Introduction

Besides player research Guns of Glory also has a system of research for the Alliance, Alliance Tech, which requires Alliance Donations from the members.

How Does It Work?

Depending on the level of your alliance there are a numbers of Levels of Alliance Tech available. Each Level contains a number of projects. These project each require Alliance Tech Credits before they can be researched. Any alliance member can select a project and click one of the active Donation buttons to donate resources or gold, in return for which Alliance Tech Credits are assigned to the project, the player gets Alliance Honor and the Alliance EXP increases. Once the Alliance Tech Credits requirements bar is full, any leader (r4 or r5) can start the research of the alliance project.

Usage of the Star

The leaders of an Alliance can set a Star to indicate a preferred project for the members to donate to. This should always be set as it helps focus donations. The payout of Alliance Tech Credits, Alliance Honor and Alliance EXP is 20% higher for the Star project, so members benefit as well. As a member, if you don't see a project with Star, or if the project with Star is already maxed out, you should ask your leaders to Star another project.

Buttons

There are three buttons to Donate. The first one is always active and always requires resources. The second and third one are randomly active and can require either gold or resources. If they require resources the amount is the same as the first button.

The resource requirements start at 3000 Wood or Food at Level 1 and increase 1000 each Research Level. At the higher levels it is also possible Iron is required, in that case the normal ratio of 5 Wood/Food : 1 Iron is used. At yet higher levels Silver can also be required at the typical ratio of 20 Wood/Food : 1 Silver.

Gold is 10 at levels 1,2 and 3, 15 at levels 4, 5 and 6 and 20 at levels 7, 8 and 9.

The Alliance Tech Credits payout at Level 1 is 30 for button 1 and increases for each Level 20 points. At each level with the second button you assign 5 times the Alliance Tech Credits as with the first button, and with the third button you assign 25 times the Alliance Tech Credits as the first button.

The Alliance Honor payout is independent of the Level, it is always 100 for button 1, 500 for button 2, and 2500 for button 3.

Note: The Alliance Tech Credit and Alliance Honor payouts described above assume the project is not starred, so do not include the 20% bonus.

Donation Timer and Tip

With every Donation 10 minutes are added to a cooldown timer. Once the cooldown timer exceeds 4 hours you need to wait until it is back to zero. If you are a frequent donator, you should consider only Donating up till 3:50-3:59, so that you can come back in 2 or 3 hours and donate again. This makes it easier to keep the donations going.

Benefits of Donating

There are actually many different benefits of Donating, so don't just do it because your Alliance Leaders tell you to do (which they should).

A simple reason is that it gives many extra boosts for all alliance members, such as increased research and construction speed, more timer helps, all kind of extra combat boosts.

It gives some alliance specific boosts, such as increasing the maximum allowed members, but also several improvements of alliance buildings, such as increasing the gathering speed in the alliance buildings.

Donating also gives your Aliance EXP, which can level up your alliance. With higher level more alliane features unlock. Not only new research levels, but also the alliance buildings. For example your alliance needs to be level 3 before you can place the Alliance Fortress, level 4 before you can build the Alliance Farm or Sawmill, level 6 for the Alliance Storehouse and level 7 for the Alliance Hospital.

And although it costs you resources and gold to donate, you get Alliance Honor in return, which is also useful to buy stuff.

Every week the alliance members donating (above a 6000 points threshold) also get some resource reward. The top 3 get an extra reward, the rest all get the same.

Making Alliance Donations is also one of the items you can score points with for the Daily Rewards.

Gold vs Alliance Honor

Resources are not easy to compare to Alliance Honor, but Gold is. For both Gold and Alliance Honor you can purchase items from (different shops). I have done a comparison for all items that are available in both shops and the ratio between Gold and Alliance Honor is the same, from which we can conclude that 1 Gold has the same value as 100 Alliance Honor.

With this relation between those two, we can judge whether it increases your purchasing power when making gold donations.

Some players might not be inclined to spend gold on Donations, but data in above table should make clear that whenever you get a chance to spend gold on the 3rd Donation button you should do it, because with the large amount of Alliance Honor you get back you actually increase your purchasing power.

For the second button you do not directly have a benefit in purchasing power, but you can also consider that with all the benefits there already are for you and your alliance by Donating, it is just great you get something back directly as well.

Setting Minimum Donation Requirements

The game keeps track of Donations on a daily, weekly and game long history. These are ideal to measure activity and willingness to contribute to the alliance. If you are as a leader in a situation that you need to make place in your alliance for new members, and you feel just looking at when a person last logged in is not strict enough and minimum power requirements are too harsh, using minimum weekly donations might be a good alternative.

Which Alliance Research to Focus On

There are many different choices for research, normally level 1 (and 2) are maxed pretty fast, but by then several new levels of research are opened up and it might not be the best to work through them one level at a time. In this section I share some considerations.

A large number of members in your alliance has many benefit. Levels 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 have a project to increase the number of members. Max this as soon as the new levels become available to stimulate growth of the alliance.

Level 6 Alliance Research contains a Battle Strategies project, each level unlocks new Strategies in the Strategy Center building, very important for the Alliance as well. Alternate the research for this one when level 6 opens up with the Expansion III (Max Alliance Membership) project.

Helping your members to grow is more important than the extra combat boosts, do projects with growth focus first (Troop Load, Construction Speed, Research Speed, Timer Help Duration, Number of Timer Helps, Alliance Building Gathering Speed, Troop Upkeep, Storage Protection)

Projects repeat themselves, when putting a Star on a higher version (II, III, IV, or V) of a project, make sure all lower versions are already maxed. Higher levels require more donations and this is in general easier for your members to do later on in the game.

Almost all projects have some usefulness, so when keeping the above in mind, there is not much you can really do wrong. However I do want to share my personal preference to put the ones below on the backburner.

It is not that the Blood Brothers project is useless, but people often think that it will extend the number of alliance members that can rally a Red Guard camp or an Underworld Villain, which is not the case. This only influences the amount of rally slots available for rallying players, which you might not need that many, so consider whether you want to keep researching this or maybe stop after Blood Brothers I.

Typically most players have much more troops than traps and because of all kind of other boosts the troops are much stronger than traps as well. For this reason I would postpone focus on the trap related projects like Drop Damage, Stationary Strength and Targeted Terror until all troop combat research is finished.

Unlike buiding construction and research, I tend to not continuously build traps, so any focus on Trap Construction Speed, feels like a wasted effort.

Big players tend to focus more on Distance, Cavalry and Infantry troops in their marches, and not Artillery. With that in mind you also might want to wait with Artillery research projects until the rest is maxed.

Most of the Alliance focussed Alliance Research is useful, but I find the Building Resistance projects basically a waste of time. Sure, if someone is going to destroy your alliance buildings it is nice if it takes them a little bit longer, but it is not going to stop them, nor is it going to do them any damage.

All Projects Filled

Early on the issue will be to have enough donations to start a research, but once you get things going and you are able to extend your alliance to more active members, it is actually the research time that is the biggest issue. This can get so bad that all projects are already maxed with donations. To deal with this issue it is possible for the alliance leaders (r4 and r5) to use their Alliance's Alliance Funds to speed up alliance research. This is a bit tricky, because the Alliance Funds are also required to restock the alliance store and basically to be able for all members to use their Alliance Honor to buy things, you need to use all Alliance Funds to restock the alliance store. Since most players tend to stock up on alliance honor, some need to use it to heal troops, some never use it because they are inactive, it is ok to use some to speed up projects, but leaders should be careful to keep their members happy and keep having sufficient items in the Alliance Store.

Tip

The donation rewards are a great way to collect some safe resources. I don't think these every expire (I have kept donation rewards for three weeks and could still claim them), and as long as you don't claim them they are free. Probably no reason to keep them that long, but just don't claim them right away, just wait until you are going to use that Food and Wood.

Conclusion

Gives a nice extra dimension to the game, and because of the wide variety of boosts it can lead to some interesting discussions what is best, although most players likely agree that the first focus should be to extend the maximum alliance membership. In case you have questions or want to share thoughts, please feel free to share in the comment section.