This is a quick put together guide on the beginning land troops: slinger, swordsman, and phalanx...basically explaining their place in each situation. There are two scenarios long-run army building for future attacks and defence... and emergency building. Emergency building is highly situational dependent, so I am not covering that here. If you want just the Conclusion and core point just skip to the end. So building for the long run. As in you plan to attack/pillage in the future and want your town to be defended to stop/prevent attacks on your cities. For this I am specifically focusing on upkeep costs, because I am assuming you have the time to gather resources and the time to train.

So first off I want to go over the attributes of each unit, but a quick explanation on upkeep costs. There is a sort of hidden upkeep cost, in that to train a unit it takes up citizen. Those citizen now no longer produce 4 gold per turn, so I include this in the hourly upkeep cost. For example the slinger upkeep cost is 8 but it’s real-upkeep is 16 due to the two lost citizens. Only variable thrown into this is troop movement in which only upkeep is doubled not real-upkeep.


UPKEEP = U // REAL-UPKEEP= R-U// MOVEMENT COST= M

Slinger: U=8 // R-U=12 // M=20
Swords: U=16 // R-U=24 // M=40
Phalanx: U=24 // R-U=40 // M=64


And now for stats comparison. Now I don’t know exactly how combat is calculated, but I am going to assume attack is only for attacks and defence is only for defence...if this is not true this assumption at least will give an approximate summary. (see last note) Only other mystery stat is endurance...which only comes into play if there are multiple rounds of combat. More endurance you have the less the units stats are effected next round. For example if a slinger and a phalanx both go into round 2 combat the slinger might have half his attack power lost while the phalanx might only have a quarter gone.

Number in parenthesis is with bonus attribute applied.

Slinger: A=7 // D=7 // E=10
Swords: A=18(23.5) // D=12 // E=12
Phalanx: A=24 // D=40(52) // E=14



CONCLUSION:

So looking at this data, the troops pretty much end up doing what they say they should do. Swordsman is for attacking, Phalanx is for defending, and slinger is that low level unit that becomes obsolete in all areas. Some interesting notes.

* A swordsman and phalanx have pretty much the same attack. Swordsman is 0.5 lower. However the upkeep for attacking with a phalanx is 24 more gold. So for the price of 2 phalanx you can have 3 swordsmen. That is 48 vs. 70.5 attack. Phalanx has 2 more endurance but I don’t think it will make it a better option to send to attack. So send them if you have them sitting around and the extra gold, but know swordsmen are better for attack.

*In Defence nothing beats the phalanx. No competition at all, these guys should be your main defence.

*A word on Slingers: It takes 3 slingers to get close to the attack power of a swordsman, and it is still below. Yet 3 slingers cost 20 gold more to attack vs 1 swordsman. It takes around 7.5 slingers to match the defensive power of a phalanx and cost 50 more gold.

THIS GUIDE IS ONLY A GENERAL IDEA OF COMBAT

I am sure combat is more complex then I make it out to be. As in there might be both attack and defence phases involved in a attack. In which case a balanced army is important i.e If you are attacking: swords for the attack phase and phalanx for the counter-attack phase of the round. Also I am sure the amount of troops plays a factor which gives slingers more merit. If anyone has any observations to add to all this please do.

Link to how doctors and chefs work: http://board.ikariam.org/thread.php?threadid=18995