Tribal Wars Getting to 500 Villages Guide

Tribal Wars Getting to 500 Villages Guide by Karmalot

Hey here’s a guide that I wrote. It is constantly being edited, as a lot of things are debatable and sometimes I change my mind to what is better. Before I start I’ll list a few achievements that I have accomplished while playing this game. I started playing this game on W17 when the world first opened up. Here is a list of all of the worlds that I have played on:

World 17
-Best Rank: 1st, for about a year straight
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
-Top 10 for about 2 years
-First to 500 Villages
World 18
-Best Rank: 1st
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
-First World Noble Train, Nobled largest player in the #1 Tribe
World 20
-Best Rank: 7th
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
-First World Noble Train
World 35
-Best Rank: 1st
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
-First World Noble Train
-2nd Place in my K was 20% my size.
World 37
-Best Rank: 3rd
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
World 38
-Best Rank: 8th
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
World 42
-Best Rank: 3rd
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
World 43
-Best Rank: 2nd
-Best ODA Rank: 1st
-Top 3 in Two Different K’s
World 44 – Still Playing
-Best Rank: 2nd
-Best ODA Rank: 4th

First I’ll start with a few game concepts. It is important to understand these statements and keep them in mind when reading this guide.
-You must be active, the more you farm the faster you grow: simple.
-Sometimes the situation calls for something different. For example, resource balancing. You can not predict exactly what the resource ratios your hauls will come, so therefore it is impossible to say which exact resource upgrades you need to upgrade first. However, the values stated in this guide should give you a general idea for most cases.
-When the Beginer Protection(BP) ends in your area, you must be the first person to empty the warehouses of the inactive villages. For this reason, rushing LC’s is not good because you will not have enough units to empty these warehouses in time. For this, you will need several groups of a few axes + spears for each village.
-For the reason stated above:
..-The purpose of spears = to afford to buy axes pre-BP
..-The purpose of axes = to escort your spears so they don’t die while farming
..-an ideal target is about 5-10 axes and 10-25 spears per farm, depending on how active the farming area is.
-LC’s are the most time and cost efficient unit for farming and because of this:
..-The money you make post-BP from the inactive villages will more than pay for your LC tech
..-Once you have LC’s, produce NOTHING but LC’s. If you can not afford to produce LC’s 24/7 with a stables 3, then you can not afford to produce anything else.
..-The purpose Post-BP Spear + Axe Farming is to maximize your capacity to produce LC’s as early as possible. Rushing LC’s does not account this economic principle. Once you can afford to produce LC’s non-stop, then you can produce axes. Farming with Spear + Axes prior to LC tech will enable you to produce LC’s + Axes earlier than just rushing LC’s with out Axe+Spear Farming.
-Again, once you have the capacity to produce LC’s, build NOTHING but LC’s, except farm/warehouse as needed.
-Once you can afford to produce LC’s non-stop, then produce axes along with your LC’s and nothing else, except farm/warehouse as needed.
-Once you can afford to produce LC’s + Axes non-stop, then you can upgrade structures and continue with the build order. Troop production is the most important concept of this game.
-Active farming troops will out produce any resource structure upgrade.

With that said, Let us begin with the a list of the different stages for a build order prior to nobling a village. I’ll list it here with no description, then below there will be a detailed description of each upgrade.

Building a Resource Base to Spears

Basically you begin the game by upgrading your resources and and farming with your paladin to the closest farm to your village, Barbarian or Bonus villages.

Beside each resource I will post 2 numbers. The first will represent the cost of that resources resource per that resources increase in production per hour. That is: how many hours it will take for the resource upgraded to pay for the cost of that resources upgraded resource. For example, Timber Camp 0 produces 5 wood per hour. Timber Camp 1 produces 30. That is an increase of 25 wood per hour. The upgrade costs 50 wood, so it will take 2 hours to pay for the cost of that upgrade. The second number will take into account the total number of resources spent on that resource, assuming each resource has a 1:1 ratio in value. For example, Timber Camp 1 has a total cost of (50+60+40) = 150. 150 / 25 = 6. So Timber Camp 1 will be displayed as such: “02.00 06.00 Wood 1” Take note of how they are increasing in order, this is of no coincidence, it’s call mathematics!

At this stage in the game, depending on what haul ratio you are producing you will need to adjust your resources accordingly. The general idea here is to decide which resource you are shortest on for the next upgrade. However, keep in mind that you will be producing spears so that you will want your wood to be about 2 levels above your clay, and your clay to be about 2 levels above your iron, as such, you may want to continue accordingly:

Now you should consider pushing towards spears.

HQ 3, Barracks 1

Upgrade your HQ to level 3 and construct your barracks. You will need to send at least 4 spears with your paladin to justify sending your paladin, based on the increased travel time from sending it with spears and the haul it will yield. If you have less than 4 spears, just send your paladin by itself.

The more active you are and the more farms you have, barbarian and bonus villages, then the more spears you should make. Remeber, once the BP is lifted, you will need to empty all of the warehouses of the inactive villages in your area as fast as possible; this will determine how many spears you will need to make. The inactive villages are typically the villages that have not grown since they have been created, their size will depend on your distance from the center. The faster you can empty these warehouses, the more LC’s you will be able to produce and the faster you’ll be able to produce them in the post-BP period.

A warehouse level 1 will hold 3000 total resources. That means, 120 spears will empty that warehouse in one shot. However, 120 spears will cost 10800 resources. So you will need to send those spears to that village about 3 times to pay for their production. But since each resource is not really equal pre-market. Wood is the most valuable at this stage, so let us take a look at the wood levels. A spear costs 50 wood, and carries 25 haul. Since the warehouse is full, the wood/clay/iron haul per spear will b e divided equally between each resource. So 1 spear will only carry 8 1/3 wood. That means, each spear must travel 6 times to pay for their cost in wood. Since it requires 120 spears to empty the warehouse and you need to travel 6 times to make money, then you should have at least 20 spears per inactive village warehouse that you expect to empty post-BP. So if there are 5 inactive villages inside your 9×9, and you’re the most active farmer, then you should build at least 100 spears pre-BP.

Once you figure out how many spears you need, you will need to make sure you build them prior to getting axes. You just need to make sure that you get axes prior to BP ending and you can build enough of them to escort your spears in the process. Farm with your spears in groups of 35 each and send the remainder with your paladin. As stated above, if you have less than 4 spears to send with your paladin, then it is better to send your paladin alone.

Building a Resource Base to Axes

Farm and continue producing spears constantly and if you save up enough resources, try to perform the following resource upgrades:

Now, you should be ready to push towards axes.

HQ 5, Barracks 1, Smithy 2

Once you’ve began emptying or have emptied all of the warehouses in the barbarian villages in your area you can begin by teching axes. Remember, your goal is to be past this stage prior to BP ending. You may want to produce less spears or lower resources accordingly to ensure you have axes prior to BP ending and this will depend on how active you are.

Produce 5 axes per farm and send them with your 10-25 spears or so to increase the number of villages you can hit. Start with 5 axes and 25 spears, if the warehouse is full. As the warehouse becomes empty and as you produce more axes then you will need to lower the number of spears you are sending to allow yourself to farm more villages with your spear pool. Stop producing axes once you have enough to escort your spears.

Take notes of the villages in your area and be sure that once your inactives become farmable when their BP is lifted that you have the units avaliable to send to that village immediately. These will be 100% hauls so you must time this accordingly. These resources collected by this method will be used to save up for Light Cavalry.

Building a Resource Base to Light Cavalry

If you save up enough resources you should be upgrading some resources accordingly:

Here you may have noticed that Clay 5 should have came before Wood 7 according to its Production increase per cost, however at this stage in the game I feel that wood is just more important because of spear production. Again, this is subject to your haul ratio’s and may varry slightly.

At this stage you will probably want to construct a market to take advantage of the great deals there. Try to get at least a 1.5 ratio on your resources:

At this stage in the game, again taking into account your haul ratio’s from your farms and adjusting accordingly, you will need to consider the time it will take to upgrade to LC’s. Otherwise, continue here:

After this point, upgrade your warehouse only until you reach level 6. Then proceed with your HQ 10, Smithy 5, Barracks 5 and Stables 3.

HQ 10, Barracks 5, Smithy 5, Stables 3

Construct the HQ first, then the barracks and then the smithy. This is because you may still be in the axe/spear production stages during this time, depending on how active in farming you have been and how many farms are in your location. Then the stables and research LC`s and do not resource scouts.

The Stables – Level 3

Queue up some LC`s, then send them out farming to your current farms and/or new inactive village farms, where applicable. Once you have all of your farms and inactive villages being farmed, then research scouts. You only really need scouts to scout the villages that you’re not quite sure if they built troops in or not and would like to farm. Another fun thing to do at this stage is to scout every village inside your 15×15. This will let them all know that you are far beyond them and some of them might even restart right away because of it. Do not produce anything but LC’s if you do not have enough LC’s in your queue to last until whatever else you want to build is complete. ie – do not queue your 45 minutes of axes if you do not have at least 45 minutes of LC queued up. And do not queue 45 minutes of structure upgrades if you do not have both 45 minutes of LC’s and 45 of axes queued. Farm with your LC`s. Never stop producing LC`s.

Farming The Inactives
Monitor players on Tribal Wars Map to see if players are activly growing their village. You can not afford to draw attention to yourself here by taunting other players to attack you. Do not attack any active players that are growing or may be building troops. The whole idea of LC farming is to out-farm your opponents and starve them, allowing yourself to grow more quickly than them. Losing troops at this stage in the game hurts only yourself and slows your own growth. Only farm barbarians or vilages that have the base-set of points, that is their points are the same as when their village was created.

Continue to do this until all of the farmable villages(non-active players) are being farmed. In which case you must do one of two things: start farming farther away in the same manner, or attack another player that has grown their village. The best case here is to expand your farming borders without attacking another player. This will depend on how active you are and will determine how fast you can grow because if you`re not losing troops, then you are growing faster than if you were. But if you are limited by your activity in this manner then you must attack another player to stop him from growing.

Creating More Farms

If you determine that you must attack another player to continue growing you should start from the lowest point players in your farming radius and move up from there.

These are the only conditions you should use to determine if you will attack a player.
– All of the farmable villages inside your 15×15 are currently being farmed by two groups(one returning and one attacking). And upon clearing the player or new farm you will still have enough troops to continue farming all of these farms in this manner AND the farm you just created.
– Your farms are starting to run dry because someone else is farming them
– You will suffer the least ammount of losses if you attack this player because he will either be a good farm or is farming your farms and slowing you down.

Since you have scouts, you can easily determine the 3rd criteria and proceed accordingly. Remeber, the key here is to do what you need to do to grow the fastest way possible at all times. Losing troops at this stage in the game will slow you down so avoid attacking players at all cost: especially those rivaling your points. Players that above you or that have the same points as you will be potential farms later on or future noble targets. Once you have your LC 24/7 production line in place you will grow faster than them. It is just slow at first because you are producing only units and not buildings, while they are producing buildings. The growth for both is exponential but for you the curve will have a much much higher slope.

Light Cavalry to Nobles

The Barracks – Level 5, Queueing Axes
Once you have units queued inside your stables, begin to queue your barracks. Never stop producing units, ever.

The Farm
These are the only structure that you should be queueing inside your HQ10. The only time you want to upgrade this structure is when either your troop queue is full & you have no more farm space, or you have troop queues long enough to outlast the buildtime of your farm. I’ve found while the stables is 3 and the barracks 5 and workshop 2, you should queue the farm prior to your exisiting farm being 100 supply full. then re-queue your HQ upgrades after it.

The Warehouse
Only build this structure as you need it. ie – If the next structure that you will queue is too large. Only have it the exact size that you need to queue your next structure; use the market to hold extra resources if one of them gets oversized.

The Market – Level 5
A market level 5 is good to have for when one resource is too high for your resource, or if you too low on another resource. Do not upgrade this past 10 until you have nobles. Probably shouldn`t go past 5 until you have Smithy 15.

Resource Structures – Pre-Catapults
Remeber, when upgrading your resources you need to determine what the limiting resource would be if you were to construct the next level up of each of the three resources. Do not construct anything other than resources at this stage in the game. The only exception to this would be to upgrade your farms and warehouses accordingly which will be described below in greater detail.

Continue upgrading your resources until you can keep your HQ level 10 upgrading resources 24/7. Typically I’ll upgrade my resources to 14-11-17, but again this will depend on your resource ratios of your farming income.

Which resource you upgrade at this point in time will be determined by the resource ratio in the haul being returned from your farms. Here is a helpful table, in the format described above, detailing the increase in production to resource cost ratio. This does not mean build these resources, it is only to be used as a tool to help you decide which ones are the most cost effective. What resources you actually build should depend only on your resources coming in via your farms.

This is when you should queue a resource structure:
-Your Farm Space is sufficient to last the build time of your resource structure
-Your warehouse space is sufficient
-You have troops queued in your Barracks 5 & Stables 3

NOTE – it is a very good idea to not go past this point until you can sustain a stables & barracks queue while you are offline or sleeping, working etc. ie – Your stables & barracks queue must be longer than the longest period that you will be offline for.

The Smithy – Level 10
Upgrading this structure past level 5 once you can sustain LC, Axe queues non-stop & your resources are high enough such that your HQ queue is non-stop. Once you start upgrading this building, you should only build two structures along side the smithy:
-The Farm
-The Warehouse
Do not queue anything else in your HQ beside those 3 structures. Again, this is all meanwhile having constant stables & barracks queue.

The Workshop – Level 2
Once your Smithy has reached level 10, construct your workshop to level 2. Tech rams and start your ram production. Build them constantly until you can produce catapults. This should be about 25-50 or so. It’ll be enough to start off with and will be good until you start to encounter players that have not yet stoped playing, in which case you won’t be clearing anyway until you have all of the other villages inside your 20×20 on farm. Once you have catapults, you’ll then need to resume your ram production at that point.

The Smithy – Level 12
You will need a few cats to submit a few players arround you into quitting the game or restarting elsewhere then this is the time to get a few cats into the farm space. Tech Catapults and make arround 20-50, or a 75-100 if you feel you will need more deterence to force your neighbours to abandon their villages or stop logging on.

Head Quarters – Level 23
By now you should have enough LC’s and Axes farming such that you will be able to upgrade your HQ continually. Remember, only upgrade this structure when you begin to experience periods when you have both your Stables 3 and Barracks 5 queued 24/7 without running out of farm space and you have sufficient warehouse space. That way you can continue to upgrade your resources more quickly. If you start experiencing periods where your HQ queue becomes empty because you don’t have the resources to keep your stables & barracks queued, then it is because you upgraded this structure too far, and should have upgraded a resource structure instead. Continue with this strategy until you have AT LEAST HQ23. The higher it gets, the more time you will save and the faster you will build nobles. However, the higher you go, the most costly it will become. So how high you need to raise this structure will depend greatly on how active in farming you are. I typically raise it to about 23-25. 26 to 25 only saves an extra 5-10 hours or so. Just remember, it is important to keep the queue going 24/7 or the time you save in production turns into extra time spent on production.

Assuming the world speed is x1, which is arbituary, and ignoring the farm upgrades, warehouse upgrades or any resource upgrading, here are some numbers to consider:

Starting at a village with:
HQ10, Barracks 5, Stables 3, Smithy 10, Market 5
Upgrading your HQ first to the levels listed below, followed by Barracks 20, Stables 15, Workshop 2, Smithy 20 + Academy + Market 10 to represent a post-noble stage:
HQ20 = 325.58 Hours
HQ21 = 314.57 Hours ~ 11.01 Total Hours Saved ~ +11.01 Extra Hours Saved
HQ22 = 304.78 Hours ~ 20.80 Total Hours Saved ~ +9.79 Extra Hours Saved
HQ23 = 296.24 Hours ~ 29.34 Total Hours Saved ~ +8.54 Extra Hours Saved
HQ24 = 289.01 Hours ~ 36.57 Total Hours Saved ~ +7.23 Extra Hours Saved
HQ25 = 283.15 Hours ~ 42.43 Total Hours Saved ~ +5.86 Extra Hours Saved
HQ26 = 278.74 Hours ~ 46.84 Total Hours Saved ~ +4.41 Extra Hours Saved
HQ27 = 275.88 Hours ~ 49.70 Total Hours Saved ~ +2.86 Extra Hours Saved
HQ28 = 274.69 Hours ~ 50.89 Total Hours Saved ~ +1.19 Extra Hours Saved
HQ29 = 275.31 Hours ~ 50.27 Total Hours Saved ~ -0.62 = Wasted Time

Now, let’s assume that you have a farm level 25 by the time you your HQ finished, so you will raise your farm 25-29 to be conservative. Aswell as your warehouse, let’s assume 18(required for HQ25) as a starting point, and you will need to raise it to level 24 to afford a farm 29. So farm 25 -> 29 and warehouse 18 -> 24. Note, I’m ignoring other buildings because they are not required to build nobles.
HQ20 = 418.14 Hours
HQ21 = 402.73 Hours ~ 15.41 Total Hours Saved ~ +15.41 Extra Hours Saved
HQ22 = 388.74 Hours ~ 29.40 Total Hours Saved ~ +13.99 Extra Hours Saved
HQ23 = 376.20 Hours ~ 41.94 Total Hours Saved ~ +12.54 Extra Hours Saved
HQ24 = 365.16 Hours ~ 52.98 Total Hours Saved ~ +11.04 Extra Hours Saved
HQ25 = 355.67 Hours ~ 62.47 Total Hours Saved ~ +9.49 Extra Hours Saved
HQ26 = 347.81 Hours ~ 70.33 Total Hours Saved ~ +7.86 Extra Hours Saved
HQ27 = 341.66 Hours ~ 76.48 Total Hours Saved ~ +6.15 Extra Hours Saved
HQ28 = 337.34 Hours ~ 80.80 Total Hours Saved ~ +4.32 Extra Hours Saved
HQ29 = 334.98 Hours ~ 83.16 Total Hours Saved ~ +2.36 Extra Hours Saved
HQ30 = 334.73 Hours ~ 83.41 Total Hours Saved ~ +0.25 Extra Hours Saved

Your nobles will be avaliable faster but it will be more time consuming and demanding with your day to day farming. How high your raise your HQ during this stage is strictly dependant upon how much money you have avaliable. The bottom line is, it is faster, but it is more costly in terms of resources: but if the resources are aplenty then all that matters is that it is faster to get to nobles in terms of time. If you are unable to keep your HQ upgrades queue’d 24/7, while queuing the stables/barracks of course, then you should upgrade resources to keep the queue going. Again, upgrade your farm & warehouse only as needed during this stage. Remember it is vital not to upgrade your stables and barracks or smithy prior to your HQ at this stage.

Some people have tried to argue that raising your barracks and stables prior to your HQ is better for troop production. Well, I assure you that it is not.

First, let’s ignore the farm and warehouse upgrades required to achieve nobles. Because it is clear that raising the barracks/stables prior to your HQ would increase the time to nobles simply because your troop production will be higher during your pre-HQ20+ stage which means that you will need to raise your farm and warehouses to a higher level during your pre-HQ20+ stage. This will make you save less time from upgrading your HQ because you will not take advantage of the farm/warehouse decreased buildtime because you’re not upgrading your HQ, you’re upgrading your stables/barracks.

Secondly, we can ignore the resource upgrades, wall upgrades, because they are not required to produce nobles. We’ll also ignore workshop upgrading, because it is independant of nobles also. And finally, we can ignore the market and smithy upgrades because they’ll be done post-barracks/stables upgrades anyway.

So we will assume that the only buildtimes to be considered are the barracks, stables and HQ.
Starting with HQ10, and ending with HQ23 in a straight run:
HQ10 -> HQ23 = 31.09 Hours
Add:
Barracks 5 -> Barracks 20 @ HQ23 = +29.18 Hours
Stables 3 -> Stables 15 @ HQ23 = +37.11 Hours
—————————–
Totalling: 97.38 Hours

Now lets say you go stables 10, before upgrading HQ to 23.
Stables 3 -> Stables 10 @ HQ10 = 22.84 Hours
HQ10 -> HQ23 = 31.09 Hours
Barracks 5 -> Barracks 20 @ HQ23 = +29.18 Hours
Stables 10 -> Stables 15 @ HQ23 = +25.00 Hours
—————————–
Totalling: 108.11 Hours
That is a 10.73 hour difference.

That means that if you go HQ last or during, and only bring your stables up to 10 from 3, exlcuding the extra farm and warehouse space you’d need aswell as excluding any barracks upgrading, which would lead to more farm space required pre-HQ23, making it take a longer time. Which means, for 10.73 hours you are producing LC’s at stables level 15 as opposed to stables (at most) level 10. I don’t have to quote production times to show that stables 15 will produce more lc’s than stables 10 for that period of time.

Again, this is only true if you can afford 24/7 production. The time you save on buildtimes of your stables or barracks independantly will yield more troops than if you were to upgrade them first. This is because you will be producing units at barracks 23 + stables 15 for about an extra 20 hours instead of 20 hours at Barracks 5, Stables 3 or any level between the two groups. Producing troops at a higher level of production for the barracks and stables simply yields more troops pre-noble in the same time period. Anyone who does not upgrade their HQ in this manner and opposes an opponent that does will lose every time.

The Stables – Level 10
Since the stables is your main farming tool, you will want to upgrade this structure to 10 as soon as possible.

The Barracks – Level 10
Now you will need to plan ahead here for when you start to clear villages. Upgrade your Barracks to level 10 to increase your Axe:LC ratio.

The Market – Level 10
This structure is cheap and quick to build. Geting the Market to 10 will depend on the resource ratios you are collecting from farming. You can sometimes get away with upgrading this post-barracks and post-stables. This can also aid you during your smithy crunch as you can hold extra resources with your merchants.

The Stables – Level 15
This is your pre-noble Stables goal. Get this structure to 15 to enable your noble nuke production level.

The Barracks – Level 20
Once you’ve completed your stables pre-noble quality, you will want to upgrade your barracks to at least level 20, Level 23 is even better and more ideal but this will depend on your activness if you can afford it or not. Maximizing your production capabilities is important because once you’re producing nobles you will have wasted some units killing off a player while you noble him so you will need to be capable of quickly re-producing your units for your next target.

The Warehouse – Level 24/25
Since your production is so good you will need at least a Farm 29 or a Farm 30 Pre-Academy, depending on how quick you were at this build order. Farm 29 requires Warehouse 24, and the Farm 30 requires the Warehouse 25. Get them up respectivly before proceeding. There is no benefit from Smithy 13-20 Pre-Noble so you should get your warehouse up first.

The Farm – Level 29/30
As stated just before here, you will need Farm 29-30 pre-noble with this build order to house your units. Build this before proceeding to finish your smithy. If you are on a teching world, you may want to juggle your smithy in here but I’ve found that it is not possible because of the unit production levels and queue lengths.

The Smithy – Level 20
Now that you have your stables 15 and barracks 20-23, now it is time to make the push to your Smithy 20. Remeber, you must still continue your 24/7 queue’s of your stables and barracks.

The Academy
Once you achieved Smithy Level 20, construct your academy and start your noble production and find a nice big juicy player target. If you followed this strategy closely you will be able to noble anyone of your choosing, assuming that they have not done this exact build order themselves. If that is so, find someone else to noble and deal with them later or ask them to join your tribe. At this stage in the game you should have arround 200 farms.

The Wall 20
Once you are nobling villages you will want to upgrade your wall. This guide is about complete map dominance in your 20×20. Following it will cause you to both out-grow and starve your enemies and clearing the ones that will not become noble targets. Walls are a defensive structure and since this guide is about all Offense & map control, they are not needed. Walls are used to boots your defensive capabilites and you don’t need walls until you need to defend. With that said I will also point out that you only need to defend against nobles. When such is the case, again as a consequence of following this guide, you will be the largets player inside your 20×20 and most of the time your 45×45. As you can see here, you will not be needing to fear anyone in your area. You will be the first one in your 45×45 with a complete noble train. And you will also be nobling the largest village in your 45×45 which in turn should be offensive. As stated below in the village ratios and noble targets, you should be running about 3 offensive villages before making a defensive one. If you are really new then you should go to a 2:1 ratio, but I assure you, a 3:1 ratio is quite safe if you have a strong enough lead on your opponents.

Wood/Clay/Iron – Level 30
Now is the time to start spending money on upgrading your resources each to level 30. It is important not let any form of unit production or structure upgrade to be slowed down by the production of packets or coins to produce nobles. It will greatly benefit you to only produce packets & coins second to increasing your forms of income: troop production & resource structures. The faster you max out your resource structures, the faster you will achieve maximum coin and packet production from your village.

Coins & Packet Production
Again, as stated above, coin and packet production comes last.

Smithy Research
This section is strictly in regards to the 10-level tech system. Here I will post a minimum number of troops required to make upgrading the research on your units more cost-beneficial than queueing another unit. Obviuously as your queues become longer and longer, you will be upgrading your tech levels much sooner than the threasholds stated below, however it is good to note that they do exist. Upgrading your research is prioritized before upgrading structures, and after adding troops to the queue. Following the above build order should yield Axe 10, LC 10, Rams 8 or 9 Pre-Noble where you`ll have about 5000 axe and 3000 LC and 220-240 rams.

From Pre-Noble to Post-Noble

Anything prior to this section of this guide, I belive is the best way to play the game. Any other way I consider to be newbish and poor. On worlds that I join, I look for players that are not playing in the matter that I described above and I do one of two things:
-Turn them into farms
-Or I noble them.

It is not possible to lose to anyone that is farming equally or is equally as active as you are if you follow the above part of this guide. Everything below this section really depends on personal preference, however I will begin to detail how I design my array of villages during the post-noble stage.

Your Empire of Villages

Ideally, you want all of your villages to have the same ammount of points, which includes defensive villages, offensive villages etc. Having similar building stuctures will help you achieve this and will also allow you to easily change an offensive village to a defensive one if needed in the future.

Obviously, your various types of villages will require different structure levels to be efficient. So you will have to tweak the structure levels slightly based on what type of village it is. The less points in your villages the better. This is to leave the most farm space possible per village for troops. The more troops you have in your offensive village, the more damage you will deal and the less losses you will take when attacking. Another important factor to remember here is production time. The higher your barracks/stables/workshop in these villages, the faster you can produce full nukes, and the faster you’ll be able to clear players arround you, expanding your map control. So for this purpose, all of the villages discussed here will achieve a total of 9714 points.

Your first village should be an offensive village with minimal defensive troops in it. How many really depends on how active you are and what quality of players are arround you. Ideally you want no more defense than you build pre-LC`s.

All of your villages should be offensive until you need to produce defensive units to defend vs a neighbour that is producing nobles. If you noble quickly enough and produce enough offensive troops, controlling your area, you will be able to elminate those players by taking their village before they become a threat to you. This is why you should really only be nobling villages that have academies. Another factor in how many offensive villages you should build prior to building defensive ones is the remaining quality of your first village`s nuke.

These offensive villages should all be outside of your current farming area. That way the units you produce to farm(lc`s and axes) will not be farming the same farms that you are currently farming. A good way to search for a direction to noble is to scout various villages in different directions and see where most often the warehouses are fullest. Thats where you should noble because less people are farming there.

You can really get away with making 4 or 5 offensive villages before dedicating a defensive one. But again, this depends on how active you are. If you end up nobling a village for some reason inside your farming radius, might as well make that one your first defensive village. More about this ratio is below under the topic: Choosing your Noble Targets.

Here is a list of village structures and troops that you should build there. The details on how the troop ratios were calculated are posted below in a section titled: Troop Mechanics. Each village posted here will have 9714 points. The troop ratio’s of the Axes and LC’s are based on the avaliable farm space from the other units and the ratio of their build times.

First Village – Offensive(Church Worlds) (Where Applicable)
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 20,770 | Limit: 1
Troops:

First Village – Offensive(Non-Church Worlds)
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: 1
Troops:

General Offensive Village
Points: 9714| Avaliable Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: ~2:3
Troops:

Noble Train Village – Offensive
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: 1 or 2
Troops:

Defensive Village
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 20,730| Limit: ~1/3
Note: Through my own simulations I’ve determined that a 1:2:2 ratio is the best ratio in every situation except vs large cavalry villages, which are rare and expensive for an opponent to build, as such, you too should only build HC’s when you are pressed for time when trying to raise your defense troop levels. Barracks units are far superior in terms of farm space and cost, constructing HC’s just maximizes your defense per time. But if you’re not getting attacked, you don’t need to waste your population and resources on them.

Troops:

Church Village – Defensive
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 8,762 | Limit: Dependant Upon Village Distribution
Troops:

Scout Village
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 20,730| Limit: ~1/20
Note: These villages will house pure scouts, both for scouting your opponents and defending your villages.
Troops:

Catapult Village – Offensive
Points: 9714 | Avaliable Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: ~1/100
Note: Eventually these will become redundant as nobles become more easily buildable. But before that happens, these villages will be very useful in keeping players you don’t want to waste nobles on from rebuilding too quickly.
Troops:

Choosing Your Noble Targets
This is how I prioritize my noble targets:
-(Sum of Resource Structures)/3;
-If Academy, then 30;
-Smithy*3/2
-(Barracks + Stables)*3/4;
Whichever is higher out of the four, I’ll noble that target first. Typically I’ll noble these villages at or near the edge of my farming from my main village.

Your first noble noble target should be at least 10 tiles away from your main. The farther outside of your farming radius the better. Nobling inside your farming radius does not increase your income. That is why it is important to noble far away from your main so that you can effectivly double your farming radius. The same should be for your 3rd and maybe your 4th village.

After that simply just noble the most threatening players within 10-20 tiles of any of your villages. If there are more than 2 villages within 10 times of yours that are a threat, you should be catting down their smithy so you can keep expanding elsewhere, unless they are the best target in the nearest 20.

Continue with that strategy until you have a large area, and simply cat down players within your region that you do not want to be growing or you don’t want to noble yet.

Only when you control a massive area, something like 20% of an entire K should you be starting to fill in your gaps.

A good way to decide which direction you want to expand first would be to send out a few scouts. Look for villages that are clearly farmable by your standards, and if the warehouses are full it means you hit the motherload. The players in that area are not farming, so when you noble in that area you will have free reign of the resources there.

If the village is being farmed, and you are left with no alternative direction to noble then you should figure out which player in that area is doing the most farming and noble him instead.

Defending Mass Incoming Rams/Scouts & Mass Incoming Noble Trains
This is what you do when you have mass incoming & mass noble trains. Follow these rules, starting with rule #1 to prioritize yourself to decide what to do when you are under attack. The first rule is more important than the 2nd one, and the 2nd more than the 3rd and so on.

Rule #1 – Incoming Ram Speed or Scout Speed
Never let them scout you. Attacks at scout speed, you need to stack with as many scouts as possible while still being able to defend all of the villages.
Attacks at greater than scout speed and less than noble speed, you need to defend with as many scouts as you can afford to let die, and a few swords, 100 or so.
If you don’t have many troops “based” in that village(that were built there), or if the village is relativly new, it is okay to let them scout you in this situation. It will be obvious that you won’t have many troops from there so letting them scout it will not reveal any “new” information.
All of the other rules are for noble speed attacks only.

Rule #2 – Incoming Nobles: Villages that house 1 or more Nobles
If you have an incoming on a village that houses nobles, you must defend that village at all cost. Especially if you use trains. When you have a large number of villages, 4 nobles will cost you more resources than losing a couple of defensive villages defending it, defending it with 4 defensive villages. Because of this rule, this is why it is ever so more important to house nobles in as few villages as possible, while still maximizing offensive power in your trains. 2-4 nobles is ideal to have been built for each of these types of villages.

Rule #3 – Incoming Nobles: Villages that house Churches
Well, this rule only really applies if there is another village in the church radius that is under attack.

Rule #4 – Incoming Nobles: Try to Snipe
If the incoming noble train is snipeable, then you must first try this. You can either set up a “support train” from a nearby defensive village and send support at the village, like you would a noble train, only split up your defensive units into 5 or 7 groups. Semd them all at ram speed, cancel the ones that miss, then send them all at HC speed, then scout speed, then sword, then spear. Note – This only is good if the incoming noble train is from the same village. If it is multiple villages it is likely that it is multiple nukes. Do not trust a sitter with this. If you are unable to be online to perform this action, move on with these rules and do not trust someone to do it as a sitter. You can try, but do not count on it working at all. Plan ahead instead.

Rule #5 – Incoming Nobles: The Pre and Re Noble
If your village has inc nobles and several nukes preceeding it AND that village has only like half a nuke in it or a couple thousand defensive troops, or if those nobles are from different villages then it is likely they are several nukes with the nobles so it will be better to not defend it and you will not be able to snipe. Instead, you should dump the nuke you have on a village before the noble lands, or try to let those defensive troops die somewhere else, or try to snipe anyway with those defensive troops. Once you’ve done this, then you need to land 3 nobles before the noble train lands, preferably 4 at the right time such that the loyalty is below 20 before the attacking players 4 nobles land. If you do this, you should destroy 4 nobles 1 or more nukes at the cost of half a nuke + 1 noble, or half a defensive village + 1 noble, or whatever you have stationed in that village.

Rule #6 – Incoming Nobles: Already Supported Villages
If the village already has support, it is likely that the player who sent them has already counted on losing these troops. You should defend these villages first. Look arround and see if you will be able to stack enough troops to defend these. A good rule of thumb is to defend the villages with at least 4 full defensive villages. If you do not have enough support OR the smithy levels of spear/sword/archer/hc are too low, ie – less than 9 or 10. Then you will need to contact the owner of the support and ask if he can recall the troops(at different speeds for his own benefit) and re-send some more support to another village(which you’ll determine farther down this list), if it can be done in time. If you can not juggle the support arround to a different village then you should either send the support home and try to snipe with whatever D troops you have built there and hope for the best or send the troops home and try to snipe and hope for the best.

Rule #7 – Incoming Nobles: Smithy Levels: Spear/Sword/Archer/HC = Max Level, Wall = 20
These villages are the more profitable to support and defend. Ideally it is best if these villages do not have nukes preceeding the noble train. Stack these villages with 4 defensive villages.

Rule #8 – Incoming Nobles: Villages housing full Defensive troops
If you are unable to use these defensive troops to snipe other noble trains that are incoming to them, use it to snipe the noble train coming to this one. If not, then you must try to stack this village. Once again, 4 full D villages worth. If you are unable, either send this support somewhere where it can die before the noble train lands, or leave it home and hope for the best.

Rule #9 – Incoming Nobles: Villages housing full nukes
Stack these villages if possible. If you are unable to stack this then use this nuke where you can before the noble train lands.

Rule #10 – Incoming Nobles: Villages with incoming nobles that have the nobles land well after other villages that have incoming nobles.
These villages you must defend last. Sometimes you will be able to defend 2 or more villages with the same defensive troops simply by juggling the support arround to different villages.

Rule #11 – Incoming Nobles: Too bad, you lose this one.
Build as many D troops as possible in that village, utilizing the barracks, stables, and workshop and try to snipe or hope for the best. There is nothing else that can be done here.

Forgive me if there’s any typo’s, I only just wrote this up now. I think it covers just about every situation.