Troops, Field Enemies and the New Skills

This season does not change how troops work. What it changes is which kills pay, what is standing on the map waiting to be killed, and which skills become available to a kingdom that enters it.

Which kills pay

Rules → Special Rules → War Merit draws the line in a bracket at the end of the entry: “(Only killing Troops Tier 4 and above will earn War Merit.)” and before it, “Different Troop tiers correspond to different amounts of War Merit.”

Two consequences for how you build a march this season:

• Your own tier matters less than theirs. The rule is about the troops you kill. A low-tier march that kills a Tier 5 army earns; a Tier 5 march that farms Tier 3 does not.
• Merit concentrates where real armies are. If War Merit Ranking in your Team is what you are chasing — and it is what settlement reads — you have to go where the opposing Teams keep their actual troops.

“Different amounts” is a ladder, and the shop's rules print it: Tier VII → 20 · VI → 10 · V → 8 · IV → 5, with Tiers I, II and III paying nothing. ⭐ A Tier VII kill is worth four Tier IV kills — and note that the game writes this ladder in Roman numerals while the bracket above it writes “Tier 4” in Arabic. They are the same tier. Full detail on currencies.

⭐ Tier VII troops are in use in this season's footage. One player's CREATE SQUAD panel was read with a tier badge of VII on every unit portrait — which is the top row of that ladder, standing in the field. ⚠️ That is one player's squad in one video, not a statement about what the season requires, but it tells you what the top of the bracket looks like when you meet it: the armies worth the most merit are also the armies that will be fielded against you.

What is standing on the map

Enemy	Levels	How to kill it	What it pays
Bone Priest	56–65	Normal attack	“points and other rewards”
Underworld Rider	21–25	Rally only	“a large amount of rewards”

The Bone Priests are the higher level and the easier problem; the Underworld Riders are the lower level and the harder one, purely because of the rally rule. A Tribe with no rally habit will walk past the better reward all season.

Shadow Wolves appear in the Shadowy Sacrificial Stone's own description — wild wolves that undergo a sacrificial ritual there “transform into ferocious Shadow Wolves and attack the Vikings.”

The three new skills

IGG's update notice for this season added three Sx skills and gated them on the season itself, verbatim: “Added new Sx skills ‘Valkyrie's Gaze,’ ‘Venom Aggregation,’ and ‘Furious Hack and Slash.’” and “They can be seen when the Kingdom enters the 4th season of the Kingdom Mayhem.”

Skill	What it does
Valkyrie's Gaze	Read the card in game
Venom Aggregation	Read the card in game
Furious Hack and Slash	Read the card in game

Those are the three names and that is all anyone outside the game has. The cards' own text is the only description of what they do, and it is visible to a kingdom that has entered a Conquest Season. Check your hero's skill slots and the Hall of Valor when you arrive — three new Sx cards entering the pool changes what a good march looks like, and the card text is one tap away once you are in.

What Sx actually means, in the game's own words

⭐ It is the game's wildcard for the S-series, and the game defines it itself. The Divine Realm Shop stocks two items built on it — Legendary Hero Shard (Sx) and Legendary Skill Shard (Sx) — and the Hero Shard's detail card explains the mark, verbatim:

“Can be exchanged for Hero Shards with the Sx mark, generic Legendary Hero Shards, and Hero Shards available to Legendary Hero Shard (S1, S2, and S3). Cannot be exchanged for collaboration exclusive Hero Shards.”

Two things worth taking from that sentence. ⭐ It writes Sx and S1, S2, and S3 in the same breath, so the x is a placeholder for the series number, not a multiplier — the glyph is a capital S, not a figure 5, and a guide that prints 5x is teaching you to search for the wrong string. ⛔ And it excludes collaboration-exclusive shards, which is the kind of exception that costs you a purchase if you learn it afterwards.

⛔ This still does not tell you what the three skills do. The shop sells you shards toward the S-series; the effect of Valkyrie's Gaze, Venom Aggregation and Furious Hack and Slash has never been drawn on any screen anyone outside a live season has seen. Read the cards when you arrive.

War skills, unchanged but worth repeating

• A war skill belongs to one hero at a time. Teaching a card to a second hero removes it from the first. March partners therefore split the skill pool, and a duplicate copy of a strong card is worth as much as a new one.
• Actives cost 1,000 Rage across every hero.
• Broken Blade switches off every counterattack skill. Containment applies it to friendly troops too, so it must never go in a counterattack march.

What you can win with them

The Season Summon at the end of the season pays from a pool of legendary Heroes, legendary Mounts and limited legendary skills, and your number of pulls is set by the level and quantity of Sacrificial Stones your Battalion occupied. The route to a better roster next season runs through holding stones this season, not through your kill count.

For a tribe leader

• Build a rally rota for the Underworld Riders. They are rally-only, they pay well, and they are the cheapest reason to get your Tribe used to rallying together before it matters.
• Point accounts that cannot hold a line at Bone Priests. Points, no rally, no risk to your ground.
• Audit march compositions against the counter triangle once. It is unchanged, it is frequently published backwards, and one audit fixes a whole Tribe.
• Tell your members to read the three new Sx cards on arrival and report back. Nobody outside the game knows what they do; your Tribe will know within a day of entering.