Advanced Chiefing Strategy

This page explains an advanced method for chiefing developed non-capital villages against active players. The method combines multiple believable targets, synchronized attacks from two or more villages, Great Celebrations, administrator redundancy, alliance cooperation and several post-capture options. The objective is not simply to reduce loyalty: it is to make the real operation difficult to identify and difficult to interrupt.

The Core Principle

Against an inactive village, chiefing is mostly mechanical: clear the village, remove the Residence, Palace or other administration building, and reduce loyalty to zero. Against an active player or organized alliance, information becomes just as important as raw army strength.

A strong operation therefore creates several plausible chiefing targets at once. Each target receives a similar visible attack pattern from the same attacking villages. Only one target contains the real hammer and administrators. The defender may recognize that a chiefing operation is happening, but should have difficulty deciding where the real hammer is going.

Administrator Strength by Tribe

Administrator loyalty reduction is a range rather than a fixed value. Planning around the average is dangerous; a serious operation should carry enough administrators to survive poor rolls.

Romans have a strong and comparatively reliable 20-30% range. Teutons, Gauls, Egyptians and Spartans have a narrower 20-25% range. Huns and Vikings can produce very strong individual loyalty hits but also have the widest variation at 15-30%.

How Many Administrators Can Be Prepared?

A powerful conventional solo setup is Village A with a Palace and three administrators, plus Village B with a Residence and two administrators: a potential 3 + 2 operation. Huns can use Command Centers to create 3 + 3 configurations across two villages, giving six Logades for the operation.

Great Celebrations: Treat Them as Part of the Attack

Great Celebrations should be active in every village that is sending administrators. This is one of the most important pre-launch checks because the celebration can improve the loyalty reduction of the administrators belonging to that village by up to 5 percentage points. If administrators are being sent from both A and B, run a Great Celebration in both A and B.

A Great Celebration in the defending village can reduce incoming loyalty damage by up to 5 percentage points, so an attacking and defending Great Celebration can effectively cancel one another. The celebration must be active when the battle occurs.

Example - Romans. Three Senators from Village A and two Senators from Village B provide five loyalty hits. With Great Celebrations active in both attacking villages, each Senator can reach roughly 25-35% against a target without a defensive Great Celebration. The point of carrying five Senators is not that all five should always be required; it is redundancy against poor loyalty rolls.

Select Multiple Believable Targets

Select at least five plausible targets where practical. Against one active player these may be several of their villages. Against an alliance, spread the apparent operation across similarly valuable villages belonging to several players.

• Target A - REAL

• Target B - Fake

• Target C - Fake

• Target D - Fake

• Target E - Fake

Every target should receive a similar visible attack structure. The defender should be forced to decide where to commit defence instead of being handed an obvious single target.

The Basic 4 + 4 Pattern

The foundation is four waves from Village A followed by four waves from Village B. The real target and the fake targets should initially resemble one another. Tight wave timing is essential: the clearing hammer and administrators should arrive in the same second where possible, with the B-village finishing wave in that same second or immediately after it.

Village A - The Hammer Village

Wave 1 - Clearing hammer

• Main offensive army

• Hero

• Rams

• Catapults

The hammer clears the defending army, removes the wall and destroys the administration building that would prevent conquest.

Against experienced players, target both Residence and Palace. A defender who recognizes the chiefing attempt can demolish the administration building that was previously scouted and construct the alternative. Using the two catapult targets for Residence and Palace may destroy one building unnecessarily, but greatly reduces the chance that a building switch causes the entire chiefing operation to fail. Adjust the targets where tribe-specific administration buildings are relevant.

Avoid unnecessary destruction beyond this. The objective is to capture a developed village, so preserving its economic infrastructure normally has more value than causing additional damage.

Wave 2 - Primary administrators

Send the main administrators immediately behind the hammer. Village A's administrator waves should carry a catapult so the entire A-side operation remains at catapult speed. This also provides insurance against an administration building being rebuilt or queued between waves.

Waves 3 and 4

The remaining waves maintain the pattern and provide additional insurance according to the operation. Keep all four A waves packed as tightly as possible.

Village B - Faster Finishing Administrators

Village B should use one ram in its relevant waves rather than a catapult. The important advantage is speed: Village A is deliberately travelling at catapult speed, while Village B can travel at ram speed.

• Village A: slower, therefore launched earlier.

• Village B: faster, therefore launched later.

• The objective is synchronized arrival, not synchronized launch.

Calculate the dispatch time so Village B catches Village A at the target. Ideally both operations arrive in exactly the same second. If that cannot be achieved reliably, Village B should arrive immediately afterwards - normally one second later, not before.

Timing rule: Never leave an unnecessary gap between the hammer and finishing administrators. A several-second gap can give an organized defender an opportunity to insert defence between the clearing wave and the conquest.

Defensive Escort on the Finishing Wave

The finishing administrator wave from B should carry meaningful defensive troops - potentially a few thousand infantry, depending on the stage of the server and the value of the target.

Once the village changes ownership, later waves are interacting with a village that now belongs to your side. A defensive escort protects surviving troops and immediately makes a counter-chief more difficult. It is especially valuable when the previous owner or their alliance may already have administrators prepared.

Building Convincing Fakes

Replicate the 4 + 4 pattern against the fake targets using cheap troops and the siege unit needed to reproduce the desired movement speed. The purpose is not damage; it is to make the incoming information look sufficiently similar that the defender cannot confidently identify the real target from the attack overview.

Do not repeat the exact same signature forever. Once an alliance has seen several identical operations, the pattern itself can become a clue. Controlled variation can include 4 + 4, 4 + 2, 2 + 4, deliberate one-second differences, or occasional larger gaps on fake targets. Keep multiple plausible targets, but avoid becoming mechanically predictable.

Tournament Square and Travel-Time Planning

Keep the Tournament Square setup suitable for both chiefing villages and calculate actual travel times rather than estimating. The deliberate catapult-speed A village and ram-speed B village are useful because A can be released first and B can be released later while still being aimed at the same arrival second.

Early-Game Cooperative A + B

You do not need to own the complete A + B setup yourself. Early in the server, one player may have the hammer while another has the administrators and expansion capacity. Combining the two allows advanced chiefing before either account could build the full system independently.

• Player 1 - A role: hammer, rams, catapults and any available administrators.

• Player 2 - B role: finishing administrators, Great Celebration and defensive escort.

Both players calculate around arrival time. The players do not need to launch together; they need their attacks to land in the correct order within the same second or immediately adjacent seconds.

Late-Game Multi-Player Operations

The concept scales beyond one A and one B. Late-game operations can use 2 x A and 2 x B villages, with roles changing between players and operations. This increases administrator capacity and also prevents the same two villages from becoming an obvious signature.

Offensive + Defensive Player Partnership

A particularly efficient alliance structure is for offensive players to specialize in A villages while defensive players build strong B and C villages.

• A specialist: hammer, Hero, rams, catapults, Tournament Square, Great Celebration, scouting, fakes and timing.

• B specialist: administrators, Great Celebration, defensive escort and expansion capacity.

• C specialist: additional administrators and free expansion slots for ownership transfer after conquest.

This lets the offensive player use military strength to help defensive accounts gain already-developed villages. Defensive players can convert those captured economies into additional defensive production instead of needing to create every village from zero.

Recycling the Chiefing Infrastructure

Once B captures the target, its expansion slot is tied to that village. If the operation is meant to continue repeatedly, prepare a third or fourth village with administrators. Village C can re-chief the captured village from your own B village, freeing B to replace its administrator and prepare for the next operation.

The cycle becomes:

Prepare -> Fake -> Clear -> Chief -> Transfer -> Free slot -> Retrain -> Repeat

Alliance Hand-Offs

The hammer account does not need to keep every captured village. If Culture Points or expansion capacity are limiting the offensive player, an alliance member can prepare an administrator in advance and take ownership after the successful chief.

This allows one experienced offensive player to continue conducting capture operations while developed villages are distributed to alliance members who can make better economic or defensive use of them.

Post-Capture Decision: Keep, Transfer, Re-Chief or Destroy

Capture First, Destroy Second

Sometimes chiefing is not about acquiring the village permanently. It can be the safest way to remove the defender before the real demolition begins.

Destroying an enemy-owned developed village directly is a military operation. Catapult waves need escorts, the enemy can stack defence, and multiple players may need precise synchronization. After the village has been chiefed, the alliance controls whether it is defended. The target can deliberately be left empty and alliance members can contribute spare catapults with very little military risk.

Approximate demolition scale

A fully developed ordinary non-capital village does not have one fixed catapult requirement because the exact total depends on its building levels, resource fields, upgrades and remaining structures. As a practical planning estimate, a mature village can require roughly 600-900 level-20-upgraded catapults worth of total destructive capacity spread across the required targets and waves.

This is not the same as needing one 900-catapult army. Once the village is controlled and intentionally undefended, many alliance members can contribute smaller amounts. One player may send 30, another 70, another 100, and so on until the village is removed.

The strategic advantage is that the alliance only needs to win the dangerous battle once. After ownership changes, demolition becomes a controlled alliance task rather than repeated attacks into a defended enemy target.

Important limitation: This chief-first demolition method is for conquerable non-capital villages. Enemy capitals cannot be chiefed, so destroying a capital remains a conventional demolition operation.

Continuous Chiefing Operations

At the highest level, the next operation is prepared while the current one is finishing. Administrators are replaced, ownership is transferred or the unwanted village is demolished, Great Celebrations are prepared, scouts check new targets, fake targets are selected and travel times are calculated while the hammer returns.

The goal is to turn chiefing from an occasional attack into a repeatable operational system.

Pre-Launch Checklist

• Real target selected and several believable fake targets prepared.

• Target confirmed to be a conquerable non-capital village.

• Village A hammer, rams and catapults ready.

• Residence and Palace both considered as hammer catapult targets against experienced defenders.

• Village A administrators ready.

• Village B administrators ready.

• Great Celebration active in every village sending administrators.

• Defensive escort prepared for the finishing chief wave.

• A waves calculated at catapult speed.

• B waves calculated at ram speed.

• Arrival order checked: hammer first, chiefs immediately behind, B in the same second or immediately after.

• Fake waves prepared across all selected targets.

• Post-capture plan already decided: keep, transfer, re-chief or destroy.

• If transferring or recycling, C-village or alliance administrators are already prepared.

Conclusion

The strength of concealed chiefing is not simply the number of administrators. It is the combination of information denial, tight timing, loyalty redundancy and prepared post-capture infrastructure. Multiple fake targets force the defender to make decisions with incomplete information. Great Celebrations improve the reliability of the loyalty reduction. Catapult-speed A waves and faster ram-speed B waves make same-second arrival practical. B and C villages keep the administrator system reusable.

Most importantly, a successful chief does not have only one outcome. The village can strengthen the attacker, strengthen an ally, be transferred to recycle chiefing capacity, or be deliberately destroyed after ownership changes. Used this way, chiefing becomes a repeatable alliance tool for transferring or removing enemy economic power rather than simply a method of stealing one village.

Related guides

Read more about Administrators: loyalty and conquering villages, Culture points, Catapults: targets, durability and how many to send, Rams and walls, Tournament Square and the 20-field rule and Event order: what happens first in the same second.