Buying instant troops from the Mercenary Guild in Viking Rise
The Guild sells soldiers you get to keep the moment you pay for them. That is worth having on an account you are pushing, and it is worth leaving switched off on one you are not — which is the only decision this action asks you to make.
This guide assumes you've completed Viking Rise bot setup.
Nothing to set up — turning it on is enough.
What the action does
Your village's Mercenary Guild offers a handful of deals each day. Each one gives you 250 soldiers immediately, with no training time, in exchange for food, lumber, stone and gold. You get four hires a day, and the offers and their prices are rolled fresh every day at 00:00 UTC.
One pass reads today's offers, works out what each one costs on this account, and hires every one it can pay for — cheapest first, so a thin stockpile still completes as many of the day's four as it can before the money runs out.
No screen is opened and nothing is tapped, so it costs you no time on the instance.
Mercenaries are expensive, and that is the point
A hire costs roughly three times what training the same 250 soldiers would cost in resources, and it buys back all of the training time. That trade is the whole feature. Switch it on where you would rather spend resources than wait, and leave it off where you would not.
The exact price moves with the troop's tier and with the discount rolled for that offer that day, so the same troop costs a different amount tomorrow.
Why there are no settings
- The offers are not yours to choose. The board is rolled once a day and there is no reroll to buy, so there is no stock list to tick.
- Every hire gives the same 250 soldiers, whatever it costs, so there is no quantity to set.
- "Never pay more than N%" sounds useful and is not. The discount is re-rolled at random each day, so a floor would mostly skip the troops you turned the action on to buy.
- Whether you can afford it is arithmetic the bot already does, against the resources the account is actually holding at that moment.
Unlocking it
The Guild has to be unlocked once per account, by beating the Mercenary Leader on the village map. He heals himself mid-fight, so bring enough.
Until that is done the action reports that the Guild is not unlocked and skips. It will not go and fight him for you — Clear Villages is the action that works the village map.
Running it at a particular time
The action is cloneable and schedulable, which is worth using here. A hire is expensive, so if you are feeding a main you may want the day's hires taken at a time you choose rather than whenever the cycle happens to land on them. Add a copy with a schedule and leave it at that — a second pass on the same day, once the four hires are spent, is a clean no-op.
Troubleshooting
It says the Guild is not unlocked. Beat the Mercenary Leader on the village map once, on that account. It is a one-off.
It says today's hires are spent. That is the normal result on most passes. They reset at 00:00 UTC.
It bought nothing and said it cannot afford today's offers. The feed line names what the cheapest one wanted, so you can see how far short the account was. Nothing is spent and nothing is wasted on a pass like that.
It bought two and stopped. It takes them cheapest first and stops when the next one costs more than the account is holding. The remaining hires are still yours until 00:00 UTC, so a later pass picks them up if the stockpile recovers.
I would rather train than buy. Leave this off and use Train Troops. The two are independent, and running both is fine.