What it is
Clash of Kingdoms is the formal name of KvK, and it's the event the rest of the political calendar bends around. Whole kingdoms get matched against each other in a promotion and relegation league, you can only fight kingdoms in your own league, and the whole thing is scored on banners you take off enemy players and then try to keep.
The name trips people up, so to be clear: this isn't Clash for the Throne, the king election. Different event, different scoring. That one runs on Conquest points and votes; this one runs on banners.
That last part is what makes it odd. Most fighting in Total Battle is a transaction: you do a thing, you get paid, it's over. A banner isn't. You're paid for as long as you hold it, which turns every banner you carry into a standing target, and every player you've robbed into someone with a reason to come back.
It's also why a kingdom spends all month keeping the peace at home. A kingdom that burns its month fighting itself arrives here weak and drops a league. The Rules of Engagement exist to bank that aggression until it's worth something, against outsiders who never signed them. If you want the primer first, there's a full KvK and Banners lesson in the Academy.
K318's clash opens with The Opening, when the kingdom joins a Battle Group with 314, 315 and 319 and the four open to one another. The calendar carries the dates.
How it scores
A banner pays for holding it, not for taking it. So the real question isn't how many you grab. It's how long you keep them, and whose they were.
Points pile up for every hour a banner sits on your city, and it stays yours until another kingdom takes it back off you.
You can't raise the Shield of Peace while you carry an enemy banner, so a carrier is exposed the whole time.
The rest of the rules:
- A banner's level is the Capitol level of the player you took it from. A higher banner pays more per hour, so one off a big account is worth far more than one off a small one. You'll only find banners on Cities with a Capitol of level 10 or up.
- Blue banners are your kingdom's, red are the enemy's. You can't touch your own side, but if an enemy lifts a banner off someone in your kingdom, you can steal it back. Defence scores here too, it isn't just pride.
- No Might limit inside your league. Hitting a kingdom outside your league is free exercise: it earns you nothing on the board.
Personal goals ride on top of the kingdom race. The higher your league, the more of them you get, and their size and difficulty scale with your troop level, the way Doomsday sorts you into divisions. One warning that costs people every run: unclaimed personal-goal rewards vanish the moment the event ends. Claim them before the buzzer.
The exact points a banner pays, the per-hour rate, and how long the clash runs all live in the event's own Rules panel. Check it at the start of each run rather than trusting last time's figures.
How to play it
- Run Ayrin for the whole event. Ayrin removes march time limits and lets you march across kingdoms at all, which is the thing an ordinary captain simply can't do. Without a hero built for it, most cross-kingdom marches just report "march time exceeded." Tengel is the budget version, with range and speed worth half his level.
- Open the portal, march, close the portal. A portal you open is a hole in your own walls. An enemy who comes through it skips your walls completely, and your shield doesn't stop them. During KvK you'll open more portals than at any other time, so the discipline matters more, not less. Open it for the march. Close it after.
- Take banners off the biggest accounts you can actually beat. Since a banner carries the loser's Capitol level and pays by the hour, one good banner off a large account outscores a fistful of small ones. Punch up as far as you can still win.
- Plan the handoffs before you need them. The best banner sits on your strongest player, and that player can't shield while holding it, so your biggest account is also your most exposed. Move banners between accounts as shields run out and people log off, instead of leaving one commander hung out for the whole event.
- Take your own banners back. If the enemy lifts one off your kingdom, retaking it is real points on the board, not a consolation. Defence is offence here.
- Claim your personal goals before it ends. Anything left unclaimed disappears when the buzzer sounds.
Deeper in
Getting there, and getting home
Marching into another kingdom isn't ordinary marching. The usual way in is a portal opened into enemy territory, the same mechanic the shields lesson warns you about, used on purpose this time. The hero way in is Ayrin, run for the whole event, with Tengel doing a weaker version of the same job. If you're moving a City rather than an army, a cross-kingdom teleport runs 180,000 gold, which is why some players park a spare seasonal-account city as a dedicated banner-transfer city.
One portal rule worth repeating: you can't attack a portal opened by a kingdom that isn't yours or the one you're visiting.
The league ladder
Every kingdom sits in a league and fights only inside it. When the clash ends, the top two kingdoms move up a league and the bottom two drop. Climbing is worth more than bragging rights: the higher the league, the more personal goals you're handed and the more the whole event pays. That's why a kingdom treats relegation as a real cost, not a bad afternoon.
What the kingdom wins
The prizes are kingdom-scale, which is why kings and diplomats care about this event more than any other.
The King, the Hand of the King, or the Queen spend these in the Treasury on kingdom-wide buffs.
The richest gold tiles in the game, spawned across the winning kingdom's map for about a day. Turn up fast or you lose most of it.
Your own reward track, its size scaled to your troop level.
Clash of Kingdoms is one of the events that pay them.
The reward ladder
These come straight off the event's Kingdoms' Rewards and Players' Rewards screens. Kingdoms are paid in Treasury Gold Ingots by where they finish in their league, and the higher the league, the bigger the payout.
Kingdoms, by league. Each league pays its top six, sliding from first down to sixth.
| League | 1st place | 6th place |
|---|---|---|
| Champion | 25M ingots | 20M |
| Master | 16.5M | 12.9M |
| Diamond | 10.8M | 8.4M |
| Gold | 7M | 5.5M |
| Silver | 4.6M | 3.6M |
| Bronze | 3M | 2.4M |
Champion first place is the prize the whole ladder is built around: on top of its 25M ingots, the winning kingdom's map fills with Gold Mines holding more than 10 million gold each. There are Battle Group leagues too, which run ladders of their own.
Players, by rank. Each kingdom pays its top 100, in gold, a Clan reward, and potions, with a title on top.
| Rank | Gold Ingots | Clan | Potions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 2M | 200K | 80K |
| 2nd | 1M | 100K | 40K |
| 3rd | 800K | 80K | 30K |
| 4-6 | 700K | 70K | 25K |
| 7-10 | 600K | 60K | 20K |
| 11-20 | 500K | 50K | 18K |
| 21-50 | 400K | 40K | 16K |
| 51-100 | 300K | 30K | 14K |
First place takes the Warlord title, worth +25% Conquest points and +100% army health and strength. Second through hundredth take Brave Warrior: +25% Conquest points and +25% army health and strength.
That's the loop closing. Keep your Rules of Engagement, arrive strong, win ingots and gold tiles, and hand your King a Treasury worth spending. Spend the month fighting each other instead, and you turn up weak and drop a league.
Not yet confirmed
A couple of specifics still come off screens the Atlas hasn't read yet:
- The banner point table. Exactly what each banner level pays, and the per-hour rate. (The Rules panel.)
- How long it runs, and how many kingdoms share a league. The leagues are named in the reward ladder above; the day count and the field size per league aren't confirmed. (The Rules panel.)
- The defenders. What the squad's defender cards show for this clash, and how to answer them. (Read off the cards.)
This section comes out a line at a time, as each screen is read.