Defense Strategy Guide

Basics first. Use defense soldiers for defending and attack soldiers for attacking.

Defense soldiers : Spearman/Bowman/Archer/Halberdier/Longbowman

Attack soldiers : Maceman/Crossbowman/2 handed Swordsman/Heavy Crossbowman/Traveling Knight/Traveling crossbowman/ Knight and crossbowman of the Kingsguard

Multi-purpose : (decent at attack and defense but worse than the specialised units) - Swordsman

1) Defending with Your Walls etc : Level up castle walls/battlements/castle gate and towers. This increases defense points of your castle and allows more soldiers to be posted on your walls to defend.

2) Defense Tools : highly HIGHLY IMPORTANT.  Every time you log in you should put 10 -15 defense tools in production line. The more tools you have, the fewer defenders you'll need or lose to an attack. Defense tools - Castle gate reinforcement/defense rocks/flaming arrows.

3) Setting your defenses when you are active : When you are online , put your defenses like this

0 -100 -0

Once the attack comes close to you, you can change the defenses accordingly.

REMEMBER TO SEND YOUR ATTACK SOLDIERS AWAY FROM CASTLE 1 MINUTE BEFORE ENEMY ARMY HITS YOU. Attack soldiers are bad at defending. Keeping them in your castle will not help your defense at all. If your enemy army succeeds in defeating your defenses , you will lose a horrible number of attack soldiers that you could have saved to take your revenge. If your defense succeeds call your attack soldiers back

Goodgame Empire Attack Strategy

Contrary to what people may tell you, attacking is more important than defense - atleast in the early to mid levels of the game. The only castles you should be looking to attack are robber baron castles (RBCs) in Great Empire, Barbarian Towers in EverWinter Glacier and so on -in other words NPCs.

Edit : If you must have resources (wood/stone) and can't cope with waiting for the slow build-up through your resource buildings, then yes, you can attack abandoned castles - preferably allianceless. Still I'd recommend avoiding that path, and if you have to, do both an economic and military espionage before looting. Use your heavy looting units (Traveling Knights and Horrors, surprisingly simple level 3 macemen are pretty effective looters as well) and a commander with loot stats.

As for attacking the NPC castles - don't bother spying them. ggeguide.com has a great database of all the NPC castles alongwith the depth of tools in the reports - something which you can't see anymore in-game since the GGE update.

The most important thing to do when attacking NPCs is using the waves to your advantage by utilising dummy troops to knock out the defense tools. Don't blindly follow the attack strategy given at ggeguide.com. Instead use the following steps to plan your attack.

1. Look at the type of troops in the NPC castle. If they're majority melee use only ranged attackers, if they're 50/50 you use 50/50 and so on.

2.Next look at the spy report's 3 avenues of attack to determine the easiest 2 to strike down. It is inefficient to hit all 3 avenues for NPCs unless you're looking at the high level NPCs where you face a courtyard battle of significant strength. Conversely, attacking down only 1 avenue will lead to heavy loss of troops for you due to the -30% attack penalty your troops will face in the courtyard battle

The avenues of attack you choose should have either or both of the following characteristics:
a) Least number of troops
b) Least depth of defense tools (depth refers to how many tools are present in each slot)

3. Use dummy waves of 1 crappy soldier per avenue to clear out the tools on the avenues you're attacking down. You'll need to use as many waves of dummies as the highest depth of the tools to clear all defense tools.

4. It's advisable to use either a full melee or full ranged attack per wave per avenue depending on your tools and the make-up of the defense troops. A 50% melee/ranged attack wave is worse than a 100% ranged or 100% melee even against a flank defended by mixed troops.

5. Use the minimum number of tools to attack. Until you start hitting Barbarian Towers or RBCs above level 25, I wouldn't advise using any tools. Your attackers will easily clear out the defense with minimum loss as long as you have a semi-decent commander.

6. Try and develop a Strong Equipment Finding/ Resource Loot commander ASAP to loot from NPCs.

Ok, now that should help you deal with attacking both NPC castles in all worlds amd inactive accounts for loot. This should be the main focus of your gametime in GGE.

There is another aspect of the game just as important- and that is glory. Glory helps you unlock the coveted Kingsguard attack units (now there are Elite Guard units as well) as well as earning you respect from having a bad-ass nick like "King xxxx The terrible" :)

I'd suggest avoid trying to farm glory by hitting players in your server. You create enemies and you'll never know when a costly and gut-wrenching war might break out because of your actions. GGE has now allowed players to get glory through the Foreign Empire event. In addition to being a really easy farm for glory points - you get rewarded quite handsomely during the duration of the event. Here's a quick guide to maxing out on glory during Foreign Empire Invasion.

1. Spy ALL the castles that pop up before you attack even one. Your first two or three attacks should be on the most heavily defended castles in order to get maximum glory quickly. It doesn't matter if you lose troops attacking the strong castles, the event awards you with more than enough attackers when you clear certain milestones in number of glory points.

2. The best part of the Foreign castles is that they behave basically as NPCs. All defense tools you see in your spy report are only 1 wave deep. So - dummy waves are really useful to clear out the defense tools following which you can hit them with your normal attacker/tool setup - losing less troops as well as having more waves to fill with glory banners

3. Use as many glory banners as possible per attack. Only use siege tools on no more than 2 waves on the flanks on which defenders are present. Fill all other waves with banners.

I suppose I could now discuss on the strategy to attack active players on the same server. However, as I see it, if you are needing this guide to figure out the basics of gameplay - you really have no business attacking other players.

Cheers

By
Magnificent @ in1
Sergeant at Chakravyuh Alliance