Army Stacking
Stacking means filling one attack with lots of different troop types instead of only your best ones. The monster then spends its hits on your cheap troops, and your good ones survive to keep fighting. Here I'll cover how it works, how to set one up, and whether it's worth the effort.
You're not sending several separate attacks. Stacking is one attack that contains many different kinds of troop. The word describes what's inside your army, not how many times you press the button.
What a squad is
A squad is the game's own word for it. You'll see it in battle reports and when you select a monster on the map. Your army doesn't fight as thousands of individuals. All your Archers IV, for example, act together as one lump. That's a squad. Your Archers III are a separate squad. Every troop type at every level is its own squad, so ten kinds of troop means ten squads.
The enemy has squads too. A monster on the map isn't one creature; it's a few squads standing together. Most event monsters have three or four.
How it works
A fight goes back and forth, one squad at a time. You hit, they hit, you hit, they hit. From the game's own combat video: the enemy only gets one swing for each squad they have. Once every enemy squad has taken its turn, all your remaining squads attack one after another, and there's nothing the enemy can do about it.
So if a monster has four squads and you bring four kinds of troop, you trade four hits each and it's even. Bring twenty kinds of troop and you still only trade four. Your other sixteen squads hit for free.
The monster's four swings will kill something regardless, so you want them killing something cheap. Put your cheapest troops where the monster will aim, and keep the expensive ones back for the free hits.
What the monster aims at
This decides which of your troops die first, and there are three different answers in circulation. The Atlas doesn't pick between them.
| It aims at | Standing | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Most damage | Official | The game's own combat video: the squad it can hurt most, counting class bonuses |
| Most health | What most players use | A major creator's on-camera correction, and a community wiki agrees |
| Most strength | Retracted | The same creator's earlier video. He publicly took it back |
The creator who taught the strength version made a follow-up to correct himself: *"I thought that the monster troops attack the biggest threat to them with strength, but it isn't. They attack the troops with the highest health."* Most of the time the official answer and the health answer land on the same squad, but not always.
__Go with health.__ It's what the community uses and what the sums below are built on. Then check your battle report afterwards to see whether it played out that way.
Setting one up
You only need your phone's calculator. The example uses riders; do the same for every troop type you own.
Step 1 — Count the monster's squads
Tap the monster on the map before attacking and count the different creatures in it. Three or four is normal. The Arachni Swarm has eight. It's an event monster that tempts people in because it levels captains quickly and pays a lot of valor, but eight opening hits is a lot to absorb, so __leave that one until you've done this a couple of times.__
Step 2 — Note your best troop's health
Open your army, tap your Riders IV, and find the __health__ of one of them: health, not strength. In this example it's 1,740. Multiply by 100 to get 174,000. Every sum below comes from that number.
Step 3 — One division per troop level
Divide 174,000 by the health of one rider from each tier below. Riders III have 960 health, so 174,000 ÷ 960 = 182. That means 182 Riders III carry the same total health as 100 Riders IV.
| Tier | Health each | Sum | Bring this many |
|---|---|---|---|
| Riders IV (your best) | 1,740 | 1,740 × 100 | 100 |
| Riders III | 960 | 174,000 ÷ 960 | 182 |
| Riders II | 540 | 174,000 ÷ 540 | 323 |
| Riders I | 300 | 174,000 ÷ 300 | 580 |
Scale to the size of army you're actually sending. Bringing 500 Riders IV instead of 100 means multiplying every number by five. Then repeat the whole thing for your archers and spearmen.
Step 4 — Bought troops get their own sum
Mercenaries are troops you buy rather than train, and they're the most valuable thing in your army. Same sum: 174,000 ÷ 6,090 (a mercenary's health) = 28. Send 28 and they sit behind the fighting.
Mercenaries lose a flat ten percent every time the enemy hits them, however many you sent. Send 28 and lose three; send 230 and lose 23. Since it's ten percent either way, plenty of players send all of them and take the bigger score. Protect them if they're precious, send them all if you're chasing points. Nobody has tested this properly.
Step 5 — Check your own monsters
Monsters here means the beasts you train in your own army, not the thing you're attacking. A rider has 1,740 health; one of your monsters has 36,000 to 51,000. They'll be the toughest thing you brought, so the enemy aims at them first and your rider sums never come into play.
Same division, once per monster type: 174,000 ÷ 51,000 = 3, so send three of that one. 174,000 ÷ 15,000 = 11, so eleven of that one. The creator who worked this out got it wrong twice on camera before spotting it, so it's an easy one to miss.
Step 6 — Fill up and send
Your captain has three separate capacity limits: leadership for trained troops, authority for mercenaries, dominance for monsters. They don't share, so fill all three. Pick a target with plenty of health left, or it may be dead before your march arrives.
Step 7 — Read the battle report
Afterwards, open the report and tap through to the details. __You're checking one thing: which of your troops got hit first.__ If it was your cheap Riders I, it worked. If it was your monsters or mercenaries, their health was too high: go back to step 5, lower those numbers and try again. Two or three attempts should get you there.
The repair bill
A rule of thumb shared from a clan: bring 20 archers to 20 spearmen to 10 riders to 1 monster. It won't make you hit harder, but it keeps the cost of reviving your dead roughly level across troop types, so one expensive type doesn't clean you out after a bad run.
Worth buying when you see it: the research that gives a chance to strike twice. It shows up in battle reports as one of your squads landing two hits in a row, and it applies to every attack you send.
Is it worth doing?
The evidence points both ways, and it comes from the same person. First he attacked one monster three times, changing his setup each go. Valor points are the tournament score most people are farming these for.
| What he sent | Score |
|---|---|
| No stacking, no mercenaries | 10.0M |
| Stacked, no mercenaries | 12.9M |
| Stacked plus all mercenaries | 18.3M |
Later he ran a more careful test: same captain, same level, identical bonuses, and he avoided levelling his dragon in between so nothing else changed.
| What he sent | Score |
|---|---|
| Stacked | 88.3M |
| Just his best troops, filled to the cap | 166M |
The winning attack won the coin flip for who swings first, which on its own could explain a gap that size. And "just his best troops" means better troops filling the same space, which would score higher regardless of ordering. His own conclusion was that stacking saves you troops rather than winning you points, but it's one test, not a settled answer.
Should you bother?
| Worth it when | Skip it when |
|---|---|
| You're short on speed-ups or silver: tier-1 troops are cheap and train in a couple of hours | You're chasing a specific score and can afford to fill up with your best troops |
| You want your mercenaries to survive long enough to get a hit in | The arithmetic would take longer than the attack is worth |
| You're farming the same monster repeatedly and want each run to cost less | You're not confident the setup is right: a wrong stack is worse than none |
Community calculators will do all the division for you. Kai's is the one people mention most. They're worth using once you know what they're working out.
Still unsettled
- What the enemy aims at. Three answers, with official sources behind more than one. Everything else here depends on it.
- Whether stacking beats sending your best troops. One careful test says no, but it won the coin flip and changed two things at once.
- Mercenaries: hold them back or send them all. Depends whether you're saving money or chasing points, and nobody has tested it cleanly.