Welcome to our fourth installment of our Forge of Empires Starting Guides. Today, in part four, we will be taking a look at manual fighting!
The third part of this series focused on your daily routine when first playing.
With the development of smithery, we take another very crucial development step. We gain access to guilds.
The game lists the benefits of guilds as fee-free trade of goods and access to the guild expedition associated with guild membership.
At the beginning, we need guilds only to increase our potential for helping other players.
In addition to neighbors and friends, we can now help all members of the guild once every day.
To do this, we choose a guild that can be joined immediately without an application and that has as many members as possible.
We do not make any other claims at the moment, because the choice of a permanent guild is not due until the Iron Age.
Now it’s just a matter of getting more coins and blueprints by helping out.
Having only used Automatic Combat so far, it’s time to move on to Manual Combat.
We select a suitable team as usual, but now click on Attack instead of Autocombat.
On the battlefield, the opponent’s horseman moves first as it is the unit with the best movement skill.
After that, one of our spearfighters is selected automatically.
The tactical consideration is to put the spearfighters in the front, if possible with appropriate field bonuses, and leave the vulnerable slingers protected in the second row.
Field bonuses for our spearfighters are provided by bushes and especially trees. Unfortunately, there are not always as many in the right place as we would like.
Only the stone thrower can already fire at one of the opponent’s warriors.
You can see how the opponent’s horseman is not attacking one of our spearfighters, but a slinger. Horsemen have a bonus against ranged units, i.e. slingers. Therefore, a single blow is enough to almost defeat our slinger.
Now one of our spearfighters can attack the horseman. Due to its attack bonus against fast units, the spearfighter does a lot of damage.
Because of its defense bonus against fast units, the spearfighter takes very little damage from the rider’s subsequent counterattack.
A second Spearfighter then defeats the Rider with ease.
Instead of using the third spearfighter to land a potential blow, we leave him with the team.
Otherwise, he would immediately become the target of all enemy units and they would then not run towards us as quickly as desired.
Such strategic considerations make the difference to automatic combat. This is why manual combat often performs so much better.
Important note: If we have not moved the full possible number of hexes with a fighter, it remains selected for the time being so that we can move on again if necessary. But we want to stay on this tile and therefore tap on the button ‘Next Turn’.
Being a faster unit, the enemy spear fighter now ventures forward to us. Although slingers have bonus against warriors and not against spearfighters, we leave this one spearfighter to the slingers. This way they don’t have to put themselves in danger.
After that, the opponent’s warriors meet us halfway.
Attacking a warrior with a spearfighter is dangerous. As known, the warrior has heavy bonuses against the spear fighter. To compensate this at least a little bit, we use the bushes on a tile next to the warrior.
Because of the bushes, our spear fighter can withstand a bit more of the expected counterattack of the warrior.
The second spearfighter has nothing to fear now, because units of the lower ages can only hit back on their first hit.
The rest of each turn they have to sit idly by. Unfortunately, I miss with my big fingers. This causes me to take another hit unnecessarily. As expected, we need a third hit to defeat this first warrior.
Our most important weapon against the warriors is yet to come: the slingers. They actually need only 2 hits to defeat a warrior.
If I hadn’t missed once in the middle, we wouldn’t have lost the one slinger. But we will cope with that.
We hope this first glimpse into manual combat has already made clear the principle.
Of course, we’ll go into this in more depth in the next guides.
Click here to read part 5 of our starting guide series, on bananas and some more on manual fighting!
Hi, I’m Lucas – a passionate and experienced Forge of Empires player and the editor here at ForgeofEmpiresTips.com. If I am not playing the game, I am learning more about the game’s new and upcoming features or writing strategy guides here.