Legion formations

In Rise of Empires the legions and the legion formation will be your tool to compete in the province and in cross province events. This is a guide to the best ways to use your legions and the best ways to setup the legion formations.

As you play through and progress in Rise of Empires you will unlock and upgrade 4 Training ground buildings which each control a Legion for you to send out into the world for gathering and killing. The effectiveness of your legions will depend on the heroes that you station there and the number and type of troops you have assigned to each.

The training grounds / legions unlock at castle levels:

3/4 - Legion I - during the tutorial

6 - Class Legion - once you select a class.

13 - Legion II

18 - Legion III

Hero Slots

Each legion that you unlock will have 3 rows for troops and 3 hero slots. Each hero that you place in a slot has control over the row of troops next to it, this can affect how many troops you can have and the effectiveness of certain hero skills. The hero slots need to unlocked though which is done via research.

Research

Each Legion (once unlocked) will have an associated Research tree to be found in the Institute. Working your way through these research items is ver important to improve the effectiveness of your legion. There are 3 hero slot items, Hero Appointment (first), Hero Cooperation (about half way down) and Hero Command (last item) which unlock the 3 hero slots as above.

You will also find items to increase load capacity, speed up marching, speed up durability recovery and improve your troops stats.

How to assign your troops

A lot of people ask about the best assignment of troops in a legion. The answer will generally depend on what you are doing or who you are attacking.

In general the troops strengths are:

Footmen - Good defense, work well in the front row. - High destructive power for taking out structures.

Cavalry, good speed and load carrying.

Archers, good range and attack

For attacking monsters and npc enemies in the game a good general formation is to run Footmen in the front, cavalry in the middle and archers in the back row. This is going to be probably the best way to set up when you have limited troops at the start of the game and will get you going against the lower level enemies. It gives a good mix of the troops advantages.

There are benefits though to using a single type of troops in each row. The game does offer a buff when you do this and as you level up you will also unlock War room buildings that give further buffs to a formation when it uses a single troop type and you will also be able to craft and equip accessories that enhance certain troop types and give similar single troop type formation buffs.

Popular Formations

Using the standard formation as described above is a good way to start the game. As you progress you will probably want to try out the following and use them when it is best.

By far the most popular formation for general activities is to use only Cavalry. This will give your formation the fastest matching speed to and from an enemy (its better to get in and out quick) and also the highest load capacity. This helps when raiding players and also when gathering.

When playing Reign of Chaos you will often find yourself having to attack honor structures which have a durability that needs to be worn down, Or you may need to capture enemy plots that also have a durability to destroy before you can take them. In this case using all footmen will give you the highest destructive ability. The trade off here though is speed. It will take much longer to reach the target.

Finally the archers have the highest attack stat, Running a legion with only Archers will give you the best chance to kill enemy troops and can work very well in the Heroes duel event. If you have the archer war room at a high level and the right heroes this can be the strongest formation in a head to head fight, depending on the enemies defense.

Heroes Placement

Once final thing to check on your formations is the placement of the heroes that you have unlocked. Certain heroes have fixed range skills or skills that only work with certain troop types. It is a good idea to check these and make sure they are being used effectively. We will discuss the skills in more detail in our heroes guide.

When placing the heroes you need to check the skills that you have unlocked for it. The ones to check are skills 2, 5 and 8. These skills can be affected by the type of troops that the hero is leading and more importantly they will have a range. The range determine how far forward the skills can work in battles.

During a battle the enemy formations face each other with the front rows directly in front of each other. A hero with a skill of range 2 can use it against enemy rows 1 or 2 rows directly in front of it. If this hero is placed in your back row then when the skill activates it will not damage any enemy troops. If it is in the front row then it can affect the first 2 rows of the enemy.

When assigning heroes to the formation, check the rang and where possible place heroes with range 1, 2 or 3 in the front. 3 or 4 in the middle and 4 or 5 at the back. Depending on your heroes this may not always be possible but as you unlock more heroes you will have more options to use.

If you have more questions about the legions in RoE please head to the Answers Page to ask there.