The Hobbit: KoM City Management Guide

The Hobbit: KoM City Management Guide by KhorelisSylvari

Resources

There are 5 types of resources found in Middle-Earth, Food, Wood, Ore, Stone, and Gold. Gold is only used for researching topics in your Academy. The others are used for training troops/defenses, constructing/upgrading buildings, as well as researching topics. This is your main source of growth in Middle-Earth. Without resources, your city will suffer terribly. It is recommended to get a Vault constructed and upgraded as much as possible within the initial 7 day shield window when you first begin your city.

Buildings

The following is a list of non-resource buildings, the descriptions of each, and the tasks that can be completed through them.

Research

The following are the research options that are available through the Academy. These options upgrade different abilities, technology, training, or speed up or provide bonuses to different aspects of gameplay.

Troops

Building troops is the key to survival in Middle-Earth. Without troops there is nobody to defend your city and you have no way of attacking other players, wilds, or goblin camps. Building troops to increase your might and dominating your enemies is mostly what the game is about after all. Troops are discussed in more detail here: Player’s Guide to Middle-Earth Troops

Upkeep

There are two forms of upkeep at this moment in time, Food and Gold upkeep. Food upkeep are food resources that require payment each hour that you have troops in your city (ally troops housed in your Embassy also applies food upkeep). Gold upkeep is a payment in gold each hour to the heroes that are assigned to do tasks within your city through your Great Hall. Having no food will not upset your troops enough to leave, they will stay put, however it has been said that if your food production is consistently negative, it will start to drain your gold as a result. Also, not being able to pay an hourly rate of the gold requirements for assigned heroes has a negative impact as well. From my experience, not being able to pay the gold results in your heroes being automatically unassigned from the tasks you have given them. I’m not sure if this is a bug or if this is meant to be the case but it happened to me the other day.

Tax/Happiness

Tax is defined as how much you charge your population for living in your city. The higher the tax rate, the more gold income you will receive dependent on the size of your population. Happiness is what defines how happy your population is with your current tax. If you set your tax too high, the population will become unhappy and will begin to leave your city over time resulting in you getting negative Idle Population. Having negative idle population results in your inability to train troops. If you set your tax low, more of the population will be happy and willing to work and fight for you.

The formula for Happiness/Tax is as follows:

Happiness= 100-Tax%

In the beginning, I would recommend leaving Tax completely alone. It starts off as being set to 10-20% I believe, this is optimal for what you will need to start with. You will get most of your gold from completing quests anyway. Later on, you will want to leave Tax set to as close to zero as possible to maximize your population and free up more troops for training. I personally leave my tax set to a very small number (usually lower than 5% but this could be greater depending on the size of your population) just so I have enough gold income to cover my gold upkeep.

Quests

The quest system is put into place to assist players in progression. Quests give a direction that the players should take to grow their city. Various tasks that are given to be completed are: Building/Upgrading certain buildings, increasing base resource production, researching options, training troops, increasing tax, raising population, etc.
By completing the tasks that are displayed, the player is rewarded with various items and resources. Common rewards are Food, Wood, Ore, Stone, and Gold. Additional rewards can also be given such as speed increase items. Quests are the most common method of obtaining gold early on in the game. This provides the player with the resources needed to continue researching, upgrading, and training. Quests are vital to new players’ growth and without completing them, you will find that at times you will struggle to come up with enough resources and/or gold to do what is needed. A lot of quests will be completed during normal gameplay and often you will find that there are quest rewards waiting to be claimed with no prior knowledge that you were completing the task it required unless you are monitoring them.

Training/Battle

When training troops it is most important to take a moment to reflect on how you plan to use the troops that you are training. There are different types of troops required for different actions’ within the game. This is also dependent upon the types of troops that enemies may or may not have. Certain troops are stronger than others while they are also weaker than others. A list of each troops’ strengths and weaknesses can be found in the guide linked above in the “Troops” section. It is recommended when having unknown enemies or not having chosen how you are going to play, to build an equal number of all types of troops (and from all 3 tiers if you have them unlocked). Pay close attention to your food upkeep and try to keep that below your food production, this makes things so much easier in the beginning. Once you reach higher levels and strength, there are ways around this, but trying to train more troops at lower levels when you don’t have the food production to maintain the upkeep will only stunt your cities growth and slow (or halt) your progress in the game. A detailed guide for basic battle mechanics can be found here: Player’s Guide to Middle-Earth Battle

Basic Management

There are many different ways to manage your city. There are also different ways for city management if you have your second city unlocked.
The main thing to do when first starting off is to max out your resource production as much as possible. This includes upgrading your Wall to be able to upgrade your Keep.

WARNING!!! – Upgrading your keep past level 5 will end your 7 day beginner’s protection bubble.

Upgrading your Keep unlocks additional resource building locations. It is also recommended to upgrade any and all Farms, Arboretums, Quarries, and Ore Veins as high as you can. Upgrade your Academy to at least level 4 and focus beginning research on Fertilizer, Arbors, Masonry, and Smelting. Near the beginning you will want to focus more on Stone and Wood due to the massive amounts of building upgrades and new constructions that you will be carrying out. After you’ve gotten close to having your resource fields filled up with buildings, I recommend starting to focus more on Food. Do not ONLY focus on food unless you are higher level and have most of your buildings and research options completed (or have a second city, which I will get into below). After you have most of your resource building upgrades to at least level 5, food becomes vital because your 7 day protection bubble ends eventually and you need to get some troops to defend your city or to be able to farm resources/gold. When you have roughly 2-3 days left of your protection bubble, it is recommended to start researching the options and constructing the required buildings to unlock your Tier 1 troops. Refer to the Troops and Training/Battle section above and the Guides linked to them for further details.

Wilds

Wilds exist to help players increase their resource production. Conquering wilds provides bonuses to your resources depending on which wild you take control of. Grasslands and Lakes provide Food, Mountains provide Ore, Hills provide Stone, and Woods provide Wood. Wilds award a certain percentage of resource production increase dependent upon the Wild’s level. For each level wild, expect to receive 5% (Level 1 Wild) bonus up to a maximum of 50% increase (Level 10 Wild). The idea is to have all Level 10 wilds to maximize your production but in the beginning this will be nearly impossible due to the strength of troops that are stationed at higher levels. It is best to focus on conquering Level 1-3 wilds to begin with and slowing replacing them with higher levels as you grow and train more and better troops. Keep in mind that you can only conquer as many wilds as the level of your Keep up to a maximum of 9 (Limit increases to 10 if you have upgraded the Keep to Level 10 using a Hobbit Building Crew; Cost: 100 Mithril each).

Basic Second City Tactic

When having a second city, it is most common to focus one city on Food and one city on Ore, Wood, and Stone. By doing this it allows you to house your troops at your non-food resource city so they do not consume your food supply. This results in you being able to train an unprecedented (virtually unlimited) amount of troops with no negative aspects. Troops will not leave if not fed so you can just keep training troops at your food city and transferring them over to your non-food city. This is a common tactic used by a lot of players within the game. This helps (and is one of the only ways) to increase your army size exponentially.

Advanced Single City Tactic

This tactic requires a slightly more advanced mindset when approaching. It is possible to increase your troops and might exponentially without a second city. This is done by focusing your city on ONLY food production. By doing this you will severely inhibit your ability to grow your city but you will drastically reduce the amount of food resources you need to farm from other players after your army gets to be a considerable size. This is recommended only for advanced players who have reached a higher level or strength and feel that they cannot progress further without a second city (and we all know how tedious those are to obtain without buying mithril).

What you do is allow your food upkeep to bypass your production and just keep training troops. Obviously you will run out of food and other resources after awhile due to the fact that your city is only focused on food and your production is lower than your upkeep. To obtain resources to build more troops, you have to attack other players to make up for the lack of production.

The reason I say this requires an advanced or higher level player is because you have to be able to find who to attack, when to attack, how to attack, and what to attack with because the last thing you want to do is lose troops during a resource plundering attack, this is just a setback and will not allow you to grow much. You need to be able to find cities where you can stroll in and take a quick and easy grab of as many resources as possible and with no losses to be able to utilize this tactic to the best of your ability.