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 stronghold level 14 onwards).

Resources Are Key

As you might have noticed THE key factor in this game limiting your growth is resources, not the timers.

Early on in the game you could train troops, upgrade buildings and start research every time a timer was finished, but, depending on your activity, once you reach Stronghold levels 13-15 this is likely no longer the case, you need to get resources first before you can start your next building and research, maybe even troop training.

With respect to resources there are two key factors, one is the maximize your resource income, the other is to make sure your resource are not taken away by enemies before you can use them.

What I will not really look into in this guide is the usage of resource for other activities than your own upgrades, like Donating to Alliance Tech or Allies. This is something up to you and your alliance.

Maximizing Your Resource Income

Gathering resources is an important way to get more resources, 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. In the next section I give some tips on boosting your resource gathering rates.

Killing Monsters and joining Barbarian Rallies are good ways to get resources as well, you typically get a large amount of one of the small resource items (1000 Food or Wood, 200 Iron or 50 Silver). These items cannot be taken away from you, so great to build up large amounts of resources.

Pay attention to seasonal opportunities. Currently the Christmas Event is still in progress and via the Christmas Maps you can collect large amount of resource items in a short time as well.

Production via resource buildings is also a good way. It is not going that fast, but because it is going on 24/7 it still ads up. Unfortunately like many I am not having a positive Food balance, and once you start having a significant army it is practically impossible to keep a positive Food Balance. I have maxed my Food Farms anyway, I just want to minimize the amount I lose in an hour. My Wood production is currently 35k per hour, which gives a nice extra amount each day. I do not have many Iron and Silver Mines yet, that might change as I grow more and will require more of those resources.

Resources from Labyrinth

Since I originally wrote this guide the Forbidden Labyrinth has been introduced and is now a very good way to get resources daily in an easy manner. Once you develop your dragon spirit sufficiently to reach floor 55 (defense and attack runestones make that quite easy), you can purchase quite large quantities of each of the resources daily. Making sure you have a large satchel capacity and a large cooldown reduction can help you get a steady resource stream. If you have farm accounts, this can also easily be applied there. Building an account up to reach floor 55 in the forbidden labyrinth is time consuming, and you need to make sure you can activate VIP so that you can plunder through all floors, but once things are set up you get a lot of resources with minimal effort. All other ways to get resources offer only little in comparison.

Boosting Gathering Speed

There are various ways to boost resource gathering: Research, Talent Points, Lord Equipment, Dragon Skills, using the Alliance Resource Building, and using Gathering Boost items.

In the Economy Research tree there are a many projects that increase the gathering rate for individual resources. My advise is to research new projects/levels as soon as they are available.

Your Lord Talent points also can increase the gathering rate of resources significantly. An additional benefit from focusing on the Economy Talent Tree is that you get access to the Instant Yield and Development Talents as well. Instant Yield I use as soon as I can, the Development Talent I keep for the larger building and research projects.

Make sure to forge some equipment to increase your gathering speeds and let your Lord wear it.

There are quite a lot of Dragon Skills to improve resource gathering. This only has effect on the marches that include your dragon, but is still worth it.

In the Alliance Resource Building you have a higher gathering rate than on regular resource tiles. Your alliance can only have one Resource Building at a time, but it is good to make use of this as well.

Compared to all other boosts above, the Gathering Boost items give a huge boost and they have the benefit that it is applicable to all resources and all your marches. It is however only valid for a limited time and it costs Alliance Credits or gold. I think it is still worth it to use so now and then. at 25,000 Alliance Credits for an 8 hour boost they are not so expensive. Also keep an eye out for these items in the Market Place, you can sometimes get them for paying only a fairly small amount of resources.

March Slots

An important factor in gathering is not only the speed, but also the amount of marches you can deploy, depending on how many March Slots you have unlocked. You have one March Slot at the start of the game, and can fairly easily unlock two more via research in the Combat tree (March Slots I at University 6 and March Slots II at University 12, make sure to research these if you have not). However the other two march slots are not so easy, one is at VIP 8 and the other in the Combat research tree, March Slots III, only available once your University reaches level 20.

In my opinion only once you reach VIP 8, which will come eventually when you just keep playing, you should consider the pros and cons of paying the gold amount to keep VIP active. All the other VIP benefits are just not really worth it. A 30 day VIP item costs 4000 gold. Spending this 133 gold per day for an extra March Slot will for sure give you more in return than purchasing resources from the gold store (e.g. pay 160 gold for 50k Food), but it is still up to you to decide whether it is worth it. FOr my personal consideration, I have unlocked the 1 day deposit in the vault by purchasing a pack and I am now trying to get 105 gold per day from the Vault. Once I reach VIP 8 (I am still almost 10,000 points away), I plan to use that gold, together with gold I win from events, to keep VIP active for the extra March Slot.

I am currently at Stronghold 17, and so far I have taken the approach to upgrade all my other buildings before upgrading my Stronghold to the next level. From now on I will change this tactic, and I will try to upgrade to Stronghold 20 as soon as possible, to be able to upgrade my University to level 20, which allows me to unlock March Slots III. Once I have done that I will focus again on my other buildings, this way I can sooner benefit from the benefits of the extra March Slot.

Keep Resources Safe

It is important to keep your resources safe as much as possible. You put a lot of effort to collect resources and it would be very disappointing if just before you give the assignment to upgrade to the next Stronghold level some large player teleports in and steals all your resources (not to mention if he hospitalizes all your troop in the process). For this reason you should make sure to never have many unsafe resources when you are not online or not shielded.

Some considerations, what I typically do is for the smaller upgrades and researches I do not use any resource items. I keep these for the huge research projects (like March Slot III), and Stronghold and Wall upgrades. This makes sure that when I do need to have a lot of resources for the large ones, I always have plenty of items.

There are various ways in which you get resources where you have some choice when to collect them, e.g. mails with Donation prizes, or the prizes from your Daily Rewards, and very important to prizes from completing Quests. Only collect these when you are going to use the resources directly (or when they are about to expire). Especially the prizes from completing quests can amount to a large amount for your Stronghold upgrade requirements.

For the Wishing Gems, you also can consider collecting these, to spend them when you are in need of resources instead of using them as you get them in your inventory. This way you get more out of them as well (the more you use on the same day the higher the payout). In the Market Place there are sometimes Wishing Gems for a very cheap amount of resources.

Another good way to keep resources safe until you need them is by storing some daily in the Alliance Storehouse. I tend to do that now with Iron, which I have plenty off, but I know I will also need a lot for the Stronghold upgrades.

Some alliances work together on Pushing members to the next Stronghold level. Typically each day a person and time is announced, and everybody works hard to fill the requirements for that person to upgrade his Stronghold. When you have a very loyal group of people who all put in roughly the same effort (and money), this might be a fine method, but there are some potential drawbacks: it is difficult to do this in a way that everyone feels fair (you tend to either get a situation that people who have a hard time growing need to use their resources to help others grow, or you have people who spend way more time help people who are hardly on), and it can lead to a lot of dissatisfaction when someone who has been pushed a lot decides to leave the alliance (and anyone who has played this type of game for a while, know there are plenty of people switching alliances).

Other Considerations

In general focus all your activities on increasing resource income and decreasing resource cost first as much as possible.

For resource gathering the location of your alliance hive is also important. Depending on the area on the map you are on, you will have higher or lower level resource tiles around you. This influences the amount of resources in a resource tile (I have not yet done any comparison tests with respect to speed on different level resource tiles, but know from other games this can also be better for higher tiles). You want to be around at least level 5 resource tiles to be able to send your troops out to gather for a while while you go offlie.

You should have enough troops to completely deplete as many resource tiles as you have march slots, but this should normally not be an issue.

Although in my experience resources are way more an issue than the construction and research timers, it is still good to make things go as fast as possible as well. The Economy Talent tree helps quite a bit, with the Construction and Research projects, but also with the Talent Development, which for a short time reduces the new building and research timers with 20%

Conclusion

I hope this guide has offered some help, both with the day to day upgrades, but also with what to focus on (e.g. unlock the additional March Slots via University level 20 and VIP 8). If you have questions or you want to share tips for others, please leave your remarks in the comment section.