Mechanics · stat aggregation
How stat bonuses combine
Your account has dozens of bonus sources: research, governor gear, charms, pets, hero stats, alliance tech, VIP, town skin. They don't all combine the same way, and some of the most important ones never appear in your battle report at all. Get the layering wrong and the number quietly drifts a few percent off, in every single fight.
1. Two channels: visible and hidden
There are two completely separate accumulation channels, and the mental split between them is the single most useful thing to internalize. Confirmed: one channel is the stat total your scout and battle reports print; the other is the skill multiplier they never show.
Visible stat bonuses
Everything that raises the four core troop stats: research, governor gear, charm, pet stats, masters, town skin, VIP, alliance tech, outposts, island, hero base stats and gear, widget stat bonuses, and the Helga/Amadeus unique passives. This is what your scout and battle reports show.
Hidden SkillMod
Hero and joiner skill effects: the flat op bonuses, chance buffs, periodic skills, pity procs. These never show in the report. They build the multiplier on top of the stat-based per-troop values. Covered separately →
2. Section A: the additive base
Within the visible channel, the base bonus for a given stat is simply the sum of every source. Governor gear plus charm plus tech plus pets plus the rest, all added together. The leader's hero Attack/Defense % joins here too, but only for the leader's own class (an Infantry leader's % applies to Infantry only).
Confirmed The basic bonus shown in scout and battle reports is exactly this sum. No hidden multiplier at this stage: it's plain addition.
3. Section B: the account-wide passives
Two heroes have a unique passive that still adds into the Section A base like everything else, but with one twist that catches people out: it is account-wide. Helga's Power of the Deer and Amadeus's Born Leader raise the stat for all of your deployed troops whenever you own the hero at that star level, even when the hero is not in the march at all.
| Hero | Stats | Squads | ⭐1 | ⭐2 | ⭐3 | ⭐4 | ⭐5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helga: Power of the Deer | Attack & Defense | All | 2% | 4% | 6% | 8% | 10% |
| Amadeus: Born Leader | Lethality & Health | All | 3% | 6% | 9% | 12% | 15% |
Confirmed The skill text says it outright: it inspires "at all times even when absent." A source-by-source breakdown of a real account shows the passive as a flat additive line summed into the visible Lethality/Health bonus, not a multiplier on top of it. So it rides in your battle-report total like research and gear. An earlier write-up called it a multiplicative, leader-only passive; that was wrong, because the test that seemed to confirm it had the hero owned in both arms, so an account-wide bonus looked invisible.
4. Section C: territory garrison
Garrisoning a building inside allied territory adds +10% Attack and +10% Defense: applied multiplicatively on top of the base, plus a flat add of the same percentage.
Confirmed The multiply-then-add form is reproduced from a community power breakdown by MTwyDev, tracing back to the Chinese Whiteout Survival community's original writeup, who worked it out first. Credit to both.
5. Section D: active buffs
Consumables ("Troop Damage Up 20% / 12h"), pet skills and turret effects form one more layer on top. (Minister appointments are not in this layer: they add into your visible stat bonuses additively, like research and gear.) The important and frequently-botched part is how your buff interacts with the enemy's matching debuff.
Probable Within a single active source, your buff and the enemy's debuff on the same stat cancel additively before composing with other layers. So +20% of your own attack against −20% of enemy attack-down nets to ×1.00 in that layer, not ×1.20 × ×0.80 = ×0.96. The simulator layers these sources and nets same-stat pairs inside each layer; getting this wrong quietly drifts the result by a few percent on every contested buff.
6. Why a Gordon joiner equals an HP buff
Here's the trap. A joiner's first skill that grants a flat stat percentage (Gordon's +25% Health, for instance) does not appear in your battle report, because it isn't registered as a report bonus. People conclude it does nothing. It does everything.
Confirmed A reproduction test settles it: 8,000 cavalry versus 10,001 infantry produces the identical casualty count whether the defender's HP comes from a Gordon joiner (+10%) or from a +10% HP city buff. The joiner skill feeds the hidden SkillMod side and combines multiplicatively with your visible stats: same effect on casualties, invisible in the report.
This is exactly why the simulator models both channels. Reading only what the battle report shows will systematically undervalue stat-granting joiners and mis-rank your rally.
Next: how every number here is graded. Methodology →
Model your real account
Enter your bonuses once and the simulator carries them through every layer correctly.