Knights Templar: To defend the innocent and the Church from violent attack.
Mission Statement
Our Alliance is dedicated to helping each member have a productive and prosperous city in the fastest means available. We offer our time, resources and wisdom to each and every member. We grow as one, fight as one, defend as one.
"This is a 'Quick Start' guide to point you in the right direction."
This site is for all Knights Templar members and anyone else to post whatever they feel they want to share. Post past experiences, lessons learned, whatever. I will try to update it with my recipes for troop production and what not! Most of this I have learned from the Wiki but will cut and paste snippets of info I see useful. You do the same if you would like. Thank you for the participation!
Points To Ponder
- The quote and historical references are just historical excerpts from the wikipedia and by no means reflect the gameplay. There are NO religious overtones here as there is no need for them here. Play the game as any and have fun and never take it too serious!
- I know a lot of you will find this info way too redundant - you megamighters! But, when I first started out, I wished there was someone around that I could constantly bug and annoy about what I should be doing. I hope you high and mighty ones will add to this page so the rest of us can move up with you.
*Reminder: These steps are by no means set in stone - there are a myriad of ways to go about this game. That's why this page is here. Just because I give an example doesn't make it right. I hope others that read this will decide to add their own experiences to this page because I want to learn as well! (It's easy! Click on 'edit this page' at the top and have at it - don't be shy!)
Quote
A Templar Knight is truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armor of faith, just as his body is protected by the armor of steel. He is thus doubly-armed, and need fear neither demons nor men. (Bernard of Clairvaux, 1135)
Members
Chancellor: Lady Silvermist
Vice Chancellor: Lord Lockraven
Vice Chancellor: Lord Deanamal
Officers: Lord Lazerius, Lord Rastlin, Lord 3sum
(Excalibur130 domain)
History
The Knights Templar were the elite fighting force of their day, highly trained, well-equipped and highly motivated; one of the tenets of their religious order was that they were forbidden from retreating in battle.
They were the first warrior monks of the western world. They had the full support of the Pope, paid no taxes, were allowed to cross any border and were not subject to any authority except that of the Pope. They had to sign over all their assets to fight for the cause. They invented banking (some say that is how Switzerland got started) and had secret codes to keep track of assets and property.
Crests of the Knights Templar
References
Refer to this page: Defensive Strategy
Then, read this page on building an army and then check out the Offensive Strategy page.
General Info
Your first city will be dropped in a random "province". Go to map view and get an idea of your surroundings. Each tile/space has a wilderness of some type or a city or barbarian camp. You can capture these wilds to take advantage of these resources. You can drag the map around with your hand icon. Notice the red lines? These mark the boundaries of provinces. When you get ready to build your next city, you might want to consider placing it in another province to take advantage of the different market rates when you want to buy or sell some of your resources. Some people like to keep their cities close to cut down on times when it comes to transferring goods but not much a factor.
The first page I like to really delve into is the Defensive Strategy page. The first paragraph is understanding how the game works - gloss over the rest of the page. The remainder of the page will become more pertinent as time goes on.
The next page I really like to focus on is Building an Army . This is the meat of the game. Remember to keep your resources balanced. You can easily run out of resources and even over-extend yourself to the point where you start to lose food, gold, etc and this will cause a ripple effect. Lose food, your troops desert; lose gold and your knights desert.
Setting Up Your City
At first, you will want to follow your Quests guide - this will help you get going in the right direction until you get the feel of it. To help, I've included a sample of one of my cities and the number of buildings I have in it. I start out with the required buildings, embassy, knight's hall, barracks, cottages, etc. Your resources will come from fields immediately outside your city that you acquire with each level of castle upgrade. I personally focus on farms as the majority. Example: Level 9 Castle, I have 15 farms, 7 sawmills, 8 mines and 7 quarries. As your troops increase, you will need more and more food to keep them fed. Again, this is just an example - you will need to determine what resources you need to maintain your city. If you would rather have more sawmills to supply your archers then so be it. You can always "Deconstruct " a field or building and then rebuild over the same tile with what you need. Thing to consider when using deconstruct - If you are tearing down a cottage to make room for a barracks, remember to upgrade one other cottage before you tear down the cottage in question. This prevents your population from taking a hit as your population will drop by tearing down this cottage.
Increase Might
If you want to increase might fast, refer to this page . This page shows you which buildings and troops generate the most might and the rate at which you get this might. Check out the column that shows you the most 'bang for your buck' (might per minute).
Troop Production
My example city has 13 barracks in it. The first barracks is lvl 9 and the remainder are at least lvl 6 and up (it's a work in progress). This setup gives me 7 1/2 archers per minute or 450 archers per hour. You can increase this by having more barracks and 'upping' the levels of your remaining barracks. You must make sure that your resource levels can keep up. AND, make sure your population can support it. Don't train 1000 archers when you only have 450 people in "Idle Population". Note: Having 13 barracks only leaves room for 7 cottages - these must be leveled up to keep up with your troop population and resource production. Refer to Barracks and Training Speed to get a better idea on this topic.
Appoint Knights
Appoint knights as soon as you can. These knights aid in resource collection, research, combat and politics. As your knight's experience grows, so does his/her salary. Watch out for this or you will find yourself in a negative gold situation. You will have to adjust your tax rate accordingly - I like to have it barely above break even. Maybe a little more to pad in case your forget about your knight's salary. If you need more gold, use the Increase Gold button. This forces each citizen to pay up 10 gold immediately but will decrease your city's happiness by 20 points. Don't go below 50 happiness or bad things happen. You can increase your tavern level to offset your tax rate to allow for a happier city!
Embassy
This is a good time to mention it - upgrade your embassy soon. This allows you to keep other troops from your alliance that have been sent to aid you in battle. If you have been constantly attacked and have had enough, ask for help and other members of your alliance will send troops to reinforce your city. The higher the level of your embassy, the more troops you can house. Remember though, your food resources will be used to feed these added troops. Also, they cannot Hide in Sanctuary like you can with your city troops. If someone attacks you, these troops will fight.
Second City
To get your second city, you will need 10 friends that play KoC to have as 'your' friend. Ask the alliance officers for help in this. They can get your request out to the entire alliance and ask members to provide you with friend requests. Use these friends as your knights because you can reward these members that step up to help you. This allows for a more give and take atmosphere which is always good.
Once you have your second city, start setting it up. Some things to consider: Do you want to make a copy of your first? I try to have different setups per city. One city can crank out lots of archers; the other city cranks out lots of resources to support the first city and so on. Once you have your second city rolling, start planning for your third city. To get this, you must capture wilds level 5 and higher to find crests. (Look in the subcat Crests in the Wilderness) Please use the charts in conquering these wilds - believe me, they will save you a lot of time, frustration and resources. No point in capturing a wild when you lose half your army!
Wall/Field Defenses
From what I have learned about these (being very little), I can't say much here. If anyone has experience with being attacked and what they had versus what someone attacked with and losses, I would love to know. Anyone can cut and paste their attack report here - that would be awesome. I've heard caltrops for archers versus traps - I dunno. Refer to this page, Offensive Strategy and scroll down to 'Cleaner Waves' and read that and hopefully it will enlighten you. You can also go to your Alliance tab and select Reports to scroll through to find various attack reports to pick out any useful info. In your attack report, you will see who attacked who. Find their name and then scroll all the way down to the bottom of your KoC page - see the 'Leaderboard' word at the bottom of the page? Click on this and you can do a member search or an alliance search. This will tell you the members' coordinates and strength! A handy thing to remember indeed.
While on this subject, the Watch Tower is extremely important. Try to level this up as soon as you can. This will notify you of an impending attack, who it is, how many and when. The higher the level, the more info you will have which is extremely important to you. The higher levels will allow you time to prepare for a defense or get your gold and resources out of there (to your second city or a wild) to ride out the storm (Blue Oyster Cult reference - gotta love em).
Attacks
This is my experience with wildernesses only. Refer to the wilds page to see what it "recommends" for you to have before you attack a certain level of wilds. For instance: To capture a lvl 5 wilderness, it recommends you send in two waves: The first wave is commonly known as the 'meat' wave. This wave of troops you will write off with exception of your knight - the knight will always return. This first wave is designed to git rid of all the traps, etc and clear the way for your next wave. Back to the lvl 5 wild: First wave - send 50 supply or militia and select your knight and then march. Now, click on the target again to select your next wave of attackers. Don't fiddle-fart around! You must send this second wave ASAP! If you wait too long, the traps will regen and you will lose some unaccounted-for troops on your second wave. The second wave must always include the slowest member of your first wave. This allows for proper timing. If you forget to choose 1 slow member for your second wave, it could actually overtake your first wave and there you go again, losing more troops than you planned for. So, second wave for this example will be 2500 archers plus 1 supply or militia, then your knight (this must be an 'IDLE' knight (one not assigned a role)) and then MARCH! You CANNOT recall your troops once you click the march button - not yet anyway. So, make sure the coordinates are correct and the troop strength is correct or you will live to regret it. If you select the troops and no coordinates, you will march to 0,0 and watch your troops get slaughtered! There is someone at 0,0 and their might is decent so be wary. By the way, you must have a Rally Point of level 2 to send two waves and lvl 3 to send three waves, etc.
Here's how it goes (LEVEL 5 WILD):
- In map view, click on the wild you want to capture (pay attention to see if it's owned by someone - you might just tick some one off).
- Click on 'Attack' and then choose your meat wave of 50 militia.
- Select your idle knight (good time here to make a mental note of the estimated time of arrival (ETA)).
- Click on 'March'.
- IMMEDIATELY click on the wild again and select your Kick butt wave.
- Select ONE militia and then select your archers (enter 2500 in this space).
- Choose your idle knight #2 (preferably the knight with the most combat experience), glance at this waves ETA and make sure it won't pass your first wave.
- Click on 'March'.
- You will notice a little pop-up message showing the march times of both waves on your map.
- After both waves arrive (your first wave will start returning (the lone knight) as your second wave arrives) you will get two reports that come in. First report will show you lost (the meat wave), second wave will show victory!
- Go to your city view and select Rally Point and then the Troop Movement tab and recall your second wave.
- The wild is now yours! In map view, you will see your crest on the wild showing it's yours.
Note: When selecting a wild to attack, there will be no crest on it showing it belongs to anyone. The only way to see if it's owned is by clicking on it. Note: You can pretty much use this procedure in attacking a barbarian camp but please refer to the barbarian camp page for recommended troops to conquer different levels.
Wilderness
I recommend you capture wilds somewhere other than right next to your city. This makes it easy for an opponent to 'snipe' your wilds out from under you. They normally try to do this when your not online like at 2 am (pssst! Remember that I mentioned using the whisper mode in chat? You can use this to find out if they are online) - then you wake up the next morning and find out that your might has dropped by 50 thousand or so! (This has happened to me!) What they have done is capture your wilds with two scouts! One will die, the other is for the victory! A cheap way to get a wild but then they will recall and abandon the wild leaving your poor city to starve. Once the food runs out, your troops desert on you and there goes your might. The KoC gods have just introduced a way to protect your wild . You can now hire mercenaries and or set traps on your wilds. Hiring mercenaries is expensive. I put traps on mine. It only costs you gold - not resources which is cool. You can also use your wilds to hide gold and other resources. As a last resort, I will send out my entire army with all my gold and typically ore - whatever you have an abundance of and Reinforce my wild with these. Check this page out to learn more tips for protect your stuff .
Third City
To get your third city, you will have to conquer level 5 wilds and higher to get the crests you need. The higher the wild, the greater the chance you will find a crest? I don't know about this. Refer to the crests in wilderness page and tournament of crests page to figure this out. Crests and Crest Research . Hunting for crests is a royal pain in the *%$. Seriously - you will have to spend a lot of troops (meat waves) and time trying to find these crests. I haven't had the pleasure of looking for the highest crests that you need for your fourth city! You will have to attack lvl 10 wilds to find these! Level 10 wilds means that your first wave will consist of 1200 militia. This is what you will 'write off' for each and every lvl 10 wild - talk about losses! Plan on losing around 60k militia to find these crests - from what I've heard. I hope someone will post their experiences here and their tactics so we can learn from this. Anyone?
Divine Inspiration
I want to talk about DIvine Inspiration (DI). It seems that you need one of these for every level 10 building you want to build. I wished it was like the research - once you attain that level, it follows you from city to city. Also, it costs you 50 gems to get one unless you're lucky enough to have one given to you by the KoC god every once in awhile! There is some debate over which building you will want to use your DI. Most experienced players say to use it on the Alchemy lab. This makes sense. With a level 10 lab, you can do much more research to gain might and build weapons. I am finding out that to have level 10 farming research, you also need a level 10 farm! Why? I could be wrong on this but the page gods seem like they want you to 'support' their efforts with your hard earned cash - I can't blame them but come on!
Diplomacy
After all is said and done, this is a game of attrition and battles. But, it's also a game of diplomacy . A lot of your alliance officer's time is spent smoothing the ruffled feathers of its members and members of other alliances. A lot of behind the scenes stuff. There's always someone taking the wild from another, someone scouting another and the one being scouted starts complaining, someone being 'farmed' (when your city is attacked for its resources), someone going off half-cocked and then there's always someone wanting to kick some you-know-what just because! Well, C'est la Vie! All I'm saying is that you should try to be diplomatic if you are in an alliance. Everyone joins an alliance for several reasons: support in resources, knowledge and might. Respect other members in that alliance and remember that your actions will affect everyone else in your alliance. Go through the proper channels and you'll do just fine. Also, pick the brains of your officers and your might leaders - you'll be surprised just how much they are willing to offer in supporting you with their resources and wisdom!
Well, that's about as far as I have gone in this game. Haven't been involved in a lot of battles - yet. So, anyone want to take this over from here? Please do so!
More to follow!