Battles in Total Battle resolve automatically, in rounds you never see, and the report you get afterwards is the first information you have about what happened. That makes the composition you send the entire decision. Once the march leaves, you are a spectator.
Your army does not fight as a crowd. It fights as stacks — a stack being all units of one type at one tier — and the game orders those stacks rather than shuffling them. The stack with the highest total health acts first. And, crucially for everything that follows: an epic monster attacks your highest-health stack first.
Why that one rule changes everything
If the boss always swings at your biggest stack, then your biggest stack is a choice, not an accident.
Send one enormous army of your best troops and the boss spends every attack killing your best troops. Send many smaller stacks and the boss burns its attacks on whichever one you decided should absorb them, while the rest of your army keeps hitting.
That is layering, and it has a pleasant side effect: every tier you have ever unlocked stays useful. Tier-1 troops you outgrew two months ago are still perfectly good at standing in front of an epic monster and dying on schedule. Old troops never stop being valuable; they change jobs.
Sizing the layers
The naive version of layering — throw in a bit of everything — leaves you with layers that vanish in a single round and layers that never get touched. The fix is to size each stack so they are roughly equivalent in what they contribute.
The formula is simple arithmetic. Take the strongest stack as a baseline, then size every other stack so its total strength is about the same.
- 2,000 Riders IV at 580 strength each is a baseline of 1,160,000.
- Matching that with Archers IV at 290 strength each takes about 4,000 of them.
The general form, if you want the count directly: higher-tier stat × 100 ÷ lower-tier stat gives you how many lower-tier troops equal 100 of the higher. Per 100 tier-4 guardsmen that works out at about 182 tier-3, 323 tier-2 and 580 tier-1.
The Atlas's Army Calculator does this arithmetic for you, including the tier ratios. The point of knowing the formula is to recognise when a march looks wrong, not to run it by hand every time.
The tier ratio, and the disagreement about it
Each troop tier is roughly 1.8 times the strength and health of the tier below. That figure is repeated everywhere in the community, and it is close enough for planning.
It is also not quite what the game shows. Troop cards read on camera give tier-4-to-tier-3 ratios of exactly 1.8125 — archer strength 290 over 160, rider strength 580 over 320, rider health 1,740 over 960. Meanwhile a widely used stacking calculator defaults to 1.9, and one community wiki models the drop at 2.0.
Four numbers, all in circulation. The Atlas states 1.8 because it is the common currency, and flags that anything downstream of it inherits the uncertainty.
Does stacking actually beat sending everything?
Not for score, and this is worth being honest about because the community often is not.
In a controlled Doomsday test — same captain, same level, identical buffs, dragon pinned — sending the full maxed army earned 166 million valor against 88.3 million for the stacked army. Close to double, in favour of just sending everything.
So the case for stacking is not that it scores better. It is that it is cheaper: you lose fodder instead of losing your best troops, and the difference shows up in your silver bill rather than your leaderboard position. Stack when troop economy is the constraint. Send everything when the score is.
Doctrine splits here. One school sends at most the top two guardsman tiers and never dilutes leadership with tier-1 troops. Another teaches stacking all the way down. The Atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it, because the sources genuinely disagree.
Two things that quietly break a stack plan
Class-specific artifacts. An artifact that buffs one class — the Philosopher's Stone for specialists, the Valkyrie Diadem for flying — raises that class's health above where you planned it, which changes which stack gets hit first. Your careful order silently reshuffles. Whole-army artifacts like the Medallion of Unity are safer when you are stacking deliberately.
Buffs applied after departure. Leader bonuses are snapshotted when the march leaves. A buff switched on while the march is walking does nothing at all. Buff first, then march — in that order, every time.
Knowledge check
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Which of your stacks does an epic monster attack first?
CorrectNot quiteEpic monsters target the highest-health stack. That predictability is what makes layering possible.
What is the real argument for layering?
CorrectNot quiteA controlled test gave 166M valor for the full army against 88.3M stacked. Stacking wins on troop economy, not score.
When are a captain's bonuses locked in?
CorrectNot quiteBonuses are snapshotted at departure. A buff applied while the march is walking has no effect.
Roughly 100 tier-4 guardsmen are equal to how many tier-3?
CorrectNot quiteHigher-tier stat × 100 ÷ lower-tier stat. At the observed ratio that is roughly 182 tier-3 per 100 tier-4.
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