How to Develop Your Military in Plague of Z
Developing and utilizing your military in Plague of Z is definitely the most enjoyable part of the game but there’s a lot that players need to be cautious about when approaching this sector of the gameplay. Maintaining an army is the most expensive part of Plague of Z and can be unsustainable if you place yourself in the wrong situation before doing it. Before you think about building an army to wreak havoc on the world, you might want to know how it works beforehand.
Plague of Z requires that the player constantly think about the decisions they make before executing them to avoid your city imploding from having imbalance sectors. We recommend that you check out our Economy Guide to learn more about how you can maintain your resources in the game. Once you’ve established a good economy, you can learn about everything there is to know about training soldiers and when to use them, which will be explained further in this military guide.
Troop Upkeep
Upkeep is a stat that measures how much food one unit consumes every hour. This directly reduces the amount of food that your city produces. Since there is no real limitation to prevent your units from consuming all your food production with their upkeep, the value can go down to a negative value. Once the value reaches the negative point, your troops will start eating all the food that you currently possess until you reach 0. When that happens, your soldiers will start starving to death.
In our economy guide, we mentioned that you should always ramp up your food production first and foremost. You can do this by increasing the number of Farms that you have or by sending your troops to constantly gather troops in the world. You can check your troop upkeep by clicking on your city’s power rating which can be found directly under the food value which is on the upper-left corner of your screen. Always make sure that you have a positive food production despite the upkeep.
Unit Types
Plague of Z has a ton of 4 different types of units not including the traps, which are defensive mechanisms that can’t be used for other purposes. These units are different from one another because they each specialize in a specific role. Unlike other traditional RTS games, units don’t exactly have a strong against… and weak against… relationship with each other. Instead, they vary in their respective stats which promote players to use these units in specific situations.
For example, the Robber, which is an infantry unit, has extremely high HP and defense stats which make them the perfect defender. On the other hand, Shooters (ranged units) have better attacks and HP which make them the perfect attackers. There are also the mounted units that have higher speed so they’re excellent raiding units. Finally, the siege weapons such as the Combat Jeeps, have high load capacity and really good range so they’re good at either collecting resources or sieging the enemy base.
Heroes
Aside from the normal units, another important member of your army is the hero. Heroes are special units that can be recruited by going to the Club. These heroes are important because they lead the army, determining how many soldiers you can take along per march order. The hero also influences the attack or defense stats of your army, meaning if the hero that you chose has a higher attack stat, your army will perform better when sending them on offensive skirmishes.
Heroes can be upgraded in different ways. For example, you can level them up by sending them on skirmishes to gain experience which will increase their stats. Cultivation increases the 4 primary stats of the hero. Upgrading these stats will also increase the potential of both your army and your city. It’s important that the player focuses on developing their heroes by constantly sending them out on multiple skirmishes and using their city’s resources to cultivate their skills and talents.
Sieging & Raiding
There are two types of attacks in every RTS game. The first type is sieging, which is the primary way of using your army. In this method, the goal is to destroy an opponent’s army and city by going directly through their defenses. Sieging is extremely difficult because this often comes in multiple waves since the enemy will always have the advantage since they have defensive bonuses. The ultimate goal of sieging is to beat a player down so that they won’t have any resources to stand against you.
The second type of attack is raiding. Unlike sieging, the goal of raiding is to gather a positive income of resources to help your city gain more economy. For this to work, the player needs to attack opponents that have little to no defenses since you don’t want to lose too many soldiers because you’d need to replace them afterward. If the player spends more than what they gain, the raid is considered a failure because they would not have achieved their primary goal for doing so.
Military Upgrades
Having a lot of troops and a good hero to lead them isn’t enough to ensure that you have a strong enough army to attack players. To make sure that you have the advantage when attacking, you need to make sure that your army has upgraded. There are three types of upgrades that you can get in this game which is unit promotion, research upgrades, and hero buffs. There are also temporary buffs that you can get when you activate buffs in your inventory.
Unit promotion happens when you level up your training facilities, unlocking the next tier of units available. Unfortunately, even though it’s a promotion, your existing soldiers won’t actually be upgraded but you can start training more powerful soldiers instead. Research upgrades can be performed in the research center under the military tab. Hero buffs are provided depending on the equipment that the hero is wearing or if you cultivate their attack or defense stats.
