online. However, they make you vulnerable when you are offline. When attacking someone, it’s a good idea to attack with a level 10

[edit] Attacking

• To break through for a successful raid or pillage: if your army strength is greater than the defense, then you will get a successful raid: if your army strength is 500(after weapon bonuses), and their defense is 499 then you will break through on the first hit.

• The formula for rescuing is the same as for a raid/pillage. However, if the person you are rescuing from is using the blockhouse, it becomes much more difficult.

• The devs seem to have made it easier to seize and somehow tweaked the formula for a seize with beta 4. In the past, for a successful seizure, the total power of your attack force must have exceeded the total power of the defenses of the area you attack, plus double the power of the targeted vassal.

• If your army strength was 1000, and you want to seize a level 100 character, you would have to get the defenses on the structure below 800, or get the defenses down to 900 and the vassals health below 50(just one example). All alarm modifiers and weapon modifiers apply. (edit, for beta 4 it has become much easier than this, although I don't have the math to back that up, it is unquestionably the case)

• So should you attack with lots of raids and pillages to wear down the other person’s defenses? That’s a good idea right? Yes and no. If you attack someone for a successful raid or pillage, they can get notification from email or their phone via sms. So its not a bad idea to try to start off with seize attempts. Then if you can get a successful seize, the other person gets notifications from getting seized so you can go ahead and use pillages and raids to wear them down even more.

• The church does not factor into the damage dealt. It makes it twice as easy to do a seize/conquer/raid/rescue/rebel if you are fully zealed up. And yes, absolutely yes, that attacking with your top soldiers does far more damage than attacking with your squires, and weapon modifiers apply.

• When you attack, attack with one squire in your attack group in case the person you are attacking has a trapper, and when you attack, the other person only traps your squire. Keep dropping squires into their trapper and trap maybe 3 or 4 squires. Then try to rescue your squires to wear down the other guy’s defenses. When you can successfully rescue, then that means you can successfully raid and pillage.

• When you do rescue your men, you will not be able to do a seize for another 10 minutes(you will have to wait 10 minutes after you seize to get attempt another seize, and the same applies for seize attempts after rescues), so continue doing raids and pillages until the game lets you attempt seizes..

• ****Its usually a good idea to have a squire in your attack group even if the other guy is not trapping you when you first attack, because they can get online and open their trapper, so if you are attacking with a level 10 then they will only trap a squire.

• There are a few things to look for when picking a vassal to seize: is the vassal inactive ( check its recent activity, is it grow? Is it mostly level 10s and the player has given up and losing the 10s? Probably not a good choice. Is the vassal mostly level 20s and maybe a few 34+ and 44+ vassals? Is the vassal a perma peace player who will never rebel?

• Try to seize soldiers that are on timers. they were stolen from someone else, and the original liege may have already used up their rescue attempts. Seize good powered soldiers, that would fit into your top 5, to keep for your army, and sell lower ranked soldiers to make lots and lots of gold.

• Check the "buy a vassal' under marketplace to see the going rate for how much a soldier will sell for, make the soldier you are selling cheaper than the rest of the soldiers at that level so yours will sell first. Raiding has become almost obsolete. Check for people in your bracket who have recently sold someone, or recently hired out as a mercenary or recently collected a ransom so you can raid their gold.. Use gold on upgrades and for when you will need healing when go on long attacks. When you are just starting out, use gold to expand your buildings as well. BUT using gold to expand will get expensive fast. Using gold for workshop upgrades is twice as effective as castle expansions so try to use soldiers in your castle to expand rather than gold.

• The developers made it possible to play for shorter periods of time-making it easier to come in and seize one vassal by using weapons. Also, now its possible to spend time away from your comp for 1 day without getting completely wiped out: the base is healed with any gold you have on hand, because now the tower stores gold proportionate to the power of guys you have in the tower- the tower is very important now.

• You can leave gold in your account and it wont get raided. Also, when a soldier is seized off of your Wall, Watchtower or Palisades, then a backup soldier from your garrison will substitute in for him. Yet there are so many more important buildings than garrison, it seems like a waste of a good soldier. we are now able to build weapons in weapon factories: the weapons used will mow down unarmed opponents. If the opponent has weapons, it is like paper/rock/scissors: sword beats axe, pike beats sword, axe beats pike.

For this reason, marketplace is almost completely useless if you are in war mode because it is so easy to seize and sell soldiers. Get into war mode. Workshop is OK, but it is best to use gold to upgrade your buildings. I cannot stress enough: your defense buildings, along with the outpost, are your most important structures. If you are really well balanced, you could go to a 3 sided defense because the watchtowers will become useful if you have people trying to rebel(just sell them) and you can store excess weapons in the garrison so they cant be pillaged. Garrison protects weapons the same way that the tower protects gold:

Bracket surfing. • The brackets in Beta 4 Knighthood are very small. If you have a buddy in your bracket that you really really trust, or if they are in your alliance, then ask them to open their trapper so you can intentionally put your vassals into their trapper to get to another bracket. Look at the realm to find a good target that you can match brackets with and attack(edit, this has become extremely difficult now that peace mode players are included in the 'realm' page). Have your bracket buddy release your peace mode vassals so you can reclaim later and have them put a one gold ransom on the war mode players. If your buddy releases someone in war mode, then that vassal can get conquered and trapper passed up the line. If they release a freeman, they are gone forever and cannot be reclaimed.

• Your bracket it determined through a combination of both your army strength and your total power. You don’t want a high army strength and relatively low total power, or on the opposite side, you don’t want an entire army of 20s and 10s. In either case you will end up in a very small bracket and find the game nearly unplayable. Try to build a balanced army.

• Your bracket size is larger at the bigger brackets: opponents with +/- 20% of your army strength can be in your bracket, and opponents with +/- 40% of your total power can be in your bracket.

• Use the numbers to find targets to attack. Then reclaim and ransom your guys from your bracket buddy when you are done seizing to get back to your original bracket. This may seem confusing at first, but over time it will get easier to match brackets with other players that you want to attack. If you are friends with everyone in your original bracket, and all of your enemies are in different brackets, then you will have an easier time playing the game. Bracket surfing becomes more important as you get to power 100 and bigger because you will find fewer and fewer people to fight in your bracket.

[edit] Crusades

• With fixed army size, Crusades allow you to get temporary increase of your fighting power for short period.

• Starting Crusade increases your army size by +1. That immediately recalculates your new army strength and bracket.

• Go to "attack" and click "start crusade". Crusades creates 1hr timer. Your are in crusade for that duration so don’t leave your computer because you are in a bracket with people who have higher army strength.

• During the crusade all defensive moves are disabled (rebel, rescue, etc)

• You WILL end up in the bracket with people of higher titles/bigger army strength and power, for duration of crusade. Do not declare crusade if you don’t have time to actively manage your attack and defense for that hour. Also, it is good to go to a one line defense while on crusade, as your army strength becomes bigger, you go into a bracket with people who have bigger army strength, but your army defenses didnt improve.

• You can declare up to 2 crusades per day, IF you stack them together, and declare the second crusade before the first one ends, you will get a second additional attacker for an even greater attack boost.

[edit] Weapons

• Weapons are manufactured using the weapon shops: to make an axe shop you need a size 5 guardhouse. To make a sword shop you need a size 5 tower. And to make a pike shop you need a size 5 church.

• The weapons work like paper/rock/scissors: swords beat axes, axes beat pikes and pikes beat swords. The attack bonus is 50% bonus. Attacking an unarmed opponent also gives a 50% bonus. So it’s a good idea to have a defense of mixed weapons so that you are not weak to any one particular weapon.

• if I attack your wall, and you have all axes(this would be a huge mistake, but for arguments sake lets pretend you have all axes, )If I attack with all swords, I would get a +50% bonus at a successful raid/seize/pillage attempt.

• As for mixed weapons defenses, if you are using mixed defenses, and are pretty evenly balanced: I attack using all swords, then all pikes and then all axes. it turns out that it costs 300 to heal with all axes, and 320 to heal with both swords and pikes. So I attack with all axes. I start cutting through, and it costs less and less to heal, it quickly gets to the point where it costs 260 to heal. Then it seems like I stop making progress, and it keeps costing a 260 to heal. So i try all pikes for 5 attacks, then all swords for 5 attacks. Then I go back to all axes. Before it was costing 260 to heal with all axes, then it suddenly on the next attack after I switch back to all axes, the cost is now 230(!) to heal, and I keep breaking through quickly.

• Using the above example, it might cost less if I have all axes, except for my top soldier and I give him a pike or a sword, and it costs slightly less to heal per attack. I am not entirely axes.

[edit] Advanced Battle tactics

• How to block a power rescue: One of the big compaints people have in the game is that people that dont understand the game, or set up their defenses, can get seized on, but they do an easy power rescue when someone gifts in, or swears in a powerful rescue vassal. Maybe a small viscount gets seized on, then someone gifts him a 490 point viscount so he can do an easy power rescue. You have a few options to block the power rescue:

• Wall up. swear in big vassals or hire bigger mercenaries to put on your defenses and blockhouse. this will improve your chances of blocking a power rescue. The downside? If you swear in 2 or 3 really big vassals, you will end up in a bracket and have a bigger army strength. if your army strength is usually about 500(lets say you are a viscount with power 100s as your biggest vassals), and then you add in 5 viscounts that are power 200 so that your army strength is 1000, well in the past you could get your alarm to 600 and be safe. if your new army strength is 1000, you will need alarm of 1200 or so to be safe from getting seized on.

• Pass the vassal up to a friend with bigger defenses than you, maybe a count or duke or marquis. Make sure its someone competent, and someone who you trust will gift your vassal back.

• Have a bracket buddy trap their vassals into you. maybe you and one of your friends make some good seizes. You decide to have one of you try to block both of the power rescues. Sticking with the above example, you and your friend are both viscounts with army strength 500. have your friend give you an alarm raise, then put their big vassals into your trapper. maybe now you have all 100s, and can use the wall/blockhouse/hospital with bigger vassals, so that you have bigger defenses, a bigger blockhouse, etc. This is one more reason why you will want friends who will help you block power rescues. You dont *need* to play with other people to get help, but you will probably hit a roadblock and have a tough timer advancing in the game if you play on your own, attack everyone without giving any thought about making friends etc.

• There are other ways to beat people who try power rescues. Lets say I want to attack someone who is really top heavy(they are unbalanced after they just add a few really strong soldiers for a power rescue and that puts them in an odd bracket, or they are just top heavy already, they have some really nice timers(vassals that he seized from someone else that are already on a timer) because it is easier to seize when your army strength is big. the person has very similar total power to me, but they have a much higher army strength (your bracket is determined by a combination of your army strength and total power) and so they are in a different bracket.

• Well, do a crusade. When the crusade ends, it forces me to drop down to my original bracket. The guy who had all the timers, his army strength is big enough that he would be able to seize from me without too much trouble, but he is no longer in my bracket because he is too top heavy, and I have an evenly balanced army.

• So I end up with some really nice timers. I get back to my bracket, get my alarm up with the outpost and no one gets my timers. The original target was probably relatively weak and the people in my bracket who would have a shot at the timers don’t bother don’t have a chance with my high alarm.

• This is just one example of putting up a ghost wall: it means that I can attack someone else(who has some really nice timers),but they cannot attack me even though our total power is very close- your bracket is determined by both your total power as well as your army strength.

• Attacking someone who is really top heavy is easy, having one really big vassal weakens the defense overall because that big vassal on top has a lot of one weapon, not a mixture of weapons.

• So far, I have said that crusade is great, it is always a good idea to go after guys on timers, and to try to ghost wall and then get timers. Lets put all of these together:

• Again, when you hit the "attack" button, you will see 3 buttons on the right: heal vassals, arm vassals and "go on a crusade". Crusade adds and extra attacker to your attack group for one hour.

• For example, if you are a viscount, normally you get to attack with your top 5 soldiers. If you are in a crusade, you get to attack with your top 6. Again, you get one crusade for every 24 hours. Dont just waste your crusades and use them randomly:

• When you see someone in your bracket who has some guys on timers, and they have low alarm. Naturally, you think that this is a good person to attack. So you attack them, use weapons, and break through, and you seize one of their guys that was on timer. They probably have gold in the tower, and get their defenses healed. You go for a second seize, and hopefully you get him.

• At this point, maybe the other guy's defenses are really weak, and he doesnt have much gold left over to heal his guys. Unfortunately, his alarm is so high, even though his defenses are close to zero, his alarm is just bigger than your strength. As previously stated, alarm stacks onto defense, so if the other guys alarm is bigger than your army strength, it must be almost impossible to seize from him, even if you took his defenses to zero, right?

• Wrong. hit the crusade button. You get an added boost to your army strength, and IF the other guy's health is down to almost nothing, and IF adding the extra attacker boosts your army strength so that it is greater than his alarm, then you will get to seize successfully on your next hit.

• People often say there is no strategy to this game, and you just hit the mouse button like a monkey and that is how you get vassals. Yes and no, if you combine ALL of the strategic elements of this game, you will really be at a HUGE advantage over the rest of the people in your bracket, and consequently, the rest of the people in the game.

• I LOVE crusade. And the weapons. And going after guys on timers. in the above example, I showed how it is possible to get multiple seizes from the same person, IF this person is still in your bracket, If there is still time left on the crusade clock, you can click "go on ANOTHER crusade". This will give you a second additional attacker. And if you still have that original opponent in your bracket(unlikely), his health will almost certainly be next to nil by this point. IF that second additional attacker gives you enough of a boost to your army strength, you can get ANOTHER seize from the poor sap you are attacking.

• The guy who seized so many guys on timers is undoubtedly a good, active player. He would try to seize some of these timers back. He will almost certainly be out of your bracket by now. Good riddance. If you used crusade to get to a higher bracket, and then did even more seizes, well when the crusade ends, you will return to your original army strength and drop to your original bracket. The people in that bracket above you, those people have a bigger army strength and have an easier timer seizing, when you drop out of crusade mode, you will have effectively put up a ghost wall. The only way those guys with the bigger army strength could try to seize those timers back, they would have to bracket surf, or drop down to your bracket.

• If you want an even bigger advantage do a double crusade and have ALL of your attacking vassal zealed up fully with the church.

• To gain an even bigger advantage, you can manipulate target locks and army strength: If you have a big vassal gifted in or sworn in if you surfed to a lower bracket, well you can really ruin someone in your bracket who attacks you.

• If someone in your bracket attacks you they put up a pink light target lock. Attack them and put up a yellow target lock light. Now you have a pink+yellow target lock, you are locked into them, You can attack them for 8 minutes, regardless of how much power you swear in, gift in, or reclaim.

• Simply accept the gift or fealty or reclaim, put the new vassal on your defenses, then try to seize the best vassals from the guy who attacked you and put a target lock on you.

• Some say that this is a shady tactic and is poor gamesmanship. Bullocks. these power attacks can actually give you a chance to block the inevitable power rescues.

• I surf down a couple times per week and seize off of someone that I *know* will try for a power rescue. Then if they attack me and I do an easy power attack and take a vassal or 2 after reclaiming my top vassal. With the latest update, it really is only possible to seize one vassal before breaking brackets. A lot of the time, maybe over 50% of the time the opponent will power up for a power rescue and rescue their vassals anyways.

• These attacks can really be abused in the game, if a count or marquis drops down to the viscount brackets, and some viscount attacks them, and the count or marquis can reclaim their top vassal and keep the target lock and start seizing on the viscount, and the viscount has no shot at a rescue. This is the big complaint people have. These power attacks have been in the game since beta 4 rolled out back in june, for a while there were only a handful of us using the power attacks. Now they are being used, and abused by many or most of the counts/marquis/dukes.

• Manipulating army strength: Even without out a crusade, you can raise your army strength. Or lower it. For example, if you are power 490 or so, and used your crusades already. add some squires to get to power 501 and gain an additional vassal for your attack strength, so that you now have 6 vassals in your attack group instead of 5. You will definitely see some new faces in your new bracket. attack them. maybe drop the squires after you are done seizing to get out of their bracket.

• Or if you are just above power 150, and have 5 vassals, all power 100 in your attack group giving you an army strength of 500. But maybe your alarm is low, only 400 or and you know you can get seized on. Drop some squires to get below power 150 to lower your army strength to 400. someone can still attack you if they have an army strength of 480, and seize on you, but maybe they look at your big alarm and not bother, or maybe your defenses will be big enough so that after mobilization, it will get difficult for you to get seized on. These are examples of manipulating your army strength without using a crusade. Dropping just below 500, or just below 150 is essentially the opposite of a crusade, because it lowers your army strength.

[edit] Alliances

• Oh my. Alliances and Guilds definitely play a big part of knighthood. All of the guilds will say theirs is the best, and has the coolest and best people etc. All of them have their positives and negatives. I really shouldn’t mention specific alliances, so I will say this:

• If you are in an alliance, you will have friends that will help you, even if you don’t have any idea who they are or that they were your friend in the first place. They will help raise up your alarm artificially, and will help you rescue your vassals by swearing to you to get your vassals back(a power rescue, or also called a 'fealty rescue' because someone swears fealty to you just for that specific rescue). When you make a good seize and want to block a power rescue, your alliance can send big vassals to swear to you for 3 days to improve your defenses to block the rescue. Sounds good, right?

• The downside is that there are other people who will go out of their way to attack you because of the alliance you are in, even if you dont know them, they will specifically target you anyways.

Some alliances will trapper pass your vassal after they seize it and so that it gets to a player with really big defenses(maybe a duke or king) so that even your power rescue attempts will fail. This is all part of the game. Some alliances will make threats and say "I will get the rest of my guild friends and gang attack you!"

If they are going to try this, you are not defenseless. If you get your alarm up ahead of time, they cannot touch you. If you are online and have low alarm, that is when things get fun.

If they are as dumb as they sound, you can ruin them. Keep raiding them, some of them may have a one sided defense on the watchtower or palisade and only small soldiers in the tower so you can raid them with impunity.

If they are getting their gold a little at a time and someone is sending them gold from another account, you can still pillage them. you can take their vassals, probably 20s, that they leave undefended(if they are running a one sided defense on watchtower, this is almost certainly going to be the case because all of the good buildings are in the wall and palisade. When you are done with them, hit the crusade button and say goodbye.

If you have enough gold, and you are running an effective 2 sided defense and have a big outpost then you can just keep healing. so even if you used up your crusade, you can just sit and heal. you alarm will go up from both mobilization and from the outpost. Build up a good outpost. Did I mention that it’s a good idea to build up your outpost?

You can also drop vassals(loyal vassals that will re swear) if you are getting ganged, but this is a mistake i think. for one thing, if you drop vassals, the other guys can drop vassals too and follow you. It also takes 18 minutes for the brackets to refresh. That is enough time for the guild guys to seize a vassal or 2. What you can do instead is just find someone with a loaded trapper. Put a power 10 in the trapper. If you put a vassal into a trapper, someone attacking you will have to wait 10 minutes before they can try to do a seize attempt.

[edit] Cheating

• Cloning is building a second account, separate from your main account and then playing on it. Or some cloners just build 20s and then farm them out to different accounts and build an army that way. if you seize someone's clone, then it will probably rebel on you, unless the cloner has gone inactive and no longer plays knighthood.

• When you are looking at someone's roster and trying to decide who to seize, and if someone is a clone, and if they are active, there are some things to look for. Look at their friend list. Look at their wall. Look at their recent activity. A lot of the time, even if someone was a clone, they might be inactive and might not rebel so go ahead and seize. If they are pretty active, and they look bogus, they are probably a clone that will rebel.

• I used to try to figure out who is playing which clone, but don't bother, it will just give you a headache. Does it matter? As long as they rebel, then they arent worth having in your army, that is really the only thing that matters when trying to decide whether or not to seize.

• Auto-rebel is a script, usually imacro, that makes an attack again and again. Imacro is like a VCR, it records the mouse clicks you can make, and then you can hit the "auto play back" so that those clicks are repeated at set intervals(maybe once every 15 or 20 seconds. So you would simply, set it up to rebel at set intervals, maybe once every 12 seconds. The example I usually give is Paolo:

• Paolo's alarm is the same as his total power: your mobilization is maxed out at your total power. So if your total power is 123, your mobilization maximum would be 123. (the other guy's alarm goes up +1 every time you attack or rebel on him). Paolo's alarm is 9011 and his alarm is 9011.

• He simply has one of the clones in his army rebel over and over to drive up the mobilization. It IS possible to rebel on Paolo and get out( I did it a few weeks ago), your army strength would have to be greater than his mobilization + the guardhouse + whatever he has on the defenses.

• Its unclear if this is against any knighthood rules, as he has done this for months and none of the devs have tried stopping it. It keeps people from seizing on your, and makes it more difficult to rebel.(edit, apparently the devs put him into peace mode?)

• Autohealing is another script, often imacro or a similar program that runs like an auto playback on a dvd or cd player, it records a series of mouse clicks, and then repeats them. In this case, some autohealers set their kingdom to 'heal and rearm" and play that back at regular intervals. You can usually spot this easily enough, if you are attacking someone and they are running a 3 sided defense and when you attack and the cost to heal goes down to a certain point then the other guy heals and you keep attacking, and he heals at regular intervals. To set this sort of kingdom up, he will need a 3 sided defense and a large balanced army to defend all 3 sides effectively, and store a ridiculous amount of gold and weapons to heal and rearm.

• The good news is that autohealers are often lazy. They might not set their weapons up well. Or they might be so unbalanced that they cannot run an autoheal with 3 sided defese effectively so that you can do successful raids on the first hit.

• Manipulate the numbers so that you are at the top of his bracket in army strength either by using crusades or by swearing in vassals so that your army strength is +20% than his. Try all the different weapons and you can probably break through for a successful raid on the first hit. After you take all his gold, keep attacking with pillages and take his weapons- he can still heal with gold from the tower. Once that gold is gone, just wear down the defenses and start seizing.

• If you still cant get through, try gang attacks and/or using trojans so that the auto heal cant keep up with the damage you are inflicting. For this to work, have 2 buddies with their top vassals fully zealed. Have one player try a zeal seize on the palisades for a vassal, if they cant find it in that building, have the second player try a zeal attack on a different building for the same vassal. and if the vassal isnt there try the third guy do a zeal seize on the other building, check for weapon weaknesses before doing the zeal attack by attacking with your lower powered vassals. (do 3 attacks with the lower power vassals then switch to your zealed up tops to try for a zeal seize)

• The other common auto heal cheat is when someone runs an auto gold in/auto gold out with auto heal in between, and run a single column defense on wall or watchtower. Again, this can be beaten with zeal or gang attacks and crusades, or even better if its all 3. Keep trying back anyways, this is actually running 3 scripts and running that many on one computer can get bogged down and glitch up. Or they may just not have the script running and forget to set it up. again, autohealers and cheaters in general are pretty lazy.

• If the autohealer leaves their trapper on, just keep throwing in big trojans to make the autohealer top heavy and put him in a bad bracket, then swear in a big vassal or reclaim to match his army strength. The big vassal your threw in will be on his court and not on any of the defenses and you can easily raid right over the defenses, take all his gold, take his vassals then rescue or rebel out your trojan(a trojan is a vassal that you have the email and password to, if you have firefox and internet explorer, have your main account on i/e and your trojan on firefox).

• The auto rebel cheat can also manipulate someone's defenses. If an auto healer runs an auto heal program to keep people from rebelling successfully, and they also run a second script: they have one of their clones run auto rebel and rebel with one squire over and over to increase alarm from mobilization. Attacking with a squire does negligible damage but increases alarm +1 every 10 seconds so it is difficult to seize. The scripts are not foolproof and if the guy running the scrips doesn't have the computer up and running the scripts at all times, then you can get through so keep checking back.

• To rebel out of such an autoheal dungeon, your best bet would be to promote yourself up a rank or 2, get some help, get some big vassals to swear to you so that you can get out on one or 2 hits. As for seizing, zeal can beat alarm, so your best bet is double crusade with full zeal. Or just keep checking back constantly.

At any rate, if you are cheating and winning then its a hollow victory. The devs seem to be cracking down on some of the bigger cheaters and seem to be more active at stopping the cheaters.(edit, this does still happen, cloners get their buildings reduced to size 2 and all their vassals get auto released)

The capthca limits some of the cheating. People still use autoheal scripts, they just dont seem to work as well. They only last 2 hours, until the Capchta numbers need to be entered. And autorebel works the same(the auto rebel continues rebelling, but since the catpcha only stops healing, well you can keep attacking indefinitely if you dont heal.

[edit] Closing thoughts and other tricks to start strong

•For knights just starting out and trying to get to baron, there is plenty of strategy. Make a marketplace, wall, WT, Garrison, palisade and go to war with four 10s to start off.

This will put you in a large bracket, with 10 pages or more of people to fight. Raid all of them and use the gold to build. keep raiding and building until you have enough to build a size 5 guardhouse, size 5 workshop and then size 5 church, and finally a size five hospital and tower. Then build weapon shops. having weapons early on in the game will put you at a huge advantage.

A lot of players who quit are sitting on loads of gold and weapons, all of their good vassals were seized so they are left with nothing but 10s. You cannot use the weapons you pillage until you have the shops.

Many people use second accounts as "bank accounts". They make a friend;s account or family member's account with just 4 vassals and store lots of gold and weapons with that vassal and then send up the gold and weapons to their main account. Raid. Raid. Raid.

Add a squire, or seize one and try the next bracket. Seize a 20 or two.

At some point you will want to recruit some 20s. Many people have trouble getting started because they have no 20s and cannot really seize without 20s.

If you go to one of the other gaming sites on facebook (vampire wars, dragon wars, elven blood etc) these games have many people who are looking for friends to build up their army for that game: if you have a big army in dragon wars, you have a huge advantage in that game. All of these game have a listing of "fans of ____ wars". Send these people friend invites saying "add me for dragon wars/elven blood and other facebook games"etc. so there is a lot of crossover of the gamers' demographic. Send them friend invites on knighthood and some of them will add the application as 20s. After they become a power 20 just delete them from your facebook friendlist

Now you have the makings of an army. Keep your 20s and 24+ guys in the wall and blockhouse and also the tower, and your 10s on the tower until you get to about baron level. YOu will also need raiders and/or man at arms. Use some of the gold you raided to buy these, or pop a 20(they are selling for close to 350000 gold at the time of this posting.

Also, many knights uninstall the game, and are totally inactive, so look in their recent history if they just went to war. there is a good chance that they have undefended 20s and 24+ for easy seizes.

As for finding a liege, there are some things you should look for in a liege: will this liege have good connections, to help me have bracket buddies to help me raise my alarm and help me with rescues? Are they online a lot and can help with advice? if someone offers a lot of gold, or they act really nice but dont have a lot of game experience, the chances are that they wont help you much in war mode. Look at their history, do they have a lot of seizes? are they able to rescue when someone seizes on them, how good are other people at rescuing on them?

All of these things should be considered. You really don’t want to get seized by a player and then have your liege ignore you. As a liege, talk to your vassals. See what is going on with them, if they have questions or whatnot. Try to work with them.

Foster them and help them grow, and hopefully if and when they do get seized, they will be willing to go to war and rebel and rejoin you. This is sort of important when you are just starting out:

When you get to about power 100, you will have other higher powered players, power 500 or 1000 or bigger, drop down and attack you and everyone in your bracket with low alarm. Then when everyone has high alarm in the bracket, they reclaim back to a safe bracket, this of course makes it difficult to advance in the game if you are power 100 or so.

One solution is to play with a really low army strength. The counts and marquis that surf down to the baron level, they are usually just wanting the bigger vassals, 50s, 100s, and bigger. IF you start playing, and you play with a low army strength, the bracket surfers wont bother you, and when you do grow(seize and recruit) bigger vassals, well hopefully they will be willing to go to war and rebel. if they cant rebel out, go to your liege for help. if your liege cant help you, then leave them and find another liege.

^^ All of these areas are pretty fundamental to starting an army. Some of the other fundamental questions are, "well why am I only able to only attack with 3 vassals?"

Your army size is determined by your “real” title. Let’s look at typical case. Your power earned your current title, and you are working on progressing toward the next title. Knights get 3 soldiers in their attack group, barons attack with 4 soldiers, viscounts get 5 etc, as simple as that. HOWEVER, if you are a baron and your total power falls below 60, then you only get to have 3 attackers in your attack group. And if you are a viscount, and your total power falls below 150, then you will be calculated as a baron, and only get 4 fighters per attack. When you go back above 150 power, then you will get 5 attackers again. You won’t have to do these calculations every time. Current Army size and army strength is displayed on your capital page.(go to the upper left corner, click 'capital' and you will see your 'attack strength' on the left part of the screen)

• Freemen can be extremely useful to someone just starting out, and for someone with no big vassals.

If you are top heavy, then the honor guard will be useful to you regardless of your power, not just if you are starting out. I can give an extreme example: When I had my biggest wall, had power two power 5000 vassals, and the rest of my vassals had 900 to 2500 vassals, when i bought an honor guard freemen, my defense jumped from 33000 to over 35500. Thats a huge jump, but that was mostly because I was so top heavy. Also, the honor guard would free up a spot so you can use that vassal that was on the defenses, he can be in the blockhouse or some other building

The task master will help any peace mode player, it gives +15% to building efficiency. The task master will NOT increase your defenses, if you click 'capital' then look at your defense numbers, it looks like you get a 15% bonus, but the readout there is wrong, you dont actually get any defense bonus. However, that outpost DOES get a +15% increase in alarm gain per hour. so if you like your outpost(I love the outpost, if you cant tell) then yeah, it definitely helps to have a taskmaster. The boost to the outpost alone makes the Taskmaster worthwhile for a war mode player, it essentially adds 3 upgrades to your outpost(each upgrade adds a +5%). So if you have a size 6 outpost with 6 upgrades and get a taskmaster, you alarm goes up as if you had a size 6 with 9 upgrades!!!!!! I have a size 10 outpost with 10 upgrades, and adding taskmaster pretty much gives me instant alarm(size 10 with 13 upgrades).

Some of the other freemen, they are nice, the hospital guys give you a huge bonus if you already have a good hospital. if you have hospital at 50% and you buy a hospital guy that increases your hospital by 25%, well you can now get hospital at 62.5% (if you have zero hospital, and buy the hospital guy, your hospital will not go from 0% to 25%, you need a decent hospital % to get a good bonus)

••• If you don't want to spend credits to buy a freeman, just buy some off of the slave marketplace.

• As for mercenaries, well hiring mercenaries can be useful as well. If you want to run a one line defense on the wall, and still want to use your outpost, you can hire mercenaries and put them in the outpost undefended, so if they get seized, its not a huge loss.

• If you are a mercenary, you cannot sell vassals, or gift vassals, or release vassals- the idea behind that rule is that if I hire a power 100 baron for one week for 200000 gold, and then they release all their vassals and become a power 30 baron, well I paid for a power 100, not a power 30.

••••• ******* (edit tried this recently and could not trap the merc, if anyone, maybe joe cunningham, has the right method to trap mercs, by all means, post it up and I will add it here)If you hire a mercenary, you can somtimes trap them into permanent fealty: Put them in your bracket buddy's trapper and have him release. Reclaim right AFTER the seven day merc timer is up, and you can keep them for good. That usually is not enough to trigger merc trapping, sometimes i still see on peoples recent history, if the merc keeps getting seized multiple times, and they end up getting trapped after the seven day timer is up.

I dont really like hiring mercenaries because I think they are overpriced, just seize them and then trap them. Most of the vassals on the merc market are just clones anyways, to make gold, someone will make another account, or use a friends account, add all the squires and then merc themselves out.

I wont lie, I have trapped mercenaries, but they all leave when i go to peace mode anyways. And none of them were mercenaries that I paid gold to hire, i just seized them.

HOWEVER, if you hire a mercenary, talk to them and they like you, they may want to stay for more than one week. They may cost a lot of gold, but for some, its worth it. One of my vassals is able to get a lot of her mercenaries to "stay". She is hawt and some of the guys agree to stay with her.

Again, mercs can be useful in the outpost, leave them undefended and they help with alarm, if you can afford them, then go ahead and pay the gold.

[edit] The evil Empire

• The evil empire is someone you can attack, that will never attack back. BUT you can never seize from them, they can never seize on you. When you attack the evil empire, you can get several different outcomes: you attack successfully and get gold, you attack successfully and get weapons, you attack successfully and get healing(this heals ALL of your vassals, not just the vassals in your attack group) or you fail to attack successfully. If you fail you attack successfully, you can take a small amount of damage, you can be damaged by about 50% damage(all of the people in your attack group lose half their health from a pit trap or they drop boiling oil) or you can lose health somewhere in between with arrows(other attacks as well?). The evil empire can take your gold, but they will NOT take vassals, and they will never do raid or seize attempts, but they can make off with your war chest if you attack unsuccessfully.

• Also, you can successfully attack the evil empire and get a freeman with a 2 day timer. This may not seem like much, BUT if you are a knight or baron in war mode and just starting out, a freeman could be extremely useful to you

• If you are a player with a big army, attacking the evil empire will likely cost you more gold than you raid from them. Remember, they can take your gold. I have never lost more than a few thousand gold, but people are saying they are losing millions. YMMV