What sets the order of attack, what a unit goes for, and why the cheapest win is the one worth aiming at.
What swings first
Strength sets the order of attack. The strongest troops swing first, and it stays that way for the whole fight.
What that strength is, exactly: the troop’s strength plus your strength bonuses, multiplied by how many troops are in the stack. Counters do not go into it — a stack does not swing earlier for being good against what it faces.
So the order is something you set when you fill the stacks, and a bigger stack of a weaker troop can swing before a small stack of a stronger one.
The only thing drawn at random is which side opens on the first turn, and that is an even chance.
There is nothing to gamble on after that first coin flip. Which of your stacks acts, and when, is something you decide when you build the march.
What it goes for
A unit does not go for what it counters. It goes for whatever it can do the most damage to, which is only the same thing when the counter is what makes the difference.
Left alone, a stack does go for what it counters. What pulls it away is overkill: if the stack it counters holds less health than its own striking strength, the excess is thrown away, and it turns on something fatter it can spend the whole swing on.
Against an epic this stops being a subtlety. The monster's stacks are enormous, so whatever it hits it kills. Its counter bonus changes nothing, and it goes for whichever of your stacks carries the most health — that is where the most damage lands. The health is the consequence, though, not the rule: where a counter is worth more than the difference in health, the counter decides. Citadel monsters that counter siege engines go for the catapults and leave the fuller stack alone.
When two stacks would take the same damage, the tie goes to the one that can hit back hardest — and that calculation does count the counter, even though the ordering above does not.
Which is why a citadel or an epic is fought by arranging strengths rather than by bringing the right classes: what each of your stacks will attack is decided by the numbers you sent, and you can aim them by sizing them.
Building the march
Send stacks of similar health.
The aim of an attack is never the biggest number: it is spending the least to get the job done. Even health across the stacks is what pushes the average damage per point of Leadership, Authority and Dominance as high as it will go.
And that is what you are really spending — the Silver and Dragon Coins that trained the troops, and the Gold and Sacred Potions that bring them back. A stack that dies for nothing is paid for twice.
Some of what comes at a stack never lands. It is a monster thing, and it is bought: the Monsters Boost tree carries a «Chance to Block a Strike» for each of the four races, ten levels each, paid in Conquest Points.
What the journal reports is what got through, not what was thrown. Both the total and the counter bonus inside it come down by the same share, so the figures stay consistent with each other and the blocked amount is the rest.
Because it is a chance, the share stopped is not fixed. In the one strike where a report shows it, a Devastator II — a Dragon — stopped a third of what 540 Giant Zombies threw: 9,997,020 of 30,294,000. What one level of the research is worth is not stated.
Against an epic monster, health buys you nothing. Everything you send dies, so nothing a health bonus could have saved gets saved.
What that leaves is strength, which decides how much of the epic you take down before your army is gone — and that is what the fight pays on.
Health earns its keep elsewhere: player against player, common and rare monsters, and citadels. Two of those three are rare sights, because almost nobody attacks a monster that is not epic.
Which is why health still decides how a march is built even when it buys no survival. Health sets the order your stacks die in, and that order is what the stacking calculator exists for. Ordering the deaths and surviving them are two different things.
A tenth of everything that dies is gone for good. The Temple brings the rest back; that tenth it cannot.
It applies to an attack on an epic monster, and to nearly everything else besides. The exception is an event that says otherwise in so many words, and those say it plainly.
The tenth is taken off the dead, not off what you sent, and what comes back is the whole number below. Lose twenty monsters and eighteen come back. Lose twenty-one and eighteen come back — the same eighteen — so the twenty-first was spent for nothing.
That is worth knowing wherever the troops are dear, and monsters are the dearest of all: they train like everything else but ask for Dragon Coins on top of the Silver, and the coins are the part that is hard to come by. Sizing a monster stack in whole tens costs nothing and wastes nothing, while every monster above a round ten buys back none of itself. The stacking calculator will do that trimming for you.
Tips
Revive what Silver cannot replace
Guardsmen, specialists and engineer corps come out of the Barracks and are paid for in Silver. When they die, write them off and train them again. Gold and Sacred Potions are not for these.
Mercenaries and monsters are the other way round, and there the Temple is always worth it. A monster trains in the Barracks like the rest, but it wants Dragon Coins on top of its Silver, and coins are far harder to come by than Silver. A mercenary cannot be trained at all. Spend the Gold and the Sacred Potions on those two and on nothing else.
Commonly believed
Enemy monsters go for whichever of your stacks carries the most health.
They go for whatever they can do the most damage to, and against an epic that usually works out to be the same stack — the epic kills anything it touches, so the fullest stack is the biggest score. It stops being the same the moment a counter bonus outweighs the difference: citadel monsters that counter siege engines will turn on the catapults instead. When two of your stacks would take the same damage, the one that hits back hardest is the one attacked.
Sharpened the targeting rule on this page: the health is a consequence, not the rule.
Every bonus is locked in the moment the march sets off.
Only the ones that are not timed. Talent points and research are fixed at departure. Anything running on a clock — a strength, Valor or Experience boost, a premium mode like Archaeology — is read at the instant of the fight or the dig, not during the march. So they can be switched on after the army has left, or while it is sitting as a reinforcement, and they still count as long as they are still running when the blow lands.