Prince

Prince is a 5-elixir Epic troop: one armoured knight on a pony who lances a single ground target at a time. He is already sturdy and heavy-hitting for the cost — 1,920 hitpoints and 391 damage every 1.4 seconds at tournament standard — but the reason he is feared is the charge. Give him 2.5 tiles of clear ground and he breaks into a gallop, doubling his movement speed from Medium (60) to Very Fast (120) and doubling the damage of the hit that connects. At 783 damage that connecting blow deletes most support troops outright. Almost everything about countering him follows from that charge. Anything that steps in front of him stops it, which is why cheap swarms, Skeletons and spawners like Tombstone or Witch are the standard cost-effective answer, and stuns such as Zap or an Electro Wizard's shot cancel it too. Knockback does not: Prince ignores pushback entirely, so Fireball, Giant Snowball, Bowler and Evolved Executioner cannot break his run, and only The Log, Monk and Little Prince can shove him at all. He also reaches 1.6 tiles, tied for the longest melee range among ground troops, letting him trade into a distracted Knight or Valkyrie from outside their swing, and he can jump the river instead of taking the bridge.

• Prince is a 5-elixir Epic that deploys a single ground-only, single-target melee troop. At tournament standard (level 11) he carries 1,920 hitpoints and hits for 391 damage every 1.4 seconds — about 279 damage per second — and his first swing after reaching a target lands in 0.5 seconds rather than the full 1.4. He unlocks in Royal Arena, Arena 7.

• Once Prince has travelled 2.5 tiles without being interrupted he lowers his lance and charges: his movement speed doubles from Medium (60) to Very Fast (120), and the hit that finally connects does double damage — 783 at tournament standard, enough to one-shot most squishy support troops in a single blow.

• An October 2025 balance update made Prince slower off the mark, lengthening the run-up he needs before charging from 2 tiles to 2.5 — a 25% increase. Supercell's stated reasoning was that Prince and Royal Recruits had been "charging into battle a little too quickly" and that their short charge distance made them tough to defend efficiently; Evolved Royal Recruits and Ram Rider were given the same adjustment for consistency.

• Prince's charge distance is the single most-tinkered-with number on the card, and after a decade of adjustments it has come full circle: 2.5 tiles at launch, stretched to 3.5 in the June 2018 Summer Update, cut to 3 in August 2022, slashed all the way to 1.5 in the June 2024 Goblin World update, pushed back up to 2 barely two weeks later, and finally returned to its original 2.5 in October 2025.

• Prince is immune to knockback, and that quietly rewrites how he gets countered. Fireball, Giant Snowball, Bowler and Evolved Executioner cannot shove him out of a charge; only The Log, Monk and Little Prince can push him at all. Stuns still work — a Zap or an Electro Wizard's shot cancels the charge outright — and so does simply putting a body in his path, which is why cheap swarms, Skeletons and spawners like Tombstone and Witch remain the cost-effective answer. Tornado is the odd one out: dragging him around does not reset his charge, and he resists the pull noticeably better while charging.

• At 1.6 tiles, Prince ties for the longest melee reach among ground troops — a band he shares with Guards, Night Witch, Battle Healer, Mighty Miner and Royal Recruits, among others. That is still a third further than the 1.2 tiles Knight, Valkyrie, Golden Knight, Mega Knight and P.E.K.K.A. get, so a Prince walking up on a distracted Valkyrie can land hits she has no way to answer. It was not always this way — he was reclassified down from 1.85 tiles to 1.6 in the July 2019 update, and shown as 2.5 tiles before a May 2016 range-bug fix.

• A February 2022 balance update gave Prince the ability to leap the river, paid for with a 4% hitpoint cut. It lets him skip the bridge entirely to get at ranged units or buildings that are busy chewing on a tank, and puts him in a small club of troops — mostly Hog Rider and its relatives — that can cross the water directly.

• The card description promises double damage on the charge, but he actually gets a hair more than that: at tournament standard he hits for 391 normally and 783 while charging, one point above exact double. It is a leftover from a March 2025 patch that shaved 0.25% off his regular damage but only 0.12% off his charge damage, splitting two numbers that had lined up exactly until then.

• Prince is an original card, dating to 4 January 2016 — the start of Clash Royale's limited iOS-only regional soft launch, ahead of the worldwide release that followed on 2 March 2016. He was also among the very first cards Supercell ever rebalanced, taking a 4% hitpoint cut in the game's First Update a week later alongside Mortar, Witch and Goblin Barrel. For years he was unlocked straight from Training Camp; the June 2021 Summer Update pushed his unlock all the way up to Royal Arena.