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 headquarters level 14/15 to level 19) at which stage you can unlock t7 troops.

Resources start to be an issue

Why start this guide at headquarters 14/15? Because at lower levels there is no real difficulty yet. By actively playing events you probably had enough resource items to start your building upgrades without even needing to gather, and timers are still short.

From Headquarters 16 onwards resource requirements are tougher to meet and resources become THE key factor limiting your growth.

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 Infected and joining Dev Camps Rallies are good ways to get resources as well, you typically get some of all resources.

Pay attention to events and seasonal opportunities. Currently there are some Chinese New Year events in progress, and several other events. Resource items are a very common reward.

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.

Boosting Gathering Speed

There are various ways to boost resource gatheringm early on Research and Talent Points are most common.

In the Economic 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 Chief 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 Collect and Rapid Development Talents as well. Instant Collect I use as soon as I can, the Rapid Development Talent I keep for the larger building and research projects.

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 the Leadership I and II research projects in the Development tree (For Leadership II you need Research Lab 13, make sure to research this asap if you have not). However the other two march slots are not so easy, one is at VIP 8 (and as far as I have been able to judge getting to VIP 8 without spending will take very long) and the other in the Development research tree, Leadership III, only available once your Research Lab reaches level 18. There is another Leadership IV at Research Lab 23, which falls outside of the scope of this guide.

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 biocaps amount to keep VIP active. All the other VIP benefits are just not really worth it. A 30 day VIP item costs 10,000 biocaps, still very expensive.

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 Headquarters level some large player relocates next to you 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 and don't have a peace flare active.

Unlike some similar games in this game the Warehouse building actually has a reasonable capacity. Upgrading your Warehouse building, increases the protection limit of your resources, and as long as your resources do not exceed this level they are not taken when you are attacked. As an example for Headquarters 16 you need 5.7M Food and Wood, Warehouse 15 protects 3.2M Food and Wood, which means already more than half of your requirements are safe from being plundered if you max out the Warehouse first before you start working on the HQ 16 upgrade.

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 big resource consumers (like Headquarters upgrades). This means I sometimes are a bit slower with the smaller stuff, because I have to do some gathering (but I am planning ahead as much as possible), but also 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. the prizes from your Daily Rewards, mails with rewards, and very important to prizes from completing Missions. Only collect these when you are going to use the resources directly. Especially the prizes from completing Missions can amount to a large amount for your Stronghold upgrade requirements.

Building Upgrade Order

Assuming you start with the upgrade from HQ 15 to 16, I suggest the following:

Barracks, Range and Garage to 16 (unlock t6 troops), Warehouse to 16 (protecting more resources), Research Lab to 16 (being able to do more useful resources), Hero Precinct and other prerequisite to 16.

HQ to 17, Warehouse to 17, Research Lab to 17, Hero Precinct and other prerequisite to 17. If you have more time you should already work on your troop training buildings.

HQ to 18, Research Lab to 18 (start with Leadership III asap), Warehouse to 18, Hero Precinct and other prerequisite to 18. Again, if you have more time you should already work on your troop training buildings.

HQ to 19, Barracks, Range and Garage to 16 (unlock t7 troops), Warehouse to 17, Research Lab to 17. Now it is time to make a plan for the next phase.

Other Considerations

In general focus all your activities on increasing resource income and decreasing resource cost (if any) 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, I don't think it is the case here, but for some case the higher level tiles also have a higher gathering rate). 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 offline.

You should have enough troops to gather for significant time on as many resource tiles as you have march slots. The more troops you have the better, ideally you would like to be able to completely depleted resource tiles in one go.

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 a bit, with the Tool and Tech Improvement projects, but also with the Talent Rapid Development, which for a short time reduces the new building and research timers with 20%. This is especially useful to use for the bigger upgrades, e.g. headquarters. At the rate I am going I will have reached HQ 19 before I can unlock my Rapid Development talent.

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 Research Lab level 18). If you have questions or you want to share tips for others, please leave your remarks in the comment section.