What it is
An epic-monster tournament built on a fight you can't win, and aren't meant to. A single, enormous epic squad stands on the kingdom map, everyone throws marches at it, and the game pays you for the monsters you kill on the way in rather than for bringing it down. Nobody brings it down. The official rules put it plainly: don't expect to win the battle, just kill what you can for the points.
So the score is yours alone, even though the monster is shared. Two things pull people out to it. One is the Valor and the ranking. The other, the one Doomsday is really known for, is that a losing march still feeds experience to the captain leading it, and you can lose a lot of marches in a few hours.
How it scores
You're paid per monster killed, not per point of damage, and the catch sits in that sentence: a march that gets wiped without killing anything scores you nothing at all. Land even one kill and it pays. Kill a lot and it pays a lot. Every kill drops tournament points, Valor and experience together, all at the raised rate epic events run on.
The game also notes that different troop types are worth different amounts of Valor and experience. It doesn't publish the table, so the only honest way to learn the ranking is to read it off your own battle reports.
Your division is set by your troop level at the very start of the run, not your hero's. That's a quiet trap: unlock a fresh top tier the day before and you drag yourself into a harder bracket for the whole tournament. Rewards then split in two. Everyone who turns up gets the boosted Valor and experience just for fighting. The top hundred of your division also take Dragon Coins, Tar and leadership Titles, and the event feeds Scrolls of Triumph into your Triumphal Challenge on top.
Reviving your dead guardsmen with gold or Sacred Potions after a Doomsday loss. Epic-monster losses can't be brought back on the cheap, so the expensive troops are the ones to write off, not buy back. More on that at the end.
Where your points actually come from
The squad is four layers, one of each class, and they're wildly lopsided.
| The layer | How many | Health each | Share of the squad |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ranged | 289.6 million | 2,160 | 97% |
| Mounted | 3.7 million | 171,000 | 1% |
| Flying | 3.4 million | 300,000 | 1% |
| Melee | 3.0 million | 210,000 | 1% |
Read the top row. The ranged layer is ninety-seven of every hundred bodies out there, and at 2,160 health apiece they fall over at a fraction of anything else's. Since you're paid by the kill and not the damage, that layer is very nearly your whole score, whatever you march in with. The other three are a rounding error you'll barely scratch.
Which settles your army for you. You want whatever kills soft ranged monsters and keeps standing to kill more, and in this game that's your riders: cavalry beats ranged. There's a second reason they're the answer, and it's in the boss's own numbers.
The squad batters your archers, your foot soldiers and your own fliers, all at eight times the usual rate, and it swings at your highest-health troops first. The one type missing from that list is your mounted. So your riders both counter the layer that scores and dodge the beating everything else takes. Stack cavalry.
A squad's info tab lists what it's strong against before you commit. The layout above is the shape of a normal Doomsday, but the game's own card is the final word, so trust it over any table, this one included.
How to play it
- Turn your bonuses on before you march. VIP, any army attack or health boost you're sitting on, all of it. It's free score and the easiest thing to forget in the rush to start swinging.
- Make mercenaries the body of every march. The Superior Epic Monster Hunters first: they carry no troop type, so the +800% has nothing to bite, and they're the cheapest thing in the game to bring back afterwards. Cheaper still the longer they've sat in your city. Send every one you own.
- Behind them, ride cavalry. Your riders are the one real troop the boss doesn't punish, and they're what actually chews through the ranged layer. Bring the tiers you can stand to lose, not your prize stack, because lose them you will.
- Leave the punished types at home. Archers, foot soldiers and your own fliers all take the +800%, die first and kill little on the way down. Don't build the march around them.
- Guardsmen, not Specialists. Guardsmen are the troops built to fight monsters. Specialists are for fighting other players and do nothing out here.
- Wear plain attack gear, and skip the victory heroes. Anything whose bonus lands after a win, Doria and that crowd, never fires, because you never win. Bring a straight attack hero instead.
The monster is shared, and a coordinated kingdom really can drop the epics, several of which spawn across one run. A clan that fells three earns the Medal of Doom, and a downed epic spills epic chests for everyone who pitched in. Your own score doesn't care, but your clan does.
The fastest way to level one captain
This is the run the veterans turn up for. Doomsday hands you exactly one captain slot, and every march that kills at least one monster pumps experience into whoever's filling it, win or lose. There's no winning, so it's all losing marches, and they all still pay. Point that firehose at one captain for a few hours and it climbs faster than anywhere else in the game.
So drop the captain you're trying to grow into the slot, even your greenest, and feed the run cheap. A losing march trains a level-one captain exactly as well as it trains your best, so the slot is worth the most on the captain with the furthest to go. This is what makes Arachne's Swarm and Doomsday the two captain-training events, and it's how they differ: the Swarm takes three captains at once and grows all three, while Doomsday takes one and drives it up fastest of all.
Losing is the plan, but it isn't free
The marches die. That's the design, not a misstep, but the troops aren't gone for good. They land in your Temple, and about ninety percent of anything killed on the attack can be revived, with gold or Sacred Potions. The whole craft of Doomsday is keeping that bill small.
Mercenaries are the answer again: they revive for a pittance, so a merc-heavy march costs next to nothing to run open to close. After each fight, bring back your captain and your mercenaries, then delete and retrain the rest instead of paying to revive them. Retraining a guardsman with silver is far cheaper than reviving one with gold.
And don't count on a revival tournament to bail you out. Even with Ruthless Slaughter running, troops lost to an epic monster are the one exception it won't discount: the cheap silver price covers your captain and no one else, so the rest still wants gold or potions. Plan the losses cheap from the first march and you can farm Doomsday all the way to the buzzer without feeling it.