The tool · Best Counter

Let Best Counter pick your rally

Best Counter is the part of the simulator I reach for before almost every rally. You tell it the garrison you are hitting and the heroes you own, and it works out the team that trades best, so you are not sending troops on a hunch. Here is what it does, why I built it, and how to use it.

Why I built it

For a long time I sent rallies and hoped. You scout a garrison, guess a team, send it, and only find out whether it worked when the report comes back. The frustrating part is that the math deciding that fight is real and knowable; the game just never shows it to you.

So I reverse-engineered the combat engine and built a simulator around it. Best Counter is the piece that does the tedious part for you: it tries your roster against the defender and tells you which team trades best. No more sending on a feeling, and no more copying a tier list that has never seen your account. How the engine was rebuilt.

What Best Counter does

You give it two things: the garrison you are attacking, and the heroes and troops you own. It then plays out the fight for every team you could realistically send, more than a million of them, and hands you a short ranked list.

Each option shows its leaders, its joiners, its troop split and a win rate, so you see not just what wins but how reliably. It ranks them by the trade: the team that destroys the most of the enemy while losing the least of your own comes out on top. It is your roster against this exact defender, worked out properly, not a guess.

Best Defense: the same tool, flipped

There is a toggle at the top: Attack or Defense. Best Counter is the attack side, where you enter the garrison and it finds your best rally. Flip it to Best Defense and you enter the incoming rally instead, and it finds the best garrison to hold with. Same tool, same engine, mirrored, so there is only one thing to learn.

It reads your roster from a screenshot

Typing a whole roster in by hand is the fastest way to give up on a tool, so you do not have to. Upload a screenshot of your Heroes screen and it fills in your heroes, their stars and their levels for you. Fix anything it misreads, and you are ready to search.

The rest of the simulator

Best Counter is one part of a larger toolkit. While you are in there, a few other things are worth a look:

• Quick Fight plays out a single matchup round by round, so you can watch each squad bleed and see which skills fired. The math it runs.
• Sensitivity answers "is this upgrade actually worth it?" for one star, widget or gear level, and shows the answer as a curve.
• Benchmark ranks your whole roster and hands you a shard-budget plan when you are not sure what to build next. How it works.
• The SkillMod calculator compares joiner skill setups with no stats needed, because skills and stats live in separate layers. Why that works.

How to use it

1. Load your roster, by typing it in or importing a screenshot.
2. Enter the opponent: the garrison you are hitting, or flip to Defense and enter the attacker.
3. Search, and read the top of the list. Copy the team you like into the game.

Every number the simulator gives you is graded for how sure the mechanic behind it is: confirmed, probable or speculative. You always know how much weight it can carry, which is the whole point of the project. More on that.

FAQ

Is the Kingshot simulator free?

Yes. The whole simulator is free, open and ad-free, and it stays that way.

Does Best Counter use my real account stats?

For Best Counter, yes: it gives you real casualty numbers, so it needs your roster's stars, gear and widget levels. If you only want to compare joiner skill setups, the SkillMod calculator does that with no stats at all.

What is the difference between Best Counter and Best Defense?

They are the same tool with one toggle. Best Counter finds the best rally to send at a garrison; Best Defense finds the best garrison to hold against a rally.

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Related: how to build a rally by hand · the four SkillMod families · what to build next