Introduction

Following the Growth Strategy Guide I wrote earlier (check it out if you haven't read it!) it should be relatively easy to grow till Stronghold Level 20. This guide contains additional tips, especially useful to get you from lvl 21 to 24.

Resources Are Still Key

The higher you get the faster the resource requirements seem to grow. The building and research timers also grow, but getting enough resources is still the limiting factor in growth, so in this guide we focus a lot on different ways to get those resources.

Before You Work on Stronghold Lvl 21

It might be tempting to quickly start working on SH 21 once you finished SH 20, but I suggest to take a step back and consider the following.

To be able to gather resources faster having more March Slots available is key. Once you finished Stronghold 20, upgrade your University to lvl 20 as well and research March Slots III in the Combat category. It is a big investment, but it is worth it.

If you haven't done so before, this is the time to start having your VIP active permanently. There are several important benefits, but, assuming you have reached VIP 8 already, the most important one is the extra March Slot. Spending 4000 gold for 30 Day VIP might seem like a lot, but it is not. If you have purchased even only a small pack, you can use the daily deposit in the Vault to already get a large part of the necessary 4000 gold. Even if you haven't you should be able to get the gold from all the events. If you don't have much gold, keep it up for VIP, it is the most important way of spending gold in my opinion.

Growing above Stronghold lvl 20 is going to be very tough if you are attacked in between kill events. If this still happens to you, now is the time to change this. Urge your leaders to make peace with other alliances, or consider switching to a larger alliance with less enemies. This might not be possible in all kingdoms, if you are lucky in your kingdom people will let everyone focus on growth in between kill events.

Relocate to an area with lvl 7 resource tiles. These tiles can be found in the center of the map and it is important to be near these higher level tiles to gather more resources while offline.

Catch up to lvl 20 with your other buildings. Each building has its own function and it is best to level them up all. Racing to stronghold 20 has its benefits because you will be able to unlock March Slots III in the Combat Research, but afterwards it is time to focus on other buildings before starting on lvl 21.

Once you have done all this, it is time to start working on Stronghold 21.

Gathering Boosts Revisited

In the basic Growth Strategy guide we discussed all the different ways to increase the Gathering Speed. Some of the important items on that list:

In the Economy Research category make sure to research all the resource specific gathering projects when they become available.

In the Lord Talent points, assign points in the Economy tree, and if there is a choice, select Gathering instead of Production. You will acquire more resources via gathering, so it is also better to spend your efforts on boosting this, if you need to make a choice.

For Lord Equipment ideally look at both the percentage increase, but also which resources are boosted. Make sure you have the right equipment on when you start gathering.

Iron and Silver vs Wood and Food

When you start working on Stronghold lvl 21 and above you will notice that the Iron and Silver requirements are harder to fill than Wood, and you will notice that your troops eat your food quite fast, so you will likely spend most of the time gathering Iron and Silver.

Probably your alliance leaders realize this as well, if not, it might be worthwhile to point out so that the focus of the Alliance Resource buildings can be on Iron and Silver.

It is best to focus on Food latest. Once you start focusing on Food, have all your marches out gathering Food and have a 24h Upkeep Reducer active. Keep an eye on how much your troops consume, if they are eating more than half of what you gather at fastest rate, you should seriously consider using the alternative of a Farm account, possibly in combination with Food Push, more about that later.

Both Food and Wood are relatively easier to come by, for example from Barbarian Camps and some of the special Events have a lot higher payout in Wood and Food.

It is also possible via High Steward heroes to get a Food Requirement decrease quite easily, for both Research and Construction.

Usage of Gather Boost Items

There are items that give you a 50% Gathering boost for 8 or 24 hours. You might find you don't have enough of them to keep them active 24/7, in which case you might consider the following.

There is no (or little) need to have gathering boosts active if you are not online for long times, e.g. during night time, as with or without boost, next time you log in to the game, all your troops will be at home waiting for next orders.

The boost works in a funny way. When you activate a gathering boost item while your troops have already been out gathering, it will be as if the boost was active from the moment your troops started gathering. So you can for example first send all your troops out gathering on lvl 7 tiles, which might take for example 4 hours. Once 2 1/2 hours have passed, you activate the Gathering Boost and see a huge jump in remaining time, or even marches returning immediately.

Monsters and Barbarians

Whenever you have stamina, make sure you use it to slay monsters or rally barbarians. Use it on high levels only (I only slay lvl 28+ monsters and level 26+ barbarians). The higher you do the more resources and goodies you get.

I try to rally barbarians as long as I still have the barbarian keys, and use the rest for monsters.

Both are good ways to get resource items (for barbarians you only get Food and Wood, for monsters you can also get Iron and Silver).

Farm Account for Food Push

Because your troops eat food, and because the Food requirements get very large for Stronghold upgrades (and few other buildings), Food becomes a real issue. You cannot slowly gather food over a longer time, because your troops keep eating it. I am currently still at a situation where I can quite easily gather food faster than my troops eat it, but ultimately when I have higher tier troops and more troops, there comes a time it cannot be done anymore.

A farm account's function is basically to provide resources for your main. This is handy anyway, but in the case of food it comes quite crucial. It is convenient to just gather some food on a farm account with very little upkeep during a week or so, and transfer it to your main account once you need it.

Sometimes this is used in combination with a Food Push (Food Push can also be done separately). For a Food Push you make a farm account (or other account with very low upkeep) part of the main alliance and ask everyone to transfer (push) there excess food to it (as opposed to letting it be eaten by troops). You can also start gathering food and as soon as your food arrives, transfer it to the Food Push account. Once you have collected enough you kick the Food Push account from the alliance and attack it with your main to transfer all food to your main and start your stronghold upgrade.

Keep Resources Safe

Since it is very difficult to get Iron and Silver items (unlike Food and Wood), it is not possible to collect all required resources in a safe way. Still, it is good to use this as much as possibe, so that you limit the benefit people have of attacking you, and you make sure you lose as little as possible when attacked.

I repeat some of the best practices that I introduced in the basic Growth Strategy guide.

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, University 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. Worst thing that can happen is when you need to do an upgrade (e.g. kill event is coming and you do not want to be shielded for 3 days), and you do not have enough resources, so always keep plenty of those resource 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 the prizes from completing Requests. 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 add up 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, although it is annoying that both the daily and total amounts are very small compared to the requirements of higher level building upgrades.

Stronghold Push

A lot of the above tips assume you are in a rather peaceful Kingdom and Alliance, so that you can actually collect the required resources over the course of several days. If this is not possible you might focus more on working together with a group of people to push each other to the next Stronghold level one by one.

Conclusion

I hope this guide will offer some help with growing your stronghold from level 21 to 24. If you have questions or you want to share tips for others, please leave your remarks in the comment section.