Siege troops have long been a forgotten relic in Game of War, weak against everything and only good for farming tiles. Over the past six months or so we have observed the steady release of Siege stats into the game and were left scratching our heads as to why this was happening.
As someone who feels like he knows the game inside and out, I was curious as to how the injection of Siege stats would play out and was shocked at where things landed. Anyone who watches or participates in the battles for the Wonder during Kingdom of Dragons, or even participated in recent versions of Fortress Wars, has probably noticed that everyone is now using Siege Troops with their Chaos Dragon (love the new name!) as the primary attack and defense configuration. What we are seeing can only be described as the rise of Siege troops!
Has the revitalization of Siege troops culminated in Siege troops becoming the dominant troop in the game? For this article, we conducted testing to see if we could discern Siege troops’ status and placement in the Circle of Death and reach some surprising conclusions!
The “only because my editor made me do it” Disclaimer: The stats and strategies presented in this article are current as of the date of publication. As anyone who plays Dragon Dimension knows, MZ is always releasing new components to the game and sometimes even changes stat functionality without notice like they did with Siege troops here. With every release that occurs, the information contained in this article will become staler (unless updated, of course!). Use this information at your own risk!
The Wheel of Death as it Was
At this point, anyone with more than a passing knowledge of Game of War should be familiar with the Circle of Death. The Circle of Death can be explained as a way of stating the relative strength and weaknesses of the four troop types when they meet in battle. Here is an article that discusses this in more detail. Recall, if you will, that your Barracks contains information about the strengths and weaknesses of your troops. For example, when you select your Tier 7 Infantry troops in the Barrack to train more troops you will see a screen that looks like this:
This screen informs you that your Level 7 Infantry are “Strong vs Cavalry, Siege” and “Weak vs Ranged, Defenses”. What this is telling you is that your Infantry troops will beat Cavalry troops but will lose against Ranged troops or “Defenses” (which means traps). Each troop type in your barrack contains this information and, in each circumstance, we are reassured that every troop type is strong against Siege troops. In fact, if you look at the training view for T7 Siege Troops you see this little tidbit of knowledge:
SIEGE TROOPS ARE WEAK AGAINST EVERYTHING!
Based on the information in our Barracks we have always operated under the impression that troop losses could be expressed as a simple acronym in the trap community — CIR — Cavalry are weak against Infantry; Infantry are weak against Ranged; and Ranged are weak against Cavalry. We used to call this the CIRcle of Death, because we were cool like that and, as you can see, we completely ignored Siege troops within that circle. We did so for good reason — everything beat Siege troops! Is that still true? We will get to the testing in a moment.
There is another, less well-known Circle of Death that many players are not familiar with. Just as there are different troop types, there are also different kinds of troops. At present we have Regular, Strategic, and Wild troops to work within our Barracks. As with the four troop types, there is also a Circle of Death in play when these three kinds of troops meet on the battlefield. The circle of Death for these troops is, as follows: Regular troops are weak against Strategic troops; Strategic troops are weak against Wild troops; Wild troops are weak against Regular troops. Unfortunately, there is not a cool acronym that we can use here, but go with RSW if you like! Don’t. Just Don’t. It’s not cool.
The Test Accounts and Testing Protocol
The test accounts used for this article were both fairly robust. Since I was the one who requested the tests from a member of my Alliance, I volunteered my troopies as cannon fodder and played defense for all test hits. My type stats are shown, below:
For this round of testing, a member of my Alliance (who wishes to remain anonymous) volunteered his time and troops, both of which are greatly appreciated, to attack my troops. Here are his stats:
As you can see, the attacker’s stats are significantly higher than mine across the board. This is also true when you compare the attacker’s Siege stats against my type stats, which could explain some of the results that we were seeing in the tests.
Given that the attacker’s Siege stats were significantly higher than my Type stats, it seemed appropriate to find a different account to conduct further testing. For this account, which we will refer to as the Second Defender, we were looking for an account that had Type stats that were higher than the Siege stats so we could compare the results of both a strong account (the first attacker) and a more even account (my account. The Type stats for the Second Defender are shown below:
The Second Defender type and siege stats were closer to the Type stats for my account and, more importantly, the Siege stats were lower than my Type stats.
The test protocol that we followed was fairly straightforward. I sent out an encampment consisting of 5 Million troops and the attacker attacked the encampment with 5 Million troops. To maintain some level of consistency (and to make it easier for the attacker) each attacking march was evenly split between Regular, Strategic, and Wild troops. If you are wondering why I explained the second Circle of Death, this is why. As the attacker was using mixed marches, the losses were staggered in a way that we would expect to see when a mixed march hit one troop type, which you will see in the reports. On a final note, no Heroes or Dragons were harmed in this testing. Neither was used since we were simply trying to get a feel for the relative strength of Siege troops against other troop types.
The Test Results
For the first series of tests, I wanted to obtain a baseline of what we would see if non-Siege troops were used. Thus, I sent four encampments out containing Regular Infantry troops which were then attacked by mixed marches or Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry, and Siege troops. Here are the results of those tests:
As you can see from these results, both Circles of Death operate as we would expect them to. I suffered significantly more losses when the attacker used Ranged troops (Infantry are weak against Ranged) and my Infantry troops fared significantly better against his Cavalry (Cavalry are weak against Infantry). The result was more or less directly in between when we had a type match of Infantry versus Infantry. Also of note was the fact that the attacker’s Wild troop fared poorly with every hit. All of these results are exactly what we would expect to see.
For this series, I was interested to see how Siege troops fared against my Infantry as I was curious to see if the result would help me reclassify the Circle of Death. As you can see, we had a better result using Infantry to defend against Siege than we did with any other troop type than against a Cavalry attack.
For the next series of tests, we decided to dial down as much as possible on the interplay between Siege troops and the other troop types. Here are the results of that series of attacks:
Given the results of these hits, I concluded that the testing protocol was flawed and backtracked to try to determine why the results came out so skewed against the information contained in the Barracks. Remember, Siege troops are supposed to be weak against every other troop type. What I was seeing, however, was that the Siege troops were consistently stronger than all three troop types. This could not be correct!
As you can imagine, I needed to go back to the drawing board! Thinking that there may have been an issue with the stat differences between the testing accounts, I then reviewed the stats of my attacker in more detail and determined that his Siege stats were higher than my Type stats, which would obviously skew the test results. This being so, I decided to conduct an additional series of tests with an account that had Siege stats that were lower than Type stats involved in the testing. Here are the results of those tests:
Now we are cooking with gas! In each of these attack scenarios, the Siege troops appeared to behave as we would expect against stronger troops but still did not fare as well as decisively as one would expect. What explains these results? Stats! Stats! Stats! Let’s compare the stats of the attack and defense accounts side-by-side:
Based on a comparison of the stats of the two accounts in play, one would expect the following outcome by the attacker (from best result to worse): (1) my siege would do best against the defending Cavalry; (2) my siege would do middling against the defending Infantry; and (3) my Siege would do worst against the defending Ranged. Why is this? We expect this because the stats for the Cavalry are the lowest for the defending account and the highest stats are present in the Ranged stats. Should we have expected any of our troops to win? Absolutely not. In all three scenarios, the defending stats were higher than the Siege stats of the attacker AND Siege is supposed to be inherently weaker against all three troop types.
Surprise! It looks like we MAY need to revise the Circle of Death to account for Cavalry potentially being weaker against Siege troops. It is really hard to test this with any level of certainty given the stat disparity present in the testing accounts. If we could locate a test account that had an even match in stats between Cavalry and Siege troops, the outcome could be more sure.
My Final Thoughts on Siege Troops
- The Circle of Death MAY need to be revised to indicate that Cavalry troops are weaker than Siege.
- Siege troops are not necessarily stronger than Infantry or Ranged troops. The stats available for Siege troops are now sufficiently high that they may have outpaced the stats available for all other troop types. This explains why Siege troops do better in the Wonder and in Fortresses against non-Siege troops.
- Siege troops are probably the strongest attack configuration for high-level accounts present in the game. This is true across the board – Wonder, Fortresses, and for rallying against Strongholds.
- Siege troops are not the strongest defense configuration present in the game.
- Siege troops remain exorbitantly expensive to train and provide such a high power that trapping with them would probably remain ineffective.
Where to go for Additional Information
I hope you enjoyed this article! Team Real Tips has guides for pretty much all aspects of Game of War. Remember, our beloved game is constantly changing. Thus, the burden remains on YOU to educate yourself on those changes. Read the blogs released by MZ! Ask questions of RealTips writers in our Line rooms and on Discord! Remember, there really is no stupid question and we are happy to help you understand the stats that you are working with!
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I am active in many of the Game of War Line rooms (Line Display Name: FinsUp / Line ID finsupgow) and I am always willing to answer player questions in the rooms or via Direct Message. If I do not know the answer to a question, I am always happy to find the answer or to test your theories to determine the best practices one can take in building their account. Join us on our Line channel to access additional content and to interact directly with our writers!
