Valor on Tap
Late research is priced in the hundreds of millions of Valor, and earning it the ordinary way takes forever. There's a faster way. You rent wyverns, point them at the one monster that can't hurt them, and farm Valor by the hundreds of millions an hour without losing a single troop.
Rent wyverns, the game's strongest hireable monster. Send them at a monster made of the units they're strong against, in numbers big enough to kill it in one strike. Because it dies before it can hit back, nothing of yours dies either, and you run the same attack as long as you like while the Valor piles up for free.
So, here's the sitch.
Valor Points are the currency you spend in your Academy to unlock research, the upgrades that make everything you own stronger. Early research is cheap. Later research isn't: a single tier can cost hundreds of millions of Valor, and if you earn it a few thousand at a time you'll be at it for weeks.
Almost all of your Valor comes from one place: attacking monsters on the world map. These are neutral enemies dotted around the map (not other players) that hand you Valor when you beat them. So the whole question is how to beat a lot of monsters fast, without your army paying for it.
The TL;DR
You hire mercenaries instead of marching your own soldiers. A mercenary is a rented battle unit. You send it into the fight, and if it dies it's the rental you lose, never the troops you trained at home. The strongest one in the game is the wyvern, a flying beast that unlocks when you reach the rank Guardsman 6 (G6).
Then you pick your fight carefully so the wyverns win it without a scratch, and you keep picking that same fight. That's the whole method. The rest of this page is why it works and how to set your own numbers.
Why a wyvern never dies
- Flying beats melee. Units come in types. Melee are the sword-and-shield fighters who hit up close, ranged are archers, and some units fly. A wyvern is a flying unit, and flying units hit melee far harder than normal: a strength bonus reported at +75%. So you hunt a monster built out of melee fighters, and your wyverns tear straight through it.
- Lossless means repeatable. Here's how you take zero losses: kill the enemy stack in a single strike so it can't hit back. If any of it survives, the leftovers get a turn and swing, and that's what kills wyverns. One wrinkle: who strikes first is a coin flip, so about half the time the monster swings before you do. Bring enough wyverns to soak that first hit and still wipe the stack on your turn, and you come out untouched either way. Then you run the same attack over and over at no cost. One attack you can do a hundred times beats one big attack you can do once.
Here's what you need
- Rank G6. Guardsman 6 unlocks the wyvern, and the method is built around it. Not there yet? The same idea works with a cheaper mercenary, just at smaller numbers.
- A healthy stack of wyverns. You'll run a few captains at once, and each march needs enough to one-shot the squad. How many each is your math (below), and it varies by account. Keep a few dozen on hand to run several captains for the mercenaries' full seven-day life. Grab them during the Mercenary Exchange when one comes round.
- Both bonuses switched on. Turn on the Great Marshal premium bonus and your Valor Points personal bonus before you start. The Valor Points one runs at +100%, which doubles the Valor you collect. That's the difference between good and absurd.
The Valor Points bonus is a personal bonus you hold in your inventory, switched on from your Bonuses panel. Activate it, pick a length (6 hours, 1 day, 7 days, or 30 days), and it runs at +100% Valor for that whole window. It has to be in your inventory to switch on. If it isn't there, you don't own one yet.
The Run
- Find a Level 24 common Barbarian squad. It's the ideal target: built almost entirely of melee units, which your flying wyverns crush. And hardly anyone farms these, because most players hoard their attacks for big epic monsters, so the map is always full of fresh ones. Keep them common, not heroic or epic, or the health jumps and the math changes.
- Bring enough wyverns to one-shot it. How many is 'enough' depends on your damage and the squad's health, and the math section below pins it exactly. The rule: enough to wipe the biggest stack in one strike, so nothing survives to hit back. Kill it clean, lose nothing, walk away with a fat pile of Valor.
- Run a few captains at once. You can send several captains at the same squad in parallel, each its own march earning its own Valor. But a captain only helps if her bonus reaches the flying wyvern: pick a flying captain (like Wu Zetian), a whole-army captain (like Cleopatra), or a mercenary captain. A captain built for melee, mounted, or epic monsters does nothing for a wyvern, no matter her level.
- Repeat. Nothing dies, so you just keep going, march after march, for the mercenaries' full seven-day life.
Some quick math before you start
Don't copy anyone's exact wyvern count. Yours depends on your own captains, gear, and research. You're really answering one question, with a second as a safety check:
Can I kill the stack in one strike? Your wyverns' combined strength has to beat the stack's total health, so you wipe it before it swings back. This is the one that sets your wyvern count. Can I soak one hit if it goes first? The backstop. If the monster strikes before you, or a second stack hits while you're clearing the first, your wyverns' combined health has to absorb that blow. Once you've got enough wyverns to one-shot, this usually takes care of itself.
Find your numbers
- Pick the captain you'll actually farm with, and strip off her armor and artifacts. Naked gives you a clean baseline, and anything you add back later only makes you safer. Test each captain you plan to send, because they're not equal: a flying or whole-army captain pumps the wyvern hard, while a captain who doesn't buff its stats (a Valor-booster, say) leaves it hitting softer, so that march needs more wyverns.
- Do one test attack: 1 wyvern, that one captain, on a common Barbarian. Read the damage off the battle report. That number, against a melee squad, already includes the +75% bonus.
- Work out your per-wyvern damage. A wyvern's base strength is 690,000 (the same for everyone). Your talents, research, and captain multiply it. Say your report shows one wyvern hitting for 8.9M: that's the number that matters.
- Divide the stack's health by that. The report tells you the stack's health too: your damage divided by the orcs you killed is the health of one orc, times the stack size. If the biggest stack is, say, 56M and your wyvern hits for 8.9M, then 56 ÷ 8.9 is about 6.3, so you round up to 7 wyverns to wipe it in one strike. Add one more for cushion.
That count is your answer for that squad, and it holds every time you hit it. Send that many (plus your cushion), one-shot the stack, and nothing retaliates. If you ever see losses, the stack survived your strike, which means you brought too few, so add wyverns or drop to a lower squad.
Per-wyvern damage = 690,000 × (1 + your strength bonus %). Wyverns needed = the stack's health ÷ that damage, rounded up. One-shot the stack and it never hits back. That's the whole thing.
Now add it all up
| One hour of farming | Valor |
|---|---|
| One squad cleared, bonuses on | ~10.5M |
| Three captains, same squad, one round | ~31.5M |
| A round takes about 5 minutes → twelve an hour | ~378M |
Every figure above comes from one player's screen. The method transfers to anyone at G6. The numbers won't, because your damage depends on your own setup. Do the sum above with your own account before you trust a wyvern count. That's the part that keeps it safe.
Team up on the big ones
The common Barbarians you farm are a solo job. One tier up are heroic squads, and those are a team sport: you can throw your whole army, all your captains, and your clanmates' reinforcements at one, or run it as a clan raid. A heroic is a cluster of high-level squads, too big to solo, which is the whole point.
And you can send wyverns as reinforcement to a clanmate hitting a heroic. Here's the good part: reinforcing troops fight with your bonuses, not the host's. Your captain, your talents, your research, and your Consulate's strength-and-health bonus all travel with the wyverns you send. So a strong player can carry a weaker clanmate's heroic attack, or a whole clan can pool wyverns to drop a heroic none of them could take alone.
- The +75% still fires, because it keys off the enemy unit, not the monster's rank. A heroic Barbarian (melee) is still wyvern food. Watch for heroic squads packed with anti-flying units, though, which hit your wyverns back hard.
- Rewards split by contribution. The clan chest goes to everyone on the march, but the Valor and experience go to whoever's troops actually fought, in proportion to what they brought. Switch your Valor bonus on before you send the reinforcement, since it stays live on those wyverns until you recall them.
- The coin flip stings more here. First strike is still 50/50, and a heroic hits hard, so pool enough wyverns across the clan to survive the opening blow and still one-shot the stacks.
How low can the target go? The run is built on Level 24 common Barbarians, but a lower-damage account can drop to a Level 23 or 22 melee squad it can still one-shot. Where the floor sits for a given account hasn't been mapped.
How high can it go? A stronger account can climb to higher-level Barbarians for more Valor per kill, as long as it can still one-shot them. The ceiling is set by how many wyverns you can field in one march.
What's the cheapest mercenary that still works? The same maths is claimed for a lower-tier flying mercenary below G6, at smaller numbers. The Atlas hasn't watched that run end to end.