Protect Your TFF! (Total Fighting Force)
A Guide to Soldier Management

Your TFF is one of the most important aspects of the game, so I want to make sure everyone knows how it all works.
Your TTF shown is the total sum of all Attack/Defense/Untrained Soldiers, and Attack/Defense/Untrained Mercenaries. It does not include coverts (spies and sentries)
First off Attack, Defense, and Untrained Soldiers all give you 2 gold per minute. 
Spy and Sentries will give you .8 gold per minute.
Mercenaries give you no gold, but can hold weapons for you and can be bought at-will.

Why Mercs?
Mercenaries die first during attacks and defends and you can buy them as often as you need. Your true soldiers can only be received by clicking and conscription, so they are much harder to get. Plus they give you gold!
When buying mercs, untrained are the cheapest and generally the best to use. They are used in both attack and defense, but don’t provide much of a bonus. Attack and Defense mercs on the other hand count the same towards stats when holding weapons (or not) as attack and defense soldiers so they can be in their place. The only downside to mercs is that they raise your TFF which gives you less targets to farm (I explain below) and they don’t provide any TBG. Other than that, they are always great to have! You can buy mercs from the merc pool at any time. Mercs can only make up 1/3 of your TFF. You buy from the same pool of mercs as everyone else so you will notice it empty at times. It refreshes every 3 minutes though, I believe.

I personally have only defense mercs and no defense soldiers as they count the same towards DA when holding weapons, and if I get mass-raided down that far, I can just buy the mercs back. I also keep a good bit of untrained mercs for attacking and getting attacked.


I’m going to include two examples to help clarify the above. .
First: Attacks (you attacked)
During attacks FROM you, troops die in this order:
Untrained Mercs
Attack Mercs
Untrained Soldiers
Attack Soldiers
You have 1000 attack soldiers, and 10,000 untrained soldiers. NO mercs. 
Your soldiers CHARGE into battle and unfortunately 200 did not come home. 
You would lose untrained soldiers first leaving you 9,800 untrained plus 1000 attack. 
You would also lose 400 gold per minute. If you had mercs they would have died instead and you would have lost no TBG.
So you can see having a merc buffer is essential to protecting your true soldiers.

Second: Defends (attacks on you)
During attacks ON you, troops die in this order:
Untrained Mercs
Defense Mercs
Untrained Soldiers
Defense Soldiers
You also lose a portion of your spies and sentries when you’re attacked. There is no way to prevent this loss but you can reduce it by having less coverts, or a higher DA than your attackers SA, although that’s not always an option. 
The same example above can be applied here: if you don’t have any untrained/defense mercs to sacrifice themselves in GLORIOUS BATTLE in your honor, you will lose untrained soldiers (or trained defense soldiers) when attacked. This is why it is imperative to keep some untrained mercs to protect any untrained soldiers you have. 
Keeping up with training at first can be difficult (always train into attack), as it is expensive. Even I admit to not always being on top of this, but if you get behind and are not protected by plenty of mercs, you could be raided and lose ALL of your untrained soldiers and possibly a chunk of your TBG depending on how many you lose.

Key Points
-The only way to lose attack soldiers is to attack, so it’s always best to store your soldiers there and retrain later if necessary. Keep some untrained mercs to lose while you’re out there slaying. Be sure to keep an eye on their numbers, as I have lost attack soldiers because I’ve run out of untrained mercs while slaying before.
-If you have 0 untrained soldiers and 0 defense soldiers when attacked (all trained into attack soldiers) you won’t lose any soldiers at all. Just mercs and coverts.

Next we’ll go over TFF sizes and attacking.
-If your TFF is 1,000 and you attack someone with 2,000 TFF holding 50mil, you will receive 100 percent of the gold they are holding (all 50mil) if you are successful with your attack.
-If you have 2,000 TFF and attack someone with 1,000 TFF holding 50mil, you will receive a random percentage of the total 50mil. It’s in the range of 60-90 percent and is random with each attack.
So always try to attack bigger armies so you can take the full amount they’re holding. 
As the era wears on you will make the decision on whether banking with a high TFF or slaying with a lower TFF appeals more or works better with your playstyle. ALWAYS build up at the beginning though, as you can train down or kill off your soldiers at will, but building up takes time and effort.

All of this is most important at the beginning of the era as TBG is the best way to start building your account. So be sure to click as much as possible early on. Each click gives 10 morale which turns into 10 untrained soldiers. And you can click through the list twice. Right now that means over 3000 clicks, so over 30k soldiers which would net out to 60k more tbg every day now! It’s not as impressive as this at the beginning, but it’s a noticeable effect. If you need help installing the clicker scripts, or have questions about them, let me know. They will help IMMENSELY and you’ll be through your clicks in no time!


So I’ve talked with many different players about putting together a guide for getting started since I started myself. This can be a difficult task as every player has their own goals, and  amount of commitment they are willing or able to put into this game. That being said, I will put forth my own strategy and suggestions using my experience from the past few eras.

Choosing your race
There are six races to choose from, and each has its own bonuses including stat and TBG boosts. Remember that you are not tied to what you choose at the beginning, we received 3 free race changes this era, and you can buy extra with experience if you need them. So you can change races throughout the era as you wish. 
What should you start as then? I, personally will choose Orcs for the extra SA bonus at the beginning, although Elves get a boost to SA  and spy so that’s not a bad choice either. At the beginning of the era, the TBG bonuses and troop loss bonuses just aren’t strong enough to start as those races in my opinion, and a DA boost won’t help you build your account. 
So I will start Orcs and build SA as fast as possible.
Why is Strike Action important early on?

Conquests! 
Conquests give experience, and experience can be used for a number of things we’ll get to. First let’s get the most out of conquests with a little math. You may have noticed that it says (x/15) depending on how many you have completed. Don’t let the 15 fool you, you can repeat conquest for experience as much as you want! You get 50xp to start and it goes down by 1exp as you do more. In fact at the current rate that you can trade experience for turns (780exp for 320turns), you can continue trading turns and knocking out conquest until they only give you 25xp (over 100 times each!) and you will come out with more experience than you started with. If you just have extra turns and don’t trade, you can do conquest even lower (until 13exp) and get more experience than from slaying. Let’s move on to what experience is used for.

Experience
Experience can be used for many different things. I’ll try to list out what you can and should spend it on below.
-Technologies: Start getting these right away, they boost ALL four stats by 5 percent at first, and go up from there. ALWAYS invest in Tech as it makes your gold go further when buying weapons.
-Economics: As long as I’ve been playing Econ has always been underpowered. With a 4 month era coming up, you could argue that getting the first few wouldn’t hurt if you max the exp per minute upgrade fast enough. But as tempting as Econ can be, I always end up regretting using the exp that I could have spent on techs or traded for slaying. So personally, I wouldn’t get any. 
-Safe Upgrades: If you plan on having a larger TFF, then getting the safe upgrades is a must. It’s free gold that cannot be touched and each upgrade permanently ups your TBG by 5 percent.
-Trading for Turns: This is a great way to build up your account if you have extra time and experience laying around. When they rolled it out you could trade and slay almost infinitely, but they have adjusted the trade rates to fix that. It’s still fairly cheap and a good way to get some extra gold, or run through the conquests.
-Trading for Troops: In my opinion the rate is still too low to make this viable, plus with the 10x morale from clicking I went over earlier there are better ways to get soldiers.
-Commander and Race Change: You get 2 commander changes and 3 race changes at the start of the era. You shouldn’t have to change commanders, and unless you make a mistake or change races often, you may never use this. But it’s here if you need either.
Now that we see how it can be used, how else can you get experience? 
At this time you get 120exp from each successful attack on the battlefield. You can also receive up to 5exp for a successful sabotage mission, but that can only be relied on during war and we’re going to try to stay away from that for now. The other way is the experience per minute upgrade.

Upgrades
Let’s go over the upgrades you can get, to give an idea of which to go for first.
There are THREE “time sensitive” upgrades. As in, the sooner you get them, the more of an advantage you’ll have over others that do not. Those are:
-Experience per Minute: This is THE most important upgrade to get early on. As of now it goes up to 5exp/min. Whether you’re on playing every minute or just log on once a week, that experience will continue to accumulate. This will allow you to trade more for slaying and stay ahead on getting techs. 
-Conscription: As I’ve said before, troops are more easily lost than gained, so this upgrade is important to help maintain your army or build it further with clicking. The faster it’s maxed, the more troops you will be receiving compared to other players, so this is important as well, especially if you want to get big. NOTE that higher Tech unlocks make this upgrade cheaper.
-Safe Upgrade: This uses exp rather than gold for the upgrade, but the sooner you get it, the more you’ll make by the end of the era. How hard you push this should depend on how much you plan on growing your TFF, as it gets expensive and you could spend the exp to slay instead. Balance upgrading this with tech as the era ramps up to stay ahead.
(More about the safe): Every turn 5% of your TBG will be deposited into your Safe until it reaches 3 Billion. This is extra gold, it's based on your base TBG so not including the race bonus. If you're going to go for a big TFF then the upgrades are essential to get as early as possible. This era was only 3 months so I only went to 25 percent, but for a 4 month era I would max it at 30. Right now I make 1.8bil a day just in my safe. The only catch is you have to empty it, you can’t choose how much to take out for an upgrade. You have to be careful early era if you're using your safe for the more expensive upgrades as other players will watch your safe as well and wait for you to pull it. Also, it will only store up to 3bil as it says. It will stop funding it after it goes one TBG over.
-Technology: Balance buying tech upgrades with trading for slaying to maintain a top account
-Economics: Should probably pass on these as the experience could be used better
-Banking and Stats
Now we’ll  look further into how the stats/upgrades work together and best banking practices.
First off, what is “banking”? Banking refers to storing gold you’ve either stolen from another player or have accumulated yourself into weapons. Either to sell for upgrades later or to increase stats. We’ll focus on storing for upgrades since that should be your focus for the first part of the era. When storing to sell later always buy SA or DA weapons as they sell back at 80 percent value, as opposed to the 70 percent you get back from spy and sentry weapons. Early in the era, I would bank almost entirely in SA while putting any extra towards a little Spy. Storing in DA works as well, but when you are attacked (and you will be) you’ll have to spend gold to repair those stored. I personally store in DA from time to time, but it’s up to you.
So if I’m storing in SA at the beginning of the era, which weapon should I choose?
Being Orcs, I will be storing in Wargs. For any other race, it’s the weapon that costs 50k gold. This weapon (for all races) gives the best gold-to-power value besides the Chariot and I’m always trying to rank. If you’re not very active, and even if you are, it can be hard to bank in that weapon at the start so don’t worry about choosing one that’s cheaper. If you’re going to sell it anyway, the value will be the same in the end. You can also bank less with cheaper weapons. But, if you’re going for an SA upgrade and don’t want to lose Stats, you could store in Wargs, and sell them when the boost from the upgrade would negate the amount you sold off. That way your SA will stay the same or be higher after the sell. There's no table for this as there are a few variables, but I will help individuals figure it out if they need it. The same strategy can be employed for DA upgrades, but not for Spy/Sentry as the loss in value when selling from there just isn’t worth it in my opinion.
When buying upgrades, YOU MUST sell the amount of weapons you need to buy the upgrade. It is impossible to get the more expensive ones buy slaying and holding. Someone WILL see it and take it. I would, and probably do. I wouldn't advise using this method unless you can upgrade in one hit. You have to store, then sell weapons to buy them, especially at the beginning of the era. You can save your safe for the last one or two, but early on it will build slow.
For Spy/Sentry upgrades you still need to store in SA/DA (or use safe) and just take the stat loss when you sell. I typically store this in DA, as that stat doesn't really matter unless you have top 5 or so. SA is too easy to build and the DA upgrades don't match the SA in power.

Let’s get on to the stats themselves
-Strike Action (SA): This is the stat you should be focused on most towards the beginning of the era. It is easy to build and the best to bank value into. Building it quickly allows you to complete the conquests and use that exp to upgrade further in tech. It also allows you to get out there on the battlefield and take that gold that should be yours anyway. When it comes to SA upgrades, get them as you bank (as explained above) and you’ll always be gaining in that stat. Look to upgrade this as long as it cost less than the exp/min upgrade as you should be getting that first.
-Defensive Action (DA): This is another good stat to bank in as value is sold back at 80 percent. Beyond that, this stat will not protect you much as SA is very easy to build and someone can always get through. It was said that this may be addressed, but we will have to wait and see. I’ll update if it does. As for upgrades here, focus on them LAST and buy them when you can hold enough to just get them.
-Spy Rating (SPY): This stat is used to see gold on the battlefield (BF) and for sabotage missions (sabs). If you plan on slaying, having a high spy allows you to see gold freely on the BF. The ratio for seeing gold outright is 2:1 -You need twice the spy of that persons sentry. (if you have 2mil Spy you can see anyone with 1mil Sentry or lower). In order to successfully recon someone the ratio is 1:5. (If you have 1mil Spy, you can recon someone with up to 5mil Sentry). The current sab ratio is 1:2 (With 1mil Spy you can sab up to 2mil Sentry) . These ratios may change next era, but it seems they may stay the same as of now. Upgrade this as it starts to seem affordable. 
If you have low Spy and decent SA, ask to have help finding hits. Myself or someone else would be glad to give you some targets to help build yourself up!
-Sentry Rating (Sentry):  This stat protects you from being seen and from sabs from other players. If you have a high TFF and make a good amount of TBG, this stat can help the low hitters from swinging at you. Most players are too lazy to recon and will just swing at what they can see. I wouldn’t push this stat too much at the beginning, but towards the middle and end it can help protect your account from rogues and new players.

To wrap it all up, I would suggest:
- Focus on SA to store value and knock out conquests for quick and easy exp
- Click as often as you can at the beginning, growing your army will increase your gold per minute 
- Number 1 priority should be maxing experience per minute (but get other upgrades along the way) 
- Use Exp to buy techs to increase your stats
- Don’t forget to BUY MERCS (untrained)
- Don’t waste Exp on Econ Upgrades