General Principles

Knowing what generals to keep and what generals to get rid of is an important topic as you start building your keep. It is a complicated question. Most of us will never have as many skill books, rune stones, general fragments, or blood of ares as we would like. Hard decisions need to be made, and the consequences of a poor decision can be intimidating.

If you look my sources¹, you will see that there is a 80 to 90 percent overlap in the information they provide in generals, but there is some disagreement between them. Use whichever guide you feel you understand best.

When picking your generals, you need to consider several things.

1. Since covenants have come out, the generals that have them massively outperform those who do not. You will be at a severe disadvantage if your primary general does not have a covenant, and/or if you cannot activate it.
2. If you play long enough, you will get premium generals. You may not, however, be able to ever fully ascend these premium generals, or fully activate their covenants. This matters a great deal when picking your main general, but assistants are comparatively easy to replace, until you are ready to invest rune stones in an assistant general.
3. If you save up your premium general tokens before using them until you have at least 75 and preferably close to 100, you should be able to ascend the newest general(s) available to at least four stars, and if you are very lucky, five stars. However, getting that many tokens will be a once or twice a year occurance for free players and light spenders. Pick whom you use these tokens on very carefully.
4. Following up on the above, a general that you can get fragments for may be theoretically weaker than some other general, but if you cannot get fragments for the other general, the one you can is in practice stronger.
5. Most dragons are really only available to paying players. If you play long enough you will probably, eventually get your wings, and after that, your second level wonder. For a Free to Play player, this may be over a year. However, that means 4 dragons. You are unlikely to ever have any others. If a general requires a dragon, do you have one for him/her? Will you ever? If so, when? Who will you use in the mean time?
6. Rune Stones are incredibly scarce. You don’t actually need most of your generals to be fully maxed out however. You can get noticeable benefit from a general with 3 purple specialties if you pick the right generals. Pick one general to max out, either your main monster general or your main PVP general. Forget going beyond purple for the rest until that one is done. If some other general needs rune stones to be useful, consider an alternative.

While I have seen generic generals that by random chance have attractive attributes (such as ore exploitation as a specialty), these are the exception. Also note, that the advice below represents lessons learned, things I wish I had understood months ago.

In general, unless you have more slots for generals than you know what to do with, stick to Historic Gold Generals. The attributes on these will be better, the skills more diverse and stronger, the specialties better.

Not all Gold Historic Generals are worth getting. Some of them, compared to others, almost look like Purple Historic Generals. You still need to be discerning.

For many of them, the value depends on your style of game play and your strategy of warfare. You cannot be strong everywhere, so why bother having the theoretical best pair for all four troop types? Odds are you can only actually max out one of these anyway. What your really need are generals that are good enough while you work on your priorities.

What Generals You Need

As you look at the ordered list below, realize that you may not have the general that you want to work on today. In other words, plan rather than accept compromises based on the generals you randomly happen to get first.

1. Decide if you care about running rallies yourself, or if you are content to only join them. If you do, you need a good monster general pair. This is different than a mounted PVP pair (the generals you pick for each role are different). If you care about running rallies, this general and h./her assistant needs to be your priority. (2 generals)

2. Decide on make-up of your main PVP march. This will determine your main PVP general and main PVP assistant. If you run rallies, this will be the second general you look at. If you do not, this will be the first. (2 generals)

3. Decide one troop type that you will (eventually) have a TON of.² This need not be the same as your main PVP march (particularly if you run rallies). You will someday use this as the bulk of your meat shield and the bulk of your keep’s defenses. Look for Wall Defense generals that complement this troop type. You need a main general and an assistant general. The main general will be the third general you max out. (2 generals)

4. Look for generals that are specialized as duty generals for your keep and other buildings. If you find one for a building that is too small to get a mayor, either use this general as a mayor for some other building or break him into fragments for later. (the number of generals needed grows with your keep size, assume a minimum of 8)

5. Look for generals that are specialized as “debuff” generals. These will be your sub city mayors. You have to be careful with these. If you do not plan on investing rune stones on these, they rate very differently than if you do plan on investing rune stones on them.³ (between 4 and 8 generals needed, depending on how many sub cities you have)

6. Look for Baibars and Queen Jindock. You will someday want five Theodo./Baibars and five Queen Jindock generals. Take your time finding these, but if you see one and you have slots available, do not pass them up. Use Theodora and Baibars to join rallies; use Jindock to gather. (10 generals)

Picking a Primary General

Now that we know more or less what we are watching for, how to pick those primary generals?

• If you look at the details on your general tokens, they each have lists of probabilities. Different tokens will have different probability lists, and these will change over time if you hang on to the token. Only pay attention to generals for whom you have many tokens where you have at least at 10% chance of getting that general.⁴
• Look for a general that has generous march size increase buffs. He or she should have a march size buff of at least 18% when you add up the main skill book, the specialties, ascending buffs, and covenant.
• Look for a general that has relatively few adjectives or adverbs on his or her buffs. Adjectives and adverbs like “Attacking,” “Marching,” “when rallying,” “to attack,” or “brings a dragon” will limit when you get to benefit from these buffs.
• Ideally wait a few days, ask other players who spend more how this general pairs with generals you already have. You do not want a general that is hard to find assistants for.
• If you get lucky this site can add the general to the comparison tables quickly. You can use the “Attacking” tables for your main PvP general pairs, and the PvM tables for your monster hunting pairs. Be aware that information about which generals conflict with which is almost never available for new generals, so the table will include some pairs that are not in fact usable.
• Fully activating a covenant requires that you get both the general you plan to use and at least two of the other three generals listed in the covenant fully cultivated, and up to at least level 30, and possibly as high as level 40. For some generals, the mechanics of the particular generals’ basic attributes means that you need all four generals, and/or to level them up even higher. DO NOT pick a general if he or she requires, for the covenant activation, other generals that are incredibly rare and expensive. It will certainly require premium generals, but some are much harder to get than others.

Picking an Assistant General

A free player will in general pick the best assistant he or she has by chance from the list of generals compatible with the primary general chosen. The harsh limitations of playing for free are brutal.

A light spender should disable covenants and specialty four for the assistant in the relevant general pairs table to help him/her pick appropriate assistants. Set the specialties for the assistant to either three purple or, at most, three orange.

A medium spender should set the specialties to three orange, and can consider setting them to three gold and the fourth to purple or orange, but should not set them to four gold. The covenant should be active on both the primary and secondary general, but probably not maxed out on the assistant; set it to either ‘Faith’ or maybe “Honor’ level.

Remember, that ascending an assistant can help activate a covenant some but

1. is not an efficient way of doing so
2. does not help you in any other way.