State of Survival: Kill Stage – Event guide

The Kill Stage a.k.a. Kill Event (or KE) starts on Friday and goes on till the end of Saturday. The main idea is very simple – killing enemy troops. The more you kill – the more points you will score. Let me explain how to do that with minimum losses on your side.

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Overview

So what does it mean, killing troops? When you attack someone (or vice versa), your troops can enter one of 3 states:

• Lightly wounded – will recover as soon as your rally returns to the HQ;
• Wounded (heavily wounded in the event description) – will get into the hospital and needs to be healed.
  • If the hospital is full:
    • 70% of your troops will appear in the enlistment office;
    • 30% will be lost forever;
• Lost – troops are forever. Can happen either when you attack someone or if you were defending with your hospital full.

Check battle report for details:

KE has 2 forms of participation.

Defensive (passive) phase

Firstly, if you’re not planning or not able to play actively during the event, just put on 2-/8-/24-hours shield (a.k.a bubble a.k.a Peace Flare) when you’re absent. I do recommend it overnight if you think your HQ can get attacked.

Second thing, make sure you don’t have any troops out farming. Since you don’t take all troops to a farming spot, but mostly 1/4 or 1/3 of your march capacity, attacking your farm tile during KE will be a priority for all participants.

Optionally, you can utilize a 2-/8-/24-h Recon Jammer – i.e. when you hoarded a lot of resources for the next HQ upgrade and under risk of being plundered.

You can play the entire event passively just refreshing your shield every X hours or asking your alliance mates to reinforce your HQ in case of attack.

Offensive (active) phase

As soon as your shield is not active, you can attack someone and be attacked too. Remember, you can’t activate shield if you just cancelled one – there’s a 30-minutes cooldown and you need to be especially careful here.

Before you start

• I would recommend switching your Chief Talents into the WAR mode while playing offensively. Switch the back into ECO if you need to heal;
• For Alliance Leaders / Deputies: make sure you have enough shield in the store (older states);
• For Alliance Members: make sure you saved enough silver coins to buy shields from the shop if needed (older/newer states);
• You can buy shields via Biocaps. Go to your HQ -> Settlement Buffs -> Combat -> Peace Flare. 8h will cost your 1200 and 24h will be 4800 biocaps, respectively.
• Same applies for Recon Jammers. Once deployed, the enemy won’t be able to see the number of troops and resources in your HQ.
• Again, make sure you have no troops farming for the duration of the event.
• The event lasts for 2 days. Event rating is calculated based on the number of points scored for the whole duration.
• Rewards can be obtained in case you scored enough points (immediately) and on the next day if you managed to get into Top-50.

Scoring points

In order to score points during the event, you need to kill (make them wounded or lost) ANY troops. The higher tier of troops you kill, the more points you’ll score. See table below for the exact number per each tier.

Since the event usually starts on Friday and lasts till the end of Saturday, I’d recommend earning most of your points during the Capital Clash. Even if your alliance is not participating, you can send few rallies from your current spot either to the Capital directly or to one of the 4 towers around it.

Safely

If you don’t want to wait till Saturday or you’re planning to get top-50, these are the most popular (read the lowest risk) options to get points:

1. Attacking other players’ farming a.k.a tile hitting. Easiest one and 100% without any loses;
2. Attacking your farming account’s HQ without hiding troops in the bunker. I’m pretty sure everyone has a second account created for farming resources for your main one? Just make sure you don’t have any strong troops inside (that’s also a reason why you shouldn’t upgrade troops on your farming account).
3. Reinforcing your ally’s HQ. If you see your alliance member getting attacked, just send your troops to him. You can do that even while your HQ is under the shield.

Risky

Now if you want to play with fire (read willing to lose some troops).

Please note troops lost during attacking enemy settlement don’t appear in the Enlistment Office – they are lost forever.

1. Attacking weaker players with a significant (>10) HQ level difference. Commonly you just find weaker alliances, port to their territory and hit few HQs. Ideally, if you have some alliance member online to heal your wounded troops because you don’t want to use speedups.
2. Attacking conflicting alliances’ farming accounts. Same as #1, but with high risk/high reward. High risk because you can lose more troops, high reward because you can get a lot of resources plundered.
3. Attacking conflicting alliances. Going solo against strong ones would a suicide mission even for P2W players, but a group of 5-6 players can do really well and act quickly before firing all the alarms.
   I’d recommend doing this in case:
   • You have an upcoming Capital Clash fight and you’d like to weaken your competitors. In this case, you can rally a specific strong member or a few weaker members;
   • You are planning to win a piece of territory and will take down their towers as well;
   • You’d like to revenge for an earlier conflict 😛

Heroes Choice

The overall rule is simple – the higher Hero Tier you have available, the better you will perform.

Offensive

In case you’d like to attack someone, 2 memorable notes here:

• P2P: Jeb is very good because he decreases Enemies Settlement Troop Lethality, meaning less of your troops will be lost forever.
• F2P: Eva is better than Sarge due to her 2^nd skill providing a boost for the 1^st one.

Defensive

If you’re looking to defend your settlement, make sure you place the right heroes on your Barricade. Any Hero having “Patrol” specialization is good:

In case you don’t have listed heroes, just assign your strongest ones.

Troops Choice

The higher Tier you have available, the better for you! Not only they do more damager, but higher tiers are also harder to kill due to more Health and Defense. You can check the details here.

Offensive: never put less Infantry thinking you will do more damage. You will only get more of your Hunters and/or Riders killed or wounded! You can add more Infantry if you really know what you’re doing. Otherwise, stick to 1:1:1 proportion.

Defensive: your own HQ – 1:1:1. Reinforcing your ally’s HQ – 1:1:1 or 2:1:1.

Saving your troops

If your shield is down and for some reason you can’t protect your settlements while there’s an incoming attack, you can avoid getting your troops wounded/lost by doing one (or all) of the following tricks:

1. Blast Shelter – easiest and most obvious. Just hide as many as you can. Please note there’s a 5 minutes cooldown if you decided to take them out and hide again.
2. Starting a rally – all troops assigned to rally are invulnerable!
3. Launching Troop upgrades in your Barracks, Range and/or Garage. Similar to #2, these troops will become invulnerable.
4. Sending troops to your alliance member’s HQ (reinforcement).
5. Sending troops to a farm tile. Remember to recall them on time!
6. Using Advanced Relocator. Jumping to another spot will cancel any rally towards your HQ.

Note: Random / Alliance Relocator won’t work if you’re being rallied.

All options above will leave your HQ empty – any resources above the Warehouse threshold will be plundered during enemies attack.

Points Calculation

Rewards

TBD

Some (PRO) tips

• Batch healing can be necessary during heavy fights.
  
• Usually, event rewards (even top-3!) places are not worth the risk of losing an excessive amount of troops.
  
• KE is a good opportunity to “zero” your opponent – attack his HQ till his hospital is full and continue attacking till you kill all remaining troops. Please note you can’t literally zero someone because 70% of the troops will still appear in the opponent’s Enlistment Office.

Special thanks to

• kole#1052 who gave me an idea to write this guide 🙂