Why Are Players Building 100s of Millions of T1 Troops?

 

If you've seen a players with HUGE numbers of T1 calvary lately you might be wondering what the point of it all is. Maybe you've seen a player with hundreds of millions or even billions of T1 cavalry sitting in their castles.

Introduction to T1 Mounted Walls

If you've seen a players with HUGE numbers of T1 calvary lately you might be wondering what the point of it all is. Maybe you've seen a player with hundreds of millions or even billions of T1 cavalry sitting in their castles.

Why the heck are they building so many and what benefits does it add?

What's the Point of Massive T1 Mounted Walls?

The #1 attack march of Evony players right now is ranged (archer) marches. The targeting behavior of this march first attacks and kills mounted troops as a priority, then starts killing archers while also splashing damage on ground units.

However, as long as cavalry of any tier remains inside the defending castle, archer troops will not be targetted. Essentially, it's a meat shield. 

How to Set up T1 Mounted Walls?

There are two components to setting up a T1-mounted wall to make it effective:

1. A ton of T1 (and additional tiers) of cavalry
2. Flat refines on your wall general and wall dragon (if you have one)

As a the main purpose of this tactic is to create a meat shield, flat mounted HP is your priority stat and can be found on both the helmet and the pants refines. 

As pictured here, Courageous Ares Leg Armor is especially valuable as it also provides percentage mounted HP refines along with siege attack and other helpful stats that outweigh debuffs from  Achaemenidae armor.

Note that Civilization Gear armor has the same maximum stats for flats as Ares/Achaemenidae armor.

Why One Troop Type?

Players have limited refines on their wall general and thus should focus their efforts on a single T1 troop type to maximize the potential that flat refines have on one troop type.

While a T1 troop wall can still have an impact without a large amount of flat refines, having flat refines on a troop type will greatly amplify the impact of that troop.

For example, T1 mounted have base HP of 400. This one piece of armor pictured above increases that HP by 6,948, resulting in an equivalent 1700% mounted HP with just one armor piece.

Additional T2 through T5 tiers (or higher) can also be built to increase the time it takes for enemies to get through the wall, but T1 have the lowest RSS cost and base stats, meaning flat refines have the greatest impact on T1 troops for RSS spent.

What about other T1 Troop Types?

Some of you may be wondering if other T1 troop types would have a similar impact. The below chart (uncredited - if it's yours let me know) details the usage of other T1 troops, which again if refined properly can be helpful in different scenarios.

Is T1 cavalry effective by itself?

Although T1 Cavalry can do decently well by itself, as a meat wall generally these troops do not do much damage to anything other than ground units. 

Against archer and pretty much every other rally type, having a large amount of siege and archers will create a back line to deal damage freely as enemy troops engage with your T1 cav wall.

How to beat a T1 wall

Other than simply just heavily overpowering a T1 wall, the best way to beat a T1 wall you may have discovered based on the chart above. Against siege rallies almost every T1 wall will fall short since siege hits backline without ever engaging with the front line wall.

After the backline is dead, meat shields can quickly be taken out by the counter troop type.

Conclusions

Building tons of T1 is a good strategy for a trap keep or very large players. It's not a bulletproof solution to defense but it's an effective way to keep enemies from using their most common and often strongest march to damage you.

Got questions about T1 walls? How many T1 have you built? Comment below!