Introduction

In Clash of Queens resources become a problem quite early on in the game, much more so then speed ups, which might be different from other games you have played. Resource Gathering is an important way to get resources and in this guide we will explain some important factors. At the end we will briefly highlight some other ways to get resources.

How Does Resource Gathering Work

You can click on any unoccupied area on the map, which will give you the opportunity to send troops to gather resources for you. You can always do this for Wood and Food and Iron (lvl 10) and Crystal (lvl 15) with become available once your castle reaches a certain level. The rate with which resources are gathered, the amount of resources you can gather with one march and the number of marches that you can gather with are influenced by several factors which we will discuss one by one.

Resource Tile Levels

The level of resource tiles in influenced by their distance from the center. If you gather resources at the edges of the map the level will be 1, close to the center this will be 7. The level of resource tiles does not influence the gather speed, but it does influence the maximum amount of resources gathered per march. For this reason it is much more beneficial to be located closer to the center with your alliance, where you have at least resource tiles of level 6, so that you can gather resources for several hours at a time. I don’t know all the numbers, but lvl 6 can give 288k wood and food and 48k iron, while lvl 1 gives 27k wood and food and 4.5k iron.

Gathering Speed Boosts

There are a number of ways to increase your Gathering Speed Boosts. The overall (applicable to all resouces) gathering speed can be influenced by having a complete gear set (the higher the better) and by using temporarily (8h or 24h) resource boost items. Especially these items give a huge boost (50%) compared to anything else.

The resource specific gathering speed can be increased via Research Projects in the Resources category and by assigning Lord skill points to the lord skills in Development. Note that these lord skills only apply to marches that include your lord, so it is better to maximize the lord skills of one specific resource and gather that resource with your lord as opposed to distributing points to different lord skill resource gathering increases. The research projects have effect on all your marches and I suggest to research the resource gathering projects quickly. The earlier you have these researched the longer you are going to benefit from it.

Alliance Buildings

An Alliance can build forts and 4 types of buildings that help resource gathering. The fort itself does not help, so it does not matter whether you gather resources inside or outside your Alliance Fort area, but it does matter whether you gather resources inside or outside of the Alliance Building that influences the specific resource. These buildings are Alliance Mill (for Food), Alliance Tree Farm (Iron), Alliance Refinery (Iron) and Alliance Exploration (Crystal). If your Alliance has one or more of these buildings consider gathering inside the corresponding area. I have not calculated the exact addition boost you get, but for me it typically takes off 17-18 minutes from a gathering task that would otherwise take 2:35-2:40 to complete. Assuming you are located near the alliance buildings, this is worthwhile.

Troop Composition and Size

I have not detected any difference in gathering speed for different troops or different troop size. The amount of troops and troop composition have influence on the amount of resources that can be carried, but very likely this is limited by the tile limit we discussed earlier. If you do lack the sufficient amount of troops to fill all your gathering marches, train more as soon as possible!

Total Marches

Having extra marches available is very important. Quite early on in the game you should be able to research Legion I and Legion II from the Military research category, which will increase your marches to a total of 3. Getting to 4 and 5 (via VIP 4 and Legion III) will prove more time consuming, but worth it when you get the chance.

March Speed

The faster your troops move the sooner they can start gathering. It is not making a huge difference for the overall time, but you might pay attention to it anyway. March Speed can be increased via the Cartography research project in the Military category and by unlocking the illusive VIP 10.

Misleading Stats

When you click on your troops when gathering, you get some statistics of the gathering that look like the image below:

When I was trying to understand the effect of gathering in different locations, I paid attention to the gathering speed in these statistics, but this number is incorrect and therefor very misleading. What you should do is pay attention to the time your gathering will take (which is unfortunately not listed in these stats, but as soon as your troops start gathering a countdown timer starts that you can see in the map view (for each troop). This count down timer and the total amount of resources you will gather give the real speed and in my case it is very different from what is displayed in the stats, for example collecting the 48k iron took (as indicated when I started gathering) 2:36:50, which meant a gathering speed of 18363 per hour and not 11195 per hour. What made it extra misleading is that when I gathered Iron near the Alliance Refinery the lowest hourly rate was reported in the stats, while obviously this is the place where gathering Iron is fastest, as was indicated by the lowest time.

Other Ways of Getting Resources

Gathering for resources is an important way, but there are others. We will briefly discuss below.

Attacking other players. It is a war game and if other players have a lot of unprotected resources, this might be an easy way to replenish your own diminishing stocks. Still, it has some drawbacks. Being dragged into a war can also be consuming a lot of resources. Also, if you have to teleport around to hit targets, the cost might be higher than the benefit.

Altar Wishes offer a nice way to replenish some stocks daily. I normally would not buy resources from the store, but the prices in the Altar Wishes are a lot cheaper and you have a reasonably good chance to get the extra 2x, 5x or 10x bonus. You can decide for yourself how far you want to go, normally I pay until around 18-20 gold for a wish.

A special price for you, my liege! Just outside your inner wall, near the hospital, there is a trader that offers special deals. Here you can often catch a few good deals, often trading resources for resources. Pay attention to this, calculate for yourself whether a trade is worth it.

The Guild of Explorers has Explorers for each of the resources. The payout differs, it is always good to try to find some nice deals here, although I suggest to pay attention to the XP points you get first, upgrading your Lord level should be key priority.

There are research projects in the Resources category and Lord Skill projects in the Development Category that increase the resource production. These are important as well. They provide a steady flow of resources.

Build one or more accounts dedicated to generating resources for your main account, so called farm accounts. I plan to write a guide on this some other time. The idea is the Farm Account will focus on getting resources (with many of the above methods) and these resources can be transferred (normally by attacking the farm account with your main account, but you could also switch to join the same alliance and transfer) to your main.

Conclusion

Above tips should help you deal to some extend with the difficult issue of getting sufficient resources for all your troop training, building upgrades, research projects and trap building. If you have questions or if you have any other tips, let us know in the comments!

Contributed by: GamesGuide on August 2, 2016