Shadow InvasionShadow Invasion

What it is

An epic-monster tournament, in the same family as Doomsday and Arachne's Swarm. One Shadow City, an epic squad sitting at level 50, appears on the kingdom map, the whole kingdom throws marches at it, and you're paid for the defenders you kill rather than for taking the city. You won't take the city. Nobody is meant to.

Two things set it apart from its siblings, and both are below: the currency it pays, and who it lets you bring. It also runs on two tracks at once. Your kills earn you a personal score, ranked inside a division set by your troop level, and those same kills count toward your clan's chests and its medal. So a modest personal finish still pulls its weight for the clan.

Conquest points, without touching another player

This is the whole reason Shadow Invasion earns a spot on your calendar.

Every other monster event pays Valor, the currency that upgrades your Guardsmen. Shadow Invasion pays Conquest points instead. And Conquest points are the odd one out: normally you only earn them by killing other players' troops, and they're what modernises your Specialists, your player-versus-player line. The game says as much itself, listing "some tournaments (e.g., Shadow Invasion)" among the few places Conquest points come from that aren't a fight with a real person.

So this is the one spot on the whole calendar where you can farm a PvP currency without touching another player. If your Specialists are stalled waiting on Conquest points, Shadow Invasion is the event that unsticks them. It's why the community's event calendars flag it as the best Conquest-points event on the schedule.

How it scores

You're paid per defender killed, not for damage on the way. The game counts kills in whole monsters, so a defender chipped halfway down does nothing for you until it falls, and any leftover damage is wasted. A march that kills nothing scores nothing, however much it cost you to send. That one rule decides what you bring.

A kill pays three things at once: tournament points toward your personal goals and your division ranking, Conquest points, and experience. Your goals and the difficulty scale to your army level, and your division is set by your troop level, so the ladder in front of you is steep whatever size you are.

One line on the Rules panel is worth reading slowly: "Different troop types will earn you more Experience and Conquest points." The city fields four kinds of defender, and each of your own troop types is built to kill one of them. Bring a spread and you can kill across all four. Bring a single type and three quarters of the city is either shrugging off your hits or swinging back at a bonus. Variety is the point, and the counter ring further down is how you build for it.

How to play it

• Send your Hero and Captains together. This is Shadow Invasion's quiet gift. Doomsday gives you one captain and Armageddon only your Hero, but the Shadow City takes your Hero and your captains in the same march, so every commander is earning at once. Set them all up before you march.
• Bring Guardsmen, not Specialists. The event pays the currency that upgrades your Specialists, but you fight it with your Guardsmen. Guardsmen carry the bonus against monsters, and the defenders are monsters. Specialists are built for players and do nothing extra out here.
• Lead with archers. The one defender you can't dodge is the flying Shadow Corax, the giant of the squad, and archers are the class that brings fliers down. Nothing large punishes them back. The counter ring below is why they're the backbone.
• Keep your spearmen light and your fliers home. The Corax hits melee at +50%, so a melee-heavy march feeds the biggest thing on the field exactly what it wants, in return for answering only one of the smallest defenders. Your fliers counter nothing here and cost the most Leadership of anything you own, so they stay in the city. Archers lead, riders back them for the Ranger, and a little melee handles the Rider.
• Stack your tiers, and never bring catapults. Carry your top two or three tiers, heaviest in front to take the blows and your best troops behind them, and leave the siege at home: catapults are built for walls and do nothing to a squad. Read the battle report after each hit: when your lowest tier is the first to fall, the stack is right; when your best tier dies first, every attack after it is wasted.
• Wear the epic-monster kit, and lead with Hercules. The defenders are epic monsters, so the Ghostflame Lantern and the rest of your anti-epic gear all earn here, and Hercules' bonus against epic monsters runs at double the usual rate. Empty the barn while you're at it: every Epic Monster Hunter carries no troop type, so nothing in the city gets a bonus against it, and mercenaries expire in about a week whatever you do.
• Be early, and claim before it closes. The city is shared and it dies as the kingdom chips it, so a stack you set up late is a stack you didn't get to use. And every unclaimed personal-goal reward vanishes the moment the tournament ends, so collect them before you walk away.

Whatever you send, the city has an answer

The Shadow City is held by four units, one of each class. Read their cards and each one is built to punish a different troop of yours: the Corax is +50% against melee, the Rider against ranged, the Ranger against flying, the Warrior against mounted. The thing to know is that your own answers aren't spread as evenly, because archers counter two of the four.

Archers carry a bonus against both flying and melee, so they answer the Corax and the Warrior by themselves. Riders take the ranged Ranger, spearmen take the mounted Rider, and that covers the whole city with three troop types. Your own fliers counter nothing in here, which is the first reason to leave them home. The second is that they cost twenty Leadership each, the priciest bodies you can bring, for a job the archers are already doing.

Then there's the size gap, and it's huge. The Corax isn't just one quarter of the fight. It's the giant: around 99,000 strength and 297,000 health next to 10,000 and 30,000 on the Warrior and the Ranger, and it costs twenty command Leadership where they cost two. Bigger targets are reported to pay more Conquest points per kill, so the Corax isn't only most of the wall you're hitting, it's likely the richest single kill in the city. And it's a flyer.

That's the whole case for leading with archers. They bring down the biggest, richest defender, they clean up the melee Warrior on the side, and the only thing that punishes them back is the small Shadow Rider. One catch worth planning for: the Corax is a 297,000-health package, and the game only pays you when a defender actually falls. A march too thin to finish it leaves all that damage on the table, so send enough archers to drop the bird clean.

Your spearmen sit in the opposite corner from the archers. They answer only that same small Rider, and the giant Corax hits them at +50%, so it's a big cost for a small payoff, and that's why melee stays light and near the back. Bring a spread weighted hard toward archers, a slug of riders for the Ranger, just enough spearmen for the Rider, and leave the fliers at home.

If Clash for the Throne is live, drop your shield

Here's the move that turns a good event into a great one, and it only pays off if you're watching the calendar.

When Clash for the Throne is running at the same time, the Conquest points you earn off the Shadow City count toward its leaderboard too, but only while your Shield of Peace is down. The game's own rules put it plainly: Clash for the Throne points "can be obtained either by defeating other players' armies or participating in the Shadow Invasion event," and none of it scores while you're shielded. So when the two events overlap, dropping your shield makes every Shadow City kill do two jobs at once: Conquest points in the bank, and a climb up the Clash for the Throne ladder without ever attacking a real player.

The catch is the obvious one. A shield down during a player-versus-player tournament is an open city, so weigh the climb against who's watching you. If Clash for the Throne isn't live, keep the shield up and just farm the Conquest points in peace.

What you're playing for

Personal goals

A ladder of tournament-point targets, each one paying out when you cross it. The bundles are heavy on Conquest points, with experience potions and Scrolls of Triumph alongside, and they grow as the targets climb. Cross what you can while you can: unclaimed goal rewards disappear when the event ends.

Division placement

Where you finish against the rest of your division, which was set by your troop level at the start. The top places pay the headline items, including a temporary Leadership title. In the run these notes were written against, first place took Shadow Slayer at +25% Leadership for thirty days, and the places below it took Light Keeper at +10%. A Leadership boost is worth more than it looks, because it makes every march you send bigger, in this event and every other one on the calendar. The exact figures shift by division, so read your own ladder.

The clan

The Shadow City drops clan chests as the kingdom brings it down, and your kills count toward a clan medal, the four-tier record a clan keeps of what it's actually won. None of that asks anything extra of you. It's paid by the same hitting you're already doing.

Scrolls of Triumph

They're the currency that levels your Triumphal Challenge battle pass, thirty scrolls a level, and Shadow Invasion's personal goals hand them out. That "More Scrolls of Triumph!" banner on the event screen is pointing straight at your battle pass.

Not yet confirmed

• How many of each defender the city fields. The four types are fixed, but the Atlas hasn't pinned down the count of each, or whether the mix shifts from one running to the next. Read the city before you commit a stack.
• Exactly how much more the Corax pays. One community source says higher-Leadership targets are worth more Conquest points, which fits the Corax being the prize, but the Atlas hasn't put a hard number on it. Treat "the Corax is the richest kill" as a strong lead, not a measured fact.
• Whether any Valor slips in alongside the Conquest points. The official wording is that Shadow Invasion pays Conquest points "instead" of Valor, though a couple of community guides claim both. Treat the Conquest points as the sure thing.
• Whether Dustan's Conquest-point bonus works here. Players widely say his bonus doesn't apply to Shadow Invasion, but that's community word, not something confirmed in game. If you're counting on him for the extra Conquest points, test it before you build a bench around him.