Game of War: Monster Killing - The Basics

Game of War: Monster Killing

The Basics

Hodor!

During 2014, Machine Zone changed how players interacted with the monsters that appear in their iOS/Android application, Game of War.

Before the change, monsters could be attacked like any other city or player with an army or a rally.  They were tough, and only the strongest players really did any attacking.  However after the change, only your hero is sent to attack the monsters and a whole new aspect was added to the game to train and equip your hero to improve their attacking and killing skills.  And most importantly, everyone started at the same basic level, so you didn't need to be a strong player to go monster hunting.

When the change happened, I was still in the process of slowly growing my stronghold and army, and I was still weak and vulnerable compared to many other players out there.   Monster killing looked like an interesting side-mission while I continued to build my strength, so I made the conscious decision to try and make the best monster killing hero I could.

A few months later I have a fully trained and equipped hero that is getting very good at killing monster at all strength levels (1 through 6).  The hero is rising up through the ranks of the leaderboard for our kingdom, and I regularly kill 10 to 20 monsters a day (outside monster kill events), providing rewards for my alliance and plenty of resources and items for my stronghold.

At the suggestion of my alliance's leadership, I am writing this blog posting to share what I have learnt about monster killing in Game of War.

This entry will cover the basics of monsters, attacks and hero training.  In future blog postings I plan on describing how I approach each monster type and other attack tips, and a posting on the order in which to train your hero.

Comments, feedback and improvements are very welcome.

Monsters

Let's first take a look at our adversary.  Each kingdom in Game of War has monsters!  They appear at random throughout your kingdom, and disappear after a short time (less than three hours).

Monsters are themed in the game, often to do with the season like halloween and spring.  Each monster can provide different unique items when attacked and killed, but the attack and kill mechanism is the same for each monster type.

Monsters appear at one of six levels of strength.  Level 1 is the weakest, level 6 is the strongest.

The stronger the monster, the closer they will be to your kingdom's wonder.  This means that most level 6 monsters are within the forest surrounding the wonder.  Level 5s will appear just outside the forest and level 1s are towards the edges of your kingdom.  There are regions where you will get two levels near each other, so for example where my stronghold normally sits in the kingdom I have an abundance of level 1 and level 2 monsters within easy reach of my hero.

Remember, you cannot simply attack monsters!  You need to unlock the ability for your hero to attack each monster level by doing hero research.  I will cover that in depth later.

Monsters appear with a status bar below their animated character.  The status bar shows the monster's strength (for example "Lvl 1") and its type (for example "Reaper").  Below the text, the status bar alternates between a countdown timer showing when the monster will disappear, and the monster's remaining strength.

Time remaining until Monster leaves

As the timer counts down, it will turn red when there are less than ~15 minutes left before the monster disappears.  Once it hits 0:00, the monster will disappear very shortly afterwards.  It is possible to continue hitting the monster when the timer is 0:00, but it can disappear even after you have started a march, so be warned.

Monster's remaining strength

The strength bar that extends shrinks from right to left, and will turn amber when there is less than ~55% strength left and red when the monster has less than ~20% strength left.  When very little strength is left the bar can disappear.  Always tap on a monster to check the remaining strength.

Tapping on a monster will bring up its statistics and the attack control panel.  I'll deal with attacking later, so let's take a look at the stats.

Monster statistics

At the top of the panel, you will see what type of resources you can gather each time you hit the monster.  The mystery icon means that pretty much anything else is also possible, but it will be of a similar value to the others.

Below the icons are your hero and monster line ups.  It tells you the monster level, and its remaining strength as a percentage.  Here is a level 6 monster:

Level 6 monster statistics

In addition to high value resources and items, level 6 monsters can also drop the Legendary Teleport item.  These allow your stronghold to gain entry into the Super Wonder, and normally cost 99,999 gold!  Unfortunately, I have yet to receive one of these items.  I hope to get one soon, and will blog about monster killing in the Super Wonder.

After a monster is killed, it will be replaced by a monster resource tile.  The higher the monster's level  was, the more resources will be available to collect.   Compared to a normal resource tile, a level 1 monster resource tile has roughly the same resources than a level 4 resource tile.  So they are worth gathering from!

Monster resource tile

Like normal resource tiles, they can also produce unique materials for use in crafting, and they will disappear after a random amount of time.

Attacks

Before I describe how to train and setup your hero, it is worth having a look at how you attack with your hero.  This will introduce a number of hero capabilities that I will go on to show how to affect.

But first, one of the most important reasons I decided to train my hero and kill monsters is that you can do this while remaining shielded!  So this is perfect distraction in the game while you build and grow your player under the protection of a shield.  The one caveat is that level 6 monsters (as stated above) mainly live in the forest, where you can't be shielded.  But I will have some tips on this monsters in a future blog posting.

Hero energy

Each attack your hero starts costs hero energy.  Your hero will have a maximum amount of energy they can store and is defined by your hero's skill, research and items.  Your current and maximum energy are shown on your hero's profile page or on the monster attack panel attack in a bar graph:

Hero energy status bar

Hero energy is automatically regenerated over time, up to a maximum amount, and the bar graph shows the amount of time until full regeneration occurs.

You can also top up your hero's energy by clicking on the plus symbol next to the bar and spending hero energy items.  These currently come in units of 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, 20000 and 50000.      You get energy items from the store, from attacking monsters and from buying certain gold offers.  You cannot currently get energy from your alliance store, but I really hope we will see this in the future.

The last energy item's value of 50000 suggests that it is possible to train and equip your hero in such a way to make the maximum energy be greater than 50000.  So far, I have only managed to achieve a maximum energy level of 43400.  

Note that it you spend an item that would put your energy over your maximum, you loose the extra energy, so be careful which items you pick.

Monster attacks

There are two ways to attack a monster with your hero and it is very important to understand the difference.  Both methods are shown in the monster attack panel:

Hero attack options

The first option "Attack Once with Hero" sends your hero on a march to make a single attack on the monster.  The number on the left (8137) is the amount of hero energy it will cost.  

The amount each attack costs in hero energy is determined by the monster's level and your hero's training.  The cost from image above, 8137, is for a level 6 monster with my hero.  A level 1 monster with the same setup is 1395.

The number on the right (09:50) is the march time to reach the monster.  Remember, your hero will need to return, taking the same length of time and you won't be able to do any other hero tasks (like rally or attack cities) until they are back.

If you don't have enough energy to send a single attack, tapping on it will send you to the Hero energy items page where you can top up the energy.

The second option "Max Attack with Hero" does multiple attacks in a single march.  Each attack within the march costs the same as the "Attack Once" option, so the number of attacks the hero performs is calculated by dividing your hero's remaining energy by the cost of a single attack.  If you don't have enough energy for at least two attacks, the "Max Attack" option will be blanked out.

It is important to note that you can't select a number of attacks between 1 and the maximum number performed by this second attack option.  Using this option will expend the amount of energy shown (40685) even if killing the monster required less attacks than you sent.

In both case clicking on the attack button spends the energy shows immediately.  So, if you recall your hero, the monster disappears or another player kills the monster before you reach it, the energy is gone.

I will talk more about how and when to use both these methods in a future blog, but here is my most important discovery about the two methods.  Each method only adds one level to the monster attack streak.  Why this important is explained after I describe attack streaks.

Attack streak

When your hero attacks a monster for the first time, the attack streak level is 0.  Each time you attack the same monster, the attack streak is increased by one.  This is true for both a single attack and a max attack as described above.

Each attack streak level gives your hero an attack bonus, shown as a percentage in the monster attack panel:

Monster attack streak

Level 0 has no attack bonus.  The amount of attack bonus and the level of attack streaks you can accumulate depends on your hero's training.

After every attack, your attack streak level increases and a 60 minute timer is started.  If you do not attack the same monster within that count down, the attack streak level resets to 0.  If you attack another monster, your attack streak on the previous monster is reset to 0.  So don't try and kill two monsters at the same time, instead do them one at a time.

Another player attacking your monster does not reset your attack streak level.

Attack streaks are very important for the higher level monsters.  Killing a level 6 monster may take as many as 20 hits.  By that last hit, the streak will be at level 20 and the attack bonus can be in excess of 300% making each attack really count.  And remember, if another player tries to steal your monster, they will be starting with a low (or zero) attack bonus.  So unless they go all out with a max attack on an almost dead monster, they will probably not succeed.

Finally on attack streaks, back to my observation on attack once versus max attack.  While max attack will do multiple attacks per march, each of the attacks will only receive the same initial attack bonus, and the attack streak will only increased by one.  Doing the same number of attacks individually will therefore increase the attack bonus on each one, thereby reducing the number of attacks needed to kill the monster at the expense of many marches and the time taken to do them.  It's a trade-off which I will come back to in my strategy discussion later.

Normal hit vs Critical hit

The final aspect of attacking is the type of hit your hero performs on each attack.  There are two types, normal and critical.  A critical hit happens with a random chance (which you can improve with hero training), and when it happens, it applies an additional attack bonus inflicting more damage on the monster.

You can tell if the attack contained a critical hit by a lightening animation when your hero reaches the monster and starts bashing away at it.

Thunder and lightening - critical hit!

If you send a max attack, each attack made as part of the march has the usual chance of being a normal or critical hit.  If at least one of the attacks is critical, you will see the lightening animation.

To put this another way, the lightening animation you see only indicates whether there was a critical hit, and not whether the hero was doing a single or max attack against the monster.

You can also see if a hit was normal or critical by reading the attack email you will be sent for each 

march.

How much energy to kill a monster?

I hope I've made it clear above (and will continue to do so in the next section), the amount of energy required to kill a monster is never explicitly shown in any screen in the game.  It depends on lots of factors and you will learn from experience how many hits it will take.

I will put my estimates, that I have found with my hero, in a blog posting soon.

Hero

Now let's turn to our hero, the person who will be doing all the hard work.  A hero's ability to attack and kill monster is influenced by a number of factors:

• Hero monster skills
• Hero research
• Hero equipment
• Hero boosts

I will deal with each in turn.

Hero monster skills

Hero skill points are awarded for each hero experience level (from 1 to 50) you achieve.  The points are allocated to hero skills (combat, research, training etc.) and to monster skills.  We are obviously interested in the monster skills.  Note that none of the other hero skill points affect how we attack monsters.  

For a level 50 hero, you get 60 monster skill points to allocate.  You can reallocate them later by using a reset monster skills item (which you can purchase from the store).

Here is my current hero monster skill tree allocation:

To unlock the second row, you need 5 points in the Monster Defense Debuff.  To unlock the third row, you need 10 points in both Energy Cost Reduction and Energy Recovery.  Note that to fully populate the tree you need 100 points which you won't get, so you need to choose carefully based on your attack preferences.

Here is what each skill does.  I will be honest about which ones I don't fully understand:

• Monster Defense Debuff: [Not fully understood] A higher value increases how much damage your hero can do on each attack.
• Energy Cost Reduction: Reduces the hero energy cost per attack.
• Energy Recovery: Increases the amount of energy that your hero regenerates over time thereby reducing the total time taken to recover your maximum energy.
• Hero Attack: Increases the attack of your hero, inflicting more damage on the monster.
• Maximum Energy Limit: Increases the maximum of amount of energy your hero can store.
• Hero Attack Streak: [Not fully understood] Increases the attack bonus you receive for each attack streak level.

My personal opinion is that hero research is where most gains come from, and once you have a good set of researches done, a balanced skill tree is not important.

Hero research

The next, and probably most important, aspect of your hero's abilities comes from research.  When the game changed from troops killing monsters to heroes, a new research tree was added to the game.  And it is a big one!  Here's my hero's completed research tree:

My Hero's Completed Research

You will see that all of the hero skill tree items are also present in the research tree. They serve exactly the same purpose here, but provided even greater boost to your hero.  There is one additional hero skill that you can only research:

• Hero Critical Hit: Increases the chances that an attack is a critical hit, inflicting more damage on the monster.

In addition there are some normal troop research items and other helps for your hero like march speed.

Finally, and most importantly, there are the monster level unlocks.  You cannot attack a monster at a given level until you have researched that level here.

Level 6 monster unlock takes a while, and just a bit of resource...

Hero equipment

Recently, the game has had some equipment added to the forge recipes that improve your hero's monster attack skills.  Here one of the items, Perseus' Gladius, that I am currently using, embedded with gems that further enhance the hero skills.

Perseus' Gladius

I am finding that the material needed to craft these items come mainly from killing monsters.  A classic catch-22!

I will try and document the items in a future blog posting.

Hero boosts and march speed-ups 

The final way you can help your hero is to use a boost while attacking.  There are two boosts that help with monster killing, as well as march speed-ups.  As with all boosts, they must be active before your start your attack.  Popping a boost after your hero is marching will apply it only to the next attack.

• Monster Attack Boost:  These come in two variants and provide a 25% bonus to your hero's attack for 15 minutes or 30 minutes.
• March Speed Boost: These apply to both troop and hero marches, and can therefore speed up your hero's attack runs against monsters.  There are various boost variants, including a 5 minute 200% march speed up which is very useful in the forest.

Once your hero's march is underway, you can speed up the march as you can with any troop march.

Get killing!

That's the basics covered.  So if you haven't already research to unlock level 1 monsters, allocate your hero monster skill points and get marching.  Those monsters won't kill themselves you know.