I tried to find a full description of how AW works in the current version. Searching in the forum brings up old posts and I understand things changed in the meantime.
Facts that might (with a somewhat high level of confidence) be true:
Players must be at least level 12 to participate to the war (EDIT2: added)
Alliance Leader can opt out for the entire alliance from participating to the war
Players can opt-out from participating to the war
Players that are inactive (i.e. do not attack) for two consecutive wars will be automatically opted out for the next war (they can manually opt in again). (EDIT2: Added)
Defense teams can be changed before the war starts (but not during the war). (EDIT2: added)
The first 30 most powerful heroes of each players are counted for matchmating with the first 5 weighting more (EDIT2: changed according the official change log)
The most powerful troop of each color is considered in the matchmaking (EDIT2: changed wording)
The number of players participating to the war is considered in the matchmking (EDIT2: added)
The win/loss history is considered in the matchmaking so that a winning alliance will face stronger and stronger opponents and a losing alliance will face weaker and weaker opponnents. (it’s not clear how many previous wars are considered)
Each Alliance has 1000 points that are divided among the teams depending on their Health points. (EDIT:3: based on health, not power!)
Bonus points for defeating a team are half of the regular points awarded to the team. (EDIT1: added)
If a player leaves the Alliance before the war starts, his defense team will stay on the field. (it’s not clear what happens if he rejoins during the war)
If a new player joins the Alliance after the matchmaking he will enter a “spectator mode” for the war. No defese team will be put on the field for him and he won’t ba able to attack.
Wars last exactly 24 hours
Wars start 24 hours after the matchmaking process is completed (EDIT1: clarified)
All battles in a war follow a war rule (intended to help the defense team) that is triggered when the bar is full. Which rule is used in a war is declared before the war starts and can be one of:
Arrow Barrage : a barrage of arrows is fired, dealing damage to all the attackers (not sure how much damage is dealt)
Attack Boost : attack stats of heroes in the defense team are increased (not sure by how much)
Field Aid : health of heroes in the defense team are increased (not sure by how much) (EDIT2: added)
Heroes can be used only once per war
Leveling up your defense heroes will not change the power of your team: they’ll use the stats they had when the matchmaking was done. (EDIT2: specified it’s solely for defense)
Each player can perform six attacks: three are given at the beginning the war, other three after 12 hours.
If the battle time runs out, the attacker loses (EDIT2: added)
Battles that are not completed when the war time expires will be carried on until the end and are accounted for in the final score (EDIT2: clarified which “time” is it)
Team respawn time increases: first time is 6h, then 8h, then 10h
If all the teams are defeated, they respawn immediately
War chests are related to Alliances (and not to players)
Winning gives 5 AW chest points, losing gives 1 AW chest points
War chests are open when the Alliance has 25 AW chest points
When the chest opens, each player will get a loot whose content is proportional to the contribution that that player made to those 25 AW chest points.
If a player exits an alliance and participate to a war with another alliance, his/her contribution the that Alliance War chest is reset to 0. (EDIT 4: from version 18.0)
Did I miss something? Is there a better description of AW somewhere?
Ok. Probably I misunderstood, it’s not that the 5 top heroes are weighted more but the 5 top troops that are considered (which makes sense as they are used over and over).
Anyone can confirm?
I believe you can level up unused heroes during the war including the ones in your defence team.
But the improved stats are not applied to the defence team during the war.
I wrote it down wrong. I meant to say that it’s useless, not that they can’t be leveled up. I’ll correct it.
It would make sense to freeze the stats for the 5 heroes in the defense team. I wonder if the freeze is applied to all heroes to ensure the power of the two teams doesn’t change after the matchmaking is done.
Both are true. Though the exact statement I saw on troop was “Alliance Wars matchmaking now takes the best troop of each element into account”…which doesn’t necessarily mean 5…but maybe that was clarified elsewhere.
Total number of member participating in war (ie: all those that have opted in at the time of match making) is also counted. The difference will not be more than 3 players and an attempt is to get as close as possible to the number on both sides.
I don’t believe the one-per-colour qualifier applies to the top 5 heroes. I’ve only heard of it with respect to troops. (For troops, it makes more sense, since they’ll be working with the top 30 heroes, which can safely be assumed to be a good mix, whereas the defence team is not required to be a rainbow team.)
As long as there are five elements, I think that’s safe to assume. Okay, maybe a player with rotten luck has no troop of a given element. Zero. Even when eligible for war. In that case, it would make sense to use the default troop … but I doubt there’s a statement on this.
I wouldn’t make that assumption in the best of situations, and we have seen some really bad wording out of SG when it comes to these things.
They also didn’t specify, though again one could assume, if that was best per team member or just best in the entire alliance. So I would say there are some clarifications we would need.
