~Lord of Ultima~

Table of Contents
Table of Contents Introduction The Basics -Newbie Tips -Glossary of Terms -Building Resource Cities -Gold Production -Building Military Cities -Tower Composition -Clustering vs. nodes -Tweaks and tools -City Planners -Minister Overviews -BoS tools Summary -Ministers: Worth it? -Resource distribution -Empire Startup Guides Military -The Golden Rules -Offence vs Defence -Tatctics -Invasion Strategy -Attacking 101 *Not done* Advanced Stuff -Raiding -Maximising palace delivery -Preparing for lawless -Organising your empire Everything Else -Special thanks -Changes -Miscellaneous

Introduction
So here is my unofficial LOU guide. Ive played a total of 6 servers now, and done everything from lead an underdog alliance to a 1st place LOU title, to hold that famed rank 1 spot in every ranking there is. Im not perfect, but I know enough that I can teach you something :) So before you guys start reading, Id like to say a few things. This game will take an increasing amount of your time as time passes, especially if you dont have ministers. It takes about 8-10 months from the start of the server for the 1st alliance to get a crown. Never say I didnt warn you about your complete loss of a social life until thats over. Theres a lot of aspects to the game, raiding, war, resources, palaces, faith, research, the list goes on. To win as an alliance, you need teamwork and planning. And to be an effective player, you need every city you own to be useful to you. There will come a time where an 85K resource city is useless to you unless you

have a way to ship those resources. So to be good at this game, you need a proper, well designed strategy for how you are going to expand. And to win as an alliance, you need teamwork and planning. Ill add more ramblings later. Good luck! ~Naturalist

The Basics
-Newbie Tips Here is some advice for new players. If you have played before, just skim over them. -Each city should be made for a purpose, either resource, military or special. Do NOT mix resource buildings with military buildings. -Cottages increase your construction speed, allowing you to complete builds in a shorter time frame. Aim for a minimum of 20 cottages while building your city. They can be removed later. -Stonemasons, mills, sawmills and foundries (refineries) do NOT stack, only have 1 touching each resource producer. Each refinery should touch at least 3 resource producer. -Don't place farms near outer walls. Cuts down the amount of food they can grow. -Find a good alliance that can teach you how to play. Ask experienced players questions, even if they aren't in your alliance. -If its your first (or even 2nd, 3rd) time playing, dont castle your 1st or 2nd cities. -To get your 2nd city, you need a moonglow tower level 10, a Trinistic Temple level 10, 250 carts, and at least 1 slot in your barracks to recruit a baron. You need 50k wood, 50k stone, 50k iron, 50k food and 40k gold for your title (under research). You will also need 50k iron and 100k gold to recruit your baron, then 100k wood, 100k stone, 25k iron and 25k food to start your city. -Dont make castles on water for your first 5-6 cities. -Dont worry about hideouts, they are fairly useless. -Glossary of Terms There's lots of lingo being thrown around that is new to some of us and old to others, because each alliance has its own language of sorts. Conversion Castle: City with resource production and military buildings that gets slowly converted to pure military Dedicated Palace, or "Ded": Palace that will be taken to level 10 No Castle Zone (NCZ): The 20 square radius around a dedicated shrine where no castles but the ded is allowed. A technique for ensuring enlightenment EL: enlightenment Power locking: A technique in which 15 7 pted castles and two dedicated palaces surround a shrine, another technique for ensuring enlightenment Lawl: lawless city 7pt - demoing a castle, now worth 7 points. HL - High level, refers to a palace to get to level 10 LL - landlocked, usually refers to a castle, might also mean lawless city Main - Main palace (or dedicated) to go to level 10 MGT - Moonglow Tower

NP - Night Protection PR's, Puries - Purified resources TA - Title Advancement TH - town hall TG - Training Ground WC - Water Castle WG - War Galleon WS - Workshops WSI - wood, stone, iron Lits - Enlightments -Building Resource Cities Resource cities are the heart of your empire, if your resource cities are crappy, you will struggle to keep up as the game goes on. So here is a step by step process on building a good resource city. 1. Open your city in the www.louopt.com city planner (see The Basics/ Tweaks and Tools/ LOU Tweak). 2. Change the add box from 100 to 97, move the sliders as you wish (if you need more of a certain resource), then hit add. 3. Add a moonglow tower and 2 markets. If you are playing without ministers, take out 5 buildings and add 3 warehouses and 2 extra markets. This is by no means giving you the best possible output, but if you follow this you will still be doing better than 80-90% of other players. Example: 1. http://louopt.com/hjbY5wDF8 2. http://louopt.com/rnMwPADF8 3. http://louopt.com/09vGfADF8 Other tips for building resource cities - Aim for a ~2000% build speed, and do it ASAP. This is about 30 cottages at level 8-9. You can take some (likely most) out later on. - When planning resource cities ignore build speed. Plan it out for the optimal resources you desire. If that means the plan only calls for 5 cottages, so be it. - While build speed is important, do your best to not run out of wood and stone to build! It's better to build slow than to not build at all, after all, 2000% build speed doesn't do you any good if you can't build anything. - Have a level 10 moonglow tower in every city. This is mandatory. If you're cities come under attack you can purify the resources in that city, so that the enemy can't plunder them, and in effect will discourage them from plundering again in the future. -Once you have a hub set up, set new resource cities to pull 140k wood and 140k stone from the hub, and have them send all extra back to that hub. You wont have to fiddle with the trade minister at all! -Gold Production http://bit.ly/ap1kps Harbor setup -15 buildings, 7.6k gold (506 gold/ building) Gold city

-100 buildings, 45.1k gold (451 gold/building) Not only does it have a higher output, but with all the harbors, its beautiful for sending to palaces later. If you need the gold production, this is the way to go!! -Building Military Cities - Aim for a ~3000% build speed, and do it ASAP. This is about 40 cottages at level 9, or 60 cottages at level 6-7. - Have zero resource production in military cities (exception: food) - Be sure to put in a moonglow tower! Markets are optional, but help enormously when used right. I usually have 2 warehouses (minimum) and 2 markets. - Have a large stone income, between the cottages, barracks and walls, youll be going through a few million stone. Military cities! NOW the fun begins! Every military city is a bit different, but fundamentally the same. http://louopt.com/jyFecOKF8: This is the most efficient possible way to build a military. If they dont have something similar looking to this in the centre, I suggest you start remodelling. Step by step: 1. Drop the city, get your CS (construction speed) up to around 3000% and TH (town hall) to level 9 at least. Set up your ministers now aswell: Build Minister -Auto Build: ON Defence Minister -Wall/Tower auto build: ON -Set Troop amount (ex: and 252k zerk castle would set 252k zerks) Trade Minister Set them to request 500k of each res from your hub, and forward excess back to the hub. 2. Build markets, recruitment buildings, warehouses and food (if any). Also get Town Hall to level 10. 3. Build barracks with remaining building slots, then build walls/towers to level 10. Start recruiting as you do this step. 4. Begin taking out cottages and replacing them with barracks. If its a castle, also castle now. Military City Layouts: Click here (semi-complete) -Tower Composition There is no set way to build your towers, but here are some options. Resource City - 4 lookouts Landlocked Castle - 2 lookouts - 6 ranger towers

- 6 guardian towers - 6 templar towers - 4 ballista towers Water Castle - 4 lookouts - 10 templar towers - 10 ballista towers or - 4 lookouts - 2 templar towers - 2 ballista towers - 20 arcane/camouflage traps -Clustering vs. nodes Location location location. Where do I make my cities?! The 2 methods that make sense are: Clustering: Building your cities as close to one another as possible to give smallest travel times between them. Nodes: Building your cities in spots to give them the best end output. I cant prove one way is any better than another, best bet is to follow both in moderation. How do you know what kind of nodes youre gonna get in your city? Forest -> wood Hill -> stone Mountain-> iron Plain -> food Heres the formula: adjacent - 8 nodes diagonal - 4 nodes So if you are touching 3 forests, and diagonal to 3 more, you will get 36 wood nodes. And of course, being next to a river means you get water! If you have an open land node it gives you 2 extra lakes, up to a maximum of 10. -Tweaks and tools While the game can be played without these tools, they make life much easier on you. They're free, widely used, work on both Chrome and Firefox, and only appear within the game. They don't add toolbars or buttons or anything to your browser toolbar so you don't have to worry about clutter. I suggest using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome to play this, as they both support the tweaks.

Greasemonkey - This is the basic tool youll need to run additional user scripts, it runs silently in the background and requires no instruction on how to use it. You only need greasemonkey if you are using firefox. -https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/ LoU Tweak - Alters the game interface with many shortcuts and implements features that were simply missing before. Absolutely essential to a successful strategy. -http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/80532 BoS Tools - Provides a means to calculate values in seconds that would otherwise take hours to work out, supremely useful for analyzing scouting reports. -http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/84343 LoU Assistant - Gives approximate time until the build minister finishes all the builds it can possibly do. Very helpful. (Note: As of the update on 24/03/2012, this doesnt seem to be working) -http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/102045 One Defiant TDK - Provides a great many options and features, runs very smoothly. -http://senocular.com/chrome/extensions/lou/LoUDefiant_about.html LOU ToolTip Tweak - Hover over dungeon for info, like how many troops to send. Uses wiki info, doesnt factor in %. -http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/110308.user.js LOUPak Tools - Hover over city or dungeon for info, just like ToolTip. However this one factors in dungeon progression (%). Left-click for extra options as well. Pretty neat -http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/125367 Mail Extension - Replaces the current mail system, allows you to have several mails open at once with tabs, and you can close mails without losing changes. -http://www.lordofultima.com/en/forum/showthread.php?tid=58886 World Mapper - Shows cities, alliances, and most importantly: Shrine ranges. Must have now that we have no palace locking. -http://lou-tools.appspot.com/# Baron Bar - Shows info about your empire, if you have any spare barons around, etc. -http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/104836 Boss Calc - Calc in research, faith, boss type/level and this gives you how many units needed to kill it. -http://jsfiddle.net/moritana/7AE63/show/ LouAid - Has some info, not very accurate though for what I can see (the layouts are awful) -http://louaid.com/default.php Combat Reading - Not necessary, hell I dont even know what most of it means. Might be handy. -http://s196285771.onlinehome.us/lou_combat_calculator_doc.htm Empire Viewer - Gives a good overview of your empire, personally I dont use it much, but it IS handy! -http://empire.lou-tools.com/ How To Play Lord of Ultima - Another web based guide, has some stuff in it, although all and more will be covered here if I ever finish. -https://sites.google.com/site/howtoplaylordofultima/ LOU Cheat Sheet - Big kudos to Osbourne for this, very well done. Handy for quick reference in some parts.

-tinyurl.com/loucheatsheet LOU Guide V1.1 - Big thanks to Hyperazion for this. Well done guide aswell. -https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KcrbjNYuHPebcqmz_HwkZbfiLdTYAYSGDgYmfW6qBtU/edit -City Planners LoU default: http://www.lou-fcp.co.uk. Used with http://loof78.appspot.com/lou_city. Original planner. Might toss up a walkthrough for it one day for anyone interested. Alternative planner: http://city.louopt.com (this is flash planner 2 in the LoU city layout window, and has built in optimization tools, an efficiency overlay, and easier import/export options than the default). -Minister Overviews Command Overview: This one is pretty straight forward. List of all your cities with troops and the current command queue and status of those commands, color coded and organized with an emphasis on offense. Not the most useful if you only have a few cities with troops but once you command 10+ castles, raiding or defensive cities it becomes a handy tool to get an at-a-glance look at the battle field. Defense Overview: This is largely the same as the command overview, but focuss simply on what is, and what isnt in your cities. Great for managing defense, or looking for that pesky baron you recruited by cant remember in which city, but otherwise BoS tools military summary gives you a better overview of your military. (get to that in a bit) Building Queues Overview Arguably the most useful of the overviews. Theres a ton of info here, but the >> button (probably have to scroll right) is possibly the most important. Its essentially a BUILD ALL THE THINGS button. This commands your build minister to upgrade as many buildings as possible according to the rules youve set to the build minister for that city. If this button is grayed out then that means there are no more buildings to upgrade within your build ministers parameters. The +1 button follows the same rules except it only adds a building at a time, as opposed to maxing out the queue. This way you dont have to upgrade city by city, building by building. Another thing to take note of here is the Wood and Stone balance columns. The first column is the current balance, the second column is the projected balance at the time of completing the current build queue, factoring in incoming resources and the cities local resource production. Negative (red) numbers indicate you need additional resources of that amount. If so, click the request button, which will open up the trade minister window and request the appropriate resources. Speaking of resources: (the left half of the build overview) This shows you a list current build queue lengths, and gives you a fairly accurate representation of the timeline for buildings in the queue that you: -already have converted resources for (green) -already have the resources in city, but not converted (light blue) -have on the way, or will produce within the build queues time frame (blue) -do not and will not have (Yellow, orange, and red, depending on how much you're missing). The Warning symbols give you an indication of any issues you may have (eg resources missing or build limit reached, could be a problem if you have keep build order checked), and the two columns of check marks/xs tell you if the building or defense (fortification) ministers are enabled. Max Convert applies all available resources to buildings in the queue.

Resource Overview: Pretty basic list of Wood, stone, iron, food and gold balances, production and current trade.Dont think this needs any explanation, but its worth noting this does not account for raiding or plundering incomes. -BoS tools Summary Summary button: This is a pretty powerful little tool, you can find it to the right of the Shop button if you have BoS tools installed (link at the top of the guide). More to come. BoS tools button: this is to the right of the summary button, and has a drop down of a number of tools to select. BoS Calculators: The first three in the drop down are calculators. Food Consumption calc is pretty straightforward. Recruit speed is also fairly straightforward (use recruit speed percentage). Combat calc frankly baffles me. Anyone know how this bastard works? I cant get it to match any of my Attack reports with any accuracy or precision. Potentially broken/unfinished/outdated? BoS Jump to: Again pretty straightforward. I dont use these too much but they occasionally save you from digging through menus or flying around aimlessly on the map. Good to know. BoS Extra Summary Doesnt do anything Extra that the in game overviews and general layout dont already provide you with, but if youre a fan of keeping, charts, graphs and/or data this is the tool to use. The key thing here is to learn how to Export to CSV. Google docs spreadsheet, Excel, and libre/open office spreadsheet all accept copy paste imports of this data, although you may have to change some parameters depending on your defaults and program of choice. An important thing to mention is this tool (under alliance) shows last login times for players. -Ministers: Worth it? YES. If you want to be competitive in this game, you either need these bad boys or you need a good 7-8 hours a day to play this game (not at the start, but once you get 40-50 cities). Build Minister: Auto-build. You drop a level 1 building, come back later (resources/time permitting) and ta-da! Its level 10 :D Essentially you can design your city and it will build itself. Defence Minister: You can set a city to recruit a certain number of units, and it will keep the armies at that level assuming you have time and resources. Will also auto upgrade your walls. War Minister: Repeat raids, so military cities can raid non-stop. Also lets you set arrival times for armies for big attacks. Trade Minister: Auto-Purifies, and you can have it ship res from one city to another to prevent overflowing. For the 7$ a month that it costs, definitely worth it! -Resource distribution Here is where people sometimes struggle, you're making millions of res every hour, but how can you get that res to the city your building? Well, theres these handy things called hubs, and there are different varieties.

Single resource hub: Have one of these for each resource on your continent http://louopt.com/0DtrMuWF8 so you will need 4 cities. Upside is, carts are unlikely to be a problem and you get lots of warning on a lack of resource (just check each hub every week or so). If you have (or plan to have) 200+ cities on a continent, this is the way to go. Dual resource hub: 2 separate hubs, one for W/S and one for I/F. The first one if mainly for building cities, the second for supplying castles. If you have that many cities, having 1 hub per resource (4 total) might be useful.http://louopt.com/nyZfiwWF8. If you have over 100 cities on a continent, you might want to use this method. The normal continent hub, good for about 80 cities usually: http://louopt.com/MRZl 2 part hub: A 2 city single hub, one city for storage the other for shipping. Storage: http://louopt.com/mygeqyWF8 Shipping: http://louopt.com/FytaozWF8 Both of these cities should be directly next to each other Another common method is to divide cities into clusters, and each cluster gets its own scaled down hub: http://louopt.com/6EBlWCWF8. -Empire Startup Guides (Androidno17) Starting a Build on a New Server To know what to build, you have to have your end goals in mind. Thus it is important to center on some simple truths: 1. A dungeon raiding castle will out-produce a resource city by nearly triple and will also bring in much more gold than a gold city. 2. Every water castle you make exposes you to attack and makes your continent more vulnerable. 3. Effective use of ministers means your castled cities do not need to make their own food. Your enemy will know this too, so maximize your troop counts. 4. Shrine enlightenment favors castles near the shrine and castles with higher point totals. Given these facts, you will want to set up an empire that clusters in particular areas on continents you are interested in. You will want to use Storage cities to manage resource feeding to your military castles and from your raiding castles, and you will want to maximize landlocked spaces to have mostly defensive troops that are able to raid on a constant basis. Initial Build So now I present my recommendation for a new server. First, you will probably only want 2 cities or so on your first continent, assuming you start at the beginning of the server's lifetime. The initial continent will fill up with too many people to make owning it for the alliance probable. Thus, you will want those two first cities to be resource generators only that will launch your career on the server. Remember too that you need to have one of these cities be on water so that you can launch off to your new home on another continent. Here is the order in which I would build the first 10 cities: 1. Resource City - This is the location the game will give you. Must include Baron making capability 2. Resource City (with extra Gold Production) - Select on a location on water - Must include Baron making capability. Surround your harbors with Townhouses here to pad you with some gold before raiding can kick in.

3. Resource City - Now select the continent and area you would like to make your first cluster on and start a resource city there. Baron making capability recommended 4. Resource City - Consider building this city on a third continent for the quest gold. You can abandon it and restart it on your cluster continent once you accept the reward. 5. Storage City - Select a nearby storage city location on water to your new continent city. This should be a general storage city for all four resources 6. Ranger City - Pick a landlocked space and start your first raiding city build - I recommend Rangers 7. Berserker City - Pick a landlocked space and start your second raiding city build - I recommend Berserkers. Note that castling these two cities will get your your next title for free 8. Food City - Build food cities on water spaces, as landlocked spaces should be reserved for raiding forces 9. Resource City - One more resource city to feed your initial empire 10. Food City From this point on build more cities to support a good cluster with Naval Offense backed with Landlocked Defense that can raid, Storage Cities, and Food Producers. When you feel like your cluster is well along its way toward building up, move to start a new one on a newly opened continent that the alliance wishes to hold. More tips to keep in mind as you build your empire Here are some more things to keep in mind when building up an empire: Do not let your offense get ahead of your defense. Every castle on water should have 3 defensive castles nearby that can support it. You can dedicate one storage city per continent to just handling food distribution - This keeps your troops from starving when a multi-resource storage city starts sending building supplies out. Use Rangers early in the servers lifetime as your landlocked defense. Gold will be somewhat scarce early, but plentiful later. Rangers don't require gold to recruit. Do not underestimate your need for food - Raiders will gather food for you, but your naval offense should have dedicated food supplies from food cities Try to own a shrine. Clustering around a shrine can be very helpful, especially if the whole alliance is doing this. Keep one landlocked city right next to the shrine if possible to act as a primary palace - High build speed, and Food Storage are key here. Create one water based resource storage city as near to the city above as possible. This city should have high wood/stone storage and lots of carts. Try to limit the number of water castles near the shrine. Use those spaces for Storage cities or food cities instead. Plan for needing to "lock" castles around the shrine later in the game if that shrine is chosen for an Alliance Palace. Also plan to build up faith with landlocked castles near the shrine. Gold cities are not necessary nor are they recommended, raiding will bring in enough gold as the game progress that you need not waste the city slot. Remember that the resources your city starts with depends on the number of forests, mountains, and hills adjacent to the spot your city is located in. This can help early in game as stone and wood are the most needed resources. This is later followed by iron and then food. Placing raiding cities near ample quantities of mountains will provide more iron raiding opportunities, hills/stone, and woods/wood as well. The more active and attentive you are to your troops the higher the likelihood that you can siege castles away from your less experienced neighbors early in the game. Be ready with your own defenses when you do though, as those castles may not be laid out well. (Naturalist) General Building Guide Here goes!

First things first, every city you make should serve a purpose. Some are for making res, some are for building building for your armies, and some are for killing people. Im going to attempt to write a guide on how to grow quickly and effectively. Ill be doing the steps by title mainly for now, once it hits bigger titles Ill cut it a bit smaller. Ill include links for you to look at as well:) Marquess (Cities 1-4) a. Build up a resource production / baron launching city. -Expand your empire as fast and efficiently as possible. b. Make either your second or third city a proper castle (see castle layouts) So by the end of this you should have: -3 resource cities -1 castle Prince (Cities 4-8) a. Continue expanding as quickly as possible. -Get your iron production up to feed your castles, also some extra food prod wont hurt! Build another castle (defensive maybe?) So by the end of this stage you should be at: -6 resource cities -2 castles (1 offensive, 1 defensive) Now if you want you can simply repeat this process for every 4 cities, getting your free title as you go. If you're a more inexperienced player, Id suggest repeating that a few times to prep yourself. TIP: Dont castle on water, it gives the enemy a lot more targets to hit. Stick to landlocked castles! Duke (Cities 9-16) At this point it depends on whats happening on your continent. But some common things are: -Start to control the shrines (drop castles around them, unless told otherwise) -Build up your TS -Take over your continent, dont leave any non-allied castles live. Once you control a continent, you can begin to prep for palaces, which is how we win the game. More on that later Again you need to put these out as quickly as possible. Plant them and start them as soon as you can. These layouts can be changed, you do not have to use these exact ones. They are simply guides. -Warehouse/Baron Launcher http://city.louopt.com/FRnIMEmA8 -(x2) Food Production City http://city.louopt.com/DVvWvNmA8 If you dont have ministers, Gold cities are good. However, raiding is a much better way to earn gold. -Gold City http://city.louopt.com/K4y3oPmA8 Remember to build a few palace warehouses, theyll be amazing later. Trust me! http://city.louopt.com/AktjYRmA8 Also, depending on how our oceans are looking, we might start building navy at this stage. See military layouts. King (Cities 17-40) a. Continue expanding as quickly as possible.

- Lay down as many raiding castles on a safe cont as you can, and get them raiding. Dont forget food cities for them. Build more navy, start expanding and getting palaces up. You can start working with your teammates to invade continents or move and go help teammates who are being invaded. Remember to build a few palace warehouses, theyll be amazing later. Trust me! http://city.louopt.com/AktjYRmA8

Military
-The Golden Rules -Do NOT attack with defensive troops (ranger, guardian, templar, paladin, ballista, sloop, crossbow) -Do NOT send offence troops to defend (zerk, mage, warlock, knight, war galleon, catapult, ram) -Do NOT castle without being able to defend it. -Make sure you have walls and towers in all castles at lvl 10 -Offence vs Defence A common question is: Should I build offence castles or defence cities/castles? Well, offence is how the game is won. Ive yet to see an alliance thats holed up with defence win anything. But you DO need defence. Think of it this way: You want to build offence. But in order to have that offence, you need the defence to keep it. So build enough defence to keep your castle, then build your offensive castle, and do it again. How much defence you need depends on the conditions on your world and continent. -Tatctics Defending attacks Another thing that beginners and a surprising number of experienced players don't know how to do: defending attacks. Theres more to it then just sending all your troops in! Here are some tactics for defending attacks. Walls and towers Obviously get them all to level 10. And look at how many fortified troops you get. with 20 ranger towers, you get 40k fortified rangers. So: Attacker: 120 zerks Defender: 40k rangers (no walls) Outcome: 104k zerks, 0 rangers Attacker: 120 zerks Defender: 40k rangers (walls/20 lvl 10 ranger towers) Outcome: 72k zerks, 15k rangers Makes a fairly good difference :) especially when you consider the attacker has 3x the TS :) Dodging If the enemy is sending 3 attacks, and you can only get 70k defence in your castle, dont bother. Why? Because 2 of them are probably assaults, and the 3rd a siege. So have your troops all arrive at the same time, even if its 3 hours late, kill the siege, and take way less losses. Its also a good way to see what troops type is in each castle, as well as keep your defence free in case of fakes. The Castling Move

Two of your def-towns have attacks incoming. You got enough def to defend both with a good kill ratio. Where do you place the def of these 2 towns? The def of city A goes in city B and vice versa. That way none of these troops is trapped in a siege and you are able to retreat it in case you need to focus more troops in one of the cities. The Juggle Two of you towns are under attack, but you do not have enough def to defend both with minimal losses. Put all you def into one of the towns and defend it for a few hours. Then pull out and put all your def into the other town. Depending on how fast you can move your def, this can allow you to drag both sieges into the night protection or delay the sieges until more def is incoming from more distant castles. The Houdini You know the situation: You would like to move your troops, but most of your towns are under mini-sieges that take ages to break. But you or alliance colleagues still have some troops left to operate with. In such a case it might be a good idea not to send those troops to defend against the actual baron siege just yet. Instead you could also use them to free some of the trapped troops faster. In the end that will allow you to face the main siege with more troops and thus take less losses. The Shuffle If you know the incoming armies you can make sure that you greet them with just the right counter units. A situation that appears relatively often is that you have a mage army sieging and a knight army hitting you as a cleaner hitting you several times in-between. Ideally you would defend only with anti-mage against the mages and with anti-cav against the knights. So if time permits: Defend against the mages with your pallies/temps, and then pull out before the knight cleaner. Pull your guardians/xbows in for the cleaner and out again before the next mage tick. Now get the antimage in again. Assuming that both your anti-mage and anti-cav is stronger than their counterparts, youll take less losses than if you put the anti-mage and anti-cav into the city simultaneously. (Adding more troops of the wrong specialization to the defense does increase the enemies losses, but it increases your losses even more). This is a tricky move and you should only do it if you have a lot of free castles with def nearby. When in doubt just def with both def-types but bring in the anti-cav units as late as possible so they fight as few rounds as possible against the mages. The Sniper You have a cleaning siege on you (e.g. mages) with a baron siege (e.g. zerks) behind it. You are lacking the def to fight the cleaning siege effectively. Instead of just putting all your troops into the city you can try and attack only the baron siege by timing your troops to that siege. Right after the siege tick you pull out again and return to do the same thing all over again. This way you can delay the siege with little losses until night protection or until more def arrives. With a little luck you even get to kill the baron without having to fight the cleaning siege. The Counter Siege If the enemy has a certain town that is key for his attack (e.g. a castle with a strong knights army that is real close to multiple of your cities), you might want to take it out of the equation for a few hours by putting a siege on it. You can either do this by sieging with a large army (deals more damage and works reliably) or by sending smaller armies every hour (usually means fewer units lost and you can use multiple towns to send the sieges).

The Early Bird (extreme counter siege) Lets say you expect the enemy to mount a large scale attack on a specific date. And you know that one city has e.g. a massive mage army that will be hard to counter. You might consider sending a siege to that city that arrives before this mage army would take off to battle. Even if this means that you have to attack during night protection. A single mage army arriving late to a choreographed attack can make a whole attack plan fall apart. Alternatively you can also just send fakes. Simply the threat that one of this core armies cant participate in the battle at short notice might lure the attacker into mistakes. It will at least give him a headache. The Lonesome Ranger (aka The Revenge) How can a single ranger kill 20.000 mages? If you cant defend a town against a baron, consider this: Tear down the walls, purify all food (or have it raided by an alliance colleague) and then have an alliance colleague put a siege on the town. Once the enemy takes the city his off-army turns into a supporter and loses 10% due to starvation. A 200k mage army would lose 20k and the sieging ranger could even retreat before his siege tick, surviving the battle. Talk about adding insult to injury. If you want to deal more damage and you have an off-army at hand, make sure that it ticks right after the attackers siege. That way he has no chance of pulling out before his off units have to defend. The Stack Not much to it. Castle a city, and load tons of defence into it. Let your enemy attack it. Win or lose, you will have killed enough of their offence that you can castle up the rest of your military cities and fill them before they can attack next. -Invasion Strategy Small Scale Invasions *forthcoming Large Scale Invasions Strategy: The goal is to invade a continent that is primarily occupied by your enemy. This assumes a strong enemy. It could very well be overkill against a weak enemy. The basic strategy is as follows: 1. Set up your foundation harbor castles and defensive navy on your home continent. (remember you need to be able to send barons by sea in large numbers) 2. These harbor cities feed the hub. 3. The hub distributes to the defensive and offensive cities. Their resource amount can be kept low and with the addition of a few hideouts, unassailable. 4. You build offense and defense side by side. When the cities are completely constructed and you have a maximum number of troops, you castle the defensive cities. Common sense dictates whether or not you castle the offensive cities too. If you decide to wait on castling the offensive cities, the troops can raid to help pay the bills. Use your defensive navy to help defend your castles. 5. Eventually you castle the offensive cities and you kick some ass.

Raiding Harbors Resist the urge to go build resource cities on your enemy's continent to fund military cities there. Resource cities build too slowly and have to be funded themselves from abroad. If the enemy ever catches on, he can just plunder you. They are also likely not going to be balanced in the measured manner that you want. A resource city cannot one day send out 1.2 million wood and stone per day and then a few weeks later start sending out 1.2 million iron and 1.2 million food. Benefit #1: A proper military harbor on your home continent can distribute its 2.4 million cargo as required. Benefit #2: If you are invading a nearby continent, it can send out a lot more than that. A resource city completely finished is sending out maybe (if you are lucky) 2 million resources a day and at a fixed ratio. If the continent you are invading is 6 hours away (12 hour round trip) a military harbor sends out 4.8 million a day. Benefit #3: Military harbors are reusable. Resource city on that continent you just invaded? Not so much. Standard: http://louopt.com/pTEo (zerk/ranger/guardian) Variants: http://louopt.com/ATEo (paladin) http://louopt.com/ZTEo (pure zerk) http://louopt.com/cUEo (templar) This is a standard military hub designed to power cities and palaces on other continents. Troop split should be 124,000 rangers and 124,000 berserkers(or guardians). This divides the resources requirements for troop production. Storage is prioritized to that troop production (and hence the warehouse buffer for wood and iron). The warehouses are also aligned to allow the flexibility to send 2.4 million resources of any resource type. This can also be replaced well by templars. Variants (more effective if available too): 1. If you have an ideal location which spawns a majority of mountain dungeons, this build can be changed to the alternative build and would house 244,000 berserkers (or 216k templars). If you have forests, paladins become an option. 2. Templar/Paladin (even rang/guard) are more effective at defending should your harbors be attacked, and you can use them to support each other in that case. This cuts down on the amount of landlocked defence you need in order to safely castle these harbors The Hub http://louopt.com/zVEo The first step once you have the foundation is to put a hub. The hub long term needs to be skewed to military needs (food and iron) rather than wood and stone. The 2 most common plunderers are zerks and knights, and zerks are the more common of the 2. So line the walls with 16 pitfall traps, or go all towers and bring troops from overseas to defend your hub. Organising the rest of your cities A large scale invasion requires a minimum of 7 cities. You should put them beside each other. 1 is your hub. 3 are defense. 3 is offense. Remember, you can have as many people as you want doing this same strategy, just be sure to not send your barons at the same spots! Minimum complement (7): 1 hub, 2 ranger/guardian, 1 templar, 1 mage and 1 zerk castle Ideal complement (10): 1 hub, 2 ranger/guardian, 2 templar, 2 mage, 1 zerk, 1 knight, 1 siege hybrid (mage/ram or zerk/ram)

Big boy complement (15): 1 hub, 3 ranger/guardian, 3 templar, 2 mage, 2 zerk, 2 knight, 1 siege hybrid (mage/ram or zerk/ram), 1 ballista, 1 warlock Based on a 24 hour round trip you will need at a minimum 1 military harbor for every 2 invasion cities. However, more is always better. If you can have 1 military harbor for every invasion city things are going to move a lot faster. Remember, military harbors can be pulled offline if the hub fills up. If the hub empties out and you have no extra capacity, you might have to start raiding with the troops you build just to keep afloat. Not a fun situation. That being said, if you want more, you should launch concurrently. Save up the barons. If you set up the hub early and all the spots around it disappear, you'll be kicking yourself. If there are LOTS of open water spaces, you can ignore this rule and take your chances. The hub should be, as best you can, in the center of the cities. The hub might seem like overkill, but remember, efficiency in this game is not about maximizing your resource production. At some point, everyone has far more resources than they can handle. It is about organization and minimizing micromanagement. Hubs once set up do the work for you. You can bring new cities online, adapt, feed palaces, with ease. Every continent you intend on having military on should have one. Building No matter how many cities you are invading with, this should be your template for TH level 6: http://louopt.com/NWEo Set your trade minister to 125,000 for wood and stone and let this city draw from the hub. Make sure the hub is not protecting resources. Its job is to give out resources, not hoard! Do your best to build the 4 hideouts around trees. If you are really getting plundered hard at the start set the trade minister to request exactly what the hideouts protect. The storage might seem strange, but you are going to need these warehouses eventually. You are free to pull them out if you are hardcore, but likely you'll want a storage buffer for food in cases of emergency (like having a life outside the game!). Cottages and warehouses should be built to level 8. Hideouts and the town hall to level 10. More Building: the other 40 buildings Build the most expensive buildings first while you still have 50+ cottages around. If resources are in the way, you might want to delete them and get all the expensive buildings up first, or you might want to wait. Similarly, you might want to get a few barracks up and you might not mind having a few time consumers left over. That is up to you. Important points: Based on the builds provided for in step 7, set your target armies for these amounts. Be careful if you are building units that use wood and stone that they do not keep your city from growing though. Sometimes rangers are best built manually. Finishing the builds Now here is where you start deleting a cottage and putting up a barrack or another military building. Your capacity will grow and your troop base will grow. You might use the troops to raid, but that slows your overall growth. If you are invading, and can afford it, it is probably best not to raid and let your troops build as fast as possible. At some point you will not need hideouts. You will want your cities to have a lot of resources in them in case of plunders because these cities have no food production: if all they have is food stored your troops could easily be starved out by a smart plunder. That is why you want the warehouses. Sample Builds

Ideology: You are at war. You are not here to take time to build 280k armies with 12 second mages. These are armies meant to be built fast, to recruit fast in case of emergencies, and to push the pace. They are resource intensive. It is imperative that the hub listed earlier not feed other cities as well. If you decide to raid with these cities the markets should be used to funnel back resources to the hub. Keep the minimum storage above 500k for each though in case of a plunder. Raiding with offensive troops is a good idea as offensive troops that are out raiding can't be sniped. Defensive troops should sit clustered together in one castle, unless you believe the enemy might come knock down your walls on a moment's notice. In those situations, divide your troops evenly so there is no definitive weakness. Tower complement: 2 lookout towers (necessary to properly LOS barons and siege), 8 templar towers, 8 guardian towers, 6 ranger towers. Templars and guardians are overall better defenders than rangers, so they get the extra towers. Your situation may vary, so feel free to ad lib. Mage: http://louopt.com/kXEo 204,000 troop strength. 5 second mages. Trinsic for baron capture. Fast Zerk (2sec): http://louopt.com/VqSf 252,000 troop strength. Trinsic for baron capture. Please only build this if you have the iron capacity to handle 2 second berserkers. Otherwise opt for the build below. This is also the build to use if you use recruit artifacts. Slow Zerk (3sec): http://louopt.com/MqSf 288,000 troop strength. If you can't feed a city (and it is hard when you are invading another continent) the resources it needs to keep up with the recruit speed, build a castle with a higher capacity. Slow Ranger/Guardian (4sec/5sec): http://louopt.com/EqSf 296,000 troop strength. No trinsic temple. A bit of a slower build, but it is high capacity. Not recommended if you feel like you might use recruitment artifacts to defend. Once finished, is ideal to fend off massive, infrequent attacks. Fast Ranger/Guardian (3sec/3sec): http://louopt.com/AqSf 252,000 troop strength. It is a simple trade from the slow version, 44,000 less troops for faster rangers and even faster guardians. It is a preference. Fast Templar: http://louopt.com/qqSf 224,000 troop strength. 3 second recruit rate. Templars use gold and so are less of a resource drain on your hub. They are also tied with guardians as the best defensive unit in the game. Slow Templar: http://louopt.com/OXEo 260,000 troop strength. 4 second recruit rate. Takes about 35% longer to fill than the fast model, but an extra 36k TS. Preference Knight: http://louopt.com/9pSf Nom nom nom. Nom. 208,000 troop strength. 2 second per TS recruit speed. No market. Why?

It is because knights will eat you out of house and home. To minimize the toll on your hub you minimize the max TS. If this city ever raids, it simply saves as much as it can. Used to quickly clear out cities that have rangers or offensive units sitting around. Hybrid Seige: http://louopt.com/1rSf I used to hybrid siege with mages. I do so no longer. It takes too long to build. I also prefer a more balanced approach. This build is 200,000 troop strength and is designed for 100,000 berserkers and 10,000 rams. -Attacking 101 *Not done*

Advanced Stuff
-Raiding

Raiding
Raiding is definitely the most overlooked feature of this game for the most part. Why raid? Just to avoid any arguments, lets do some math. Disclaimer: The following calculations were done with +25% troops A good resource city = 85k/hr (2mil/day) A good raiding castle = TS of castle: 120k zerks, 120 guardians Level 9 Mountain dungeon 2 hours away 18% So at this point in the dungeons life, it puts out 521k res per hit. 120k zerks + 120k guardians = 3.6mil loot So you could have 6 raids of 20k/20k going at any given time. At a 5 hour round trip (2(2)+1) (hours to dungeon(2)+1) 6 x 521k = 3.1mil res - (6)100k = 2.6mil or 520k/hr (12.5mil/day) So, math has proven that including replacing losses, a zerk/guardian raid castle makes 6x what a resource city makes. Keep in mind castles can be attacked, and raids need to be set. Actually: 12.5mil - (24)45k = 1.08mil. So even discounting food, you still make 5x a resource city. But, I was using an ideal composition castle on its dungeon type for that math. Most times you dont have that luxury. So lets try again: A good resource city = 85k/hr (2mil/day) A military castle (knights) = TS of castle: 100k knights Level 9 Hill dungeon 1.5 hours away 3%

So at this point in the dungeons life, it puts out 300k res per hit. 100k knights = 1.5mil loot So you could have 5 raids of 20k going at any given time. At a 4 hour round trip (1.5(2)+1) (hours to dungeon(2)+1) 5 x 300k = 1.5mil res - (5)60k = 1.2mil or 300k/hr (7.2mil/day) 7.2mil - (24)104k = 4.7mil/day So, math has proven that including replacing losses, a knight military castle raiding makes 2x what a resource city makes. Keep in mind castles can be attacked, and raids need to be set. More raiding stuff The most valuable raiding secret I have learned has nothing to do with maximizing your berserkers, or raid composition, but simple CITY LOCATION. I've never seen anyone talk about it, but it is clearly the most important step to maximize your resource return. It is the single most important decision IN THE GAME. I'm not kidding. The most valuable dungeon in the game due to the amount of gold it provides are mountain dungeons. Mountain Dungeon Strategy #1 Pick a location near mountains #2 For every mountain terrain square 1 square away, give the settlement location 10 points. Include diagonals, so essentially the 8 squares surrounding your proposed location. #3 2 squares away? 9 points #4 3 squares away? 8 points #5 4 squares away? 7 points The settlement location with the most points is the optimum location to place your mountain raiding city. Properly placed locations using this simple formula will greatly increase your chance of having a mountain dungeon with a rotation time of less than 5 hours. To more experienced players: Yes, I factored in initial travel time. yes, I also factored in research. To all players: You do not need to be exact with this. But it is FAR better to build a raid city with 12 mountain squares in a 5x5 radius then to build a city in between 5 mountain squares but only 7 overall. And if you are unsure, then use the math. How do dungeons work? Well, initially you wont get much for dungeons. And youll ask why that one guy has a bunch of nice dungeons, while you dont have any. This is partly luck, and partly skill. Dungeons are decided by how much TS there is in the area. If you have 4 full castles near each other, youll get better dungeons than if you have 6 castles spread across the continent. Also, completing dungeons (reaching 100%) spawns more dungeons. So even if the dungeon is low level, keep hitting it until it expires.

Troop Composition Here is in my view the best template for ultimate dungeon raiding and purified gathering: http://city.louopt.com/w5D1rHWE8 Stats: 244,000 max troops. 2 second berserkers. 3 second guardians. Replacement rate of troops: 1,500 per hour. Troop composition: 122,000 berserkers, 122,000 guardians. ASSUMPTIONS: 1) Sending the right amount of troops to clear loot but no more. 2) 3.5 hour average trip time 3) Max research Mountain dungeon: Average defense 14. Average loot capacity: 35. Average number of deaths every 3.5 hours: 930 Forest dungeon: Average defense 22. Average loot capacity: 30. Average number of deaths every 3.5 hours: 1,714 Hill dungeon: Average defense 23. Average loot capacity 30. Average number of deaths every 3.5 hours: 1,785 Therefore, unless you are raiding forest and hill dungeons exclusively, this will keep troop levels at maximum capacity and should prevent raids from "bouncing". Raids should be sent out at a ratio of 1:1. 1 zerker for each guardian. However, ideal raiding strategy would allow for some flexibility: if you were raiding a mountain dungeon and a hill dungeon you could raid the mountain dungeon with 6:4 guardian/zerk and the hill 6:4 zerk/guardian. More guardians also = increased longevity of a dungeon. Dungeons should last 20-30% longer, which is ideal for picking and choosing where you wish to raid.
Infantry (zerks, rangers, templars, guardians) get bonuses against mountain dungeons Cavalry (paladins, xbowmen, knights) get bonuses against forest dungeons Magic (mages,warlocks) get bonuses against hill dungeons Siege (war galleons, sloops, frig/any troop works well too) get bonuses against shipwrecks Offensive Troops can easily raid any dungeon with the right number of troops. Defensive should stick to their bonus type until research/faith has them boosted to at least 50%. Then its fair game. Different troops carry different amounts of loot: zerk, ranger, templar, warlock: 10 loot paladin, guardian: 20 loot knight, crossbow: 15 loot Water only: sloop: 1500 frigate: 1000 war galleons: 3000 Also factor in travel times, the cavalry speed makes warlocks better raiders than mages, even though they have the same loot cap. This helps knights even out to zerks, and mathwise puts paladins at a great advantage. The simple way to do it is this: If youre surrounded by mountains, build troops suitable for raiding mountains. If youre surrounded by forest, build troops suitable for raiding forests. If youre surrounded by hills, build troops suitable for raiding hills. For naval raiding, build them near the edge of your continent.

Better explanation: It is better to be able to send out 12 raids of 15,000 zerks than 6 raids of 30,000 mages. The mages may have a bit more survivability, but youll get far more resources ovall using zerks. The amount of loot earned from a dungeon increases over time. Here are the rough (but fairly accurate) multipliers for dungeons: 10% 1.175 20% 1.35 30% 1.525 40% 1.7 50% 1.875 60% 2.05 70% 2.225 80% 2.4 90% 2.575 With an appropriate base (max loot possible at 0%) it should be very easy to calculate progression. Now the key ingredient to successful raiding: Guardians. Guardians are great raiders when coupled with other troops, such as zerks or rangers. In the early stages of the game, zerk/guardian mixes work great. Later on, once your troops have around 50-60% research + faith bonus, feel free to use ranger/guardian mixes as they are also useful for defending attacks, much more suited than a zerk/guardian hybrid. 240k zerks: 2.4mil loot cap 120k zerks/ 120k guardians: 3.6mil loot cap 120k rangers/120k guardians: 3.6mil loot cap As you can see, these mixes can be very effective when raiding. The numbers needed for this are in the guide (under the label guardian mixes, 100/100 means you send 100 zerks and 100 guardians, 200/200 is 200 of each, and so on). All Dungeons lvl 1-3 Lvl 1: 0%: ~150 Loot 90%: ~400 Loot No tweaking number: ~280 Loot (28 zerks, 18 knights, 14 paladins, 10/10 guardian mixes) Lvl 2: 0%: ~600 Loot 90%: ~1,900 Loot No tweaking number: ~1500 Loot (150 zerks, 100 knights, 75 paladins, 50/50 guardian mixes) Lvl 3: 0%: ~2,300 Loot 90%: ~5,200 Loot No tweaking number: ~4000 Loot (400 zerks, 275 knights, 200 paladins, 130/130 guardian mixes) Mountain Dungeons lvl 4-10 Lvl 4 0%: ~9,000 Loot

90%: ~25,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~20,000 Loot (2,000 zerks, 1,750 knights, 1,000 paladins, 700/700 guardian mixes) Lvl 5 0%: ~30,000 Loot 90%: ~67,500 Loot No tweaking number: ~55,000 Loot (5,500 zerks, 3,750 knights, 2,800 paladins, 2,000/2,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 6 0%: ~67,000 Loot 90%: ~175,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~140,000 Loot (14,000 zerks, 10,000 knights, 7,000 paladins, 5,000/5,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 7 0%: ~130,000 Loot 90%: ~350,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~280,000 Loot (28,000 zerks, 20,000 knights, 14,000 paladins, 10,000/10,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 8 0%: ~250,000 Loot 90%: ~680,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~520,000 Loot (52,000 zerks, 35,000 knights, 26,000 paladins, 18,000/18,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 9 0%: ~410,000 Loot 90%: ~950,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~800,000 Loot (80,000 zerks, 58,000 knights, 40,000 paladins, 27,000/27,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 10 0%: ~560,000 Loot 90%: ~1,430,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~1,100,000 Loot (110,000 zerks, 70,000 knights, 55,000 paladins), 36,000/36,000 guardian mixes Forest/Hill Dungeons lvl 4-10 Lvl 4 0%: ~8,400 Loot 90%: ~21,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~1,700 Loot (1,700 zerks, 1,400 knights, 850 paladins, 600/600 guardian mixes) Lvl 5 0%: ~27,000 Loot 90%: ~61,500 Loot No tweaking number: ~50,000 Loot (5,000 zerks, 3,500 knights, 2,500 paladins, 1,700/1,700 guardian mixes) Lvl 6 0%: ~55,000 Loot 90%: ~150,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~120,000 Loot (12,000 zerks, 9,000 knights, 6,000 paladins, 4,000/4,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 7 0%: ~120,000 Loot 90%: ~320,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~250,000 Loot (25,000 zerks, 18,000 knights, 12,500 paladins, 9,000/9,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 8 0%: ~210,000 Loot 90%: ~580,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~460,000 Loot (46,000 zerks, 30,000 knights, 23,000 paladins, 15,000/15,000 guardian mixes)

Lvl 9 0%: ~300,000 Loot 90%: ~780,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~680,000 Loot (68,000 zerks, 45,000 knights, 34,000 paladins, 23,000/23,000 guardian mixes) Lvl 10 0%: ~450,000 Loot 90%: ~1,250,000 Loot No tweaking number: ~1,000,000 Loot (100,000 zerks, 65,000 knights, 50,000 paladins, 33,000/33,000 guardian mixes) Shipwrecks Forthcoming If you see any of these at 0%, hit them and send me (naturalist) the report. Lvl 1 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 2 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 3 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 4 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 5 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 6 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 7 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 8 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 9 0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons) Lvl 10

0%: ~??? Loot 90%: ~??? Loot No tweaking number: ??? Loot (??? sloops, ??? frigates, ??? war galleons)

-Maximising palace delivery There are 8 virtues. In each virtue you need 100% faith and a lvl 10 palace to win. So thats 8x 100% faith lvl 10 Faith: each level of palace makes for 1% faith. So to acheive 100% faith in say, honor, you need: a) 100 lvl 1 palaces (1bil wood/1bil stone total) b) 50 lvl 2 palaces (2bil wood/2bil stone total) c) 34 lvl 3 palaces (3.4bil wood/3.4bil stone total) If we want to take the cheaper, better route, we need a lot of shrines. Thats why continent control is important, those shrines give us faith. More shrines mean we can build up faith faster and cheaper. Its nearly impossible to build faith solely on level 1's, so lets say the average level is lvl 2. Thats 4bil res (2bil wood/2bil stone) x8 32bil res for faith. The dedicated palaces take up a lot of res as well. Here's the climb. lvl 1: 10mil W/S lvl 2: 30mil W/S lvl 3: 60mil W/S lvl 4: 100mil W/S lvl 5: 250 mil W/S lvl 6: 350mil W/S lvl 7: 500 mil W/S lvl 8: 800mil W/S lvl 9: 1000mil W/S lvl 10: 1500mil W/S So thats 4600 mil W/S (9.6bil total) for a level 10 palace. x8 32bil (faith) 77bil (dedicateds) Total: ~110 BILLION resources. Big number huh? Wrong. An alliance has 100 members. So that means each member is responsible for 1.1 bil (in theory)

Hub Method A Let's say we have 10 W/S cities for donating. That's reasonable. If each makes 80k/hr, we have 800k res per hour being produced. If you have all these 10 cities feed a hub, that's 20mil res daily. Now lets say you donated to palaces every day, for 2 months. 60 x 20mil 1.2bil. Wait, you already passed the 1.1bil you needed to donate.. with 10 cities and a couple hubs. That can't be right? But it is. Making the resources isnt a huge problem; you can set aside 10 zerk castles and have them raiding hills and forests. You'll net well over 20mil in a day if you keep the raids set. Its the distribution that gets people sometimes. Some good ways to do this are to make a donation cluster, eg: -15 W/S cities (30mil a day) or 15 raiding castles (~20-50mil a day) -1 Hub (40mil wood storage, 40mil stone storage, 3-4k carts+ships) -3 Distribution centres (8mil wood storage, 8mil stone storage, 10-14k carts+ships) Have the cities/castles send all wood+stone to the Hub, then get the Distribution centres to pull from the Hub. 30mil donations a day, from less than 20 cities. And it's set up so you only have to send resources once a day. If you set up 3 of these clusters on continents with dedicateds or lots of faith palaces, you can be donating around 100mil a day. Hub Method B Fill a bunch of palace warehouses near the shrine, then empty when enlightenments arrive. example: http://louopt.com/KaSf Holds 50mil wood/stone, 9k carts, empties in 6 trips. If you have 4 of these, that's 200mil every enlightenment, assuming you have the resources coming into the hubs. People from other continents can also send to these hubs if they are on water. A tactic I have seen for when your alliance members are shipping res to your hub because the palace is landlocked, is this. Have 1 of the hubs like i just showed above, and have 4 more (landlocked or on water) pulling wood/stone from it. That keeps your warehouse from overflowing, or at least extends your capacity to 250mil rather than 50mil. The Merchant Method This includes having storage and shipping in every city of your empire. If the city is on water, put 3 warehouses next to sawmills and masons, 4 markets and 4 harbours. If its landlocked, put in 2 warehouses and 4 markets. This applies for castles too (except navy, only put 4 markets here. Dont put in harbours). Once you reach the endgame, consider upping these numbers to having 10 markets or 8 harbors, and 4 warehouses. Also make sure your res cities are making 40k wood/stone per hour (combined, so 34k w/8k stone is fine) so that you have the res to send! So, ideally this should let you send 1 million resources to palaces, per city, per DAY! 50 cities x 1mil a day = 50 million resources a day. do this for 1 month: 1.5billion resources to palaces.

By the time LOU starts to rear its head, you have 150 cities. 2 months and you've built a level 10 palace on your own! To effectively use this method (or either of the methods really), you need BoS tools. Theres an option called fill with resources open that, type in the coords of the enlightened palace, hit palace delivery, select how much you want to send, and hit send. It will pull from every one of your cities possible until it hits the amount you specified, or as much as possible if it cant send that much. A full 70k W/S city with 1.5mil storage and ships will donate 1.7mil daily. Assuming your round trips are less than a day, 10 of these will donate 17mil daily. 20 will donate 34mil. Compare that to the hub method above, it works better. However, this is only useful if you control the seas. You can also do this with castles, zerk or paladin castles on water raiding, 1.5mil storage, 240 ships. Layouts: Hub: http://louopt.com/Dino Distribution Centre: http://louopt.com/Tino W/S with harbors: http://louopt.com/Cjno W/S for Hub: http://louopt.com/Ojno Raider for Hub: http://louopt.com/hkno (120k zerk/120k guardian*) (2sec/3sec) Raider with harbors: http://louopt.com/Mkno (120k zerk/120k guardian*) (3sec/4sec) *Use troops that take iron for these cities, that way you don't use your wood/stone for the palaces to train troops -Preparing for lawless Not something youre likely to look forward to, but it happens. People do quit, and oftentimes no-one has their login info when it happens. So they will go lawless, and youll want their cities, rather than them going to other alliances. The first thing you do is find out when they are going lawless. This is exactly 30 days (720 hours) after they last logged out. Unless they have ministers. Even if its only 1 minister, they will go lawless 30 days after the ministers expire. So how the hell do you get this information? BoS tools/ extra summary / my alliance / refresh: Shows all the last login dates. So they may go lawless 20 minutes after this, or 6 hours. Its not precise by any means. For the people with ministers, you can monitor their score, once it stops growing it could mean their build minister is done (or that everything possible is lvl 10, watch for this). Another method Ive used is siege a castle of theirs with no baron, and keep that up until the incoming attack light goes away. It will be 30 days from the point that light goes off, so watch for it as an alliance!! Be aware that some people might have ministers that run longer than their defence minister. Using these 2 methods together is usually the safest. Now, as you know, a city without a castle can only send 5 barons at a time (carts permitting), while castles can send 15. This being said, the inactive players castles are usually in the middle of their cities, so taking one and adding 10-19 markets (8-15 barons at a time) can get you a LOT of their cities very quickly. I used this once, and got 48 cities within an hour. So it does work. However it took me about a month to save up that many barons, so again team effort comes in handy. You get lawless that pop up without you planning ahead for them. Early on, sometimes its better not to bother, but late-game, lawless are great. Starting building of 3-4 cities a day SUCKS. For this, I suggest building 5 markets (1k carts, 4 barons) and a trinistic+barracks in a few of your cities, so that they are spread out (choose the one closest to the lawless). It also helps to simply build a single city like this on other continents for when lawless happen. I also like having a city group for cities that can recruit a baron. -Organising your empire

So now (unless you skipped everything but his section) you know how to build all sorts of cities. But how on earth do you keep track of them?! City names This is usually to separate your cities, either by continent or some other form. Heres a couple of common methods: C13001 C13W001 -C13 is referring to the continent (13) and the number following is the city number. The W is there if its a castle 24 City 01 24 Castle 01 24 Navy 01 24 Palace 01 24 Harbor 01 Ect -24 Is the continent, city or castle is referring to resource city or military, and the number. This is the method I use. Easy for me to keep track, bit obvious though. 53_TR_OP_01 53_TR_OP_03 -First number is the continent, last one is the city number. Everything in between is gibberish to confuse people, but you could also use that to divide into clusters (switch TR for QY or something). Castles follow the same pattern. Freedom 01 Freedom 02 Freedom 03 Ransack 01 Ransack 02 ect -Each name (Freedom, Ransack) is the name of a cluster somewhere. Your average cluster is 10-20 cities, with a hub, some resource cities, some castles, and maybe a palace donator or two. You can use whatever method you want, these are just some examples. If you want more, look around at any players around you, or go back to other worlds and look around there. City Notes This is the bottom with a scroll thing on it, right under your score. In the top row you can write something like 2sec zerk castle or Hub C11 or wood/iron/food or Raid castle. This is so you know what the city is without going into the city. Also stuff youd rather not have the enemy look at. If you wanna get really technical, find a system that works for you. Heres the one Im experimenting with on my newer world: B 26/31/9/16, C400 S30 The italic B means this city an recruit barons The underlined numbers show how much res the city produces (W/S/I/F) The bold how many carts and ships (C = carts S = ships)

252k TS Zerk, C400 The italic shows what troops are in the castle The bold how many carts and ships (C = carts S = ships) However, you can get by very well with simple notes, like templar, zerk, res, hub c23 ect ect City Groups This was added rather recently, and its amazing when it comes to organizing. Im not sure how other people use the option (update material) but this is how I do it. Finished (Completed cities) Unfinished (Not completed cities) Resource (Resource cities) Military (Military cities/castles) Warehouses (Hubs and storage) Barons (Produces barons) Navy Off (Navy cities/castles) Navy Def (Navy cities/castles) C54 Offence (One for each cont with military) C54 Defence (One for each cont with military) Cont 54 (All C54 cities) Freedom Cluster (All cities in the freedom cluster) Fairly self explanatory. I put the city in its group(s) when I overlay the layout and name it. Before this, I simply name it new city or lawl if its lawless. So a Zerk castle would go in unfinished and military until it was finished. How does this help? Well if you're setting raids, open the military group. If youre setting a naval attack, open the navy group. If you're adding carts/storage to cities for palaces, open the resource group. So on so forth.

Everything Else
-Special thanks Rexterra - Raiding Info hyperphuzion - Overview Explanations devinlp - Fix for resource node info about lakes Rheaper/Titan10k/Nongak/Babayaga/jayfighter/Gromet - Teaching me how to play :) Zachax - Warring Tactics Acadame - Gold output Info etnmarchand - General Info dirrk - General Info Osbourne - LOU cheat sheet All the members of Leonidas, TheRaGe, Warlord Alliance, Evil Elf Workshop, Order of Orangutangs and Post_Ascesion (for my crowns, current and future ;) -Changes 1.0 Copy pasted info into a better format 1.1 Added an index, added more info, took out some of the more useless stuff. (19/05/2012) -Miscellaneous