[A guide to conquering county/shire]

This is a guide to conquering a county and shire. Both are very similar except that shire has substantially more troops. Nevertheless, the process for conquering them is the same. This is a guide based on my experience. If you find a better way to conquer counties and shires, feel free to post another guide.

Prerequisite

- 7-9 hours (less than 7 will result in failure unless you use strategems, which will be discuss later)
- 8-10k ram, 30k rookies, 20k archers, 30k ballistae, and 1 of each fodders (scouts, laborers, swords, pike, calvaries, cuirassiers, rickshaw etc...) (this is the number to be used with green wrap book. If you do not have it, troops required are a lot more.)
- A city next to the county (literally touching it)... the farther you are away , the more troops u will lose each battle.

Preferred things to have
- Green wrap book (essential if you don't want to be extremely weakened after conquering a county)
- Jewelries... lots of different types to hire the hero u capture during the county conquering
- Lvl 9 rally point (you need this to send out maximum amount of troops)
- Two hero with lots of Brv (suggested lvl 50+ for both) for constantly conquering back to back.
- High lvl research in gastronomy, projectile, siege, guard, navigation and equitation.
- A mount or two (for faster troops traveling)

Things to know about County/Shire:
- Troops and fortification regenerate fully after 1 hour. Regeneration continues until it reaches 100%
- They have all type of troops ranging from labor to trebuchet
- Scouting with scouts is generally a bad idea.
- Each unpatriotic reduces 1 allegiance per 6 minutes (10 per hour and 90% in 9 hours basically)
- The wall has 20million hp, and all research are maxed out (meaning they are likely to shoot u first in most cases due to longer range and faster tempo)
- Fortifications activated at the end of each round (true for all npc cities) - 20k traps, 10k barricades, 6666 archery tower, 5000 rolling logs, 4000 rockfall.

Process to conquering a county
1. Stack up the city that will be attacking with as much food and gold as possible
2. Conquer with 1 rookie and check out available fortification and troops inside a county. Do this with a crappy hero and make sure u watch the battle or else you won't be able to see the data after the battle is over.
3. Maraud the county with your best hero. At this point, do not bring ram and trebuchet (if you have them), and instead brings lots of heavy melee (swords/calvary/cuirassiers) to protect ur range unit.
4. When army return, start conquering the county with above mentioned troops in prerequisite. Remember to apply green wrap book if you have it and cure injured troops in hospital after each fight.
5. When the army reaches the county, the defending troops will be very little due to being wiped out earlier by maraud.
6. Wait 1-3 turns so that your range can wipe out all the melee that is rushing toward you.
7. Start moving your your troops forward. The following should be moved forward: Scouts, laborer, rickshaw, archers, ballistae, ram. If you are lucky, your 3 fodder will die instantly, saving the troop lost on archers and ballistae.
8. Next round. Move all your troops forward.
9. Again, if you are lucky, all your fodder will be dead. If not, you will start seeing some loss due to archery tower and their range shooting down your range first.
10. Next round. Station all your fodders in defense mode except rookies who should be moving forward. Archers should also move forward aiming for their range troops. I repeat RANGE TROOPS, not archery tower. Your ballistae should be aiming at archery tower. Any archery attempt to attack the archery tower will result in massive troops lost. Your 20k archer is there to tank the archery tower to reduce the loss on ram and ballistae, not to kill archery tower. It is a lot easier and faster to retrain archers than ram and ballistae.
11. Next round. By this point or next round (depending on ur equitation skill and hero mount), you should be able to wipe out the archery tower. Your archer should be able to wipe out most of their range troops due to retaliation. If not, continue to march forward. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT march too close to the wall or your archers will be wipe out in one turn by the barricades and rolling logs. Rookies should be moving forward and backward for the rest of the battle (again don't get close to the wall).
12. All that is left are barricades, traps, rolling logs, and rockfall and a 20million hp wall. If you are not forgetful, you may move your range up to the point where they will do maximum damage and set them in defense there. This is not necessary but will speed up conquering one or two turn. If you are forgetful, then just set them to defensive mode. At this point, if you have surviving fodder (which is highly unlikely), you may send them to suicide at the wall to waste the rockfall and rolling logs. It's hilarious to see 450 rockfalls and rolling logs killing 1 cavalries. The rest of the battle will just be consist of walking rookies back and forth while waiting for ur ram to hit the wall and conquer it.
13. Repeat step 6-12 until 100 patriotic reached
14. Take a sip and watch tv and wait until allegiance hit 0.

FAQS:

What does this process mean? Why do we not clear up barricades?

This process is meant to be done with minimal loss. You can queue up 2 armies with 5k ram each back to back to hit nonstop, but however, doing so will make u lose more ram (take longer to take down the wall means more rockfall killing the ram each round that the wall lasted.) This will make the conquering goes faster (you still have to wait for 9 hours overall...) in that when it reaches 100 unpatriotic, you can stop conquering and let the allegiance fall to 0 before hitting it one last time.

My guide does not clear up barricades simply because they does little or nothing to ram who moves slowly across it. It is ram that will be doing the real conquering. Furthermore, by clearing out the traps, archery tower, rolling logs, and rockfalls, the county will regenerate fortifications, but some of it will go into barricades. The ratio of 20:10:6.666:5:4 at the beginning will shift when regenerated. With that ratio, it means if no barricade are lost, the traps, archery tower, rockfall, and rolling logs will go up while regenerating but so will the barricades. So if you by some chance let the county rest for an hour after several conquer using the above method. The fortification will be something along the line of 10k traps, 18k barricades, 3k archery tower, 3k rolling logs, 2k rock fall. That means we will lose less and less troops each time we reconquer it due to less trap/archery tower/rockfall. (rolling logs doesn't do anything to ram really...)

Can we speed up the process?
- Technically no, but if you have strategem and a really high Int hero, you can use rumors to reduce allegiance instantly and save your self an hour or two of waiting.

Can we slow down someone else process of conquering a county?
- Yes. Simply send enough troops to conquer a county but never move them forward. Hence you will NOT lose any troops and stalled them for 40 turns, allowing for fortifications and troops to regenerate. You can send multiple armies to queue up for a county and prevent someone else from taking it.

How do we know if someone is purposely slowing down my process of conquering a county?
- First sign of indication is that you are being queued while conquering a county. Second is that when u refresh the location where the county is, the status of the county should be at war. Lastly, if you want to know who is doing that, you can use Trail Tracker(?) from strategem and get a list of name, time arrival, and lord of who is attacking your county.

Why do you say 7-9 hours is needed when you need to wait 9 hours for 90 allegiance to fall?
- Remember the exception due to strategems? You can stop conquering a county after reaching 100 unpatriotic by whatever mean as fast as you want but you will still need to wait for it to fall to 0 allegiance.

What are the point of scouts when you just conquer with 1 calvary/rookies to see what's going on?
- You can scout and check allegiance of someone's county and conquer it when it reaches near 0 and keep it with minimal work. Scout defense ranging from 25k to 240k... Good luck.

What are the point of county?
- You need to conquer one to achieve higher ranking military to go to higher nobility. Successful conquer of a county will result in 9 silver treasure chest and keys upon ranking up. You are also allowed to have 12 cities before having to conquer a shire (keep 11 though and save the 12th for shire)

Last words:
Conquering a county is not meant to be a solo process. Queuing with 2 armies make reaching 100 unpatriotic faster but will result in more troops lost (splitted ram force) as well as more food consumption while queuing. It is often recommend that two, or even more ppl work on a county together and then help each other out.

I personally conquered a county with 51k ballistae and 0 ram. It was slightly easier because the wall only has 8mil hp.

Note: Using high Int hero for defense during the first wave to conquer while clearing traps is NOT a good idea because due to their lack of offense, ram will not take down wall fast enough. As a result, you will lose out more rams than with a bravery hero even with higher defense on your INT hero