Haypi Kingdom Troops: Infantry, Cavalry, Archers and Catapults Explained

Haypi Kingdom troops came in exactly four kinds — infantry, cavalry, archers and catapults — and every fight in the game was decided by how those four traded speed, range and carry against each other. The old troop guides are mostly gone with the forums, so this page rebuilds the stat table and the roles the way veterans actually used them, using the live numbers from Prestige: Kingdom War, the independent rebuild of the classic.

Haypi Kingdom troops: the stat table (rebuild values)

These are the base stats as they ship in Prestige: Kingdom War today. The original app’s exact numbers shifted across patches between 2010 and the final 3.20 build in August 2013, and the wikis that recorded them are largely abandoned, so treat this as the rebuild’s table rather than a scan of the 2011 help screen. The relationships between units — who is fast, who is far, who is cheap — are what carried over.

Three things to read off that table before anything else. Carry is what Haypi called overload, and it is the whole reason cavalry became the raiding unit. Population is also the prestige you earn for training the unit, so a catapult is worth ten infantry on the title ladder. And crop per hour is the upkeep that never stops: a stack of troops sitting in a city costs the same food as a stack on the march.

Infantry: cheap, fast to train, and built to die

Infantry are the 30-second, 1-population unit. At 75 attack and 150 life they do not win fights on their own, but they are the best value per crop in the game, they train faster than anything else, and at 80 carry they haul almost as much as a cavalryman for a quarter of the upkeep. In practice they had three jobs.

• ▸Meatshields. Anything that absorbs the first volley so your expensive units survive to fire back. A single infantryman in front of a catapult line is the oldest trick in the game.
• ▸Trap-clearers. City Wall traps catch whatever hits them first. Throwing a handful of cheap infantry at a walled city before the real army arrives is how you spent 40 crop instead of 200.
• ▸Early hunters and garrisons. Before you could afford cavalry, infantry cleared low-level oases and sat in them.

Their weakness is speed 150 and range 25. Any army with infantry in it moves at 150 at best, and anything with range will hit them before they close. The full case for and against is in the infantry vs cavalry guide.

Cavalry: the unit everyone ended up running

Cavalry cost 4 population, train in 60 seconds, and bring 175 attack, 175 defense and 500 life at speed 300. That speed is double infantry and six times a catapult, which matters more than any raw stat because the faster side strikes first and an army only moves as fast as its slowest member. A pure-cavalry stack arrives at 300, hits first, and is home before a mixed army has finished its approach.

The 100 carry is the other half. A raid is only as good as what it brings home, and per unit cavalry haul the most in the game. They are also the natural hunters: in the rebuild, troops out hunting at an oasis cannot be attacked, so a cavalry stack that is always either hunting or raiding is both productive and hard to catch. The cost is 4 crop per hour each, which is where most new players got burned.

Archers: range 200, glass jaw

Archers are the 2-population, 45-second unit with 100 attack, only 50 defense and 125 life, and range 200. The range is the point. Against a melee army an archer line fires while the enemy is still closing, and against a walled city they out-range the defenders’ infantry and cavalry. Shooting Skill at the Technology Center extends that range further. But at speed 125 they are the slowest thing short of a catapult, and at 50 defense they fold the moment anything reaches them, so archers were rarely fielded alone. The classic use was as the second body in a fort run, covered below, and as a defensive garrison behind a wall.

Catapults: range 400, the fort and turret breaker

Catapults are the expensive unit: 10 population, two minutes each, 1,800 wood and nearly a thousand iron per piece, and 10 crop per hour to keep. In return you get 300 attack, 450 life and range 400, double an archer’s. Nothing on the wall reaches them before they fire, which is why they were the answer to any high-level fort or a city with levelled turrets. The catch is speed 50. A catapult army crosses the map at a crawl, telegraphs itself for hours, and anyone who scouts it has all the time in the world to react. They are also 40 carry, so they are useless for raiding. You bring catapults when something needs breaking and for no other reason, and when to use catapults is a real question with a short list of answers.

Range and speed: who fires first

This is the logic that made Haypi combat feel different from the other kingdom games of its day. Speed decides who strikes first; ranged units fire from range before melee units close; and the army as a whole moves at its slowest unit. Put those three rules together and you get the game’s meta.

• ▸A mixed army with one catapult moves at 50 and, in the first-strike sense, is judged by that slow unit. Your 300-speed cavalry gain nothing by being in it.
• ▸A pure-cavalry army moves at 300, out-speeds every defender, and hits first every time it attacks another field army.
• ▸Archers and catapults fire before melee closes, but only if something in front of them survives long enough for that to matter.

So the meta collapsed into pure cavalry for anything mobile, and slow specialist stacks for anything that had to be broken. If you were ever asked in alliance chat why nobody built infantry after the first week, that is the answer. In the rebuild the Speed attribute, Marching Skill (3% per level) and horse or manual equipment push an army’s effective speed further, which is why many veterans put their first attribute points from a new title into Speed.

The classic fort run

Every veteran learned this one, usually from an alliance leader who learned it the hard way. Forts and oases have NPC garrisons that scale with level, and a levelled fort will shred an army that just walks in. The run went like this.

• ▸Catapults forward. They out-range everything in the fort and start dealing damage before the garrison can reach them.
• ▸One infantry, then one archer, as meatshields. The garrison’s first strike lands on the cheapest thing in front. One 40-crop infantryman eats the first hit; one archer eats the next, and fires on the way in.
• ▸Cavalry on Wait. The cavalry are told to hold rather than charge, so they do not run in ahead of the siege line and take the volley meant for the meatshields. They mop up once the catapults have done the work.

It looks fussy, and it was, but it was the difference between clearing a level-8 fort with a handful of losses and feeding it a thousand cavalry. The rebuild keeps forts and oases at ten levels each with garrisons that scale, and the fort control guide covers the modern version of the run.

Counters and army composition

Because pure cavalry dominated, most counter-play was about cavalry. A few patterns held up across three years of servers and hold up in the rebuild.

• ▸Walls beat raiders. Traps and turrets on the City Wall are the cheapest way to make a cavalry raid unprofitable, and traps in particular punish anyone who does not send a clearer first.
• ▸Archers behind a wall punish melee. A cavalry stack attacking a city with a real archer garrison takes ranged fire before it lands a blow.
• ▸Catapults beat walls but lose to anything that catches them. Scout an incoming catapult march and hit it in the field with cavalry, or simply move the garrison out and let it break an empty wall.
• ▸Cranny beats everyone. A raid that arrives to a hidden warehouse is a raid that fed 4 crop per hour per horse for nothing.

Composition is a longer conversation, and the honest version is that most of the time the right answer was still a cavalry stack with a purpose. The troop composition guide and counter-cavalry tactics walk through the exceptions.

Starvation math: crop per hour times army

Crop is the stat that quietly ended more accounts than any battle. Every troop consumes its crop-per-hour figure, every hour, wherever it is. Haypi’s own tutorial put it plainly: if you do not have enough crops, your troops will starve. The arithmetic is simple and brutal.

The trap was that a mid-game player’s cavalry stack easily out-ate their croplands, and the deficit hid behind a full warehouse until it did not. Planting tech (10% per level in the rebuild), occupied oases and a warehouse big enough to buffer a bad night were the only real fixes. If your food income looks stuck after a lost army, remember that troops out hunting or garrisoning still bill upkeep even though they are not in the city. The starvation guide has the full budget approach.

Overload math for raids

Overload is the total carry of the surviving army, and it caps what a raid can bring home. Multiply the carry stat by the count: 1,000 cavalry can carry 100,000 resources, 1,000 infantry 80,000, and 1,000 archers or catapults only 40,000. A raid that wins but sends 200 cavalry to a city with 60,000 sitting outside the cranny leaves 40,000 on the table, and a raid that loses half its horses on the wall brings home half the loot. Veterans sized raids to the target: scout first, read the warehouse figure, subtract the cranny, and send just enough carry to empty it. Sending more was wasted crop; sending less was wasted risk. Cavalry at 100 carry and speed 300 made this arithmetic trivial, which is one more reason the game became a cavalry game.

Bottom line

Four units, and the game was really about two of them: cavalry for everything that moved, catapults for everything that had to be broken, with infantry and archers as the cheap bodies that let the expensive ones survive the first volley. Learn the first-strike rule, budget crop before you train, and size your raids to your overload. That was the whole troop guide in 2011, and it still is in the rebuild. For everything else about the classic, start with the Haypi Kingdom pillar page.

Prestige: Kingdom War is an independent game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Haypi Co. Haypi Kingdom is referenced as the classic that inspired it.