Introduction

For smaller players that go through the motions each day of doing some research, troop training and building without having a clear plan, this guide gives some suggestions as to how to best grow (from castle 16 to lvl 20).

Resources Are Key

As you might have noticed THE key factor in this game limiting your growth is resources, not the timers. At least, until you get into a more advanced stage, where acquiring all kind of special items will become key.

Early on in the game you could train troops, upgrade buildings and start research every time a timer was finished, but once you reach castle level 16 this is likely no longer the case, you need to get resources first before you can start your next build/research/training.

Maximizing Your Resource Income

There are various ways to get resources, but in my experience gathering resources is the most efficient, especially considering you do not need to be online for your troops to gather for you. Checking in every couple of hours to send your troops out again is good enough.

However first few other ways.

The recently introduced Dragon Treasures are better than gathering resources on a regular tile, especially if you can occupy an Advanced Dragon Treasure tile. Unfortunately only one of your marches can occupy a Dragon Treasure at a time. Pay attention to when they refresh (three times a day at fixed times) and try to get on an Advanced one. If you get on there at the start, 7 hours later you could for example have 1 million Wood and Food.

Also killing monsters gives some resources. I always try to use up my Lord energy slaying monsters in between gathering.

My strategy to grow from Level 16 to Level 20 focused mostly on maximizing the amount of resources I could gather each day.

The amount of marches you have is a very limiting factor. There are 4 ways to increase this from the initial 1 to the ultimate 5 marches. These are the Military Research Projects Legion I, Legion II and Legion III and VIP level 4. Legion I and II are relatively easy to achieve, but legion III is far away with College Level 20 as a requirement, while VIP level 4 can take forever if you rely on the daily free points. You might be tempted to stay at 3 marches and first focus on all kind of other buildings and research, but you should not, you should make it a focus of reaching VIP level 4 and Legion III as soon as possible. This means put all focus of resources on upgrading your castle to Level 20, College level 20, and doing the necessary Military projects only to get to Legion III, and use gold you have to speed to VIP level 4 and make sure you have enough gold income (daily quests, events) to keep your VIP active.

Upgrading Castle 19 (12.9m wood and food) and 20 (16.8m wood and food) is not easy. You also have to be careful as to have not too much unsafe resources. I suggest to safe up on your items, altar wishes, maybe even postpone the collection of some resources from System (etc) mails until you know you have enough to start these large builds. Don’t use all those already for smaller builds, as it will be tough and risky to collect all resources for these major upgrades from gathering.

The Gathering speed can make a huge difference as well. Use all ways possible to increase this. This could be focusing on research to increase your gathering speed (but this is relatively costly, you might focus on this after unlocking Legion III, or as long as it is not conflicting). Use one or two of the Gather Bonus items each day. You can get these in various way, I never paid gold for them and still have around 40. They can come as prizes for events, but I also got a lot by trading them for wood with the trader near the hospital. I believe it is only 10k wood, for sure a good trade. In addition if your alliance has the alliance buildings to increase the gathering rate, also consider gathering in such areas.

Gathering size, the amount of resources you can gather each march, is also important, especially when you are not online all the time. Most of the time the tile levels is the only restricting factor here since you will have enough troops to carry the resources (train tier 2 mages for this purpose, they carry a lot and you won’t lose much in case somebody hits you on a tile). Make sure you are in an alliance that is located in at least level 6 resource tiles (if not get your alliance to move, or switch to another alliance, seriously).

Other Considerations

In general focus all your activities on increasing resource income and decreasing resource cost first as much as possible. This means for example make sure the Altar is one of the first buildings to upgrade, because it gives higher payout (and at certain levels an extra free daily wish), focus your research in the War Technology and Resources categories and projects like Saving Treatment in City Development, train your Helen Heroes first to increase Resource Gathering speed etc etc.

Early on my tactic was to reskill my lord after every kill event, but lately I have stayed geared for war. I might change this again in the future, but I found the benefit of resetting my lord skills to focus on resource production and gathering quite limited. The gather boosts from Lord skills only work for deployments with the lord, this means you have to send your lord out with one of your marches (while I tend to like to have it in my castle to protect from attacks) and it only benefits one of the marches you have out. I find resource production in general to be quite small compared to the amount of resources I get from gathering, so I also do not care too much about missing out on those extra boosts from the Lord skills.

Conclusion

I hope this helps some, if you have questions or you want to share tips for others, please leave your remarks in the comment section.

Contributed by: GamesGuide on October 6, 2016