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⚔️ Reading the Stacking Calculator
Work out which troops to send at an Epic, in what order, and understand why the plan puts your strongest units at the bottom of the list.
You are about to hit an Epic and you want the biggest number on the damage counter. The TB Stacking Calculator takes what you own and what you can command, and hands back three complete battle plans — how many of each unit type to bring, in which order they will die, and what each plan is worth in damage. It lives under Game Tools → Stacking Calculator and carries an Experimental BETA 0.8 badge, so treat its numbers as a strong guide rather than gospel.
The one idea the whole tool is built on
The calculator's own Field manual states the rule it works from: in a fight, the stack with the highest total HP dies first. That single sentence turns the usual instinct upside down. To make a stack survive to the end you do not make it bigger — you make its total HP smaller than every stack in front of it.
Why that matters is the second half. The plan models the fight so that the first stack to die never gets to attack at all. Every stack behind it attacks at least once, and picks up one extra attack for each further block of positions — a block being as wide as the Epic stacks number. So the gain comes in steps, not one swing per row. With Epic stacks left at 4 and ten stacks of your own, the attacks work out like this:
| Position in the death order | Attacks it makes |
|---|---|
| #1 | 0 — it dies before it swings |
| #2 to #5 | 1 each |
| #6 to #9 | 2 each |
| #10 | 3 |
Damage from a stack is its attacks multiplied by its total strength. So in that example the stack at the bottom of the list contributes three times its strength, while the stack at the top contributes nothing whatsoever. That is the entire reason for stacking: not more troops, but the right troops at the bottom of the list.
Step 1 — your three pools
Open Pools in the left rail and put in what your account can actually command. Each pool pays for a different part of the army, and they are spent separately:
- Leadership — Guardsmen, Specialists, and any Vanguard engineers.
- Dominance — Monsters.
- Authority — Mercenaries.
Under each field a bar shows how much of that pool the current plan uses, with the amount used, the amount left and a percentage. A plan that leaves Leadership half empty is telling you it ran out of unit types to spend it on, not that it is being cautious.
Step 2 — the Armoury
Guardsmen, Specialists and Monsters are each laid out as a tier grid, so the same shortcut works in all three — click a tier code or a column header to toggle a whole row or column at once. The Monsters grid has its own columns (Dragon, Elemental, Giant, Beast) and spends Dominance rather than Leadership. Mercenaries are the one block that is built differently: they are listed band by band instead of as a grid.
Each unit type you select becomes exactly one stack in the plan. The calculator decides how many of that unit go into the stack; you only decide whether the type is available to it at all.
Row height is one link button, not two: it reads Compact while you are in the roomier density and Comfortable while you are in the tighter one, so the label is always the density you will get if you click it. Show unavailable units brings the faded gaps into view — the tier-and-type combinations that have no unit in the game — along with any mercenary whose stats are still pending. Clear all empties your unit selection after a confirmation, and leaves pools, margins and bonuses untouched.
Step 3 — pick one of the three plans
Choose your plan shows three cards. Each is a complete, separate answer to the same question, and the one with the highest damage carries a BEST crown; the others show how far behind they are as a percentage. Use Cards and Table to switch between the card view and a side-by-side comparison.
| Plan | What it does | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|
| Method 1 — Binary Search | Squeezes the HP gaps between stacks as small as they can be while keeping the order strict. | Getting the death order exactly right matters more than anything else. Its own trade-off, as the Field manual puts it, is that it may leave some Leadership unspent. |
| Method 2 — Safe / Doubling | Gives each lower tier roughly twice the Leadership of the tier above, creating wide HP gaps. | You want the death order to hold even if your bonuses are not exactly what you typed. |
| Method 3 — Str/HP Optimized | Sorts by strength-per-HP so the most efficient troops survive longest. It is the only plan that adds a Str/HP column. | You are bringing a lot of mercenaries or monsters. |
Every card also carries an order badge. Order OK means each stack has strictly less total HP than the one above it, so the sequence will play out as drawn. ✗ 2 breaks means two stacks are tied or out of sequence and the fight may not follow the plan. A plan with breaks can still show the highest damage — read the badge before you trust the number.
Step 4 — read the Battle plan
Battle plan is the list you actually take into the game, top row first. Alongside the totals it repeats the order check, and when the order is broken it names the exact positions, so you know which rows to look at.
- Count — how many of that unit to bring. This is the output; everything else is context.
- HP/unit — the unit's health after your bonuses, which is why raising a bonus moves the whole plan.
- Total HP — must fall as you read downwards. That is the order rule in one column.
- Total str — the strength the row brings. Multiply it by the attacks its position earns and you have that row's share of the damage figure.
- Str/HP — only on a Method 3 plan. Method 3 is the one that sorts on strength per point of health, so it is the only plan that shows the column and the only one that ends with the note explaining it. Choose Method 1 or Method 2 and the column is simply not there — those two sort on total HP alone.
- L/A/D — which pool that row is drawing on, and how much of it the row spends.
Clicking a row jumps you back to that unit in the Armoury, which is the quickest way to remove a type you do not really want to field.
The fine controls, and when to touch them
- Vanguard — up to three engineer stacks placed at the very front, deliberately given the highest HP so they die first and absorb the opening blows. Off by default. Only the section title says Vanguard; every control inside it says sacrifice, and they mean the same thing. The count field is Sacrifice stacks, the pickers are Sacrifice 1 (dies first), Sacrifice 2 and Sacrifice 3, the collapsed section summarises as 2 sacrifice stacks, and the save dialogue counts them under Sacrifice stacks too.
- Margins — the minimum gap the plan leaves between neighbouring stacks, in units. All three start at 1. Raise Stack margin if plans keep coming back with breaks; S→G margin and Tier margin widen the gap at the Specialist-to-Guardsman handover and at each tier change.
- Bonuses — forty fields in total, split into Health and Strength, each with General, Guardsmen, Specialists and Monsters groups. A type bonus adds to the All bonus, and Guardsmen and Specialist bonuses add on top of General. With everything left at zero the plan is calculated on base stats, and an amber note saying so appears above the three plan cards — not in the rail — as soon as there is a plan to warn you about.
Saving a setup
Press Save setup to keep the current configuration under a name. A saved setup stores your pools, margins, vanguard, bonuses and unit selection, and can optionally be labelled with a player, an Epic and the damage you actually dealt — useful for comparing a plan against the result it produced. Setups in the top bar lists everything you have saved, with search and sorting by recent, name or damage.
Setups belong to your account only. Nobody else in the clan sees them, and there is no limit on how many you keep.
Common questions
My plan says the order is broken. What do I change?
An order break means two stacks have the same total HP, or a later stack has more than an earlier one, so the sequence the plan draws will not be the sequence the game plays. Two fixes usually work. Raise Stack margin in the left rail from 1 to 2 or 3, which forces a wider gap between neighbouring stacks. Or switch to Method 2 — Safe / Doubling, which builds much larger gaps by design and is the plan to reach for when the order matters more than the last few percent of damage.
You can also remove a unit type in the Armoury. Breaks most often appear when two selected types have almost identical health after bonuses.
Why can I not select a mercenary I own?
Because its combat stats are not in the calculator yet. Only one mercenary band currently has them. Units without stats are shown with a Stats pending marker so you can see they exist, but they cannot be put into a plan, because there is no health or strength value to calculate with. Bands where nothing is usable are hidden behind the collapsed Not yet available drawer at the bottom of the Mercenaries block, and the amber note at the top of that block counts how many units are in each state.
Does the strongest troop really go last?
Yes, and that is the whole point. The stack that dies last makes the most attacks, so it should be the stack with the most strength behind it. The awkward part is how you achieve it: because the highest-HP stack dies first, the last stack must have the lowest total HP of the lot. That usually means fewer units, not more.
How the plan gets there depends on which one you picked. Method 1 and Method 2 order the stacks purely by total HP, highest first — strength decides nothing about the sequence, only what the sequence is worth. Method 3 is the one that sorts on strength per point of health, so the lowest ratio dies first and the highest ratio dies last; that is also the only plan that shows the Str/HP column, and it ends with a note spelling the rule out.
Can my clan see my saved setups?
No. Setups are stored against your own account and are only listed for you. Attaching a player or an Epic to a setup labels it for your own filtering; it does not share it with anyone.
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