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Last knights guide for starters

Content

Introduction

As this is a strategy game, it is quite hard to understand from the First age and you need to grow in the game and learn what can be done and what can not be done. To make things a bit easier for new players I wrote some things down. Not everything that is written in here is always the best thing to do but it might give you a basic start.

As you probably know 25 countries are fighting each other in this game and have to try to gain as many points as they can and try to stay alive. This has to be done by taking cities from each other which mostly ends in the kill of a certain country. Because it is very hard to kill another country on your own you better make some friends as soon as you can and make them fight on your side. The game is over 24 hours from the moment 3 countries are still alive, or 72 hours from the moment 4 countries are alive – whichever comes first! When the age has lasted 21 days, it stops no matter who’s left (but that doesn’t usually happen). War has to be organized though and a country needs to be lead, so from the moment you have 5 people with HQ access (explained later) you can vote someone as a LD (leader) who can appoint a leading group (High Command - HC), that organizes the daily things in a country (choosing allies, making strike forces and taxi’s,...) The people in this group are essential for the survival of a country and are usually online a lot. It is better not to interfere in their decisions at the start too often. They'll gladly explain their choices to you when you ask them politely, but it's quite hard to get a full view of the situation at the beginning. So use your eyes and ears and you'll pick up a lot.

Choosing a country

The first thing twhat you have to do if you want to start playing is to choose acountry. Maybe you have some friends who know the game already and with whom you can join. Perhaps you want to make a certain army, which can only be made in a certain amount of countries. The choice is really up to you. There is no country that is better than another, every country has its advantages and its disadvantages but it is harder to survive in a country with 7 borders at the start than in a country with 3 borders!

City Center

Visit the castle(1)

This button is only available in large and medium cities (not in small cities). You can determine the type of city, by looking at the map. A purple square indicates a large city. A black square indicates a medium city. A black circle means it's a small city.

The city size is also reflected in the city garisson. The garrison are the amount of soldiers defending the city.
Before you can start training to gain ranks and get more points you need to decide what kind of army you want

  1. PvP-army: if there is a war between countries, commanders can attack eachother at the border so called player-versus-player fights (or commonly referred to as PvPs). This means you can attack other on your own. A PvP army is intented to be good at these PvPs.
    PvP armies usually contain units that concentrate their damage into one round.
  2. Ranking army: a ranking army is intented to make you gain ranks fast. Ranking armies usually consist out of healers mixed with other unit types. The ultimate goal of a ranking army is to get into a training loop. You are in a training loop when you gain more gold in the battles than it costs you to forceheal the odd injury. You can't avoid all injuries, that's just impossible, but when an injury does occur you should've gained enough gold to go to the hospital and immediately forceheal the unit (see the hospital section of this guide).

When buying an army there are two sorts of limits you'll run into. First there is the actual buying limit (usually referred to as the softcap). When buying new units you won't be able to go under this cap. The caps are reflected in your income. When you try to buy a unit that would put your income under the soft cap, the system will refuse this. At the grey ranks the soft cap is at 0; as soon as you become a blue rank you can have a negative income so the soft cap becomes -330 (and will go lower every time you promote).
The second limit you'll run into is the promotion limit. By promoting units you can go under the soft cap. At a certain point the game won't let you promote any further cause you've run into the hard cap. The hard cap is at twice the soft cap (eg. at -330 soft cap, the hard cap is at -660). At the grey ranks you have a fixed hard cap of -10.
A general rule to build a good army is to calculate how many units you need in the reference guide (faq/help). You can also check this at www.tlkhelp.be. Focus on the rank you want to reach and what stage you want your units to reach. Basically you need to divide your hardcapped income at the desired rank by the wage of the desired unit at the desired level to determine how many units you'll be needing.
If you just want to reach the green ranks you can start promoting very fast, if you want to reach red ranks then you can’t promote your army before you hit general.
If you build your army you have 2 choices: either you wait a while with promoting (Captain** or Captain***) which makes the training from Baron to Marquess easier or you promote all your units at once which gives you a lot of money and makes training quite easy until Baron. Once on the Baron rank you need to "rebuild" or "reform". Those are 2 different things.

Rebuild: dismiss all your units and buy more units of a lesser rank instead (trains very slow and takes quite some time because your units have to rank up again) never rebuild with ranged units!!!! Unless you want to rebuild for the whole age! Medieval has very short ages so it's not worth it to make long rebuilds.

Reform: dismissing a part of your units and buying others in stead until you have enough to reach Marquess. This is a little easier and you don't have to reform a lot.

You can only reform if you're close to the desired amount of units already: for example if you have 35 units and you need 40 to reach Marques you can reform but if you have 20 and you need 40 you have to rebuild!

For your first army don't take too many different units, mostly a concentrated army of a certain unit is very good! The starting money you get is 25 000 gold so you can't buy the best units with that money.

The best thing you can do is buy your units at apprentice and sometimes 1 or 2 standards.

From the rank of General it is possible to form armies to unite your countrymates under 1 banner. As higher ranks can not join lower ranks it is logic that the high rankers make armies and the lower rankers don't . A good advice is ALWAYS join an army.

Because armies are mostly the safest place to be in, unless you have a reckless commander of course. If you build a taxi to travel to the main army or a training army try to get a second commander. In case you need to go offline and an enemy comes up, he can save you and run away. Sorts of armies:

Armies are always disbanded if you won the battle (as attacker) or if you lost the battle (as defender). In the first case you enter the city you attacked and in the last case you flee back to the capital. As city garrison have mostly between 60 and 200 soldiers it is not easy to take cities without injures at the start of the age. So you need to form big armies to take them, but as armies disband when you use them you can't use the main army (gathering of all the commanders of that country) each time, so strike forces are used instead. Strike forces are an online group of people that form an army to take cities. As they are online they can rejoin the disbanded army as soon as the strike force leader puts it up again. This way you don't scatter people around which is very important. The strength of your main army decides if you can survive enemy attacks or not, because if all the lands of your country are taken except 1 this means all the commanders of your country are in 1 city which is hard to take (so you need to use the main army to take that last city) after you used it, it might take some time until all the offliners rejoined the main army again. That's called rebuilding the main, at the end of the ages that might take upto a full day as players from all over the world are playing this game. The last sort of army that comes up frequently are PvP armies. Because it is very unsafe to go PvPing alone at the border (you can get struck by an enemy strike force), PvP are made to make it safer to go PvP. The use of them is very good but not that much used anymore as a lot of enemies drop their main army on that pvp-army (all on liners are mostly in that army so they can not get pvped after dropping main)

Headquarters (HQ)

Once you reach the rank of general you get some responsibility in your country!

You'll be able to vote a LD! Don't make hasty decision but think first! It's usually a good choice to vote for the people that HC/WC are voting for because those are mostly the most active players of the country and brought the country this far. Though there is no rule that says you have to! The choice is totally yours!

If you should be appointed as HC, WC or even LD you can enter the HC room as wellin the Head Quarters. In here the HC message can be set, wars can be declared and alliances can be made.

Patrol the market

Once your army is set up you can start training them. The training scenarios have different description, but are all have the same difficulty (the training strength is according to your rank). If you have quite some injuries in your army it's not smart to keep training because some of your army might get killed or captured. You can use market to train at until you hit Lieutenant.

Patrol the mountains/tundra/desert/plains/ forest

Training from Lieutenant until general* is done here. In this stage of the training your terrain bonuses count. This means that your army is better on certain sorts of terrains. This should also be important in the choice of your army! Countries have a certain bonus, so if you can pick a unit that accumulates the unit terrain bonus and the country terrain bonus, you can defeat armies that are better than yours but are on your favored terrain. The terrain bonus of your army can be found in "encampement"

Visit hospital

This is the place where your injured units are. Though they can be healed for a certain price. Low wage units (units that don’t have much wage, so where you have a lot of) are cheap healers while units with high HP are expensive healers. At the start don't force heal your units!

It's only a waste of money that you can use later on! For example if you have injuries in PvP you can force heal and attack someone else.

Go to the border

In here you see all the cities/villages that border the city you are in. This means you can also see the players in that city. If 2 countries have a real war you can attack eachother at the border. Realize that if you attack someone else and you go offline with a lot of injured soldiers, you can get attacked as well!

Commanders that can not be attacked:

  1. injured commanders
  2. commanders that were already attacked and have 6 ticks protection
  3. online commanders
  4. commanders from a country of which there is no real war with

Training for General* ranks is also at the border. You need to attack border villages, sometimes there is only a village of 5 soldiers to face, in other cases there are Marshals of 80 soldiers that can destroy your army if you don't pay attention.

Lower ranks can also train at the border but this is not advised as that training is quite hard!

Encampment

This shows you your army and what state it is in.

Terrain bonus is inhere as said before, also how many injured units you have, Name, type Lives, XP, HP, Str, Racc, Rstr, Heals, wage. The meaning of these things are explained in the reference guide on faq/help.

When your units reach a certain amount of xp you are able to promote your units to a certain level!

This means that they become better but also more expensive!! The clue is to find a good balanced army that has the perfect wage! At certain ranks you can not promote your units higher because you have no wage left to promote them! Each rank you gain more wage and you can promote and buy more units! In the start don't promote too many units higher than advanced so you have enough units later on in the age when your promotion cap becomes bigger!

Your friends

This menu shows you all the people that are in your country from the lowest rank until the highest! To prevent people from spying, only general and higher can see all the info of all the commanders! If you did not reach that rank, you can only see people's info that have the same rank or lower.

From the moment you reach Captain, you can post in your friends. This small forum is mostly meant to give other commanders info and to have fun. Spamming in that thread is not to be advised as good topics that do have a purpose get forgotten then!

Your buddies

People that you want to keep in mind can be added to a buddy list so you can find their names faster and keep in touch easier.

Battle results

At the start as new player all players that have some experience will share it with you if you ask for it as they also win with new players getting better! Stupid questions don't exist. There are no mistakes as long as you learn from them! The clue is to make a decent army, join main from the moment you are lieutenant, join a lot of strike forces (don’t go offline in them or you'll get left behind) and listen to what the high command tells you! They mostly know what's going on (enemies that are close or other dangers) if there is NO TRAINING that’s not only up for the good of the country but also for the good of yourself because that means you are in danger at that moment! It might be a good idea to regularly check the HC messages and the flags! If you don’t know what the meaning of a certain flag is click on it and you'll see them all then!

War time

This is no topic in the game itself but this needs some explanation. If your country is fighting another country and the war is on real your countries are at war!

This means they are fighting each other to kill and get points. If you want to kill your enemy you have to take all their cities, so you'll need strikeforces, pvp and a finally a main drop to finish the enemy main. This takes a lot of coordination form the HC, some luck, as much commanders as possible in the main army AND everyone healthy!

Therefor there is the HC-message and the country flags which give the war info to the commanders. Can you train/can you not train, do you have to join the main army or not, is there a strike force up, can we pvp,...

These orders must be followed as strictly as possible! (at least if you want to keep your army healthy as long as possible) unless you have a very good reason for it the main army is not to be left because it's the safest place where you can be (exceptions possible ofc).

If you aren't in the main army an enemy strike force might hit you or even worse a enemy main! (which screws up your army totally for at least 24 hrs)

Being in the main also gives you the option for personal border attacking (pvp) and joining strike forces which gives you a nice amount of xp and gold.

Though if you can't stay online don't join a strike force unless you have permission to do so because if you do you will get left behind and your country needs everyone in the main (to defeat enemy mains) conclusion: main army is the best place to be in IF everyone joins it because that makes it strong.

Personal Border Attacking

This is a very important part in the war itself because pvp can take the main amount down very fast. If you want to pvp you make sure that your army is completely healthy in the first place and then you can click “Go to the border” in City Centre. If there are enemies at the border you see them there in a row from much xp (top) ranked to less xp(down) BUT don’t focus on the xp or normal army ranking to attack an enemy.

If these 3 points are all in your favor you should be able to win! There are some exceptions, for example if an enemy main dropped on you but you won and they stay at the border for 5 more minutes then force heal all that you can and start pvp'ing. This way you can do a lot of damage. Another exception where you better don't pvp is when you have to go offline soon. If you pvp and you have quite some injuries , you are an easy pvp target for enemies! All the targets that you can choose have the button "attack" and the "spy" button open! If not there are several possibilities:

  1. your countries are not at war
  2. your countries have war but it is set on friendly
  3. your target has already been pvped and has a pvp protection for 6 ticks
  4. your target is injured

PvP protection

This is protection which is given to everyone who was defender in a battle and had injured soldiers from it! This battle can be a personal border attack, a main drop or a strike force. The pvp protection only gives you protection against personal border attacking and you can see the amounts of ticks you have protection left in the City Center (6 ticks from the moment of the attack = 3 hours) Think twice before you train or battle before those 6 ticks are over because the enemy can still be close and you might have to go offline soon which gives your enemy the opportunity to attack you again!

Important terms and Abbreviations

HQ-HC-WC-LD

HQ are the people from general+ who are able to vote a Leader of a country and the other 3 (HC-WC-LD) are the ones who lead the country (coordinate war and give orders and advise to people)

TICK

An hour in tlk contains 2 "ticks" which means the point of XX.00 and XX.30 (every half an hour Game Time)
On those ticks you get 1 turn, your units get healed up a bit, you gain 1 mp (move point) and cities have a bigger City Value (city value is the money you get a day from a city)
The ticks are very important for the MP (move points) because you can’t have more then 3 move points and it is not smart to spoil them in war time you need to take action every hour.

Wheel

Move points are also important if you want to strike a city! To attack a city you need at least 1mp and all those who are in your army that have 1 mp will move with you to the taken city. If you lose you keep your mp and stay in the city where you attacked from.
There is a way though to do more then 1 strike from 1 city. This way is called "the wheel". (this is explained very good in http://www.tlkhelp.be/wheelguide.php)