Commanders, who leads your attacks and what the Assassin is good for
The commander is the attacking counterpart to the castellan. He carries equipment, leads the army out of the castle, and determines how hard the attack hits. How many commanders you have at all is determined by the Encampment; what they can do is determined by the equipment you gear them with. This overview covers commander counts, their bonuses, equipment sources, and their link to attack waves and VIP, plus a section on the Assassin, the fastest attacking unit in the game.
What a commander is and what he does
The commander is an equipment carrier, exactly like the castellan, just with the opposite role. The castellan sits at home and holds the castle, the commander goes out: he leads an attack on a target on the map as well as defensive support sent to a fellow player, to your own camp, or to an outpost. On his own he can't do anything; his entire value lies in the equipment you put on him.
Before sending out an army, you choose which commander to use. If you don't pick anything, the game automatically grabs the first free one. That's exactly why it pays to rename your commanders by role: melee attack, ranged attack, support, loot. Otherwise you're hunting through the list by icon, and under pressure you'll regularly pick the wrong one.
The commander uses the same six slots as the castellan: armor, weapon, helmet, artifact, appearance (skin) and hero. The game data does distinguish the carrier type, though: commander pieces are tagged as general, castellan pieces as baron, and they can't be swapped. Of all dropped equipment, roughly 53% goes to commanders and 47% to castellans.
How many commanders you have by Encampment level
The number of commanders you can have deployed at once depends entirely on the level of your Encampment. Up to level 4 the Encampment is built using regular player levels, from level 5 upward it only takes legendary levels.
| Encampment | Requirement | Max. Commanders |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | level 2 | 3 |
| 2 | level 15 | 6 |
| 3 | level 29 | 9 |
| 4 | level 42 | 12 |
| 5 | legendary 1 | 15 |
| 6 | legendary 2 | 18 |
| 7 | legendary 3 | 21 |
| 8 | legendary 4 | 23 |
| 9 | legendary 5 | 26 |
| 10 | legendary 6 | 29 |
| 11 | legendary 7 | 32 |
| 12 | legendary 8 | 35 |
| 13 | legendary 9 | 40 |
| 14 | legendary 10 | 45 |
| 15 | legendary 11 | 50 |
The English wiki lists 35 commanders at Encampment 12 as the cap. But the game data actually goes up to Encampment level 15 with 50 commanders, so the cap has moved higher with later legendary levels. In practice, a regular player up to level 42 ends up with twelve commanders, and only gets more once they reach the legendary phase of the game.
The bonuses a commander carries
Bonuses add up across all equipped pieces. The table below shows the main commander effects and the highest value the game data allows for them on a single piece of equipment.
| Bonus | Maximum per piece |
|---|---|
| Vanguard combat strength | +20% |
| Flank combat strength | +20% |
| Support unit strength | +20% |
| Unit survivability | +30% |
| Loot from player attacks | +20% |
| Experience from attacks | +20% |
| Scouting range | +25% |
| Army's food consumption | -30% |
| Resource deposit mining | +25% |
| Extra attack waves | skin pieces only |
How many bonuses a piece can carry at all is governed by its rarity. Common equipment has only the main bonus (0 secondary), rare has 1 secondary, and epic, legendary and unique each have 2 secondary bonuses. Sell value scales with that too: 25 coins for common, 250 for rare, 1,000 for epic, 6,000 for legendary and 12,000 for unique. Hero pieces have their own scale, with values of 30, 300, 1,250, 7,500 and 15,000.
On top of that, there are two ten-tier military achievement series for collecting quality equipment, Well-equipped and Armed to the teeth. One awards up to 60 achievement points, the other up to 75, and the final tiers ask for thousands of pieces of the given rarity.
Where to get commander equipment
There are plenty of sources, and most of them are free:
- Attacks on NPC targets. Equipment drops from almost everything, with a few exceptions: the Khan's Camp, the Samurai Camp, the Berimond Watchtower and the Daimyo's Castle don't drop any.
- The Forge (forging). You can craft a new piece of a given quality out of unneeded pieces of that same quality.
- Buying from the Equipment Merchant, the Master Blacksmith and native villages.
- Quests and daily tasks.
- Relic equipment for coins or rubies, or by hitting the relic equipment icon or landing the jackpot on the Wheel of Unimaginable Riches.
- The War Chest. Completing quests earns you relic pieces: 3 quests for each of the first five pieces, 5 quests for each of the last five, the selection is random.
Pay special attention to the combination with VIP: the top tier gives +80% chance for better equipment, so farming barons with active VIP has a completely different yield. If you're collecting relic sets, time your purchases and chests for when your VIP is running.
Commanders, attack waves and VIP
How many units and tools you get into a single attack is determined by the number of waves. The base comes from your player level: level 1 to 12 gives one wave, 13 to 36 two, 37 to 50 three, and 51 and up four. Legendary players with the Hall of Legends can reach up to six waves.
On top of that base, skin pieces equipped on a commander add extra waves. It's the only slot that carries this effect, and the only way to add waves outside of leveling up.
VIP status fills in the rest of the equation. At tier ten you get +50% attack march speed, +40% glory from attacks, and the already mentioned +80% chance for better equipment. VIP also unlocks extra premium commanders every day: 25 at VIP 5, 50 at VIP 6, 100 at VIP 7, 150 at VIP 8, 200 at VIP 9 and 300 at VIP 10.
Add it all up: the commander decides your army's strength and survival, level and skins decide the number of waves, VIP decides speed and rewards. Anyone who only optimizes one of these three things is leaving the rest on the table.
The Assassin, a fast target capturer
The Assassin is a ranged attacking unit built around a single trait, march speed. He was added to the game on October 1, 2013, and around 2014 his speed was increased from 40 to 70. Everything else is the price paid for that: he has low loot capacity and high food consumption.
That makes him a poor choice for plundering resources, but ideal for capturing targets, where it comes down to who arrives first:
- resource villages,
- alliance monuments,
- laboratories,
- royal towers,
- resource islands in the Stormy Isles event.
The other use case is surprise attacks: the short march time doesn't give the opponent time to bring in defensive support or heal up their units.
His melee counterpart is the Demon Slayer. Both units used to be exchangeable for talismans during the King of Thorns event; that event is gone from the game now, so today there are only four ways to get an Assassin: through the daily login bonus, through special ruby offers, for reaching 35,000 power points (one-time), and for inviting friends, three of whom reach level 30 (also one-time).