Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest: How to Avoid Getting Zeroed

To avoid getting zeroed in Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest, you must maintain an active Peace Shield whenever you are offline, keep consumable resources stored in item form, and shelter standing armies away from your vulnerable base. Getting zeroed occurs when an attacking warband breaches your citadel, plunders your unprotected resource reserves, overflows your Healing Pits to kill your troops permanently, and wounds or captures your Warlord Champion. Surviving incoming raids relies on denying attackers worthwhile loot and keeping your forces out of harm's way.

Maintain Peace Shield Uptime

Keeping an active Peace Shield running whenever you log off is the only reliable way to guarantee complete fortress safety. Unshielded citadels are easily detected by realm sweeps and targeted for plunder by stronger alliances. A single unshielded breach can destroy weeks of trained Marauders, Chaos Warriors, and Warhounds.

To sustain your shield protection without spending real money:

• Buy shields through your alliance: Purchase 8-hour or 24-hour Peace Shields from the Alliance Store using accumulated Alliance Honor points.
• Invest earned currency: Spend Warpstone earned from milestones and events directly on defensive shields when alliance tokens run short.
• Set reminder timers: Set an alarm 15 to 30 minutes before your current shield timer expires to ensure you can refresh it before hostile scouts locate your citadel.

Keep Unprotected Resources Below the Warehouse Cap

Hostile scouts look for high balances of open Iron, Wood, Meat, Lead, and Warpstone. Stashing your wealth removes the incentive for larger warlords to target your coordinates.

• Leave resource packs in your inventory: Never open quest crates, event bundles, or gift chests until the exact moment you begin a Citadel upgrade, Cabal construction, or major troop training batch. Unopened item chests cannot be plundered during a siege.
• Upgrade your Warehouse regularly: Leveling your Warehouse expands the baseline vault capacity, permanently protecting fixed quantities of core supplies even if an enemy breached your defenses.
• Spend excess open supplies before logging off: If you hold Meat or Wood above your Warehouse capacity, spend the surplus on sorcery research, wall trap repairs, or troop healing before stepping away from the game.

Evacuate Standing Armies When Unshielded

If you run out of Peace Shields, keeping your army inside your citadel guarantees heavy casualties. Stationed defenders will rapidly fill the Healing Pits, causing any additional wounded units to die permanently while leaving your Champion exposed to capture.

To preserve your units during an unprotected gap:

• Reinforce shielded alliance members: March your primary warband into an Alliance Fortress or to a guildmate who maintains an active Peace Shield.
• Dispatch extended gathering marches: If no shielded allies are available, send your troops on an eight-hour march toward a distant, low-yield resource tile or a slow-moving camp across the map. While your base may lose loose surface resources, your army will stay out of the garrison when a raid hits.

Avoid Offensive Actions That Trigger War Cooldowns

Launching an aggressive action on the realm map immediately strips away your Peace Shield and activates a war cooldown. During this cooldown period, the game blocks you from activating a replacement shield.

Scouting an enemy player, hitting a player-occupied gathering tile, or launching a siege march all count as offensive actions. Hostile alliances often bait smaller players into scouting them to drop their protective barriers. Unless your alliance is coordinating a structured rally with planned reinforcements, limit your map activity to neutral PvE targets, such as Chaos Spawns and Trolls, to gather components and champion experience safely.

Fortress Defense Comparison

Static defenses deter solo scouts, but they cannot stop coordinated multi-player rallies on their own.