Museum Crafting Guide

With the museum promotion going on this week (crafted war artifacts have a 5x greater chance of having their properties be in the 6% range), I thought I’d put down some quick thoughts on what you should look for in museum artifacts.

Museum artifacts are extremely costly to upgrade – both in opening up new lines of bonuses and maxing out lines you’ve already opened – that you have to be very selective about what artifacts you’re going to max out. For example, after however long it’s been since the museum has been released (1.5 years?), I’ve only gotten 1 artifact to open up all 5 lines and to 4 lines in 4 other ones.

Since the promotion this week is regarding war artifacts, let’s start with those.

War Artifacts

The World War Hall artifacts are slightly less powerful than their Main Hall artifact cousins. Instead of following the 1, 6, or 11% bonus progression, they follow the 1, 3, or 6% maximum values. So, you won’t be able to get as high of percentages in world war as in regular battles but, that’s probably a good thing.

World War artifacts come in Weapon and Armor slots like the Main Hall, but, instead of having Jewelry and Pottery artifacts, they have up to 4 slots of a generic type called War Equipment. So, you can currently have up to 2 Weapon, 2 Armor, 4 War Equipment, and 3 Legendary artifacts active at once.

Now, the bonuses I’ll discuss below are the best bonuses to look for with the game as it is now. It’s possible (and likely really) that the developers will change some of the troops around over time to make some troops more favored than the ones they are now. But, we’ll go with how it is currently.

Also, since upgrading artifacts is so costly, I’d generally recommend settling on a specific troop or two that you want to make up the main force of your army and look for bonuses for those troops. Like, Heavy Tanks and Fighter aircraft. Or, APCs and MRLs. Or bazookas and bombers. A couple of troop types that pair together nicely.

Also, the game allows you to re-roll one of the lines of an artifact for 100 crowns a roll. It’s expensive, but you can take a decent 3 or 4 line artifact and turn it into a stellar 4 or 5 line artifact.

Weapons:

These artifacts either give bonuses to the damage that your troops dish out or remove HP from invading troops. In general, you should look for lines that give bonuses to your own damage.

Probably the most valuable traits to look for are damage bonuses to Fighters, Bombers, Heavy Tanks, Bazookas, Guerrillas, Paratrooper, MRL, and maybe Attack Helo. In addition, it might be helpful to have bonuses in Invading Fighter and Bomber HP – these bonuses will lower the HP of incoming aircraft to your base. Bonuses to APC damage isn’t good because that will effect just the vehicle which deploys the troop. If you want to focus on APCs for your army, it would be better to focus on bonuses for heavy infantry troops which get deployed from the APCs themselves.

Ideally, you should look for artifacts that carry as many types of these on the same artifact as possible. And, that have the highest starting bonus percentage as possible.

Here’s an example of maybe a decent war museum weapon:

So for this, we’ve got two lines of Heavy Tank damage that occur on lines 1 & 3, so those won’t take many resources to unlock. If you were to eventually max out both of those, those could give you a 13% and a 10% bonus, adding up to 23%. If you were to find another artifact similar to this, you could get a 46% bonus to heavy tank damage – that’s pretty huge.  In addition, it’s got a couple of other decent lines including the Invading Fighter Hitpoints which could max out to a 10% reduction of the enemies fighter aircraft hitpoints.

Armor:

These artifacts are kind of the inverse of the weapon artifacts – they give hitpoint bonuses to your own troops and give damage reduction of your enemy’s troops. Similarly, the best properties to look for in these are hitpoint bonuses for your Fighter Aircraft, Bombers, Heavy Tanks, Bazookas, Guerrillas, MRL, APCs, Attack Helo, and Paratroopers. Also, reductions to damage for invading heavy tanks, fighters, and bombers might be good additions to have. But, I would primarily look for hitpoint bonuses for your own troops.

Here’s an example of a decent armor artifact.

This artifact has two lines for Fighter Hitpoints (6 and 1%) and two lines for Paratrooper Hitpoints (3 and 1%). These could yield a 25% bonus for Fighter HP and a 23% bonus for Paratrooper HP if maxed out. In addition, you can see from the lit up dice there on the third line that I rolled this line until I got a bonus that seemed more useful.

War Equipment:

In my opinion, these are the slots you should invest the most heavily in. They contain some super powerful bonuses that, when stacked over a possible 4 war equipment slots, can give some nutty results. According to feedback from the developers, the bonuses are capped at around 85% – so, you can have bonuses higher than that on your artifacts stacked multiple times, but the game will ignore anything over 85%. But, no way to confirm if that’s the case. [There is the case though that your bonuses over 85% will offset some of the negative reduction of artifacts from your enemy. So, let’s say you have a hypothetical Enemy Spawn time that adds up to 110%, but your opponent has a Spawn Time bonus of 20% – your greater bonus would reduce his spawn time to a 90% reduction over normal, but then finally the system would bump that down to 85%. But, really, that gets into the weeds a bit]

Some useful attributes to look for in war equipment artifacts are the following: All Enemy Defensive Tower Damage (a reduction in the damage taken your enemy’s towers which includes mortars, AA guns, AT guns, towers, sniper towers, missile silo, fort, and redoubts). Let’s just pause for a minute there to let that sink in. If you find the right combination of bonuses, you could reduce the damage you take from your enemies defensive structures by an absolutely bonkers 85%.

In addition, you can find All Enemy Defensive Tower Hitpoints (a reduction in the total hitpoints of the previously mentioned defenses of your enemy).  Enemy Defender Spawn Time (an increase in how long it takes for enemy troops to respond – extremely powerful!). In addition, these artifacts can also give bonuses to your own defenses such as All Defensive Tower Damage (increases the damage from your previously mentioned towers), All Defensive Tower Hitpoints (you guessed it, increases your own defensive tower hitpoints), Defender Spawn time (reduces the speed of your own troops respawning in your defensive base), Defender Damage (increases the damage of your spawned troops).

You can find other bonuses in these equipment slots and some might be worth upgrading like AA gun damage/HP bonuses or something, but for the most part, look for ones that have as many of the previously mentioned items as possible. And, I would lean mostly toward things that help your offense (reducing the enemy spawn time or reducing their defensive tower effectiveness).

Here’s my current war equipment artifacts (which I have to say are some of the better ones I’ve seen out there):

So, these artifacts currently give bonuses (along with a couple of legendary artifacts I’ve picked up for free) of:
All Enemy Defensive Towers Damage: -41%
All Enemy Defensive Towers Hitpoints: -19%
Enemy Spawn Time Increase: +12%
All Defensive Towers Hitpoints: 15%
Defender Damage (of my own defenders): +10%
All Defensive Towers Hitpoints (my own): 15%

So I’m already shrugging off 41% of the damage that the enemy towers dish out on me and I’m not even fully upgraded yet. Of course, the upgrade cost is very expensive so I may never max these artifacts out.

Main Hall Artifacts

For a long time, before they released the War Hall artifacts, this is where everyone was investing their resources. Boy, a lot of us wish we could have gotten those resources back and put them into the War Hall now. Oh well.

There’s really only a few items in the main hall worth investing in these days and that’s the categories of:
All Resources Looted (a bonus to the amount of loot you get back from a raid)
Damage/Hitpoint bonuses to your troop of choice you do most of your raiding with
Oil Well production bonuses since Oil is generally your more scarce resource

Also, having some armor artifacts with Defender Damage and Defender Hitpoints and some weapon artifacts with Defender Spawn time can be useful to have defending your base from attackers. I also have a couple of artifacts that reduce the abilities of incoming raider troops since all I’m trying to do is reduce the amount of resources people can steal from me.

Other than that, nothing really. Sure, it might be useful to keep a few artifacts around that have Forest Expansion Cost Reduction and Library Cost Reduction in Food/Gold/Oil, but those are really just items you use every once in a while and then they collect dust in your storage.

So, really, your ideal artifact is looking for a Jewelry artifact that has a starting 11% bonus to All Resources Looted in two slots. If you were to find 2 of those, you could get a 42% increased loot return on any base you raid. Plus, those items might also have other individual resource looted bonuses on them like Oil, Gold, or Food which can drive those totals higher. But, I think they’ve dialed way back on these items as I haven’t found ones with high values like this in a long time. So, you might have to be satisfied with finding a double 1 or 6% All Resources Looted bonus.

So there you have it – a sort of quick summary of what to look for in your museum.

Now, get out there and click your crafting button (a lot)!

State of the field address

Dang – way too long since I updated this! Sorry!

A lot has happened in the game since last I wrote here – namely the “re-balance”. And, yes, that’s stated with scare quotes. They changed a ton of troop statistics, buffed defenses by about 30%, and other things which caused most people to take ‘the sky is falling!’ response. But, it ended up being not too bad. The only sort of rotten part is that war bases are harder to take down now without using full troop tactics which ended up being an attempt by Nexon to get you to buy more of them. But, fortunately, it seems they’re providing more in-game methods of getting decent troop tactics now so it’s probably ‘aight.

The nice thing about the update is that it made a few mostly useless troops more playable. I’ll discuss a few troops and compositions below. Honestly, most of us are still experimenting with the changes so I don’t know if there’s definitive answers yet. But, the nutshell is that factory based troops are even more powerful than they were before which makes getting Brandenberg and being German with the 15% Teutonic Fury even harder to avoid now. So, so much for nation/Wonder diversity.

• Saboteurs – I don’t know if the jury is still out on them yet since so many of us hadn’t upgraded them cause they sucked. But, they definitely last longer now and avoiding traps is a big bonus for them. Definitely worth trying out now and they have their advantageous situations.
• Machine gunners – better now since they’re 3 spaces and shoot over walls. So, if you have a 3 spot, 1 of those is probably compelling over 3 shooters now. Probably will be useful with heavy tanks to keep infantry off of them.
• Heavy tanks – they were great before, they’re even better now. If you can find good museum artifacts to boost them (mainly HP) and can complete their university research (it’s a slog), they’re extremely powerful. Use them.
• Bazookas – huge boosts. They’re the new king. Many folks run with all bazooka armies now. Use them. On defense, they’re great too, especially against Atomic and above attackers that might be coming at you with a lot of tanks. Also, bazookas are great to get for your alliance gate troops.
• MRLs – widely disdained before, now getting some love. They pair well with APCs in the front to protect them while they destroy stuff from the back. Keep them rolling and they can be very destructive. [See the pattern of all the previous troops mentioned being factory troops?]
• Attack helicopters – thankfully, they got some boosts so they’re usable now. Upgrading them as much as possible is required plus museum boost to HP/attack damage if possible. Lots of fun to play with if you can keep troops off of them (decoy and fighter strafing) and snipers from taking them out. They pair well behind some heavy tanks, APCs, or bazookas.
• Armored cars – still kinda useless for regular raiding (just use raiders) and for war except for maybe the rare case where someone has the Kremlin and then has a bunch of farms bunched together that will spawn a lot of troops. But, on war DEFENSE, these guys are great. Especially when you fill town center or strongholds with them on Industrial or lower bases. Basically, unless you have a lot of aircraft to take them out quickly, they’re hard to catch and can decimate some of your softer troops in no time.
• Assault vehicles – they weren’t really touched in the update and there’s no museum artifacts for them yet. Maybe there’s some compelling use for them, but I haven’t really seen it yet.
• Artillery – artillery is so 2018. Still capable, but when you start going up against tougher bases, they’re not going to perform as well as they used to. Still good on defense, but bazookas and armored cars are probably better options these days.
• Foot soldiers – can still be useful, especially coming out of APCs. In too much quantity, too vulnerable to the missile silo though.
• Riflemen – the British powered riflemen have definitely been on the decline lately. They used to dominate the landscape, but not so much anymore.
• Fighter aircraft – still king. Upgrade them as much as you can. Running 4-5 fighters in Cold War Age is still usually the best option.
• Bombers – they got some pretty big damage boosts. Honestly, I’m not that good at using them yet, but I’ve seen some players do really well with them. They’re probably the most powerful once you complete the Amelia university line and get a 5th airstrip slot and can run 3 fighters and 1 bomber so the bomber can get some protection.
• Transports – I wouldn’t use them until they’re upgraded all the way. But, others may disagree.

Tactics: since they changed the tactics BACK to being one space from some of them being two (which was a mistake from the beginning), it gives a bit more variety than they all decoys which was previously hard to ignore.

• Assault rally – I can’t see how they won’t nerf this a bit. Way too powerful now. Lots of folks just run with 7 of these now. Currently bugged past level 1, but they’ll hopefully fix that.
• Decoy – nerfed back some, but still powerful
• Sabotage – now that it’s 1 slot again, useful again!
• Healing – still useful for heavy tank attacks, but assault rally negates them a bit since it increases your damage resistance. But, still useful.
• Betrayal – less common than when they changed the tactics to take up 2 slots, but it’s back now! Especially useful in trying to pick up a heavy tank that spawns from a bunker or a destroyed factory.
• Barrage – maybe some niche uses for destroying stronghold or town center spawned troops that are heavily guarded with AA guns, but, there’s probably a better way.
• Protection – probably not that necessary now with the damage reduction that Assault Rally gives.
• Demolition – why are you still using this? To me, this is usually the top sign that a player has a lot of room to grow. Burning 5-7 demo tactics on destroying a missile silo or some mortars will leave you vulnerable later in the battle. Split your troops or use other tactics instead.

So, the good news is, there seems to be more options these days. I’ll list some sample troop compositions by age to possibly use as your main forces. Play around with things from there. I still would alternate between running raiders for a while for resource collection and dropping medals and then switching back to your main full-base destruction force and rising in medals.

• Early Industrial and below – 4-5 cannons/artillery, 5-6 heavy cav/regular tanks, 10 foot troops, 10 shooters, 2 healing carts, 1 machine gunner.
• Late industrial – 5 heavy tanks, 20 foot troops (or mix it up with something else). Attack low medal global players. Over and over. Good for wars too. Paired with German and Brandenburg, kind of unstoppable. Level your fighters up as much as possible to deal with anti-tank guns and nothing can hold you back.
• Global – same as late industrial. Get through global age as soon as you can still once you’ve upgraded all your offense, built the missile silo, and maxed 1 tank depot and garrison.
• Atomic – for your general attacking, imo the heavy tank is still your work horse. Run 5 heavy tanks and mix some other stuff in with them. 3 regular tanks, artillery, foot troops, bazookas, etc.
• Cold war – more diversity
  • 5 heavy tanks, 3 attack helos, 3 foot troops
  • 4 heavy tanks, 4 attack helos, 6 bazookas.
  • All bazookas. Maybe paired with 1-2 tactical helicopters, some APCs, and a couple of attack helos.
  • APCs, MRLs.
  • Some mix including commandos?

Well, I think I’ll wrap this up here – I’d welcome any additional compelling army compositions. But, if you’re player without a lot of time to experiment, hopefully the guide above will give you a good place to start. At least, until the next “re-balance”…