The Crusade

In the limited-time Crusade you conquer residences on a special map with a separate army and win bonuses for your castles.

The Crusade ("Your Crusade" in the mini-game menu) is an event that only runs from time to time: before it starts the game shows a countdown, afterwards "The Crusade is over". It is played on its own map with its own army – your real troops stay at home and risk nothing.

Your crusade army

When you first enter, you spread your crusade troop strength across five groups: melee units, cavalry, siege units, general staff and saboteurs. The game shows how much you can distribute in total; saboteurs must be between 20 and 200%. Your choice applies for the whole Crusade – think it through.

Map and residences

The crusade map is made up of residences in three sizes. You can only attack residences that border ones already conquered, so the map grows outwards from the centre. Each residence requires certain troops – small ones usually melee, cavalry or siege units, large ones generals as well. If your own residences border a target, it is "surrounded" and gets cheaper. Your own residences and those of your alliance members are highlighted.

Every conquest brings glory and a bonus – for resources, troop recruit speed or merchants. Medium and large residences also give free spells for the Mage. You have a limited number of attacks per day; the counter resets at 20:00. "Highlight player" and "jump to" help you find opponents and coordinates quickly.

Sabotage and rankings

Your saboteurs weaken other players' residences: each act of sabotage uses up part of your saboteurs and lowers the target's glory by a random amount. Below the map are two rankings, glory and sabotage. The top places in both get extra bonuses after the Crusade.

After the Crusade: the bonuses

Once it ends, everything is tallied. You then activate your resource bonus and troop recruit bonus castle by castle via "crusade bonus" in the sidebar; each activation lasts 7 days. You can do this in up to 20 castles, a few more with Premium and active masters. The trader bonus needs no activation: after the tally it works for your whole account for a week ("global active").