World Exploration is a mechanic which, in tandem with the World Exploration Ship, allows a player to craft Merch, a new equipment slot.
Along with the Merch Forge, World Exploration becomes available at Guardian Level 100.
There are several stages the player may work through in order to obtain Merch crafting materials and blueprints. Completing a stage will award up to 22 crafting materials as well as one set (6) of blueprints. If the stage is on a bonus day, it will award an additional set of blueprints.
Recon can be used to get the rewards from unopened treasure chests even though it doesn't give stage clear rewards.
After full completion of a stage, it becomes sweepable, like most other farming stages in the game.
There are currently 20 available World Exploration stages, each with different loot variants. The following table only lists clear rewards, not chests.
Stages[]
Armies[]
This feature is first unlocked in stage 10 "Being a leader". Swordsmen beat Tanks ( > ), Tanks beat Riflemen ( > ) and Riflemen beat Swordsmen ( > ). In addition, each army can only consist of 1 Type of unit.
In stage 11 "Training Day", the main method of acquiring armies is learnt: Towns. By going on a town tile, the territory is claimed, and from then on get 2 gold every turn, increasing by another 2 for each town upgrade, up to a maximum of 10 gold per town. This gold can then be spent on acquiring army units for the teams.
Towns can be upgraded using wood and stone. These resources can be gathered from bush and rock nodes, or in a lot of stages also gotten by claiming woodmills/quarries. These first appear in stage 12 "Sabotage" and give varying amounts of resources, depending on the stage. As the towns are upgraded, the army units you can create per turn go up equally to the coins/turn. At level 1 you can buy 2 units per turn, and this goes up by 2 per level. This comes at a cost of 1 Gold per unit.
Level | Wood Cost | Stone Cost | Coins/Turn |
---|---|---|---|
Level 1 | 5 | — | 2 |
Level 2 | — | 5 | 4 |
Level 3 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
Level 4 | 10 | 10 | 8 |
Level 5 | MAX | MAX | 10 |
In addition, stage 12 teaches you about armies buffing teams. Ally armies only buff the team that they belong to, however enemy armies buff teams around them. These buffs are huge and wildly change the dynamic of battle. Swordsmen give a melee atk buff, Riflemen give a ranged atk buff and Tanks give a def buff. These buffs scale linearly, 10% for each army unit and this works the same for allies and enemies.