Brothers in Arms — 2026 Handbook

A focused reference for Whiteout Survival's monthly state-wide PvP scoring event. Built for chiefs from milestone-tier casuals to leaderboard contenders, with a focus on decisions over descriptions.

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1. Overview

Brothers in Arms (commonly abbreviated KE for "Kill Event") is a recurring state-wide PvP event in which players earn event points by killing or severely injuring enemy player troops. The event runs on a fixed monthly schedule and is available to every player in the state automatically — no unlock, no prerequisite building level, no Chief level gate.

It uses a dual reward structure:

• Milestone Rewards — granted automatically at fixed point thresholds
• Leaderboard Rewards — granted to the top 100 players by final score

Brothers in Arms is consistently scheduled during the same calendar week as the Sunfire Castle battle. Treat the two as overlapping objectives, not separate events — Castle Battle kills generate kill-event points, and your alliance's preparation should cover both.

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2. Schedule & Cadence

Brothers in Arms occurs once per month and runs for approximately 48 hours, beginning at Friday 00:00 UTC. The exact end time is reported inconsistently — some references place it at Sunday 00:00 UTC, others at Saturday 23:59 UTC. The in-event timer in your state's event panel should be considered authoritative.

The 48-hour window falls within the same calendar week as the Sunfire Castle battle. Whether the castle battle itself sits inside the 48-hour window or runs adjacent to it varies by state — confirm your state's calendar before planning the alliance schedule.

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3. Core Mechanics

Scoring Trigger: Kill or Severe Injury

The single most-overlooked detail of the event: you do not need to kill a troop to score it. Severely injuring an enemy troop awards points the same way killing it does. Two consequences follow:

• Tile attacks and partial-defeat city engagements still score even when your march fails to wipe the target outright.
• Defenders who lose a battle but inflict severe injuries on the attacking march still score from those injuries.

This rule means engagements you might otherwise abandon as "non-decisive" can still be worth committing.

Point Values per Troop Level

Points are awarded based on the level of each enemy troop killed or severely injured. Higher-level troops yield disproportionately more points.

Two structural points to internalize from this table:

• Tier dominates count. A single Lv 11 kill is worth fifteen Lv 1 kills. Targeting decisions should privilege high-tier marches even at lower body counts.
• Scaling steps up at Lv 7+. Per-level point gain accelerates from Lv 7 onward. Engagements where you can damage T7+ troops are worth materially more per troop hit than the lower tiers suggest.

Methods of Earning Points

Points may be earned through any of the following:

1. Attacking enemy player cities — direct combat against another player's city
2. Attacking enemy marches on gathering tiles — engaging troops stationed on world-map resource tiles
3. Castle / Fortress Battle participation — including the Sunfire Castle battle in the same week
4. Defensive kills — troops you kill or severely injure on defense when your own city or a reinforcement target is attacked

Server-Age Scaling

Both milestone point thresholds and reward contents scale according to server age. Newer servers face lower thresholds and proportionally lighter rewards; older servers face higher thresholds and richer rewards. The scaling formula is not exposed in-game, so always confirm your state's specific milestone values from the in-event panel before setting a target.

This scaling has a practical implication for cross-server advice: any specific point figure in a third-party reference is, at best, accurate for one server age. Your own state's in-event values are the only canonical numbers.

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4. Scoring Method Comparison

The four scoring methods carry materially different risk profiles, point density, and time costs. The matrix below summarizes the trade-offs; prose details follow.

Exact casualty percentages are not consistently confirmed and likely vary with troop tiers, hero composition, and target strength. Treat the rows above as relative.

City Attacks

A failed attack on an enemy city can produce permanent troop deaths for the attacker, alongside severely and lightly injured troops returning to your city. Severely injured troops require Infirmary capacity to heal; if your Infirmary is full, additional severe injuries are diverted (typically to the Enlistment Office) and may be lost if not handled quickly.

A failed defense produces injured troops only — severe and light — with no permanent death from defense itself. This asymmetry is structural: a failed defender typically pays less in raw permanent terms than a failed attacker because defenders do not lose troops outright.

Gathering Tile Attacks

Attacking enemy marches sitting on resource tiles is generally the safer way to score because losses tend to be limited to injured troops rather than permanent deaths. The exact mechanic is not clearly documented, so treat tile attacks as lower-risk, not zero-risk, and plan Infirmary capacity for them as if every attack will produce severe injuries.

The point density of a tile attack depends entirely on the tier of the target's gathering march. A T11 gathering march produces a large per-engagement score; a T1 march produces almost nothing. Scouting tile composition before committing is the difference between a high-yield window and wasted march time.

Castle / Fortress Battle

Kills made during the Sunfire Castle / Fortress Battle generate Brothers in Arms points alongside the castle's own rewards. Risk level varies by the specific battle phase and whether you are attacking or defending, and reports differ on whether permanent losses are possible. Plan as if some permanent loss risk exists until you have confirmed your state's behavior in-event.

In states where the castle battle falls inside the kill-event window, the castle phase typically pauses general kill-event aggression under NAP rules. This makes it both the highest-density scoring window for participants and the lowest-risk window for non-participants, since most of the state's hostile attention is concentrated on the castle itself.

Defensive Kills

Troops you kill or severely injure while defending count toward your own score, making a strong defensive setup a passive scoring tool — but only if you remain unshielded. The trade-off is straightforward: defending exposes you to injury costs and the time burden of healing, but generates points without consuming march time. For chiefs with strong defensive setups (high wall, defensive buffs, full reinforcements), staying unshielded for part of the event can produce meaningful score with no march cost.

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5. Infirmary: The True Constraint

For most players, march time is not the bottleneck during Brothers in Arms — healing throughput is. Understanding the healing pipeline is therefore the highest-leverage piece of preparation for the event.

The Casualty Pipeline

When your troops take casualties, they are routed in this order:

1. Lightly injured → returned to your city, healed automatically over time.
2. Severely injured → routed to your Infirmary, healing only with healing speedups or time. Each occupies a fixed slot until healed.
3. Severely injured beyond Infirmary cap → diverted (typically to the Enlistment Office) and at risk of being lost if not handled.
4. Killed → permanent loss. Failed city attacks are the canonical case where this occurs. Defenses produce injuries only; tile attacks are generally understood to produce injuries rather than deaths, though the precise mechanic is not explicitly documented.

Sizing for the Event

Your Infirmary capacity should be sized against your largest single march, not your total army. A practical mental model:

• If your strongest march is X troops, expect that a meaningful fraction of any failed engagement will arrive as severely injured.
• Across multiple engagements in a 48-hour window, severely injured troops accumulate faster than passive heal time can clear them.
• The two levers for accelerating throughput are healing speedups and alliance helps on healing. Both should be inventoried before the event.

If your Infirmary cannot hold a meaningful share of your strongest march in severely injured form, troops will be diverted to Enlistment Office overflow during the event — and may be lost if unattended. Upgrading the Infirmary in the days before a kill event is among the highest-impact building investments available to a chief preparing for PvP.

Pacing Healing During the Event

• Use small healing speedups (5-minute, 1-hour) opportunistically; reserve larger ones for known-large heal queues after major engagements.
• After Castle Battle, expect simultaneous healing demand across the alliance. Plan healing-help requests around that bottleneck rather than improvising.
• Avoid sequential failed attacks. Each failure stacks Infirmary load; the second compounds against the first's heal queue and roughly doubles the recovery time per engagement.

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6. Rewards

Milestone Rewards

Granted automatically as you cross each point threshold. Reward contents and thresholds both scale with server age, so specific items, quantities, and breakpoints will differ from any third-party reference you encounter — verify in-event.

Reward types commonly include:

• Gems
• Speedups (Construction, Research, Training, and/or General)
• Hero EXP
• Secured Resources (Meat, Wood, Coal, Iron)

Higher milestone tiers may also include skill manuals, Fire Crystals, or custom resource chests on certain server generations.

Leaderboard Rewards

The top 100 players by final score are eligible for ranking-based rewards, with higher ranks receiving substantially more gems and speedups than lower ranks. Specific quantities scale with both server age and rank; check the in-event leaderboard panel for the values in your state.

Some servers may enforce a minimum point floor to receive leaderboard rewards even if ranked in the top 100. This is not universally confirmed, but it is a sensible safeguard: if you are aiming for ranking rewards, treat clearing the early milestone tiers as a hard prerequisite.

Practical Priority

For most chiefs, milestones come first — they are predictable, automatic, and recoverable from any score. Push for leaderboard placement only if you can comfortably reach mid-to-late milestones with margin to spare. Players who chase top-100 ranking before securing the milestone floor frequently end the event with neither.

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7. State Conventions (NAPs and Server Rules)

The game imposes no built-in restrictions on valid targets during Brothers in Arms. In practice, most states establish player-enforced rules — often called a NAP (Non-Aggression Pact) or "rules of engagement" — to keep the event competitive without crippling top alliances. Common conventions include:

• No attacks on top 5 or top 10 alliance cities outside designated battle windows
• Maximum of 2 attacks per enemy city during the event
• Gathering-tile attacks permitted until the Castle Battle phase begins
• Specific kill windows during which all PvP is open

These rules are enforced socially and through alliance leadership, not by the game system. Breaking them typically triggers coordinated retaliation rather than any in-game penalty. Always confirm your state's current ruleset with alliance leadership before the event opens — conventions vary widely and shift between events.

A frequently underweighted point: NAP rules apply to you as a defender as well. If your state forbids attacks on top alliance cities, you cannot use deliberate provocation to bait defensive scoring from rivals who would otherwise be off-limits.

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8. Pre-Event Preparation

Pre-Event Checklist

The morning before the event opens:

• Infirmary emptied; no lingering severely injured troops
• Healing speedup inventory counted (totals per duration)
• Construction and research speedups consolidated
• Highest-tier troops trained to full march capacity
• Hero gear and skills configured for the marches you intend to send
• Alliance plan confirmed: targeting list, callers, rally schedule, Castle Battle role
• Personal scoring goal set (target milestone tier; leaderboard or no)
• Backup target list scouted (in case primary targets shield)
• Shield supply available (free shield, item shields, gem-purchase backup)
• Healing-help requests pre-coordinated with alliance

Long-Lead Preparation

If the next event is more than a week away, the highest-impact investments are:

• Infirmary upgrades, sized to your largest single march
• Healing speedup accumulation — these are the event's true currency
• Top-tier troop training to maximize point density per surviving casualty
• Hero skills in support of the marches you will field

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9. Phase-by-Phase Playbook

The 48-hour window divides into three phases of distinct optimal play, plus a Castle Battle interaction that may overlap any of them depending on your state.

Phase 1 — Opening Window (Hours 0–12)

• Most active players push milestone tiers in this window. Kill density and tile-march density are both at their peak.
• Inactive cities scouted in advance are at their freshest — abandoned marches and full gathering tiles are still up.
• Objective: clear the lower milestone tiers. These are the highest-certainty rewards in the event and form the floor of every viable strategy.

Phase 2 — Mid-Event (Hours 12–36)

• Tile density drops as marches are killed and not redeployed by inactive players. City attacks become the dominant scoring method for active chiefs.
• Active opponents have either committed to leaderboard play or shielded; targets thin.
• Objective: continue milestone progression while protecting Infirmary throughput. Avoid sequential failed attacks — recovery time compounds.

Phase 3 — Final Push (Hours 36–48)

• Leaderboard contention concentrates here. Players aware of their rank push for late jumps; players ahead of pace defend their position by shielding.
• Most active players have shielded by this stage. Inactive cities and remaining gathering marches are heavily contested.
• Objective: if contesting top 100, hold a final scoring window in reserve and execute it with full marches. If not contesting, secure your highest-reachable milestone and shield through the close.

Castle Battle Interaction

The Sunfire Castle battle takes place during the same calendar week as Brothers in Arms. In states where the castle battle falls inside the 48-hour kill-event window, castle kills count toward your event score and the alliance's main offensive concentration shifts to the castle for the duration of that phase.

For non-castle players during the castle window, two tactical points apply:

• Most state NAP rules pause general PvP during the castle battle. Treat this as a healing and recovery window, not a free scoring window.
• Castle Battle is typically the highest-density scoring opportunity available. If your alliance is participating, prioritize attendance over independent scoring elsewhere.

Confirm your state's exact castle timing relative to the kill-event window before the event opens — the assumption that they overlap is common but not universal.

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10. Tactical Toolkit

Shielding Decision

Many players run a shield for the full event duration to eliminate being attacked. Shielding does not block your own offensive scoring, only defensive scoring opportunities.

The decision depends on:

• Whether you are contesting the leaderboard. Defensive kills add up, especially for active defenders with strong walls.
• Whether your alliance is coordinating a defensive trap requiring you unshielded.
• Your recovery capacity if attacked.
• Your state's NAP rules — if your alliance is protected from attack, the shielding decision is largely moot.

Target Selection

• Inactive and abandoned cities are the safest source of consistent points. Identify them in advance and confirm they remain inactive at event open.
• Gathering tiles with high-tier marches are higher-yield but more contested. Tile composition (troop tier) determines whether a tile is worth the march cost.
• Active enemy cities carry the highest risk of permanent troop death. Engage only with full marches, rallied where possible, and confirmed scouting on the target's defenses.

Point Exchanges

A common player-level practice is for friendly players (or alternate accounts) to send small marches to each other's cities to be killed for points. This is not a refund mechanic — the troops sent to be killed are genuinely killed or severely injured under the same casualty rules as any other attack. Use exchanges only when both parties understand the cost and have prearranged exact march sizes and tiers. Exchanges using high-tier troops produce large point swaps but also consume substantial training resources on both sides.

Defender's Playbook

Staying unshielded for part of the event is a legitimate scoring strategy for chiefs with strong defensive setups. Practical mechanics:

• Garrison friendly reinforcements before any expected attack window. A packed garrison both deters attackers and increases the casualty cost they pay if they commit.
• Counter-rally coordination. If your alliance is positioned to counter-rally, an attacker who fails against your city may be vulnerable to a follow-up rally during their march recall. Coordinate this in voice/chat, not in alliance text.
• Bait setups. Rotating your defending hero loadout to invite an attack from a specific rival, then swapping to a defensive loadout before impact, is a high-coordination move that requires precise timing — easily mistimed.
• Healing-help readiness. A defender absorbing repeated attacks needs healing-help volume from the alliance. Coordinate this in advance — it must not be improvised mid-event.

Rally Coordination

Rallies concentrate kills against a single target and dilute attacker risk across multiple chiefs. Effective rallying during Brothers in Arms:

• Use rallies on fortified active targets where solo marches would fail.
• Avoid rallying inactive cities — solo marches are sufficient and free up other ralliers for harder targets.
• Point credit from a rally distributes across participants. Plan rally rosters around scoring goals, not just power totals.

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11. Player Archetypes

Brothers in Arms rewards different play styles differently. Identify the archetype that matches your situation; the rest of this section's advice tunes accordingly.

Milestone-Only

Aim: clear all reachable milestones, ignore leaderboard.

• Front-load scoring in Phase 1. Tile attacks against mid-tier marches and inactive city kills are sufficient.
• Shield through Phase 3 once your highest milestone is locked.
• Healing speedup consumption should be modest. Reserve them for unexpected losses.

Leaderboard Contender

Aim: top 100 placement, ideally top 10–25.

• Coordinate with alliance for sustained scoring across all three phases.
• Hold a final-push window in Phase 3. Inform your alliance to expect heavy healing-help demand at that time.
• Healing speedup consumption will be heavy. Do not enter the event without a deep healing reserve.

Alliance Defender

Aim: contribute through defense and reinforcement, minimal offensive risk.

• Stay unshielded during planned defensive windows. Pre-stack reinforcements in priority defenders' cities.
• Coordinate counter-rally responses through voice channels.
• Defensive scoring will not produce leaderboard placement on its own, but combined with rally participation can push a defender past mid-tier milestones with low offensive risk.

Resource-Constrained / Newer Chief

Aim: extract maximum reward value with limited troop and speedup reserves.

• Tile attacks against weak gathering marches are your best scoring method. Avoid city attacks entirely.
• Target scouting matters more than for any other archetype — every march cost counts.
• Shield aggressively. The lowest-tier milestones are still high-value rewards relative to your account stage; secure them and exit.

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12. Common Pitfalls

• Underestimating Infirmary throughput. Most players run out of healing capacity long before they run out of marches. Treat the Infirmary as the binding constraint of the event.
• Treating tile attacks as risk-free. They are lower-risk, not zero-risk; severely injured troops still demand heal capacity.
• Ignoring the kill-or-injure rule. Players who think they need clean kills miss the fact that severely injuring high-tier troops scores identically. Engagements you would otherwise abandon as "non-decisive" may still be worth committing.
• Sequential failed attacks. Each compounded failure stacks Infirmary load. Stop and recover after one failure before risking another.
• Ignoring the Sunfire Castle overlap. Castle Battle kills count toward your event score in states where the two windows overlap; planning them separately leaves points on the table.
• Joining late with no plan. Early milestones are easy with prearranged scoring; mid-tier milestones reached in the final hours frequently fall short.
• Misreading state NAP rules. Conventions vary widely and shift between events. Confirm with alliance leadership before the event window opens, and reconfirm at the start of any new phase.
• Spending heroes on unwinnable engagements. Hero capacity is shared across marches; sending your A-team on a low-probability city attack costs you the ability to scout-and-pivot if it fails. Match hero quality to engagement probability.