Team Battle 4v4

How it is won

Two alliances of four. An alliance falls when every one of its keeps has been razed, so a broken ally is a hole in your own line — and its lanes are yours to hold as well as your own.

If no keep has fallen after 7 minutes, War Weariness sets in: every 75 seconds the damage keeps take climbs by another 25% of its normal amount, up to three times normal. A stalemate always breaks into a final push.

The field

Every battle deals one of nine formations — how the eight keeps are placed on the field:

• The Warfront. Four keeps a side ranked down the home edges — four lanes sharing one front.
• The Echelon. A staggered line — two keeps thrown forward, two held back, and a saw-tooth front.
• The Hammer. Four keeps packed into one fist behind each home edge — one host, one field, one blow.
• The Horns. Two crescents facing across a bowl — the horns meet first, the centre decides it.
• Spear and Shield. Two keeps thrown at the enemy’s throat, two held deep — the spear bleeds, the shield pays.
• The Saltire. Four keeps jammed into one corner diamond, and the whole war runs corner to corner down the diagonal.
• The Oblique Order. A slanted line across the corner — one wing thrown at the crossings, the other held deep behind it.
• The Quarters. Two tight pairs at opposite ends of your own corner — two fists, one alliance, and a long walk between them.
• The Siege. A walled citadel at the heart of the world, four keeps besieging it from the corners.

…on one of twelve battlefields: Warfront, Chasm, Crossroads, Marshes, Steppe, Ashfront, Leyfront, Winter March, Goldfront, Wallfront, Terracefront and Townfront.

Gold and the army cap

You open with 900 gold and earn 39 a second from the horn — more every minute the battle lasts, up to six times the opening rate. Every enemy troop you kill pays 8% of what it cost to field, and an enemy Builder is worth 1,500 gold; bounties grow as the battle goes on.

Your army is capped at 165 population. A levy counts for one; the biggest troops in the game count for up to 11.

Kingdoms

Any of the ten kingdoms. This battle carries its own balance weights: each kingdom's trait is re-tuned for it, because a front several lanes wide asks different questions of a kingdom than a single duel does.

Ranked

Team Battle 4v4 has a ladder of its own, the Alliance Ladder: a standing in it is yours in this battle and no other.

Starting one

Choose Team Battle 4v4 on the home screen and march. You are matched with other commanders, or you can start straight away against the AI — and a War-band, raised from the home screen, lets friends march together.

New to it? Read how to play first; the controls are one page.