Basics of Resources (Production & Gathering) - Part 1

Research

The Advancement Tree in the Academy has many skills that increase: City Production, Gathering Speed, Troop Load, and Resource Consumption Protection.

Also, the Defense Tree has skills for Reducing Troop Upkeep and increasing Resource Protection Capacity.

If you research these skills, you can not only increase the number of resources gathered but also protect more resources.

Understanding Food & Troop Upkeep

Troop Upkeep is when your troops consume Food. You can check the rate that Food is consumed at the Rally Spot detail screen. Your consumption per hour can very quickly increase as you build more troops, so it is important to know your Food Protected from Troop Upkeep level. This can be viewed by checking the details at your Warehouse.

Since very few resources are protected, you should only open Food Boxes when an immediate purchase is planned. If you open them early, food will quickly deplete to the Food Protected from Troop Upkeep limit.

Understanding Warehouse Protection

When you are attacked, only a portion of your resources are protected. You can check this at the details screen of the Warehouse and then review the 4 amounts at the top (Food Protected, Lumber Protected, Stone Protected, Ore Protected).

Although it is good to know that all of your resources cannot be taken, it further explains why you shouldn’t open resource boxes until you have a purchase planned for them. Also, when you gather resources, they are immediately added to the top bar and can be taken when attacked.

One way to extend your Protection limit is to transfer some resources to the Alliance Warehouse. Your resources here cannot be taken since the Alliance Warehouse cannot be directly attacked.

NOTE: If the Alliance City is destroyed, any resources you have stored in the Alliance Warehouse will be returned to your top bar. Be conscience, if this happens that your resources will not be protected beyond your Protection Limits.

Resource Production and Gathering Buffs

A good way to easily increase Gathering Speed is to activate Gathering City Buffs. By pressing on your keep, an icon labeled City Buff will appear. When pressed, scroll near the bottom and then press the option “Increases all resources gathering speed”. There are 2 options:

24 Hour and 8 Hour Speedups

Before sending any troops to gather, you should be sure that one of these is activated.

If you are out, you can purchase a 24 Hour Gathering Speedups in the Item Store for 1000 gems or from Alliance Shop for 20,000 points for 8 hours and 45,000 points for 24 hours. Although you can get them many ways, if you ever find yourself running low, this is always an option.

NOTE: For collection buffs, it is important that you activate at the start of collecting. This is when collection times are calculated and they will not change even if your Speedup wears off. For this reason, you can choose to use only 8 Hour Speedups immediately before sending a march.

Resource Production (Inside your Keep)

These resources are the easiest for you to gain because they take the smallest effort to produce. Every 12 hours, resource spots will be full and you must collect them to continue to produce more resources. This means, that if you check the spots only twice a day, you will receive the maximum resources from your Resource Spots.

There are 5 different kinds: Army Camps (Increase Training Speed and Training Capacity), Farms (Produce Food), Sawmills (Produce Lumber), Mines (Produce Ore), and Quarries (Produce Stone).

Over time, it will become clear that your food is generally in excess (mainly only used for building Ground units) and your Ore and Stone are VERY limited (Heavily used for Building Upgrades, and building Mounted and Siege units). Due to this, You should lean more towards those building those types of Resource Spots.

A recommended build once you have unlocked all 30 resources spots would be:

7-8 Sawmills, Mines, and Quarries
4-5 Farms
1-2 Army Camps

Until all 30 resource spots have unlocked, build whichever ones are most useful to you. But you don’t overbuild anything (since eventually your ratio should settle similarly to above).

To complete daily challenges and to continually work on increasing your City’s Resource Production, you should have at least one builder working on upgrading a Resource Spot.

You can purchase Production Speedups in the Black Market for resources. The cost of purchasing the Speedup is significantly less than the number of resources you will get in return, so you should always purchase when available.

Extra Tip

To optimize Builder Slots, you should use the first slot for upgrading resource tiles and the other 2 slots for upgrades that take a longer time. When unlocking slots 2 and 3, they are available for only a few days (without paying gems again). A workaround is to purchase the slot and then begin a very long upgrade that extends well beyond the few-day window. The slots do not go away while an upgrade is still in progress.

Doing this will allow you to have long upgrades that continue to count down while you continue to upgrade your Resource Spots in the first slot. This will save many gems in the long run.

CONTINUED IN PART 2