Introduction

Your troops have an upkeep, meaning they eat your food. The more troops you have the more food they consume and also the higher the tier or level of your troops, the more food they consume. This guide will explain how to maximize your food production and how to reduce your upkeep.

How Does Upkeep Work

It is helpful to have a good understanding of how the upkeep exactly works. Once you understand the details you will find that having a negaive upkeep is not the end of the world, far from it.

When you go to your City Stats (via your Stronghold menu), you will see the total hourly Upkeep that you have. This is comprised of all (not hospitalized) troops you have, taking into consideration any upkeep reduction boost you might have active.

Your troops will try to eat that amount of food, but only if it is available. If it is not available, nothing happens, your troops won't die or perform any less in combat or gathering.

Food is available by consumption only once it has been opened/collected and as far as it is above your Storehouse Capacity (taking into consideration any storage capacity boosts you have active).

So any food stocks below this capacity will never be eaten, and any food from your farm buildings will not be eaten as long as you haven't harvested it.

Food Production

There are several different ways of getting food. For this guide we will focus on Food Production. Some popular other ways are Food Gathering and attacking other castles. We focus on Food Production because, once setup, it is a (mostly) passive method to get your food, and it has benefit to keeping your Food Production higher than your Food Consumption, or keeping the negative gap small.

The first thing to do to maximize your food production is build as many farms outside your city walls as possible. Keep in mind that as you unlock new areas for resource buildings, the maximum allowed number of each resource building also increases, so always build an extra farm when possible. Also make sure you always upgrade these farms to your Castle level. The amount of farms and levels of farms determines your base food production in food per hour.

There are a number of different ways to increase this base food production with a percentage.

The 24 Hour Farm Boost item (you get them as prizes, but you can also purchase them from the Alliance Store for only 6000 alliance credits) boosts the production of one farm with 100%. You can use these on each of your farms. The other boosts discussed below boost the combined production of all farms.

In the Economy Research Category there are a total of 4 projects that provide Food Production Boost of in total 78%.

There are 3 Food Production projects in the Economy Skills. I have not yet unlocked the 3rd one, the first you give 5% and 20% Food Production boost.

For equipment there are several rings that give up to 15% (unenhanced) Food Production Boost (e.g. Ring of Production), and weapons that give up to 45% (unenhanced) Food Production Boost (e.g. Bow of Tristan).

Food Consumption or Upkeep

Your troops consume food, when available. It actually cannot harm if you do not have enough food, your troops will not die. It is more an annoyance, because you need food for training more troops, doing research, and upgrading certain buildings, and it is difficult to build up enough food for these tasks if you consume way more food than you produce.

The more troops you have the more your army consumes, and the higher the level or tier of troops, the more they consume. A tier 5 soldier consumed 5 times as much as a tier 1 and a tier 10 soldier 2 times as much as a tier 5.

Some players consider dismissing lower level troops to get rid of part of their Upkeep.

In the Development Research Category there are two projects that each give a 5% Upkeep Reduction.

For equipment there are two Greaves that give an Upkeep Reduction Boost, the Boots of Speed give a 4% Upkeep Reduction Boost and Galahads Boots a 5% Upkeep Reduction Boost.

In the 4th Category of the Alliance Research there is an Efficiency I project that gives a small Upkeep Reduction boost.

There are two 24h Upkeep items that can be purchased in the store for gold that give you a Upkeep Reduction, 500 gold for a 25% Upkeep Reduction boost and 900 gold for a 50% Upkeep reduction boost.

Tips

Besides a production rate each farm also has a capacity. Without any boosts it is setup so that a farm can keep producing for 10 hours until it reaches full capacity. If you do not harvest farms and they get full production will stop. Once you have reached full storage capacity and you have negative upkeep, harvesting your farms will only cause the food to be eaten by your troops. Unless you are going to use the food rightaway (either for your own builds, research, training etc, or send it to another player, or a zero upkeep account), you might hold off on harvesting your farms and keep them fully loaded until you need the food.

Focus on saving food in safe ways, for example Food items, Alliance Storehouse, unclaimed Donation Rewards, unclaimed quests, Wishing Gems. Even your Daily Rewards you should only collect when you need the food if you are already at max storage capacity.

Once you need a relative small amount of food for troop training, a building upgrade, or a research project, do not right away use up your safe food, but instead plan ahead and send out all marches to gather food, harvest all your fully loaded farms, use the Instant Yield (and the Instant Gather with 5 marches out, once you have unlocked this) talent and you will find you already can accumulate quite some food.

Consider as an alliance to have one zero upkeep account. This is only useful in relative peaceful kingdoms, otherwise it becomes a target for other alliance. Here people can move their excess food to and collect it when needed.

Do not forget about the heroes. My favorite is Sir Ector and I eventually hope to upgrade him to three stars, so that it not only gives a great food reduction for research, but also for construction. As a low/non spender it will be very hard to upgrade the purple/pink heroes in my experience, so you might reconsider spending a lot of Guard EXP on those.

At a later stage in the game it becomes really useful to be able to collect food outside your main account, so building one or more farms starts to be key. I suugest to start early, as building farms also takes time.

Conclusion

I hope this explains the concepts Food Production and Upkeep and helps you deal with it. If you have any other tips or questions, please share in the comment section.