Legend of Cao Cao Online

[Zyzyfer]

Hmm I meant that Cao Cao could single-handedly hold off the initial wave, while the others buff the caravan and basically stand around waiting for the baddies. But yes the level for yesterday's did increase a bit. Forget 3 seals, I couldn't even survive it haha

Anyway I just hit level 30 and unlocked Annihilation. The in-game explanation was really bad. I have trouble navigating that PLUG forum, is there any recommended reading about how Annihilation works?

[Xiahou Mao]

Annihilation is reasonably simple to understand. It's the game's PvP mode where you put your characters up against other people and battle for supremacy.

Pick five characters, and assign them into a formation (each formation gives different passive boosts, I use Herringbone as I have mostly physical attackers). Pick to start a fight, and you're given three potential opponents to face and only general details about each. You can see how many points they've earned in Annihilation this week (1000 is the baseline, higher means they've won some games, lower means they've lost ground), along with their Warlord Rank and the portraits of the five characters in their lineup. Pick one of them, deploy your team, and you face them on this week's chosen map (Grassland). You get twenty turns and twenty minutes to wipe out their team controlled by the AI. If you win, you gain points on the Annihilation leaderboard. If you lose, you lose points.

There's no cost of silver coins or rations to play Annihilation. You're limited in how often you can play by your War Tickets, of which you have five. They regenerate roughly one each half hour. Only the matches you directly play affect your ranking. If other people draw your team and play against you, you won't even know it's happening, so you won't lose any points if they win (or win any points if they lose).

At just rank 30, you're likely not going to fare too well in Annihilation, but that's okay. The most important part of Annihilation is that its weekly rewards include free gold coins based on your performance. If you don't play any games in a week, you don't get any rewards. At your level you might not get many gold coins because you won't get too high up the leaderboard, but you should make sure you play at least a little bit to get some, and as your characters level up more you'll be able to get higher rank and get more. I'm able to get to the 5-10% ranking on the leaderboard with my team each week, which gives me 4000 gold coins a week. And that helps greatly in outfitting my characters without needing to open my wallet.

[Zyzyfer]

I am only impressed if you are topping the leaderboards with Xiahou Mao

Thanks for the rundown, based on the layout of the UI for that page, I was worried it might be some kind of real-time fighting system.

Edit: Does anyone else bother with the Practice battles? It gets a bit tedious and time-consuming to manage them for getting victories as I get bigger...

[Xiahou Mao]

I don't personally bother with Practice battles beyond when it's required for a mission and rewards (which is no longer the case for me after one of the recent updates). That said, it still serves as a purpose as a means to obtain Fame (a currency that's not terribly easy to get) and a way to train your units without spending Rations (which becomes more important as your units get higher level... me fielding my best team of five costs about 160k Rations right now).

[Zyzyfer]

Fair enough. Training is a point I had not thought about. After searching for prime victory targets for a few cycles I decided the effort isn't worth the reward, even if fame is hard to come by. It's just so time-comsuming to stay on top of it and I am trying to cut back some on the phone use by this game now that the honeymoon phase has ended haha

I do see stuff you can buy with fame, is it useful for anything else?

[Xiahou Mao]

Mainly the stuff you buy. It's also used to unlock a few unit types for your defending troops (which is of dubious usefulness given what I said before), as well as some extra formations for Annihilation.

Personally, I mostly accumulate some Fame for my Annihilation rewards each week, and just let it build up. Eventually if I'm one permit shy of a big upgrade/promotion for an important character, I might buy that permit with my stockpiled Fame. In the meantime, it can just sit there.

I need to decide which character I'm going to take to level 99 next. Tomorrow I'll have at least two attempts to fuse a Class 7 Artifact on the 50% weapon day. I'm hopeful I'll get something really powerful and that'll make my choice for me! If I get junk, I might have to make a boring choice like Chen Qun as a level 99 healer...

[Zyzyfer]

It's funny you should bring up artifact fusing. I have looked at that menu several times now; despite having a bunch of archives, I have no artifact permit option, and the only stuff I can fuse is (admittedly junky) 1 star stuff. If I have junky stuff like that, should I bother even fusing it? I don't have a whole lot of artifacts for now so even the junk gets used in bigger campaigns haha

[Xiahou Mao]

Archives aren't related to Artifacts. They can be crafted into Permits required for normal upgrade-related equipment past level 60, which is the big bottleneck for leveling characters past that point. It takes 14 Weapon, Armour and Accessory Crafting Permits each to upgrade a single character's equipment from level 56 to 77 to open up the final promotion at level 80. The only ways you can get those permits are from the Daily Missions past level 30 (one per day), crafting Archives into them (20 Archives > 1 Permit, also costs 300k Silver Coins), or from login rewards/event rewards. If you're diligent about gathering the Permits/Archives, you should be able to upgrade one character a month to the final promotion, with some left over.

So that's different than Fusing. Fusing is the simple act of turning two artifacts of a certain level into a higher level one. And you can Fuse more than your one star stuff! There's a dropdown menu at the top-left (it should say Class 1 to start) that lets you pick what level of Artifacts to Fuse. You can use that to try to Fuse your higher level things, too. It's just tricky at the start because, as you said, you can make use of even your junky items.

I did well with my Fuses! I got a +35% Earth Damage accessory (hello, Zhuge Liang), a +20% Offensive Tactics accessory (Cai Yan will like this), and a Heroic Axe that gives First Strike (if the equipped character is attacked by an enemy in range, he'll actually turn the tables and initiate the attack himself, this is great for Lu Bu and Meng Da who have ways to stop enemy counterattacks). So now I have some direction on which character to level up next. Lu Bu! I choose you! Then Zhuge Liang with whatever permits are left over.

[Zyzyfer]

Well it's an old question now, but I figured out a pretty good way to get ranged/mage armor leveled up. Toss them as a group into the appropriate battlefield for practice. Click on auto battle and repeat until their armor levels up, or they run out of energy. Did this with my level 40 Sima Yi and Guo Jia today. They were way behind in upgrades because of their armor, but they both earned enough armor experience for two full upgrades. I stuck them in the second practice battlefield, usually pairing them with Liu Ye and whoever else needed either armor or general experience. Worked great.

Edit: Just to add a few relevant bits I discovered since I first wrote this post. Missed enemy attacks also give you armor experience, although it seems to be small. And enemy spells cast against you also appear to give armor experience.

You can also just put 2 or 3 officers into a practice battlefield. I didn't realize this, although I should have. I tossed my level 20 armor stragglers Cheng Yu and Yan Pu into the 1-20 practice battlefield all by themselves, Yan Pu got his armor to go up after a poison spell cast against him.

Edit 2: Well since it seems that whoever is running the alliance stopped playing, I'm going to withdraw my application...

[Xiahou Mao]

That's why I didn't stay in the Scholars alliance, it was too small at the time to actually get any Alliance-related activities done.

But good news! Tomorrow, the time we've all been waiting for shall finally arrive. The Yan Baihu story mode will be released!