This is a completely off topic post. One of my current iPad games I like to play is Call of Arena. Unlike Clash of Clans, which I also play, there is no good web guide for the game. People are frequently asking questions on chat because, well, lack of good support. This post is designed with some basic advice and information. It is rather long and really should have a table of contents but does not. If anything is wrong, please comment to tell me. If you have additional numbers to give a better idea of how the game works, please tell me. If you know of a good guide I should be reading, please tell me. I wanna know. 🙂
Gladiators and the Tavern
I’m currently upgrading mine, but you generally have three gladiators you can buy at any time.
Gladiators are the heart of this. You get a few basic ones when you start. You buy new gladiators at the tavern.
The tavern is where you buy new gladiators. It is your friend. I can’t recall if you get it free when you start, but if you don’t build it. When you can, upgrade it. Taverns sell different classes of gladiators, different weapons holding gladiators, different quality gladiators. Read the descriptions because they are helpful. Grow fast means you can train him more cheaply when upgrading him with your bread in the field. The class of gladiator will change based on your level inside the game, and your existing gladiators. One person on chat told me that it took them getting to level 75 before a superior gladiator in the tavern.
Don’t like the gladiators you have available? You get several free refreshes a day. At mansion level 4 with tavern level 4, I had 8 free refreshes a day. I had to wait 30 minutes after a free refresh to get another free refresh. Otherwise, it cost 50 gems to get a refresh, and 300 gems to get an elite refresh. Elite refreshes increase your chances of getting higher class gladiators.
Gladiator Strategy
Gladiator status, satisfaction and freshness impact the number of points you have when going into the arena.
Do you want the best gladiators? Want the best chance to win plunder? Me too. My advice would be to do the following:
- Plunder to get ahead. Plunder does not get you fame when you win. Lower level fame means you are more likely to play against inferior gladiators. Use your plunder money to buy medals, armor at the smithy and training in the field.
This is one of the few help pages you have on Call of Arena. Not very helpful, I know.
- Keep your gladiators satisfied, refreshed and status upped. If your gladiator is status downed and not satisfied, then he loses points vitality, strength and dexterity. The red down arrow can take away so many points that a B class 20 medal level 23 gladiator could lose to a 15 medal 15 level A class gladiator. (Been there. Done that.)
- Sell lower grade gladiators and give their experience lower level higher grade gladiators. (I once sold a level 21 C class gladiator, gave the experience to a level 13 A class gladiator and had a level 17 A class gladiator later. It was worth it.)
- Upgrade your armor in the smithy. These points do add up, and they are very much worth it. Also, I don’t believe they add fame.
- Join a better alliance that will open up buying opportunities. Participate in daily combat to get honor points to buy higher grade gladiators more consistently than you might find in the tavern.
- Friend people at your level. People on chat swear by this, because it you have a number of people at your level you can attack and plunder. These friends appear under the heart tab on the plunder menu.
- Buy medals. Medals can get you much needed extra points for vitality, strength and dexterity. Do not commit to buying the medal (though you pay whether you commit or not) if it costs you points.
- Put your gladiators in nicer houses. This keeps their satisfaction up.
Plunder
If you are trying to save, sometimes buying a truce with gems may be worth it.
If you are plundered and have truce, your truce will be deactivated if you plunder someone else. Think about your goals in the game before you do this. Friend people at your level to find people to attack. If you see a much lower number, be careful because they could have awesome gladiators who can kill you dead. The right strategy could result in getting grade A 30 level gladiators for a Fame 25 person, and is no guarentee that when you have fame 48, you can beat them.
The thing to remember with plunder is there really is very little strategy here. Before the game even starts, the computer knows if you will win or lose it. You don’t have the chance to improve on odds like you do in the campaign map by fighting the battle manually. Your best shot is being friends with some one to see what level they are at, or by paying the five gems to get insight on if you want to fight them.
Avoid getting plundered
The best strategy I have found for avoiding getting plundered is to increase your fame as fast as possible. Campaign map to upgrade your low level gladiators easily by using your tickets to train them on levels where you already won gems and have a gold cup. Perform at the arena to get gold. Once I hit about level 45, I found I rarely got attacked. On the downside, I almost never win plunders.
You can also avoid getting plundered by having a truce. Truces happen after you either get plundered or if you buy one.
Why do you want to avoid getting plundered? First, it costs you gold, bread and iron. This prevents you from buying things, upgrading things, etc. Second, because it makes your gladiators guarding your school less satisfied and their status go down. No one likes to lose, including your poor little dudes. (This last part is speculation.) I think getting plundered also costs gladiators freshness, that little boot symbol. (Again, speculation. Have not paid too much attention.)
Gladiator Weapons
I could change this guy’s weapon.
As you play the game, you’ll probably find you prefer one weapon over another. I like hammers in conjunction with spears. Hammers allow up close combat while the spear guy stands far away from the melee and hits them undefended from the back.
When you buy your gladiator, you get the weapon type he comes with from the tavern. You can change this at the big helmet like thing. You have to upgrade the helmet thing if you want to transfer the weapon type for all gladiators level 11 or higher. When you do upgrade, any weapons upgrades from the armory are lost. If you’ve upgraded to level 5 on the armor and then want to switch, this will end up costing you well over 20000 iron and a day to get back to that same level. Think carefully before making the change.
According to the information the game provides, sword gladiators are good for attack and defense. Dual-sword gladiators are strong on attack. (They can injury three dudes at ones if they are all grouped around that gladiator and he is doing his spinning thing.) Hammer gladiators have impressive explosive force and resistance. Spear gladiators are good at long-distance combat and melee. Shield gladiators are good at absorbing tons of damage. Net gladiators are good at control and attack.
I hate facing off against net gladiators, because the net really slows you down in battle and they then attack defenseless you because you cannot dodge. No fun. (Which suggests I should really use them.)
On Call of Arena chat, everyone appears to have their own preference depending on their style of play so really it does come down to you. It is worth having at least one of each because some skills benefit only certain types of gladiators. If you have no two handed combat gladiators and have to assign a skill just for that, what do you do? Bah. So diversity is good.
On the campaign map, some routes to the silver and gold cups require having three types of each gladiator. This is another reason to possibly transfer skills and have lots of gladiators.
Hospital
Sometimes your poor gladiators get hurt. Heal them.
Sometimes, your gladiators get hurt. Erk. Erk. Annoying. This is not a good thing. If they get hurt, they need to go to the hospital to get healed. The sooner you do this, generally the better. Being hurt really, really, really hurts the gladiator’s effectiveness in combat and slows their collecting of gold.
Getting healed costs money though. Remember you need money to heal them.
Why do gladiators get hurt? Generally because you run up against superior competition who just does you in. Avoid losing. That’s the best strategy to avoiding the hospital and paying to fix up your pool little dude-os.
There are some attributes available which also can help, including one that makes it much harder for gladiators to be injured and another that makes it much less likely they will need to be healed.
Chat
Half the time, conversation does not exist. A third of the time, it is people looking for tips on how to play the game. The rest of the time, it is people looking for people to join their alliances.
Chat often looks dead. This is because the game designers I think made the pretty poor decision to have chat saved for only about 5 to 10 minutes. After that, all chat comments expire. This makes communicating within an alliance pretty difficult: Chat comments are not saved and if people in your alliance are not chatting inside that window, your alliance looks dead. There are no notifications, which also makes knowing if people are chatting pretty difficult to find out about.
The main chat is often pretty active, and I have seen conversations in Norwegian, English, Slovak and Ukrainian. I have not seen much chat in Spanish.
You only get so many comments on public chat. Once you reach that level, you need to pay 50 gems in order to chat more. (Did I mention that by toggling over from Call of Arena to here, I lost the ability to see ongoing discussion? And I’ve never seen any discussion from my clan despite having made a number of comments there? Chat is truly horrible when compared to Clash of Clans.)
Layout
Layout does not matter. I’ve grouped some things together mostly to make them easier to find.
Unlike Clash of Clans, layout does not matter. Sometimes, there are challenges trying to get things to fit. I wish they would give some benefits for proximity to things like the tavern, but alas, no.
I’ve tried to group some things together mostly to make things easier to find.
If you put a building somewhere and you want to move it, look in the lower right hand corner in normal play mode with no other menus open. Click on the little icon there. A menu should appear on the right hand side. Click on custom, and from here you can move buildings around. (Not all of them can be moved.)
Like Clash of Clans, there is no real benefit for things like plants. It does not help rebuff people who may plunder you, help satisfy gladiators, etc. Nice to make things look pretty, but that is about it.
Alliance
Getting in the right alliance, getting honor points means you can buy things like gladiators.
In Clash of Clans, changing clans doesn’t really have much of an impact in the game. People frequently hop clans in order to get troop donations while having zero responsibility to donate. (RAGE! RAGE! I KICK YOU OUT OF MY CLAN WHEN YOU DO THAT.)
In Call of Arena, there is an incentive to stay in your alliance: If you leave, you need to rebuild your points in the alliance to get ranking. The points you have from previous alliances can be used to purchase things, but that only works well if your new alliance has unlocked things for purchase. I strongly recommend against alliance hopping as a result.
The major benefit of an alliance as I see it is the alliance war. It is an opportunity to easily get 100 gems, often just by participating once. (This is why some people get annoyed. People do not participate in daily combat, provide no honor points, but do participate minimally in alliance war to get the gem. I know some alliance actively kick people out for this sort of thing, most often visible because the person has no honor points and an accumulated points of 0.)
The other major benefit of an alliance is that buying thing. You’ve got to convert bread, gold and stone to points or participate in daily combat to get the points to buy stuff. Helpfully, doing this increases the number of points you have and your alliance rank. You might also get warm and fuzzy feelings directed your way. (Of course since the game has crap communications between players, the chances of actually seeing that or being able to send your own warm fuzzies is low.)
Tickets
Tickets are important because they provide chances for combat and performance in the theater. There are a number of ways to get tickets. Your tickets will slowly automatically return over time. If you get a good night’s sleep, you will wake up with them all back. You get tickets when your fame increases. I believe you get tickets when your gladiators go up a level as a result of the campaign map, but I am not 100% certain on that. You can also get tickets by visiting friends. You lose tickets when you participate in plunder and campaigns, and when you perform in the arena. Run out of them and you’ll have to wait to do these things.
Aureus
There are a number of ways to get aureus, otherwise known as gold. (Aureus is Latin. My guess is Freyr Games didn’t want to rip off Clash of Clans that much.)
The first is the bank. It automatically creates a fixed amount gold for you on an hourly basis based on the level of your bank. You need to click on the bank regularly because you hit a limit where no more new gold there. (At level 4, I get 3,720 gold an hour and it fills up at 62,000. No more gold there after that.) Because of these these two things, upgrading your bank is a good thing. More hourly gold, higher limits for when it is filled up before it holds no more unless you click on it.
The second way you get gold is because your gladiators earn it for you and it goes in the bank. (Click on the bank, because their earnings make that top level fill up come sooner.) The higher level your gladiators, the more satisfied they are, the better the status, the greater volume of gladiators you have the more gold your gladiators earn you.
I’ll run through some fixed yields to give you an idea: A 21 has a fixed yield of 942 an hour, A 14 has 648 A 13 had 606, B 23 has a fixed yield of 858, B 15 of 570, B 14 of 534, B 13 of 498, B 6 of 246 and B 5 of 201. A grade gladiators earn a lot more gold than their B counterparts. Gladiators get bonuses. These are also dependent on grade. Status wise, for middle up B 23, bonus was 171, middle up B 15 it was 57, middle up B 14 106, sideways A 21 bonus was 188, sideways A 13 it was 121. For trending down A 14 bonus was 129, trending down B 13 it was 99, trending down B 6 it was 49 and trending down B 5 it was 42. (These are for level four banks. I do not know if these numbers change from bank level to bank level.) The more gladiators you have, the higher your potential earnings from them.
The next option is the theater, where you can earn gold and fame by performing. (This thing does not upgrade.) Unlike earnings for the bank, the grade of the gladiator does not matter in the theater. My Grade A and Grade B level 13 gladiators get the same amount of gold and game for performing. These numbers are all based on levels. For level 23 you get 1056 gold and 633 fame, for level 21 you get 864 gold and 581 fate, for level 15 you get 528 gold and 480 fame, for level 14 you get 648 gold and 288 fame, for level 13 you get 432 gold and 259 fame, for level 6 you get 192 gold and 115 fame, and for level 5 you get 168 gold and 100 fame. Each performance costs a gladiator 30 boots/freshness points. If you’re doing this, make sure you use gladiators that you intend to do nothing with as they need time to get freshness back or you have the ability to bathe them to get freshness back.
After this, the other ways to get gold generally all involve the arena. You can plunder or do the campaign map. The further you are in the alliance map, the higher the value for winning a campaign. Plunder all depends.
This game isn’t really good at labeling thing but there is also the dark campaign map. (Annoying at times. Incredibly annoying.) When you get to a certain place on the campaign map, the ability to compete there opens up. You don’t get fame and experience, but you can win gold, bread and iron at a much higher rate than you can get gold in the normal campaign map. Still, it does not generally come close to what you can win in plunder. (Though at level 6 in this map, you can come close. I believe the accumulated total for gold when you defeat the level 6 dark campaign is 25,000 gold which is not bad at all.) Unlike the normal campaign map, you’re limited in the number of times you can play it on a daily basis and refreshing before it refreshes naturally will cost you 100 gems.
Gems
Like Clash of Clans, gems are very helpful in terms of speeding things up. Unlike Clash of Clans, the advertising for this is truly 100% obnoxious and cannot be avoided. This advertisement for gems appears almost every time you login.
There are a few ways to get gems. Early on in the game, there are a number of prompts for how to get gems that include things like building buildings, etc. Click on the gold cup in the lower left hand corner to see what awards like gems you can get. These get further apart and harder the further you go in the game. I think my next one involves having 1 million gold.
Also early on in the game, you can get gems by watching videos in the theater. I do not know if this was disabled, if you reach a certain level the option disappears, or if it disappears after you watch a certain number of videos. In any case, the option eventually goes away so watch them fast and get your free gems.
You can get gems on the campaign map by completing whatever the gold battle requirement is. (Some of these are quite hard: Hammer Gladiator uses Strong Hammer to kill last gladiator.) The third is in the alliance war. You can generally get gems by participating, but more if your alliance focuses on one town and finishes in the top 1 or 3 (cannot recall). Lots more gems.
Gems can be used to buy aureus (gold), upgrades and to speed up finishes of things. Gems can also be used to buy elite refreshes in the tavern.
Granaries and Smelters
Granaries and smelters. Oh my!
Like clash of clans with the elixir and gold, the total amount of bread and iron earned automatically on an hourly basis depends on the level of the granary or the smelter. The higher the level, the more available. (Upgrading limits are based on the level of your mansion.) The production rates are equal for both.
For level 2 hourly earnings are 900, level 3 are 1200, level 5 are 1800 and level 6 are 2100. To upgrade to level 3 it takes 2 hours, for level 5 it takes 12 hours, and for level 6 it takes 24 hours. (I upgraded level 5 while I slept.) It costs 4000 gold to upgrade to level 2, 16000 to upgrade to level 3, 200000 to upgrade to level 6. Storage is 2700 for level 2 and 10800 for level 5.
If you pay 5000 gold to the altar, you can activate hestia. This results in all your granaries producing an extra 300 bread an hour. This can be handy when you want extra bread to train your gladiators, and I recommend paying the gold when you think you will be checking into the game regularly.
Skills
You can get a random skill from the little mushroom thing for a small price and after a long wait,
Skills are awesome and useful. They can really help you in combat. When you get your shiny new gladiator fresh from the tavern, he has no skills. There are three ways if I have figured things out correctly that you can get skills: Through experience points (either through training or on the alliance map), from the little thing that looks like mushroom, or buying skills with honor points because of your alliance.
When you look at your gladiator attributes full screen, you can often determine what skill they are likely to have unlocked at a certain point before it happens as it occasionally shows up faded to say it hasn’t been unlocked yet. This can sometimes be a good incentive to level up the gladiator to get that skill faster, or buy a random one to replace it.
Like other things, the little mushroom thing is upgradeable and there are consequently three skill levels. (No clear naming when upgrading so no idea what the mushroom thing name is.) It costs money to get a skill there and it is completely random. You also have to wait. There is some strategy involved as to which skills should be paired with which other skills, but this is not my strong suit and I generally don’t think too much about it. I like the green smiley one personally that keeps the gladiator satisfied all the time because it means I do not need to think about that. (On the other hand, having more offensive firepower would be better.)
Laura Hale, Wikinews reporter 