Picking your first siege pair

Note

In the Overview, I explain my thinking. This is a fairly long article, but contains a lot of useful background information if you want to understand how I arrived at these conclusions. If you just want to be told what to do, you can skip it and dive right in here.

Your Siege generals will be the last PvP generals you invest rune stones and BoA on. This is because siege troops require gems to heal.

For Free to Play Players:

There are only two traditionally recommended generals that are also easily ascended by a F2P player for siege troops:

• Matthias I
• Ulysses S. Grant [D]

That ‘D’ signifies that Grant requires a dragon to be of any use, and neither of these are great options to begin with. That being said, Napoleon is fairly easy to win, so even a free player might get enough copies of him to give him at least one or two red stars. I am unsure how a Napoleon with one red star compares to a Matthias with three or more red stars.

However, my analysis indicates that Suleiman the Magnificent is consistently undervalued and underrated. Ascended to three red stars, pairs with him as primary have similar attack buffs as the current leading premium generals once you realize that his debuffs will make the attack he does have more effective.

He is thus my recommendation. You should then pick one of the many premium generals that Suleiman pairs with as your assistant.

For Light Spenders

For light spenders, it is increasingly the case that the best choices for primary generals are premium generals. Additionally, because the siege general is the last general you should be working on anyway, you have more time to slowly, over the course of (literally) years, assemble the fragments you need to ascend this general.

Eventually you will have your ranged, ground, wall, and not just one mounted but both a PvP and Monster mounted pair all maxed out on rune stones, and all either ascended or waiting on more fragments to finish ascending. Then and only then will you evaluate which siege generals you have the most fragments of and from that which one to start developing. In fact, you might even wait until you have Suleiman’s specialties maxed out to four gold as well before deciding (although remember not to ascend your assistant).

Lastly, keep in mind that siege is often the best troop class to use for reinforcing someone’s keep. However, due to the way that buff activation conditions work, many of these premium generals face significant disadvantages when used this way. Raimondo, Teach, and Suleiman will retain their value, and Septimius Severus, who when evaluated as an attack general falls just below top tier, starts to look much more attractive.

If you are a light spender, I strongly recommend accepting the smaller attack buff in favor of being able to get points using this pair to reinforce others in your alliance.