What it is
An epic-monster tournament. One squad — the Ashen squad, with the Sand Exarch at its head — stands on the kingdom map, everybody attacks the same thing, and the tournament pays you for what you kill. In shape it is Doomsday or Shadow Invasion. In what it pays it is nothing like them.
It is new and it is rare. It arrived in April 2026 ahead of the sixth Seasonal Kingdom and came back that August, and nobody has seen enough runnings to say how often it returns. Treat it as a thing to drop everything for rather than a thing to plan a week around.
How it scores
It pays experience and tournament points. That is the whole list. No Valor, no Conquest, no march loot. This one fact should change the way you kit up, and it is covered under how to play it below.
The experience is the reason to be there. It is roughly twice what a comparable epic monster pays, and at scale that means single attacks returning eight or nine trillion experience, heroes climbing ten levels in a running, and captains that had been stuck for months moving seventy levels in two days.
The squad drops no chests. This is the part that catches people out on their first attack: you hit the Ashen squad, you get no chest, and it looks like something went wrong. Nothing went wrong. Chests come from the tournament points you bank, exchanged afterwards — not from the kill.
Personal goals scale to your Hero and troop level, so the ladder in front of you is steep whatever size you are. The goals are widely reported as harsh, and running out of resources before finishing them is the normal outcome rather than a failure.
How to play it
- Take the Valor gear off. Doria, Great Marshal, every Valor and Conquest bonus you own does nothing here — the event pays experience and points only. Bring experience bonuses instead, and put your strongest army-strength and army-health gear on the captains rather than saving it for the Hero.
- Send the Hero and all three captains. This is a full-strength epic attack, not a one-captain errand. Set every captain up before the squad appears, because it will not be standing long.
- Stack properly, or do not bother. The whole skill is stack order. Leave your lowest tiers at home entirely and carry only your top two — the point is that your best troops are never the ones dying first.
- Check which stack died. After each attack, read the report. If your top-tier Guardsmen and Specialists are dying before the tier below them, the stack is wrong and every attack after it is wasted. When the lowest tier you brought is the first to fall, the stack is right.
- March at capacity. Under-filling is the commonest mistake — send less than you can carry and you have paid the same losses for a smaller hit. Halving numbers down the stack keeps the arithmetic easy: 88,000 then 44,000 then 22,000.
- Revive with silver, not gold. Two days of this will take a silver reserve from twenty-nine billion to six. Gold is the scarcer currency and there are cheaper places to spend it, so burn silver, and where reviving costs gold, retrain from the barracks instead.
- Be early. Everybody in the kingdom is hitting the same squad and it dies fast. A stack you set up while the squad is already dying is a stack you did not get to use.
Bringing a Valor build. The captains, gear and bonuses that carry every other monster event are dead weight here, and you will not notice until the battle report comes back with an experience figure and nothing beside it.
Deeper in
What the top hundred take
Rare Tar, Epic Tar and Dragon Coins on a sliding scale, and titles at the very top.
| Rank | Rare Tar | Epic Tar | Dragon Coins |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8,000 | 20,000 | 50,000 |
| 2 | 4,000 | 10,000 | 25,000 |
| 3 | 3,600 | 7,500 | 20,000 |
| 4–6 | 3,200 | 6,250 | 15,000 |
| 7–10 | 2,400 | 5,000 | 12,500 |
| 11–20 | 2,000 | 4,500 | 10,000 |
| 21–50 | 1,600 | 4,000 | 7,500 |
| 51–100 | 1,200 | 3,500 | 5,000 |
First place also takes the title Sand Sovereign, worth +50% experience for fourteen days. Second takes Sunbound Warrior at +25%. Both are worth more than the Tar: a fortnight of boosted experience carries into every other event on the calendar.
The scale of it
The numbers here are unlike the rest of the game and worth stating plainly so you can judge where you stand. A large account reported passing three billion tournament points with the hundredth place in its league sitting at seven billion — so the leaderboard is out of reach for most players, and the experience is the prize that is not.
That is the honest way to play it. Rank if you can. Level regardless.
Because the payout is experience, the value does not depend on placing. A player who never troubles the top hundred still walks away with the best levelling two days can buy.
Why it empties you
An epic squad kills troops in bulk, and the goals push you to keep attacking after the point where it stops being cheap. Expect to spend the running in a loop: attack, revive or retrain, restack, attack again. Players describe an hour and a half of deleting and retraining troops before the event even starts, purely to get the stack right.
Budget for it before it opens. Silver for revivals, food to carry a larger army than usual, and speed-ups for retraining the tiers you burn through.